Debate on Zionism, racism unabated

By M.S. Prabhakara

CAPE TOWN, AUG. 21. The agreement on removing from the draft declaration of the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) the controversial formulations equating Zionism with racism and demanding reparations for slavery and colonialism from the U.S. and former colonial powers has not dampened the debate on these issues in South Africa.

The debate on the linkages between Zionism and racism, with its interesting historical and contemporary nuances in South Africa, goes beyond the pressures brought by powerful lobbies for and against pressing such a linkage. Apart from the compulsions of the host Government which cannot appear to yield to such pressures, the fact is that the debate has a relevance to the very essence, indeed the very origins of the struggle against apartheid and racism in South Africa.

Early manifestations of Zionism in South Africa were informed as much by socialist ideas as by the search for a home, not necessarily exclusivist, for the Jewish Diaspora. For instance, of the six organisations which took part in the founding conference of the Communist Party of South Africa in July 1921, two were explicitly Zionist. These Zionist tendencies in no way affected the Communist Party's commitment to an inclusive non- racialism, a point noted by all leaders of the South African liberation movement.

However, it is also true that barring this radicalised minority of Jewish origin, who indeed rejected political and territorial Zionism, the majority of the Jewish population, who at one point accounted for nearly four per cent of the white population, loyally supported apartheid. Jews without high professional qualifications who engaged in trade and commerce also were in direct competition with the Indian shopkeeper, in most cases Muslim, a feature which has also influenced South African Indian Muslim attitudes towards Zionism and the State of Israel.

The remarks made recently by Mr. Kader Asmal, ANC leader and South Africa's Minister for Education, cautioning against the ``glib equation'' of Zionism with racism, reflect these complex factors. At the South African Human Rights Commission's preparatory conference for the WCAR, Mr. Kader said: ``Those who think that Zionism is inherently racist must reckon with the fact that some of the most courageous anti-apartheid whites in South Africa happen to have been Zionists as swell. On the other hand, none of these courageous anti-apartheid Zionists could condone the violence that is systematically carried out in the name of Zionism in parts of the world today.''

In an interesting amplification that followed, his colleague, Mr. Ronnie Kasrils, himself of Jewish origin, made the important point that among the many white South Africans who courageously opposed apartheid were persons of ``Jewish origin who rejected Zionism''. This radical divide between such two contradictory manifestations of Jewish identity was perhaps most dramatically evident during the Rivonia trial. All the six whites arrested at Rivonia were Jewish. As against this was the prosecutor of the case, Mr. Percy Yutar, demonstratively Jewish, whose conduct of the case became a byword in viciousness, directed in particular against the two Jewish defendants who finally stood trial.

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