Recently the New York Review of Books reported that in November last year Columbia University—one of the most prestigious in the United States – “suspended two student groups that support Palestinian rights: Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Palestine.” The management of Columbia University has clearly suffered a decline in moral standards since the days when their student Pixley Ka Isaka Seme (the founder of the forerunner of the ANC) won the Orator’s prize for his speech on the African Renaissance. But the action of suspension should cause no surprise: the USA is an ardent supporter of …
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Yet this is not the point I am building up to. I am interested in the fact that one of the student groups who were suspended is called Jewish Voice for Peace, and this gives the lie to the claim that Jews or the population of Israel (and of course these are two quite distinct bodies) are uniformly unconcerned about the rights of Palestinians. As I pointed out a few weeks ago in my piece on the Gaza crisis, there is within Israel a substantial population of leftist / enlightened citizens who recognise that the rights of Palestinians have been trampled on and who write and campaign in support of these rights, in opposition to the thuggish government of Binyamin Netanyahu.
This became very clear to me when in 1995 I was invited to Israel (all expenses paid, yippee) to take part in a conference at the University of Tel Aviv. The conference was on Africa and was titled “Breaking Boundaries”; it was a modest attempt to patch up the damage that Israel’s reputation had suffered among Africans through the support of the Israeli security forces — logistical and through the arms trade — for some of the worst dictatorships in Africa, including the apartheid regime. It was a way for Tel Aviv University to show the participants, who were all from Africa or specialising in African Studies, that a sizeable bloc of the Israeli population did not support the actions of their own right-wing politicians.
Because I was given rapporteur duties — something I had previously made my mark at during the NUL’s conference of African Vice-Chancellors — I was assigned two student assistants, one an Israeli Arab (a community distinct from Palestinians) and the other a son of the chief rabbi in Tel Aviv of the Falasha (Ethiopian Jewish) community. We became good friends and it was partly through their example that I learnt about the leftist, non-racist trend in Israeli politics outlined above.
Over the next two weeks I’ll expand on this, and also (putting on my tour guide hat) detail time off I had from the conference, visiting Jerusalem and Rehovot.
I wish to point out that there is a broad spectrum of political opinion in Israel, with a substantial leftist / liberal minority supporting the struggle for the rights of the dispossessed Palestinian people (which is not, of course, equivalent to supporting Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza). The African Studies conference at the University of Tel Aviv, a conference titled “Breaking Boundaries”, was intended to help heal the wounds that had been inflicted by the Israeli armed forces and arms trade and their secret service, MOSSAD, supporting some of the foulest dictatorships in Africa, including the apartheid regime.
The conference was closely monitored by Israeli government personnel and there were a couple of compulsory “official” events. On the first of these we were all taken out into the barren countryside to plant a tree for Israel. We were each given a sapling on arrival and a flask of water and some propagator and set about planting the saplings with varying degrees of inexpertise. There were no speeches, but some sort of youth brigade sang a rousing song. I was quite happy, as tree planting is a very good thing indeed. Wish that and more could take place Lesotho.
The next event was far less happy. We were due to be addressed by the Israeli Foreign Minister, Yossi Beilin, a notable and courageous leftist / liberal, whom I had heard years before speak at the Oxford Union, but he was unwell, so his place was taken by his deputy, who turned out to be a thug. Amidst a lot of other anti-Arab spillage he accused Palestinian nannies in Israel of regularly murdering the Jewish babies in their care. One of the student assistants I’d been assigned, an Israeli Arab, sat trembling through this and, come discussion time, in a calm, controlled rage he accused the Deputy Minister of an outrageous racist slander. I could sense the reaction of the audience and when he’d sat down I whispered to him: “That was extremely courageous. Everyone is very happy with you.” He whispered back: “I guess the Deputy Minister isn’t. But stuff him.”
Another glimpse into the plurality of Israeli society came one evening when the entire conference was treated to dinner and live music in the ancient harbour town of Joffa (its Hebrew name; Yafa in Arabic). This is on the southern edge of Tel Aviv and is famous for its architecture and its orange plantations. It was a lovely evening at the end of which my other student assistant — the son of the chief rabbi of the Falasha (Ethiopian Jewish community) in Tel Aviv — asked if he could walk me back to my hotel. It would, he said, give us a chance to chat. I happily agreed. When we left the restaurant he asked if I was a strong walker; I said yes (those were the days!) and he led me up a steep street in the opposite direction from the hotel. This was so that from the top we could get a fine view of the ancient Arab harbour with the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv just beyond. Then we made our way back to the hotel, with refreshments on the way (delicious chilled apple and celery juice, which seemed to be a speciality of blisteringly hot Tel Aviv).
He asked me what I knew about the Falasha and filled in my knowledge, which was more-or-less restricted to their having been airlifted from Ethiopia by the Israeli government. I asked him, as a black community did they face racist discrimination in Israel and he replied “what do you think?” and then added: “but not from everyone. This is politically a very divided nation.”
I had one more glimpse of the dark side of the Israeli State. Just before I was due to fly back to London and then onwards to Lesotho, the conference organiser — Joachim Warmbold, a very fine man of German origin, who had lost many of his family in the Nazi death camps — asked me to accompany through the airport passport control another conference participant, a young Sudanese Muslim who was a postgraduate student in the UK and who was booked on to the same flight as myself.
There was a risk he might face some pretty aggressive hassle from the passport checkers. At the control I asked the Sudanese to pass through behind me, but through his body language to make it clear we were travelling together.
I was grilled pretty thoroughly; first, where and what was Lesotho? (I corrected their pronounciation of the name, a task I’ve carried out all over the world). Then, where had I been while in Israel and whom had I met? I replied, outside the conference only to the Weizmann Institute of Science, as a guest of the poet Olga Kirsch, who lived there (I’ll be talking about that visit the week after next).
This revelation met with silence and then: “the Weizmann Institute?! So! Are you a spy?” I resisted the temptation to reply “the name’s Bond” and shook my head vigorously. By then they had had enough of me (I have this carefully cultivated effect everywhere I go) and I was waved onwards after I’d explained who the Sudanese was. He was waved through as if he were a fly being swatted. Well, at least now the passport guys know how to pronounce “Lesotho.”
To be continued…
Prof Chris Dunton
