Tributes pour in for the retired journalist who was murdered in his Parkview home
“So what do u think?” Jeremy Gordin messaged me last Friday night. “Did I capture Bibi and Israel in 1,300 words?”
He was referring to his Politicsweb column, published overnight, which dealt with the current turmoil over democracy in my adopted homeland.
“Yes, you did,” I replied on Saturday morning. “The space allotted to you doesn’t allow for deeper consideration of the complexities.
Roy Isacowitz looks back over his six decades of friendship with Jeremy Gordin
Jeremy Gordin, journalist, poet, author and long-time Politicsweb columnist, was killed at his home in Johannesburg over the weekend.
It was the summer of 1965. I was at Temple Shalom synagogue, next door to the Doll’s House on Louis Botha Avenue, which, despite its vocation, was the regular scene of Saturday night socials.
Several readers of my previous column have asked why I made no mention of Yitzhak Rabin when writing about Israel’s need for a redemptive figure like South Africa’s F.W. de Klerk. The short answer is that it didn’t occur to me. The longer answer is given below.
In order to compare the motivations and actions of Rabin with those of De Klerk, I have identified five factors which, I believe, were essential to De Klerk’s dramatic reversal of direction in 1990 – the qualities that defined his decisive role in history.
Firstly, he came from the heart of the Afrikaner people and, for most of his life, he shared its ideological commitment to white racial domination. Had he been an Afrikaner pariah, like Breyten Breytenbach, say, his transformation would have been less dramatic and a lot less potent.
Theunis Christiaan de Klerk, an ancestor of former South African president F.W. De Klerk, was hanged by the British in 1815 for his role in the so-called Slagtersnek Rebellion. Another ancestor, Lourens de Klerk, was killed by the impis of Zulu king Dingaan in 1838, one of about 100 people to die in a brutal massacre.
The former president’s grandfather fought against the British in the Boer War, one of his uncles was J.G. Strijdom, South Africa’s fifth prime minister, and his father Johannes de Klerk, was a senator representing the apartheid National Party who served as a cabinet minister for fifteen years under three prime ministers.
One of his earliest memories, F.W. wrote in his biography, was sitting on his father’s shoulders during the emotional cornerstone laying ceremony for the Vootrekker Monument (arguably South Africa’s Wailing Wall) outside Pretoria in 1938. He was three at the time.
Many of us, I suspect, have been flirting with apocalyptic anxiety over the past 18 months, in the face of both the Covid pandemic and the contemporaneous worsening of the global climate. For my generation, that dual whammy has been the first real wake-up call after decades of post-WWII stability, growth and relative peace. All of a sudden, in our old age, we are having to contemplate the possibility of the end of the world.
One person who didn’t need an epidemic poke-in-the-ribs to begin concerning himself with the Apocalypse was the journalist, author and poet Peter Wilhelm – my mentor and friend – who spent the past three decades conjuring up extraordinary visions of a dystopian future and the post-apocalyptic world that might follow.
As I write, Joe Biden seems to be doddering to an excruciatingly close victory in the US election. That result, if it comes about, will be litigated furiously by Donald Trump and – depending on the success of his litigation – it could well be fought in the streets.
Having been liberated from the shackles of democracy by the words and actions of their leader, the Proud Boys and other simple-minded jingoists are unlikely to accept the authority of judges any more than that of vote counters and assessors. If things are looking ugly now, they could soon get a whole lot worse.
“It’s time to imagine a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.”
Those words – which appeared in a New York Times opinion piece last week – have created a tempest in that segment of the Jewish world that regards itself as progressive. They were written by journalist and commentator Peter Beinart, who, until the publication of the article, was one of the darlings of the Jewish Left.
Now he seems to be everyone’s favorite anti-Semite, the catch-phrase for anyone who disagrees with the Zionist mainstream. “Denying the right of Jews to a national homeland is anti-Semitism,” wrote Ben Dror Yemini in Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily, before apparently realizing the absurdity of his knee-jerk response.
“Beinart is not Anti-Semitic,” Yemini added quickly. “His intentions are different, but his position assists the anti-Semitic campaign.”
I’m glad we clarified that.
Even some columnists in Haaretz, the only surviving island of sanity in Israel’s media, have gotten into the act, describing Beinart’s about-face as “utopian” and “jumping ship”.
Personally, I’ve never had much time for Beinart’s blinkered and earnest liberal-Zionism, in which, “the dream of a two-state solution that would give Palestinians a country of their own let me hope that I could remain a liberal and a supporter of Jewish statehood at the same time.” Seventy-two years after the nakba and fifty-three after the occupation, intelligent people shouldn’t have been lulling themselves to sleep with such dreams.
But, to Beinart’s credit, he saw the light. “Events have now extinguished that hope,” he writes, pointing to the close to 700,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and the fact – obvious to all but those who refuse to see – that “the leaders of Israel’s supposedly center-left parties don’t support a viable, sovereign Palestinian state.”
Hardly anyone in Israel does. For decades, Israel’s leaders have had their fingers crossed behind their backs when talking of a two-state solution. It was the price they had to pay for the billions of dollars in American aid and access to European markets. No-one really believed they were serious, did they?
With Trump now in charge, Israel has largely dropped the charade. Talk of a two-state solution elicits little more than sniggers these days. Now it’s all about annexation – the de facto situation for years already, but the stamp of kashrut that the messianic right seems to need to cross ownership of the territories off their bucket list.
Beinart says he now believes in a bi-national state – “a Jewish home that is also, equally, a Palestinian home. And building that home can bring liberation not just for Palestinians but for us, too.”
Yet, oddly, he writes that “this doesn’t require abandoning Zionism… It requires distinguishing between form and essence. The essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel; it is a Jewish home in the land of Israel…”
Oops, just when he was getting it right he blew it.
It is true that Herzl originally spoke of a Jewish home in Palestine and the issue of full statehood was open until the Biltmore Conference in 1942, if not later – but that home never, ever included Arabs. The wimps of Brit Shalom may have spoken of Jewish-Arab equality but real, macho Zionists never did.
From the start of Jewish settlement in Palestine, the issue that most concerned the leadership of the Yishuv – aside from security – was avoda ivrit (Hebrew labor), which was code for separate development. Ostensibly a means of opening up jobs for new Jewish immigrants by getting Jewish farmers to hire only Jewish workers, avoda ivrit was in fact the means of developing an ethnically-pure Jewish society – long before the establishment of the state. Hebrew labor was achieved through violence and racism. Even David Ben Gurion, an activist for Hebrew labor, at one point accused fellow Jewish workers of treating Arabs with violence, arrogance and condescension.
Jewish racism and anti-Arabism dating back to the dawn of Zionism are well documented. “They behave toward the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, commit unwarranted trespass, beat them shamefully without any good reason, and brag about doing so,” Ahad Ha’am wrote in the 1880s. According to Israel Rokach, a resident of Jaffa, the Jewish farmers “do not think of the fellahin (peasants) as human.” And that was well over 100 years ago.
Many more scales need to fall from Beinart’s eyes before he understands that the essence of Zionism was – and remains – racism, ethno-centrism and Jewish exceptionalism. Those are the values on which the current generations of Israelis were weaned – and they don’t make for successful bi-nationalism.
Peter Beinart is on the right path. It took courage to write what he did and I applaud him for it. But he’s deluded if he thinks that Jewish statehood is the only obstacle – on the Jewish side; the Palestinians have their own obstacles – to the establishment of a bi-national state. The Zionism that he continues to swear by is rancid. There is no way it can serve as a moral basis for the state’s Jewish component
Israel’s Jews have been brought up to be conquerors, bosses and masters. They are uniquely unqualified to live as equals alongside Palestinians. A good place to begin a process that might, eventually lead to bi-nationalism would be an honest reckoning with Zionist dogma and praxis.
With both the coronavirus and the germ of annexation clogging the air in these parts, it’s surprising that most of the stench is not coming from Jerusalem but from somber and measured Jews in the diaspora – those who call themselves Zionists but aren’t willing to walk the walk.
Take for example the letter sent by about 40 prominent British Jews to the Israeli ambassador in London, solemnly warning about the grave consequences of annexation. “We are yet to see an argument that convinces us, committed Zionists and passionately outspoken friends of Israel, that the proposed annexation is a constructive step,” opined the Jewish notables, among them historian Simon Schama, writer Howard Jacobson and former foreign secretary Malolm Rifkind, as reported by the Guardian.
“Instead, it would in our view be a pyrrhic victory intensifying Israel’s political, diplomatic and economic challenges without yielding any tangible benefit.”
Or, in simpler terms, do you really want to tell the truth to the goyim?
Where have Schama, Jacobson and the other tribal chiefs been over the past fifty years as, step-by-step, Israel put the foundations of Jewish sovereignty over the West Bank into place? Where were they when Israel built and populated the settlements which it is now using as an excuse for annexation?
Hiding the truth from the goyim, is where they were. Being committed Zionists and passionately outspoken as Israel went about its apartheid business.
They certainly didn’t do much to prevent fifty-plus years of creeping annexation. But now, when Israel proposes to formalize what already exists in practice, they find their collective voice?
They give hypocrisy a bad name.
Annexation is not an aberration; it’s not a madcap idea that Benjamin Netanyahu and his sidekicks suddenly came up with in 2020, possibly under the influence of the coronavirus. Nor is it a partisan viewpoint held by a minority of the Israeli population.
Annexation is the natural – the organic, inevitable and inexorable – culmination of Zionist praxis going back to the late-19th century. For as long as modern Jews have coveted the land on which Palestinian Arabs were living, total Jewish sovereignty has been the one and only goal. There has never been any other goal.
“We are not coming to a desolate land to inherit it; rather, we are coming to conquer the land from the nation that resides there,” Moshe Sharett wrote in 1925.
For David Ben-Gurion, “We are not workers—we are conquerors. Conquerors of the land. We are a camp of conquerors … We worked and conquered and we were joyful with victory.”
The ultimate goal – conquest of the entire biblical Land of Israel, preferably with as few of its native inhabitants as possible – was never hidden. It wasn’t reserved for whispered conversations in dark corners between consenting adults. It appears repeatedly in public statements by Zionist leaders and in resolutions by Zionist organizations.
From the Second Aliyah onward Zionism had a clear and unwavering objective. Successive Israeli governments fiddled with the objective but never disowned it. Gaining and holding onto biblical territory in its entirety has always been the lodestar, even if committed and passionate Zionists in the diaspora preferred that it not be mentioned in their presence.
Over the years, Israel’s leaders have sometimes had to trim their sails to the prevailing diplomatic winds. In 1956, that meant withdrawing from the conquered Sinai peninsula, despite Ben-Gurion’s euphoric statement that the territories occupied by Israel would become part of “the third Jewish kingdom.”
The country’s ostensible acceptance of the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan was another such tactical realignment, as was Ariel Sharon’s dismantling of the settlements in Gaza in 2005. When the destination is clear and obvious, one can take the necessary detours to reach it.
The Sinai and Gaza are debatably part of the biblical heritage – few would wax lyrical today, as Davar newspaper did in 1956, about the Sinai being “the cradle of our transformation into a nation” – but there has never been any doubt about Judea and Samaria; Hebron and Nablus.
They were, are and always have been essential to the Zionist dream. What Netanyahu is threatening to do now – supported by Trump and his gaon son-in-law – is regularize what has been the quotidian since 1967. Diaspora Jewish leaders oppose it because it will call their bluff – highlight their hypocrisy. They will finally be seen for what they are.
Personally, I’m all for annexation. It will be a reactionary, atavistic move in every possible way – but at least it will reveal the Zionist mission for what it is. There is a chance, however slight, that it might clear the logjam; that it might finally get people thinking beyond their knee-jerk, romantic Zionism. It will show Israel in its true, apartheid light – a racist society lording it over its ethnic inferiors.
I don’t know what will happen after that, but letting in some light can’t be a bad thing.
The Kibbitzer has been mostly missing in action during the current pandemic, though for good reason. I used the lockdown to complete and publish a biography of my father, Jock Isacowitz. I am pleased to announce that the book, “Telling People What They Don’t Want to Hear: A Liberal Life Under Apartheid,” is now available on Amazon in ebook format and will be available in paperback in July.
Jock, who died when I was ten, was an ex-servicemen’s leader after World War II, a former communist, a liberal and a prisoner of the apartheid regime during the 1960 emergency. He fought hard for the classic liberal values of equality, civil and human rights and freedom – values that were deprecated under the apartheid regime and remain elusive in many countries today, including some of those that call themselves democratic.
For me, researching his life and trying to come to grips with the man he was – and who I barely remembered – was a profound experience. Now two decades older than Jock was when he died, I was taken back to a period when people still believed in liberal and democratic values and were prepared to sacrifice for their achievement.
It sounds quaint and anachronistic in the period of Trump and his clones, but revisiting the opposition to apartheid in South Africa during the Forties and Fifties rekindled my dwindling belief in the possibility of truth, justice and freedom. I hope it does the same for you.
You can read more about the book, “Telling People What They Don’t Want to Hear: A Liberal Life Under Apartheid”, on The Kibbitzer Books. I have also written a short preview of the book on PoliticsWeb.
Of course, if you simply can’t wait to read it, it is available now on Amazon.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts, either as reviews on the Amazon site or comments here.
FROM THE OFFICE OF THE EX-PRESIDENT
February 28, 2018
Sawubona Bibi:
Interesting that some people claim I’m a has-been. That it’s all over for me; that I’ll disappear from centre stage in a cloud of impepho. This is our home-grown version of incense, similar to the stuff they used to perfume your Temple in the days before those white monopoly capitalists, the Romans, razed it to the ground.
Yet earlier this week – as a private citizen, mind you – I gave a little talk to the students of Bizimali High School in my hometown of Nkandla and now it’s all over the fake news pages and web sites, presented as some sort of aberration.
My chat was merely a way of explaining the vital importance of education and the dangers of drugs as well as to let the young ‘uns benefit from my experiences and detailed knowledge of the history of the Zulu nation. Yet, as I say, you’d think that I re-wrote our famous Constitution – in my view, by the way, a foolish and lily-livered document. (Squirrel played too big a role in its writing and the Old Man agreed with its tenets only because he had a bizarrely soft spot for the white monopoly capitalists and also knew the boere had a ring of steel around Pretoria.) Homosexuals have equal rights – they can even marry each other – and women and journalists also have rights and, most worryingly, a man apparently can’t have sexual congress with a woman if she says “no”, or even breathes it throatily and passionately into his ear, which, as you and I know, means “yes”. And so on. As you would say: Oy.
Anyway, I explained to the students that if I had been allowed to be a dictator for six months – in other words, not have had to deal with that stupid Constitution and those lard-asses in parliament – I would have sentenced young people hooked on drugs to Robben Island where they would have been forced to study. This is what I said: “Those who do whoonga, dagga, alcohol, must be removed to a college, maybe Robben Island, and be forced to learn and leave that place with a degree.” You see my point, don’t you? Enforce some tough love, give these kids some worthwhile training for life. But of course the newspapers are rabbiting on today only about me “having wanted to be a dictator”.
Then I thought I’d teach them a little history as well as briefly explore the pitfalls of democracy (a crappy concept if ever there was one, as you well know – not at all good for either African or Semite). I said: “We need to take lessons from Shaka Zulu, one of our great, great leaders. Shaka ruled successfully for 12 years. But look at us. We have ruled for 23 years and we are still crying. Why? Because Democracy should have authority but ours doesn’t. Once there is no authority in democracy – once everybody has a say – it becomes worse than a dictatorship, it becomes more dangerous.”
And I explained a bit more. “Maybe it’s because Shaka did not sit in many meetings that Shaka was successful. He knew that if he called a meeting, people would derogate his authority. There is an important lesson we must take from him: that we enforce the right thing by imposing it.”
What do I get in response for these eminently sane words, these pearls of wisdom? You know the answer.
Yours, slightly depressed (though at least no more meetings!),
Jacob.
THE PRIME MINISTER’S BUREAU
February 28, 2018
Shalom Jacob
Amazing you should write that because I’ve been making the same point for years already. We’ve all become so conditioned to thinking of democracy as the ultimate political system – the be-all and end-all – that we never stop to think whether that is really the case. I don’t think it is. When tough decisions need to be made, the endless give and take of one-size-fits-all democracy is more often an obstacle than a solution.
Take my good friend Xi Jinping, for example. Not that China is a democracy, but in good democratic fashion it has been changing its leader like clockwork every ten years. Then along comes Xi, who says (correctly, in my view) that it’s illogical to expect a leader to solve all the problems of two billion people in a mere ten years. He needs more time, more leeway. He needs authority. Like the Jews, the Chinese are a very argumentative people and difficult to work with.
I don’t claim to be an expert on South Africa, but with all the problems you have (I’ve heard you have far too many Moslems and Sharansky tells me that anti-Semitism is rampant), it doesn’t surprise me to hear that the greatest problems you faced while in office were all due to democracy. Over-fastidious courts, weak central authority, cheeky subordinates who won’t do as you say. I’ve been there my friend.
And then of course there’s the curse of the media and the insane notion that they should be able to write whatever they want. Serious leaders are now coming around to the understanding (first enunciated by yours truly) that an uncontrolled media is the key obstacle to good governance. In the last few weeks I’ve discussed the issue with Don, Vlad, Abe (al-Sisi), Vik and Richie (my nickname for Erdogan) and they were all were adamant that they had to crack down on the media in order to serve their countries. (They’re all very good friends of mine and I speak with them often.)
As it happens, I’ve recently been looking at history for examples of strong and successful leaders. (Did you know that my father was a very famous historian? He didn’t get the recognition he deserved due to the hatred of the media and the scheming of the leftists in Israeli academia.) Anyway, I’ve become particularly interested in the Caudillo, which is the title given to strongmen in South American countries. What is most striking is that the Caudillo typically combines political with military leadership.
That would disqualify the man you call Squirrel (the closest he ever got to the military was shooting miners in the back, as far as I can tell), but it definitely works for the two of us, doesn’t it? I’ve just looked you up on Wikipedia and discovered that you, too, are a military man, having spent many years in senior military positions at ANC camps outside South Africa. Semper fi, bro!
If you’re interested, I’ll send you a picture of me standing on the wing of a hijacked plane just minutes after the elite commando unit I commanded captured it from anti-Semitic hijackers with tea towels on their heads. I always carry the picture around with me to flash as necessary; you have no idea how it pisses off President Bone Spur!
Think of Juan Peron; tough, loved by the people, the scourge of the left. That’s a Caudillo! That’s the sort of leader we need to be. You, of course, could also marry an Evita, while I’ll still be lumbered with old piggie motor-mouth.
In case life wasn’t interesting enough (in the Chinese sense. Did I tell you that Xi Jinping was a very good friend of mine?) a prosecutor told a court in Israel this week that I had done a businessman friend of mine favors valued at over one billion shekels in return for favorable coverage in a website he owns. Favorable coverage! The leftist media wouldn’t cover me favorably if I my name was Che Guevara, while the rational media, such as it is, is already owned by me and my friends. (Did I tell you that I have many good friends? Some of them even give me gifts of cigars.)
These charges are a form of political assassination. A person more paranoid than me would see the recent goings on as the first skirmishes in an attempted coup. Not unlike the one that unseated you, mind you.
Well, they’re not going to succeed. The Jewish People need me and it’s for them that I fight on. Remember, we’re on the side of the righteous, as Mike Pence said to me.
Your brother in arms
Bibi
P.S. I just looked up whoonga. My God, marijuana mixed with AIDS drugs?! Let Ramapussy try deal with that one democratically!