by davidrobertlewis -

Palestinian academics condemn Abbas Holocaust statement

In response to recent statements by President Mahmoud Abbas, a group of Palestinians have​ released an open letter:

We the undersigned, Palestinian academics, writers, artists, activists, and people of all walks of life, unequivocally condemn the morally and politically reprehensible comments made by President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas about the Holocaust. Rooted in a racial theory widespread in European culture and science at the time, the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people was born of antisemitism, fascism, and racism. We adamantly reject any attempt to diminish, misrepresent, or justify antisemitism, Nazi crimes against humanity, or historical revisionism vis-a-vis the Holocaust.

The Palestinian people are sufficiently burdened by Israeli settler colonialism, dispossession, occupation, and oppression without having to bear the negative effect of such ignorant and profoundly antisemitic narratives perpetuated by those who claim to speak in our name. We are also burdened by the PA’s increasingly authoritarian and draconian rule, which disproportionately impacts those living under occupation. Having held onto power nearly a decade and a half after his presidential mandate expired in 2009, supported by Western and pro-Israel forces seeking to perpetuate Israeli apartheid, Abbas and his political entourage have forfeited any claim to represent the Palestinian people and our struggle for justice, freedom, and equality, a struggle that stands against all forms of systemic racism and oppression.

Rashid Khalidi — Sherene Seikaly — Tareq Baconi — Muhammad Ali Khalidi — Zaha Hassan — Noura Erakat — Raja Shehadeh — Isabella Hammad — Lana Tatour — Nadia Abu El-Haj — Bashir Abu-Manneh — Raef Zreik — Leena Dallasheh — Lila Abu Lughod — Kareem Rabie — Mezna Qato — Amahl Bishara — Dana El Kurd — Nadia Hijab — Samera Esmeir — Ahmad Samih Khalidi — Abdel Razzaq Takriti — Maha Nassar — Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian — Huwaida Arraf — Rosemary Sayigh — Areej Sabbagh-Khoury — Tamara Ben-Halim — Yezid Sayigh — Jumana Manna — Nadim Bawalsa — Yousef Munayyer — Omar Qattan — Ismail Nashef — Nu’man Kanfani — Himmat Zoubi — Shahd Hammouri — Hamzé Attar — Hana Sleiman — Haithem El-Zabri — Samir Sinijlawi — Mussa’ab Bashir — Sam Bahour — Huda Al Imam — Bashir Bashir — Joey Ayoub — Michel Khleifi — Layth Malhis — Abdalhadi Alijla — Anis Mohsen — Karam Dana — Omar Dajani — Ubai Aboudi — Issam Nassar — Bassam Massarwa — Zaina Arekat — Bahaa Shahera Rauf — May Seikaly — Jerry Jareer Khoury — Rania Madi — Wesam Ahmad — Refaat Alareer — Omar Jabary Salamanca — Mona Hewaydi — Y. L. Al-Sheikh — Yasmeen Hamdan — Emilio Dabed — Ines Abdel Razek — Basheer Karkabi — Majed Abusalama — Leila Farsakh — Yazan Khalili — Moien Odeh — Hilary Rantisi — Tariq Raouf — Aimee Shalan — Nadia Khalilieh — Linda Kateeb — Bassam Dally — Zahi Khamis — Sami Jiries — Razzan Quran — Nour Salman — Jamal Rayyis — Izzeddin Araj — Tarek Ismail — Susan Muaddi Darraj — Basman Derawi — Rawan Arraf — Asad Ghanem — Assad Abdi — Umayyah Cable — Fahad Ali — Samar Dahleh — Ayman Nijim — Jumana Musa — Miryam Rashid — Helga Tawil-Souri — Leila Shahid — Leena Barakat — Nadia Saah — Hana Masud — Asma Al-Naser — Diana Buttu — Selma Dabbagh — Rana Issa — Riyad Khoury — Nasser Saleh — Said Abu Mualla — Haneen Zoabi — Muayad Alayan — Afnann Egbaria — Khaled Karkabi — Jaber Suleiman — Tarif Khalidi — Pelican Mourad — Ibrahim Fraihat — Basel Ghattas — Wisam Gibran — Fathi Marshood — Radi Suudi — Ahmed Abofoul — Omar Barghouti — Abdelhamid Siyam — Noor A’wad — Lara Elborno — Areen Hawari — Liyana Kayali — Nadia Naser-Najab — Kamal Aljafari — Anthony Broumana — Seema Hejazi — Fady Joudah — Samah Sabawi — Ramy Al-Asheq — Yousef Abu Warda — Khalil Sayegh — Nadim Khoury — Waseem Abu Mehadi — Jonathan Kuttab — Line Khateeb — Abdellatif Rayan — George Abed — Khalil Shikaki — Diana Alzeer — Lena Khalaf Tuffaha — Nadim Rouhana — Bassam Shihada — Hiba Husseini — Majed Kayali — Nahed Schäffer-Awwad — Burhan Ghanayem — Loubna Turjuman — Abeer Al-Najjar — Naseer Aboushi — Yasmeen Daher — Siman Khoury — Amani Barakat — Dimah Habash — George Bisharat — Walid Afifi — Hasan Hammami — Khalil Hindi — Akram Baker — Margaret Zaknoen DeReus — Mazen Masri — Tanya Keilani — Marzuq Al-Halabi — Hanan Toukan — Abdelnasser Rashid — Fadya Salfiti — M. Muhannad Ayyash — Yasser Abdrabbou — Maurice Ebileeni — Rashida Tlaib — Lina Qamar — Oraib Toukan — Rima I Anabtawi — Emad Salem — Mona Khalidi — Mohammed Said Samhouri — Raja G Khoury — Sara Husseini — Nasser Mashni — Jawadat Abu El-Haj — Norma M. Rantisi — Ann Shirazi — Ahmad Shirazi — Suheil Nammari — Nafez Abo-Elreich — Moosa Omar — Karem Sakallah — Farouq R Shafie — Mahmoud Muna — Izzat Darwazeh — Awni Daibes — Nadeem Karkabi — Ra’fat Sub Laban — Lina Ramadan — Gabriel Mifsud — Khaled Hamida — Basma Al-Sharif — Ali Mansour — Falestin Naili — Manar H. Makhoul — Nabil Armaly — Hassan F Hamed — Waleed Karkabi — Nada Elia — Abed Azzam — Hassane Karkar — Ben Jamal

by davidrobertlewis -

Islamic Fatwa Council issues Fatwa against Hamas

THE Islamic Fatwa Council (IFC) has ruled on the conduct of Hamas (Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah), charging the Islamist entity with violating the laws of the Holy Quran. The Fatwa was published on the IFC website on 9 March 2023 and is signed by Grand Ayatollah Shaikh Fadhil al-Budairi.

According to the document, the IFC “deems the recently publicized audio and video material containing testimonies of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip to be both alarming and concerning. It is the responsibility of the Islamic Seminaries to take a clear and firm stance in light of the inhumane actions of Hamas.”

The IFC says it has “reviewed extensive documentation of Hamas behavior towards Palestinians in Gaza, including their recently publicized testimonies. Our findings — which are also displayed in our jurisprudential reasoning — result in our ruling that:

  1. A) Hamas bears responsibility for its own reign of corruption and terror against Palestinian civilians within Gaza;
  2. B) It is prohibited to pray for, join, support, finance, or fight on behalf of Hamas – an entity that
    adheres to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood movement.

The IFC says it “joins The UAE Fatwa Council and the Council of Senior Scholars of Saudi Arabia in declaring the Muslim Brotherhood movement and all of its branches as terrorist organizations that defame Islam and operate in opposition to mainstream Islamic unity, theology and jurisprudence.

IFC FatwaDownload

by davidrobertlewis -

DEBUNKED: Palestinians and Jews, each form a distinct race & the conflict is thus like apartheid

IT WAS South Africa’s Hendrick Verwoerd who first resorted to the apartheid analogy in 1961 when he dismissed an Israeli vote against South African apartheid at the United Nations, throwing blame and deflecting attention by saying, “Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude … they took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state. (1)

Subsequent assertions emerged during the late 1980s alongside claims of a conspiracy between Pretoria and Tel Aviv to share nuclear secrets, however it is more likely that the regime first gained its technologies from the USA and France, when the Safari 1 reactor was built in cooperation with the ‘Atoms for Peace’ program run by the US DOE in the 1950s and ’60s, only later resorting to cooperation with Israel’s Menachem Begin in order to refuel reactors and share nuclear technology as sanctions kicked in.

The analogy received renewed impetus after the release of Nelson Mandela. At the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People in 1997, Mandela famously said: “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians; without the resolution of conflicts in East Timor, the Sudan and other parts of the world”.

The quote is often redacted to exclude other conflicts, and should be seen within the context of his earlier 1990 statement: “Support for Yasser Arafat and his struggle does not mean that the ANC has ever doubted the right of Israel to exist as a state, legally. We have stood quite openly and firmly for the right of that state to exist within secure borders“.

The primary objection to the apartheid analogy which may be raised is that Nations are not races. The result is what philosopher Gilbert Ryle referred to as a ‘category error’. A semantic or ontological error in which ‘things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category’. While ethnicity plays a part, there is no scientific nor any legal basis for making such a claim.(2) (3).

Attributing race to Jews in order to make a false comparison with apartheid is racism and anti-Semitism, and meets definitions of anti-Semitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

A 2020 academic paper on the question Is Replacement Theology Anti-Semitic? begins by defining anti-Semitism as “normally understood as prejudice or hatred against Jewish people as a race” before concluding that since Christianity doesn’t perceive the Jews as a race, Christian theology cannot, by definition be anti-Semitic.

Advocates of the analogy often refer to the infamous 1975 UN resolution 3379 ‘equating Zionism with racism‘ which was overturned by an overwhelming majority of nations in 1991. The same assertion was voted out of the final text of the controversial 2001 Durban Conference on Racism  and the text reaffirmed at Durban II. 

A highly flawed 2017 UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) report examining the policies of Israel within the context of a UN definition of apartheid, admits the error of race, proceeds to supply “reasons for the error of comparison” and states, there is ‘no single, authoritative, global definition of any race’ at the same time that it attributes race characteristics to Jews for the purposes of analysis.

The ESCWA report was withdrawn by UN Secretary-general Guterres in 2017, while the Goldstone report was similarly retracted in part. The same category error appears in an equally flawed 2009 local HSRC report written around the time of Durban II. 

While the policies of Israel may, for many of its critics, be reprehensible and morally indefensible, the root cause is not race, (a loaded term) but rather the confluence of religion and nationality and in particular, religious schism which results in nationality on the basis of religion, a fact common to many Middle Eastern countries.

by davidrobertlewis -

Kanye West: Is South Africa becoming a safe haven for anti-Semitism, homophobia?

READERS may remember Kanye West, the musician caught in an Anti-Semitic spiral, having gone from Racist bad to Nazi worse in the space of six months. Now IOL claims “Kanye West says he’s ‘moving to South Africa’ to start a new life”. Of course, what IOL meant was there were ten Kanye West’s under the bed — the news outlet has to date refused to apologise for a fake multibaby story, even though editor Piet Rampedi subsequently resigned.

The article by ZamaNdosi Cele does make it clear that the video is “making the rounds on social media platform, TikTok” but readers are expected to trawl through twitter postings before discovering that the origin is a Kanye West parody account and the story has been trafficked by an international ring of news rappers.

There is certainly no attempt by Cele to gain any comment from a newsworthy source, nor is there a clear warning by editors that the material has been debunked and the outlet has been caught out fabricating stories before. Readers would need to move over to SA news site Briefly to discover the truth.

West earlier posted antisemitic tropes on his social media accounts, shared antisemitic conspiracy theories with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and later, on social media, threatened violence against Jews

You may thus be forgiven for thinking the IOL article appears to offer solace to Anti-Semites, wishing to come to South Africa to catch the homophobic, Pro-Palestine alliance emerging between the ANC and EFF whose lack of a clear majority has resulted in a shameful sacrifice of LBGT rights by the left?

In July 2022 the Al-Ghurbaah Foundation condemned a fatwa against homosexuality issued by the Muslim Judicial Council accusing it of “mere reliance on the classical scholarly opinions of the 9th century.”

Clearly the mainstream press in South Africa are living in Cloudcuckooland where Palestine and Israel are concerned. While Palestinian gunmen were massacring Jews praying at a Jerusalem synagogue on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the following items escaped editorial attention;

SEE: Yeezus you ain’t Jeezus

by Robert Train -

Jozi Mayor Thapelo Amad: ‘No Homos please, we’re Muslims’

WITH the colors of Pan Arabism and the words ‘Palestine’ written in bold, Johannesburg’s new major Thapelo Amad made his inaugural appearance. The politician and imam is a member of the far-right, minority Al Jama-ah (Arabic: الجماعة, lit. ’the Congregation’) party, which has found itself with a golden vote, as part of a strange coalition between the Metro’s ANC and EFF.

All three parties have diverging, and perhaps irreconcilable policies when it comes to the status of LGBT, women, secularism and the Middle East.

While the Al Jama-ah manifesto opposes “moral sexuality education for primary school children to ensure they not issued with soft porn material in violation of the sexual offences act”, it has a host of feel-good policies on poverty alleviation, economic upliftment and the like.

But it significantly also opposes events such as Gay Pride, much like its counterparts, Fatah and Hamas, and is actively positioning itself to introduce moral policing in the Metro, informed by scripture.

The ‘Palestinian Embassy’ in Johannesburg were quick to shower Amad with awards in the aftermath of his successful mayoral campaign (see photo left).

One need look no further than a press release by the party in October 2022 which takes issue with News24 and its supposed “Diabolical Headlines” where the party strangely felt the need to respond to a news-story about a potential ISIS attack.

Amad’s party proceeded to upbraid reporter Qaanitah Hunter for ‘implying that only Muslims are opposed to Gay Pride’. The party then went on to claim there are several Christian organisations also ‘vehemently opposed’ on religious grounds.

Hunter claims the News24 report referred to, “implies that only Muslims are opposed to the Gay Pride event; they are aware that there are several Christian organizations — based on religious grounds – that are also vehemently against it.”

Amad’s Party ‘vehemently opposed’ to Gay Pride

The Party according to spokesperson Shameemah Salie “does not identify with any LGTQ (sic) activities whether it be Gay Pride parades and even comedy shows, it rejects any insinuation in which Muslims are not just negatively implicated but persistently fingered for wanting to cause chaos in that city. Whether – from a religio-theological perspective – we determinedly disagree with their forms sexual orientation and their queer belief system, it should unambiguously be stated that most of our communities do not support these LGBTQ groups.”

According to Salie: “Their lifestyle is condemned and unacceptable with the practices of Islam and Muslims. “

She also accused News24 of Islamophobia and said: “The paper’s repugnant headline undoubtedly is an unambiguous expression of purposeful Islamophobia; they want communities of other faiths to view Islam and Muslims negatively.”

The statement also said the party was “aware of constitutional rights” of LGBT and would find ways to ‘deal with them’.

Ed note: Secularism, as the man who coined the term George Holyoake asserted in his principles of Secularism, is not the absence of religion, but rather the absence of religious rule.

In particular Holyoake stated “A Secularist guides himself by maxims of Positivism, seeking to discern what is in Nature—what ought to be in morals—selecting the affirmative in exposition, concerning himself with the real, the right, and the constructive. Positive principles are principles which are provable. “

UPDATE: The press statement now appears to have been taken down alongside all the party’s press material and is no longer available on their website. However the document pdf and its url is still referred to on the Net and a copy is in our possession, and available below:

by davidrobertlewis -

EFF confirm religious dimension to conflict in Israel/Palestine

WITHOUT any hint of irony, a press statement issued by political party, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) asserts: “History informs us the Temple Mount /Haram el Sharif is one of the most sensitive sites in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in that ‘the hilltop site is the most sacred place in Judaism and the third holiest site in Islam and that the entire compound is considered to be Al-Aqsa Mosque by Muslims.'”

The statement condemns Israel Minister Itamar ben Gavir’s recent visit to the holy site in what the party claims is the ‘unlawfully annexed East Jerusalem city of Palestine”.

The EFF should be aware that South Africa’s constitution enshrines religious freedom within a secular framework, and that supporting discrimination on the basis of religion is contrary to article 15 Freedom of Religion, Belief and Opinion, in particular protection of religious observances, as well as other rights such as freedom of movement and right to assemble peacefully.

The dispute over the final status of Jerusalem predates the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which both sides lay claim to East Jerusalem. Jordan occupied East Jerusalem from 1948-1967, when it was annexed by Israel following the 6-day war resulting from the mass mobilisation of armies in neighbouring Arab States of Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

Prior to 1948 the ‘corpus separatum‘ (Latin for “separated body”) was the internationalization proposal for Jerusalem and its surrounding area as part of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. It was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly with a two-thirds majority in November 1947.

According to the Partition Plan, the city of Jerusalem would be brought under international governance, conferring it a special status due to its shared importance for the Abrahamic religions.

The corpus separatum was one of the main issues of the Lausanne Conference of 1949.

SEE: Everything you know about the Palestinian Struggle is wrong

by davidrobertlewis -

DECLASSIFIED: How a controversy over a Palestinian supporter of the Nazi Party exposed a campaign to sugar-coat events in the aftermath of WW2

WHEN PHOTOGRAPHS of Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini touring Trebbin Concentration Camp appeared the images were greeted with disbelief. The 6 previously unknown photos in which the Palestinian leader and self-styled ‘grand mufti of Jerusalem’, al-Husseini, inspects a Nazi concentration camp along with Nazi senior officials and government figures, are shocking to say the least.

Three of the images now in the public domain provide “irrefutable proof that all of the men present had precise knowledge of the fate of Jews in Hitler’s Germany — and of the likely fate of Jews in their own home countries under Nazi rule, ” writes Wolfgang Schwanitz. The photos are stamped “Photo-Gerhards Trebbin.” 

click to enlarge

This evidence of Palestinian leadership involvement in the events surrounding the Holocaust, as more than simply a disinterested party, stand alongside documentation and commentary by Schwanitz, showing a delegation including Iraqi politician Ali al-Kailani accompanying al-Husseini. These are not the only clues, indicating that al-Husseini’s published memoirs, upon which much of current historical opinion on the politician (including a controversial Wikipedia article) is based, are just plain wrong.

Joel Fishman in a forward to a special issue on al-Husseini in the Jewish Political Studies Review says:”During the past decades, new archival sources have become available. They include Nazi documents captured by the Red Army, State Department and CIA collections which have become declassified, and related primary sources from Germany. “

“For example, in 1977, the State Department declassified the “Axis in Arabic” files of the US Embassy in Cairo. This valuable collection includes transcripts of the Mufti’s speeches to the Arab world, broadcast from Berlin by shortwave.”

“Approximately 8 million pages of documents declassified in the United States under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act added significantly to our knowledge of wartime Nazi crimes and the postwar fate of suspected war criminals” write Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda in the introduction to their book Hitler’s Shadow. Yet other documents remain classified, see postscript below.

Dr Steven Wagner of Brunel University London, head of a project which aims to ‘unmask al-Husseini via his war-time letters and diaries’ concurs:

“It’s now possible to set the record straight. Researchers have lacked access to direct primary evidence about Husseini’s time in Germany and Italy during 1941-45. Lack of evidence has hampered research about Husseini’s aims, motives, and decisions. Most of what we know about him has derived from his own memoir, written decades later, compared against colonial archives.”

Click to Enlarge
Husseini and Himmler

Yet a good deal of this apparent ‘new evidence’ was already in the public domain in some form, long before the circumstances of al-Husseini’s close relationship with the Hitler regime was raised in a very public fashion in 2015, at which time, the evidence appeared then, to the casual observer, to be merely transcripts of a 1941 meeting with Adolf Hitler, ‘an innocent meeting with Der Fuhrer’, along with several books by authors accused of ‘Nazifying the subject matter’.

In reality most of the early intrigue stems from evidence submitted before Nuremberg and later Eichmann trial.

by davidrobertlewis -

Dear Ms Naledi Pandor

Dear Ms Naledi Pandor,

Your campaign to exclude the Jewish African Diaspora from the African Union refers.

That I live in a country with an egregious history of involvement and support for Hitler’s policies of mass extermination of Jews, should not have to be the starting point for a debate in South Africa. Yet, I am forced to remind you that it was then Minister of Interior, DF Malan who introduced both the Quota Act (1930) and Aliens Act (1937), restricting Jewish employment and also Jewish immigration to South Africa.

A National Party membership card of the time carries both the Swastika and the words: “The South African National Party emanates from the S.A. gentile National-Socialist movement and incorporates the said movement as also the SA Grey Shirts”.

The resulting political formation was the selfsame movement which introduced apartheid race laws defining our country’s citizens in terms of race criteria — criteria modelled upon Hitler’s own Nuremberg Laws.

Between 1933 and 1941, the Nazi policy of judenrein (cleansing of Jews) aimed to remove the German Jewish population “by making life so difficult for them that they would be forced to leave the country”. By 1938, about 150,000 German Jews, ‘had already fled the country with many Jews unable to find countries willing to take them in’.

The plight of the SS Stuttgart, a ship carrying 537 Jewish refugees is illustrative of the problem. Chartered to beat the ban imposed by the Aliens Act, it was opposed in Cape Town harbour by DF Malan’s Grey Shirts, who subsequently held several meetings on the “Jewish Problem”, addressed by HF Verwoerd and TE Donges, who exclaimed: ‘The Jew is an insoluble element in every national life.’ [1]

The Évian Conference was convened 6–15 July 1938 at Évian-les-Bains, France, to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wishing to flee persecution by Nazi Germany. Attended by 32 countries, with South Africa apparently in observer status, our country agreed to “taking only those with close relatives already resident”, in the process condemning many of the Holocaust’s victims.

Last year Israel was granted observer status by the African Union — 46 AU Member States already have relations with Israel including our own, and the resolution has the support of a majority of its members. In so doing, the Chairperson of the AU affirmed the union’s “positive role of mediator to the conflict.”

Nevertheless South Africa’s policy towards Israel, consistent with Mandela’s bipartisan support for a two-state solution, was taken to task by the vocal Palestinian Lobby within the country. The result is that your government currently opposes the presence of Israel within the AU and now comprises a minority group of 21 nations so opposed.

A recent Constitutional Court decision (SAHRC on behalf of SAJBD v Masuku and Another) affirmed the right of Jewish South Africans to an identity which includes affinity with the State of Israel. Counsel for the SAHRC stated that the word Zionist “in the South African context means Jew because the vast majority of South African Jews are Zionist”.

Whether or not you take issue as I do with current definitions of Zionism — whether as a religious, political or secular philosophy, is beside the point.

The fact remains that Israel itself possesses a considerable African population, comprising Ethiopian and Maghrebi Jews i.e. North African Jews who are “native Jews who had traditionally lived in the Maghreb region of North Africa”, and others, comprising some 3.3% of the total population.

There also exists a sizeable population of Jews in Africa, such as the Ogoni from Ogoniland in Nigeria,​ ​Abayudaya in​ ​Uganda and Zimbabweans, who to some extent are recognised by the Orthodox Rabbinate, following completion of religious victuals, but who are otherwise discriminated against by the Israeli Beth Din.

Our own country has a relatively small Jewish diaspora, with Non-Theist Jews such as myself, a minority within a minority.

To those who persist in pursuing an abhorrent apartheid doctrine, within South Africa, for instance, by claiming all Jews should be classified as white for the purposes of population registration, but be nevertheless discriminated against when it comes to our secular rights and freedoms, I can only state, that my own children are very much Rainbows and people of color.

Instead of campaigning to remove Israel from the AU, supposedly to pressure the Israeli government when it comes to the dispute over the Final Status of Jerusalem, I suggest that your time could be better spent tackling the lack of rights and representation of black Jews within the African Union.

Instead of embarking upon a path which leads directly into a confrontation with the majority of AU members, in order to pursue a territorial conflict in which Arab states were awarded some 65% of the territory of Ottoman Palestine, only to dispute the remaining 35% awarded under the British Mandate and UN partition plan, may I suggest that you could a lot better by removing sanctions against your own citizens — unlawful sanctions against persons such as myself who do not currently possess a right to a secular identity due to the prognostications of your own political, religious and legal emirs.

Take a look at a map of Palestine supplied by the Ottoman Railway Company showing that Palestine once included what is today Southern Lebanon, parts of Syria and the East Bank of the Jordan, before you rush to defend the Anti-Semitic supercessionist movement called Hamas.

Instead of cynically expressing solidarity with a Palestinian sectarian organisation which seeks to create a ‘Palestine within Palestine’, currently lacks a Freedom Charter and which is fundamentally opposed to LGBTIQ rights, you could do far better by creating a safe and open space for both parties to the conflict to witness African Ubuntu and the democratic processes within the AU.

If you wish to raise any issues with regard to the above, please do not hesitate.

Sincerely yours,

David Robert Lewis

Notes

  1. incapable of being dissolved into a solution.

SEE: Remarks of the Chairperson of the African Union Commission on the granting of observer state to the State of Israel

by davidrobertlewis -

Israel Amnesty Report, an exercise in ellipsis and paradox

THERE is an astonishing contradiction at the heart of the latest Amnesty International Report on Israel, one deserving further analysis. Resolving it, could be the key to unlocking a potential solution. Ignoring it, could mean, business as usual, since the document’s omission of history and demographic context, makes the report in all likelihood, an exercise in futility.

Prior to 2018 and the passing of ‘Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People“, by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s raison d’être was exactly, as the didactic law maintains, to provide a nation-state for the Jewish people. Yet there was always hope that the country could achieve a lot more for all its citizens. As a cosmopolitan and democratic hub in the Middle East, it had pretensions at being just like any Secular Western country, a melting pot of divergent interests.

It was successive Intifadas beginning in 1987, which put paid to this notion. The reason can be seen by the manner in which Amnesty International treats the issue of nationality, preferring to tackle the problem from the perspective of a proposed, single unitary state, one which ignores the logic of Islamic Jihad, and Palestinian separatism, all while holding to a UN-sponsored fiction that Israel occupies Gaza, for the purpose of analysis.

Thus Palestinians in Gaza, according to Amnesty are being denied their rights to become Israeli citizens, at the same time they are being denied their rights to become Palestinians in a country that includes all of the territory under the former British Mandate.

The same is true in the West Bank, where the issue of nationality, passports and permanent resident status are compounded by an ongoing dispute involving land and borders, one that revolves around a centuries old teleological crisis involving the City of Jerusalem. To put this another way, it is a crisis within monotheism, as to which monotheistic religion prevails at the end of the day.

In recent years there have been a number of attempts to apply UN definitions of the ‘crime of apartheid’ under international law to the conflict. I have written about some of these earlier, mostly misguided endeavours to impose pseudo-scientific race definitions onto the situation [1], and have routinely objected to the resulting category error, since clearly nations are not races. There is no distinct Palestinian ‘race’.

Page 7:
[Amnesty International] does not seek to argue that…any system of oppression and domination as perpetrated in Israel…is…the same or analogous to the system of segregation, oppression and domination as perpetrated in South Africa between 1948 and 1994.

Page 211:
Amnesty International has analyzed Israel’s intent to create and maintain a system of oppression and domination over Palestinians and examined its key components: territorial fragmentation; segregation and control…It has concluded that this system amounts to apartheid.