Farid Esack - Apartheid South Africa and Israel Today, Parallels (2007)

Speaker 1: He grew up in South Africa and was a part of the struggle against apartheid as an activist in the inter-religious solidarity movement for justice and peace. Farid is a Muslim theologian who studied in Karachi, Pakistan, completed his PhD in Birmingham, England, and did post-doctoral work in Frankfurt, Germany. He has taught at several universities in Europe, South Africa, and the U.S., and is currently a fellow in teaching at the Harvard Divinity School. So he's come from Boston to us. He is a prolific writer on many topics, including Islam, gender, liberation theology, interfaith relations, religion and identity, and Quranic, our new word of the day, hermeneutics. How many know that word? Well, of course Liza does. Of course, check that. It means interpretation, I think. Is that right?

Farid Esack: All right.

Speaker 1: His current major field of interest is Islam and AIDS, and he has spoken on topics related to Jerusalem, religious pluralism, Muslim-Jewish relations, and religious radicalism in international venues. He's our kind of guy, wouldn't you say? I am so happy to present to you Farid Issaq.

Farid Esack: whatever it is worth, a much better speaker without my notes. And at the same time, I never feel comfortable In some ways, there is a parallel between this obsession with notes and holding on to the text and religious fundamentalisms. The more insecure we become as speakers, the more we need to hold on to a text. And so, yes, the text. I feel safe, you know, with the text. I recently visited some friends at Notre Dame. And what is worse, sorry, about my text, I had my notes printed out at the hotel. And then before, of course, I checked whether it was okay, they said, yes, it would be fine. It's not too long, is it? So I said, oh, no, it's not. It's about four pages long. But then I had to get my eight pages font into a four page size, which now means that I actually need my glasses. It was about a year or two ago when I went to Notre Dame University. By the way, I kind of thought about this last night again when I saw these students on fraternity row, you know, walking around in bands, literally hordes, you know, like you see these packs with fraternity T-shirts on, all of them identifying with a particular clan. Anyway, so I was at Notre Dame University in South Bend, and the school's football team, the Irish, they were playing against their ancient and also nearby rivals, Purdue. Now, the march that traditionally precedes this match is traditionally preceded by a lot of fanfare, with thousands of family, alums, and fans coming from all over North America. And about three hours before kickoff, In the heart of this bastion of Roman Catholic scholarly excellence in the United States, I stood outside the back door of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, where a large crowd had gathered. A very long honor line snaked its way from the Basilica to the stadium in order to receive the Irish, as many of the Irish, by the way, were black, but that is what Notre Dame's team is called. The Irish emerged from the basilica after attending a special mass. They walked out serious-looking, well-dressed business executives to be greeted by the oohs and the ahhs of an awestruck crowd as they made their way over to the stadium in perfect silence. Several spectators tried to just shake the players' hands and made the sign of the cross as they passed by. A few minutes later, tucked away behind a building adjacent to the basilica, I found more fans. They were now kneeling and making the sign of the cross before or after having lit a candle before a statue of the Virgin Mary in Our Lady of Lourdes grotto. I wondered whether the athletes had also come here before their special mass inside the basilica. What I did find out a few hours later is that a few minutes before kickoff, many of them did take the time upon racing into the stadium, run off to the other end of the field, knelt down and offered the last prayer in front of this massive portrait of Jesus. standing out there open arms. Now this, many of you are familiar with it, it's this touchdown Jesus. This 10-story high mosaic on the southern wall of the main university library stands higher, in fact, than the stadium, keeping a watchful eye over the Irish at every home game. There were two other rituals that I observed. The bookshop turned souvenir shop was packed to full capacity. with hundreds of shoppers going for everything from rosaries to sweatshirts to postcards. The second ritual, less crowded, involves stopping by next door at the alumni office to renew one's commitment to the flock. It appeared to me that God, in the divine attributes of Jesus of Nazareth, already in all probability a Catholic, was now being reduced, or elevated in this heresy, to a Notre Dame mascot. I was struck by all of this, undecided whether to treat this as a comedy or to be reverential towards whatever gave meaning to all of these Notre Dame Irish devotees. I could not help thinking that regardless of the depths of the fervour demonstrated by all of these true believers, These rituals and Catholic religious symbols were being co-opted into the financial dynamics beyond the famous institutions of higher learning. The sacred was being co-opted by the secular. A secular deeply wedded to sectarian and financial interests. Notre Dame's guard was an Irish fan and a very wealthy one too. And he hates Purdue. You can see where I'm going with this. And when I look at some of the Zionist creation myths and a God that hates Purdue, I can hear people saying, no, this guy doesn't get it. For somebody committed to interfaith dialogue, you want to laugh at other people's foundational myths? we may want to argue that the foundational myths of the Jewish people of election and the covenant, often spelled with a C, are far more pivotal and doesn't really warrant this kind of trivialization. I'm not so sure. Why are the foundation myths of Afrikanerdom, or take the Maasai of Kenya, who believe that... that they are the trustees of all the cattle that God had ever created, and that they're the owners and the guardians of these cattle. The Maasai, therefore, have the right to enter the lands of other people and take their cattle. So you have the creation myths of the Maasai. You have the creation myths of Afrikaanerdom, the Alstermen in Northern Ireland, the Serbs in former Yugoslavia. Why should we not hold their creation myths with more reverence? What elevates the Zionist foundation myths above others' that theirs are beyond critical scrutiny? What processes of history involving power and the powerful transform the myths of some people into folklore and others into non-negotiable truths that may not be measured by the standards of universal human rights that all of us, including normal critical scholars, must now tiptoe around. So yes, what am I without my myths? Perhaps the difficulty doesn't lie in what we are without these foundational myths. Am I frozen in a certain historical idea of what it means to be? If I insist, for example, that my manhood is intrinsically connected to my being in relation to you as a human, but it is connected to this creation myth that Muslims, and Muslims certainly share with Christians, that Eve was created from the rib of Adam, for example. And she was created for Adam. So my existence as a man, this is my identity. In relation to you as a woman, if I insist that this foundational myth must imply a superiority over you, you have every right to say, well, I'm really sorry. But your being a man must be revised. You may want to ascribe this value to your masculine identity. And so the question, but if it is tied to my inferiority as a human, I'm really sorry, you've got to find another way of being a man. If your Muslimness is tied... to the supremacy of Muslims over others, you have to find another way of being a Muslim. Don't expect me to buy into your Muslimness. If your Jewishness implies a chosenness or implies a connection to a particular land that other people were living in, I'm really sorry. I can't stand in reverence at your creation myths. God does not hate Purdue. And so... The question then is not simply one of who I am, but what do I want to become as I grow into a deeper awareness of the implications of my own identity constructions for the lesser one. All notions of unchanging selves are ultimately at the heart of racism, chauvinism, literalism and fundamentalism. And within them are the seeds for the mistrust of all endeavours that seriously engages other people and that takes a quest for justice seriously. To come back, to come to the question, this is my underlying approach to the question of South Africa, Zionism and Israel. Now, people ask always, can we compare the situation in Palestine to apartheid? It is understandable the indignation with which this assertion is often met by people who are friendly towards Zionism or Zionists. Nobody wants to be connected to a regime as despicable as the apartheid regime. This wasn't always the case. There is something, I mean, Dick Cheney, for example, six months before Mandela was released, He had still insisted on describing Mandela as a terrorist. He had still insisted on describing the African National Congress as a terrorist. But now we're living in a world where Nazism has no supporters. You know, after the Second World War, nobody could be found that had identified as Nazis. Every single German identified themselves as part of the resistance movement. And so now we've arrived at a time when Mandela is everybody's favorite uncle. Those universities that are now rushing all around the world to honor him with honorary doctorates and so on, who 20, 30 years ago punished faculty for introducing politics into their campuses by calling for divestment. Now Mandela is safe. Mandela is now this cuddly old man and so on, the African National Congress had been neutralized, now we can all want to pose for pictures with Mandela. Every single South African who has had a background in the liberation struggle, and who has been to Israel, Every single South African with a background in the South African liberation struggle have insisted that at the very least what we have happening here is not just akin to apartheid, but is actually much worse than what apartheid ever was for black people. And so, but then of course, no, I mean, there are a couple, oh, no, it is being, you are being unkind to the South African experience and so on. We'll come back to that in a moment. The word apartheid is actually a very benign term. It came in common use after World War I. The apartheid regime that used it did not intend for it to become the hated word that it did. Once it did acquire the sinister connotations that it always represented for those at its receiving end, the regime protested that people misunderstood it. When attempts to clarify what was meant by it failed, they tried to rename it. And as the borders of the unacceptable increased, they toyed with many, many terms, guardianship, separate development, radical pluralism, parallel development. But for us who suffered under it, apartheid denoted the forced separation of one group of people from another on the basis of race by a minority regime, a white minority regime with all the power of the police state. The contest for the meaning of the word was decided by the refusal of the black people of South Africa to have their suffering labeled by the oppressor. We mocked all the new terms that the regime conjured up. And with all the power at their disposal to do what they pleased, they could not determine for us how we should respond and how we should name it. They coined the word. We exposed its evil to the world and we refused to let them seek cover in ambiguity or in alternative words. The question as to whether Zionism can indeed be compared to racism is really not for us the most significant one, but whether there are similar patterns of rationalization and justification at work among Zionists in Israel and elsewhere, which lead to similar consequences for the Palestinians. The similarity in consequences is objectively verifiable, and the similarity in discourse is discernible to us when we listen to the justifications and see how they play out every day in Palestine and in Israel. And so, based on this, I am quite clear. that the Palestinians, what they are experiencing is infinitely worse, as I've said, than what we've ever experienced under apartheid. And the price that they have to pay for resistance, much more horrendous. In at least several different areas. One of the major things in South Africa was that the white people of South Africa had never envisaged their futures entirely without blacks. And so white people created these bantustans. And the bantustans were going to be reservoirs of labor that white people needed. But they needed black people. And in this needing of black people, there was a combination, there was a benignness in the middle of all of this repression. And so many whites actually grew up fond of blacks. Oh, blacks as our housekeepers, blacks as our gardeners, blacks as nannies for the children. Some South Africans, most ardent racists, Eugene Tereblanch, for example, proudly speaks about how he grew up with black people. So there was an enormous sense of pride in our black people. A black people that's containable, like you know you have your pets. They're cute, they're cuddly and so on, as long as they are containable. Once they become too problematic or too dangerous, you get rid of them. And this is very different in the case of Israel. There is a sense, perhaps from the one amongst many, many of the Zionists, an acknowledgement that they could not create this state of theirs without, with the Palestinians, alongside the Palestinians. And so in very many different ways, in different kinds of policy, how do you work the demography of your country? The huge question in Israel is, is this demographic problem of these Palestinians who are just kind of giving birth like rabbits, you know. And so both internally and, I mean, both for Palestinians inside Israel proper, as well as the Palestinians in the occupied territories. In South Africa, we never had this obsession. There were attempts, yes, to bring in the Poles and some Germans and white expertise and so on, but there was never a will to actually wipe black people out of South Africa. In responses to the resistance movement, South Africa did, apartheid South Africa did not know concept of collective punishment. This is one of the most barbaric things happening in Palestine. The idea of bulldozing the homes of alleged activists or terrorists. The idea of arresting and detaining indefinitely family members when you can't find... The closest that South Africa came to this was the question of, I think it was the Uppington 16, when a whole group of people were found in a crowd. And one of the members in the crowd was responsible for murdering a policeman. And the police had rounded up 16, and the court said that this wasn't justified. There may have been a part of the crowd, but no. But the whole idea of using... the vineyards of people using their olive groves, the collective destruction of homes, the detention of people along with their families. These were completely unknown responses in apartheid South Africa. The legitimation of torture, the Israeli Supreme Court has again more recently justified the use of torture as part of this whole anti-terrorist thing. But perhaps one of the most problematic, as far as resistance is concerned, as far as the international solidarity movement is concerned, is that the terrain was very, very different at the time of the struggle against apartheid. There wasn't a single superpower. The United States was competing with the Soviet Union at that time. And the milieu around it was not nearly as hegemonically entrenched as the current atmosphere. But of course, we're seeing that that is also receding at the moment. If you see the mess that the United States has landed up, I mean, just imagine just four or five years ago. was it four years ago when the war on Iraq started, many of us dreaded that, oh gosh, as they rolled into Baghdad, gosh, is Syria next? Is Iran next? What happens to Palestine? And so on. And now, after three, four years, wait, no, they can't deal with Iran. Forget about Iran. They're losing Afghanistan. And so it's not fine. It still maintains uncontested hegemony in the world today. But it isn't a hegemony that is on the upswing. On the contrary, it is on the down. Similarly, the international context in relation to the United Nations, South Africans had always understood that. that it had friends in the UN. The UN and its special committees against apartheid and decolonization, various agencies of the United Nations. South Africans were never in doubt that the international community were with our people. And this had changed. The term international community had now become another substitute. It's like the World Bank and the IFM, the different wings of the White House. And so the international community had now become but another extension of what Washington decrees for humankind. But perhaps the most intractable problem, I think, in facing us today is the interconnectedness between racism, guilt, not just racism and guilt, and the crimes that northerners committed against the Jews. The crimes that northerners, I'm talking about northerners as in white people in this case, committed against the Jews. And so here people are sitting, it's a combination of an enormous guilt. We both, we were quiet, we kept quiet when all of this happened. But even when we knew what was happening, if you look at say United States response and several responses inside Europe itself, governments preferred to not do anything about it until well after the fact. But there is, amongst very many decent people, there is an ongoing sense of, gosh, yes, we were complicit in this crime against the Jews. And in this remembering our own complicity in this crimes towards the Jews, we prefer to be silenced. It's like in another analogy that I use. It's like, you know, when you were guilty of abuse and you see the person that you had abused abusing somebody else. you may understandably turn a blind eye to the crime that this person is committing towards somebody else. Because those crimes could in fact remind you of the crimes that you had in fact committed. So in many ways, I think the sense that there is amongst many people in a country, for example, like the United States, of turning a blind eye to the crimes of Israel against the Palestinian people, it is a reflection of the inability of this society to come to terms with its own anti-Semitism. People have not dealt with their own anti-Jewishness. And when you haven't dealt with your anti-Jewishness, you then want to make up for it. Okay, fine, this uncle abused the child, and now the uncle gives the child sweets. Give the child sweets, give the child sweets. That's not the way in which you deal with your crimes. Build a Holocaust Memorial Museum. Okay, fine. Name a street Martin Luther King. You get done with it. Okay, fine. What are these blacks still moaning about? We named the street Martin Luther King Avenue. What's the story about the persistence of anti-Semitism? We have an anti-Holocaust museum in our town. So what more do you want? Why do you guys keep on moaning and so on? And so it is the interconnectedness between the guilt, the shame, but also, on the other hand, the exploitation of that guilt and that shame. It's not just guilt and shame. It's also the exploitation of that guilt and that shame. Do South Africans, and this is the most important question for me, do South Africans who've lived and suffered under apartheid recognize the existence of Palestinians as akin to theirs under apartheid? And do we see the struggle of Palestinians for freedom and dignity as similar to the one that we had undertaken? Nelson Mandela's statements are on the back of that poster there. Desmond Tutu's statements are at the back when Desmond says that looking at the conditions of the Palestinians reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. And I say, why are our memories so short? Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? In many of our responses to this, yes, we talk about even-handedness, we talk about moderation, we talk about valuing both sides and so on. And I want to problematize this. When we reduce the problem to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or worse, the Israeli-Arab conflict, or the Middle East situation, What does it really say about us, about our own power interests and our own refusal to have our comfort zones disturbed? To describe violence against women as just that, violence against women, it risks alienating your male partner in a business. If that abusive male husband is also our business partner or possibly one's boss or one's primary funder, then things can get really sticky. So we walk away saying, I don't want to get into the middle of this domestic violence. And we delude ourselves with seemingly conciliatory mutterings without ever addressing the questions of abuse. We are in the middle of it because we do business with the abusive husband or we profit from his abuse of his wife. and we sustain his delusions that he is okay, a part of the civilized crowd. We seek refuge in the both sides of a story to tell, as a way of dodging our own complicity. Rather than us merely hallowing the abuser with a mantle of respectability, our silence draws us into a web of complicity. However small a minority they may have been, only those who really refused to turn a blind eye to the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis were civilized. Only those who refused to be silent were civilized. All others had Jewish blood on their hands. To talk about the German-Jewish conflict or the black-white situation or marital problems in the face of manifest injustice and domestic abuse is no great virtue. It is the path initially of acquiescence and ultimately of complicity. My last page. Half a page. No, she's sitting here with a time sheet in her hand, those of you who don't know. A scholar who's written on this speaks about an analogy. Consider this analogy. A group of well-meaning activists in the late 1850s, 1850s America, hoped to bring an end to the horrors of slavery without war. They propose that the two sides strive for reconciliation, that the slaves sit down at the negotiating table with the slave owners and attempt to work out their differences through negotiation. The activists believe that the institution of slavery is oppressive, a violation of human rights, and that it must end. But they also recognize the property rights of owners to their slaves, as well as the owners' right to their lives and their livelihoods, their right to exist and not to be murdered in a slave uprising. The activists propose a middle road between the two sides, recognizing that both are responsible for the conflict. Slaves have shown a propensity to rebel and to violence, causing the slave owners to tighten their oppressive grip. We need our security. But believing that both slaves and owners have a right to be free, peaceful, and secure lives, and that the only way to achieve this is to avoid blaming the other side. People, just a couple of concluding comments. Yeah, I have no two ways about the similarity. I'm happy to continue talking to people about it and so on. But the truth is also that the struggle in South Africa was characterized by more than, I mean, the African National Congress was founded in 1904. A long history of organized resistance. there was a vibrant international solidarity movement throughout the world. But it's also true that our country's struggle had an inner coherence. It had a clearly identified leadership. There were tendencies in the liberation struggle that were fascist. There were tendencies in the liberation movement that were racist. I remember, you know, it's not nice, but I remember in the late 70s singing songs as a student, arson, rape and bloody murder when the black revolution comes. So there were racist and misogynistic tendencies inside the liberation movement. The racist tendencies inside the liberation movement never delegitimated our movement. There were these necklace bombings, you know, this necklace, necklacing, put ties around people's necks and so on. They never delegitimated the essential nature of our liberation struggle. I think it is tragic that the Palestinian struggle doesn't have more coherence to it. I don't think that it is a crime to not have a Mandela. This whole idea, yes, Yasser Arafat wasn't a Mandela, yes, they don't have an ANC. I don't think it's a crime to not have had a Mandela. It is true, yes, that the African National Congress had a clear vision of a non-racial society. We knew exactly how, what we wanted to do, and to some extent, you know, we began to get there despite our own kind of economic sellout and so on. It is tragic, I think, that this kind of leadership does not come from the Palestinians, from the Palestinian resistance movement. But at the end of the day, People don't have to behave properly and nicely for them to be entitled to human rights. Human rights, justice, and dignity, it's not a cookie that you hand out to well-behaving children. It is something that all of us are born with. And so our work, our solidarity work, our justice commitment and so on, it is because of our own complicity, both historically as well as our ongoing complicity. Your economy, your lives, your society thrives because of economic relationships that in turn has to have all of these wars going on in different parts of the world. And so it is not a favor that you are doing by being engaged in solidarity work. You're doing this for yourselves. Thank you very much. I'd be happy for people to stand up and ask questions. One of the major differences with the apartheid situation and with Zionism is when the whites came to South Africa, they had to struggle all the time to assert their sense of belonging. Later on, they did develop an idea that this was land in Afrikaans, given on the authority of the highest. They did develop this idea that God had given us this land. There's also interesting parallels, by the way, in concentration camp suffering under the Brits and how every single Afrikaner family had a death in British concentration camps in the different world wars. That also led, that perpetuated this idea of we must create a state wherein we are safe and so on. But this never meant, how do we bring in all the others of Dutch origin or Huguenot origin, which is also one of the strands of Afrikanerdom, into the country and get rid of all of these whites? How to contain these whites in homelands? With Zionism, it's very, very different. There is this idea, also not in all forms of Zionism, but the whole idea that this is history or providence or you don't really have to believe in God to believe that God gave you this land. But it's a far more tenacious idea, built on the tenacity of this idea that we're entitled to this land. This fused then with colonialism, which disregards the existence of people, of subject people. It's like, you know, America was discovered when Columbus arrived. There was no America 400 years of history. People don't matter. So the Zionist creation myth then fused with other colonialist myths. All of this then means that there isn't space. There should not be space for Palestinians in this land. That's the first point that I wanted to make. The second point that I wanted to make was that for me, when you say, is this all just tied up, all of this human rights stuff? Yes. I very consciously tied some of my thinking through to the question of gender oppression. Because often people ask, people are, oh, so why are you singling out Israel? I don't know. I don't know if I'm singling out Israel. I've spent my life fighting against apartheid. And when the new this thing came, I fought, I fought, I spent my life fighting against sexism. And now HIV and AIDS is ravaging our continent. I'm spending my life. Did you pick me up? When you picked me up, you know, I looked, I saw your other kinds of stuff, stickers and so on in your car. It's about the struggle for environmental justice. It's about the struggle to recognize climate change. No, no, no. It's not singling out. So many activists in the struggle against apartheid, it was part of a larger kind of struggles. Some had latched onto Latin America, others onto southern Africa and so on. And so it is part of a broader thing. I think that if one thinks that there's only one issue in the world, and this is Palestine, something is seriously wrong with you. It's this kind of very simplistic, this thing, you know, that, ooh, there's only one thing wrong in the world, it is George Bush. Hey, no, smell the coffee. There were problems with this country before George Bush. And long after George Bush, there will be ongoing problems and so on. And so, yes, it's a part of a broader struggle of our own humanization. I mean, I work on issues of Muslim fundamentalism, the whole question of the oppression of religious and gender minorities inside Muslim societies. All of these things are very, very important to me. I have only 24 hours in a day, though. South Africans... All of us, we were really united in this economic sanctions thing. As early as the 60s already, Chief Albert Lutuli, who was, by the way, South Africa's first Nobel Peace Prize winner. I know that Desmond and Mandela has become a bit more famous than him. And he was a leader of the African National Congress as early as the 60s already. He had called for sanctions against South Africa. Inside South Africa itself, there was never any debate amongst us around this. Some of you will remember that Gatcha Boutelezi, who was really an extension of the apartheid apparatus, that Gatcha had opposed sanctions, but then Gatcha was never really recognized as a part of the liberation struggle. we had no moral qualms about it. We had no moral qualms about the additional hardships that this would impose upon the South Africans, the kind of argument that was being made all the time, as if it was really, as if it were really our hardships that opponents of sanctions were concerned about. This was rationalization, you know, but it was about containing those, it was their support for the apartheid regime that was really... We recognize the sanctions campaign against South Africa as one of the four pillars that brought the regime to an end. And so it's a very, very important one for us, the whole divestment campaign. Economically, it did have a significant impact on South Africa. There's no two ways about it. The collapse of the South African economy, the collapse of the RAND, and so on. I don't know if in terms of political effectiveness, a divestment campaign will be as effective against Israel as it was in South Africa. I think that the economy, that the Israeli economy, and I'm not an economist, I'm speaking just off the top of my head, other people here may be much more knowledgeable than what I am about this. I think that the Israeli economy is far more intertwined with the global economy than what the South African economy was. And so the South African economy, oh no, I'm talking, it's the other way around. that it could be far more effective in Israel's case because the Israeli economy is far more connected to the global economy. I don't, however, know if this is the value of sanctions. I think that the value of a divestment campaign against Israel is the moral impact of such a campaign. It is the moral impact of such a campaign. It is... What's that? Absolutely. And... Your need to say, we will not participate in this. We will walk away from this. So it is both... to inflict and to force them to think of what they're up to in the absence of any serious international state pressures on Israel. I'm talking about the United Nations and the United States and the North. The only alternative that there is, it is for local communities, for local organizations, for churches, to their own properties, wherever they have shares, for them to say, no, we will not, and for individuals as a huge moral weapon. And I think they do recognize this. And so for me, it's not so much will it work or won't it work. I think the way so much of direct support and funding and so on for Israeli society comes from the north, it may not work in economic terms, but I don't think that that is the question. The question is, do we have a moral obligation to not invest? I have no doubt about it. Think of different reasons for why the Palestinian resistance movement is as fractured as what it is. The one is one can talk about the actual destruction of the lives of people. We did not experience this in South Africa. They kept Mandela in jail for 27 years, but there wasn't this idea of targeted assassinations and so on, there wasn't it. That notwithstanding, I don't think that the Palestinian political leadership can also escape its own... the state of Israel doesn't only target people in this sense. They also target people with bribes. They also target people with contracts. And so I don't think that the Palestinian leadership can escape how it had been targeted in these forms. The corruption of the PLO, the corruption of so many of the leadership of the... I don't think that... And I think we should be honest about it. Our being in solidarity with a people does not mean that we turn a blind eye to all of these things. So I think that the leadership of many of the Palestinian formations have a lot to answer for. It's not just about how do the Israelis buy us out. It is how do you make yourself amenable to being bought out. And so those are also questions I'm afraid that we do need to ask. Yeah. We see it in front of us. We see how a very genuine hurt afflicted the people of this country on September the 11th, four or five years ago. A very genuine affliction. A very genuine hurt. And we saw how a small bunch of people came out yesterday again in Tenet's book that's coming out. Yes, George Tenet. In Tenet's book again it comes out how a small bunch of people ran away with the genuine hurt of this whole country. country was really hurt. What did a small bunch of people do? They had their own ideological agenda that they had been sitting, Wolfowitz, thank God for the mess that he is in, there is a God, there is a God. Wolfowitz and some of the crowd that he was, they had this agenda and September the 11th happened, fitted in neatly whether they really cared about the hurt of the American people or not. Some of them may, some of them may not have cared. What did they do? They hijacked the earth of this country and launched invasions. And so it isn't about whether September the 11th really happened or not. It's not about whether the Holocaust really happened or not. It did happen. It did happen and people were genuinely hurt. But at some point we must say that no, our hurt about the event itself, it is so sacred that I will not stand for your exploitation and your running away with that hurt. And so my anger at your exploitation of that hurt must at some stage take a back to that hurt itself because of the sanctity of that hurt. And this is what many Jews do. who also are families of survivors, or survivors, say that, no, you can't do this to us. Norman Finkelstein, of course, has done excellent work detailing how indifference and denial of the Holocaust, how that became supplanted in the beginning and end. until 67, when people were fairly indifferent to it and so on. Many Jews were also embarrassed to even talk about it. How the power configurations of 67 led to this becoming what he describes as an industry. Because the argument is then that, oh, we can take all these Russians, of course it's a bit problematic now that, I mean, in different studies they found out that about between 20 to 26 percent of the Russians who say that the Jews are really Jews in terms of ethnic background. But we're taking in these Latinos, we're taking in these Indians, we're taking in the Falashas, and they're not really white. So it's a different kind of racism, I think. But it's in the same way that, say, Latinos in this country can, I'm not saying they are, can converge with whiteness against African Americans then. Or lighter skinned African Americans can also then merge with the whites and then set aside. I think the logic behind all of these forms of exclusivism is the same. Whether it is identical forms of race and racism, that I'm not quite sure if I'm happy to go along with. Is that okay? But thank you. In some ways, the Bantustans were an attempt to rip aside black South Africa. In some ways, you can look at the tricameral parliament when they created the separatist things for Indians and coloreds as an attempt to... I don't think that that was ever accompanied by the kind of vengeance that it was simply... a product of social engineering. How to contain these black people, there wasn't an attempt to destroy. And sadly, as John Dugard, the UN Commissioner on the Occupied Territories notes, that this is really what is happening in Palestine at the moment. It's not just an attempt to engineer a new kind of society. It is actually an attempt to destroy a people. The TRC is something that one thinks about after some kind of just solution is arrived at. I don't think that ideas on the TRC at this stage of the struggle of the Palestinian people, I don't know. I mean, I think that these are ideas on escapism. They help us to just kind of dodge, and that's the one thing, and I don't mean this in an unkind way. The second thing is that... The GRC played an important role in how we managed immediately the transition. The idea that people will not be jailed for their crimes and so on, I don't think that this is a concern for the dominant powers in Israel that they would ever be jailed for their crimes. I think that the connectedness to international power and so on ensures that they would never have any such thoughts, that they would ever end up in jail for any of their crimes against humanity. The GRC, as far as the construction of a post-South Africa society, just beyond managing the difficulty of transition, it has had a limited value, as people like Desmond Tutu and others are at pains to point out now. white people on the whole, only when they thought that they had committed something and that this was their way of not being punished for it, it's only then that they came forward. But this whole idea of collectively whites being interested in this TRC, no, they were never really interested in this TRC.