A new Israeli poll says that one in four Israelis is depressed, and that levels of anxiety are rising. Of course. Their society is in crisis. In the New York Review of Books last summer the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee published a portion of his latest novel, Summertime, purportedly a South African man’s notebooks from 1972. [Earlier today I wrongly characterized the work as actual notebooks of the writer.] They include a wonderful description, below, of his response to a raid carried out by the South African security services on a house of South African black refugees in neighboring Botswana in which a family were killed. The scene is breakfast, and divisions between a father and son over apartheid.
I pass it along today because you will see the rage and despair Coetzee’s protagonist has about the white colonialist leadership of South Africa retreating from history and rationalizing its power by references to Christianity and terrorism. The analogies here are not perfect, at all, but Coetzee’s piece captures many of the feelings writers on this site have about Israel’s military response to threats, its caricature of the Arab world, its blundering into a cul-de-sac of nationalism, and the divisions that these events are creating in the Jewish family.
A couple other notes. The piece is from 1972. It took another 17 years for a great leader to take power in South Africa, who understood that apartheid was the wrong path. F.W. de Klerk–who sought to lead his country out of the swamp, and who unbanned the terrorist organization Mandela was the head of. South Africa’s emergence has been a painful process, of course. Lately I reflected on my own apprehension of what is in store for privileged Israelis here; and you need only read Coetzee’s great novel Disgrace to understand the racial violence and prejudice that persisted even in free South Africa. No one says this is easy. But the key to this excerpt is Coetzee’s understanding, a very true one, that South Africa’s leaders had blundered out of the course of history.
His father has nothing but disdain for the continent to the north of them. Buffoons is the word he uses to dismiss the leaders of African states: petty tyrants who can barely spell their own names, chauffeured from one banquet to another in their Rolls-Royces, wearing Ruritanian uniforms festooned with medals they have awarded themselves. Africa: a place of starving masses with homicidal buffoons lording it over them.
"They broke into a house in Francistown and killed everyone," he [the son] presses on nonetheless. "Executed them. Including the children. Look. Read the report. It’s on the front page."
His father shrugs. His father can find no form of words spacious enough to cover his distaste for, on the one hand, thugs who slaughter defenseless women and children and, on the other, terrorists who wage war from havens across the border. He resolves the problem by immersing himself in the cricket scores. As a response to a moral dilemma it is feeble; yet is his own response—fits of rage and despair—any better?
Once upon a time he used to think that the men who dreamed up the South African version of public order, who brought into being the vast system of labor reserves and internal passports and satellite townships, had based their vision on a tragic misreading of history. They had misread history because, born on farms or in small towns in the hinterland, and isolated within a language spoken nowhere else in the world, they had no appreciation of the scale of the forces that had since 1945 been sweeping away the old colonial world.
Yet to say they had misread history was in itself misleading. For they read no history at all. On the contrary, they turned their backs on it, dismissing it as a mass of slanders put together by foreigners who held Afrikaners in contempt and would turn a blind eye if they were massacred by the blacks, down to the last woman and child. Alone and friendless at the remote tip of a hostile continent, they erected their fortress state and retreated behind its walls: there they would keep the flame of Western Christian civilization burning until finally the world came to its senses.
That was the way they spoke, more or less, the men who ran the National Party and the security state, and for a long time he thought they spoke from the heart. But not anymore. Their talk of saving civilization, he now tends to think, has never been anything but a bluff. Behind a smokescreen of patriotism they are at this very moment sitting and calculating how long they can keep the show running (the mines, the factories) before they will need to pack their bags, shred any incriminating documents, and fly off to Zurich or Monaco or San Diego, where under the cover of holding companies with names like Algro Trading or Handfast Securities they years ago bought themselves villas and apartments as insurance against the day of reckoning (dies irae, dies illa).
According to his new, revised way of thinking, the men who ordered the killer squad into Francistown have no mistaken vision of history, much less a tragic one. Indeed, they most likely laugh up their sleeves at folk so silly as to have visions of any kind. As for the fate of Christian civilization in Africa, they have never given two hoots about it. And these—these!—are the men under whose dirty thumb he lives!
“Fortress Christian State”
Well, in keeping with my recent approach to commenting…utterly meaningless comments about Italians…here is yet more absurdity…perhaps Israel could also be turned into a “Fortress Christian State”
(and possibly absolving us Catholics, once and for all, for those little “Crusader” episodes?)
Birthright Event!!
“Are Evangelical Christian More Fervent Zionists than American Jews?”
Don’t Miss It!!
link to jta.org
There is no group in Israel more despised than the Messianics. This association may well cause Jews to give a second thought to the implications of support from these people. So far, the X-Zs have always been careful to distance themselves from the Messianic movement and renounce any thoughts of proselytism, but the missionary fervor apparently can’t be contained.
“rationalizing its power by references to Christianity and terrorism”
Exactly! The lock is the religion. All the political groups use it, and have used it, at points throughout history, maliciously, malevolently, and to kill.
Coetzee’s piece is so powerful.
That it is. I have mentioned before how much insight I believe The Life and Times of Michael K offers into the Palestinian experience.
The depression of South Africans was twofold: One that they knew that suppression of another people, a majority within an accepted jurisdiction, was improper, inhumane, unjust, unnecessary. The second feature was that they were afraid of what would happen to them should the suppression end.
Thankfully, South African anti-apartheid efforts were led by Nelson Mandela and other highly principled humane leaders in the ANC and other organizations, that insisted and had the ability to compel a just AND benevolent transition.
In Israel there are similar fears, with two MAJOR differences, qualitative differences. Those differences don’t negate lessons learned from South Africa, but they are so qualititively different to compel thinking about the two as NOT PARALLEL.
The two differences are that Israel/Palestine is not the suppression of a majority by a minority. The West Bank is significantly externally occupied, but is NOT ruled by the settler minority in the West Bank. The settler minority is a feature in the settlement enterprise only. They themselves are NOT rulers, beneficiaries, but NOT rulers.
The second component is of the demographics of Israel/Palestine, NOT 90% black, 10% white as in South Africa, but 50% Palestinian and 50% Jewish, with compelling majorities in the regions of their prospective jurisdiction. There is a concept of tyrrany of the slight majority (in which 49% are suppressed). Given the degree of hatred of the other by a too large proportion within each population and the radically differing political agendas of too large a minority in each population (hotheads), the likelihood of very violent and non-compromising civil war is high, very high (95% range). And, civilians bear the brunt of wars between hotheads.
The situations are NOT PARALLEL. To think, and then act as if they are, is to create hardship.
It sounds nice, but the consequences of careless analysis is disaster.
Take it seriously.
Again, to refer to an old theme. There is no current equivalent of the ANC that has the character of leadership and the near-universal support of its constituencies to “change the course of rivers”, meaning to confidently shift from animosity fed resistance to the necessity of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Hamas NEVER indicates that in its statements or originating documents in particular. Omar Barghouti isn’t universally regarded as leader, as Mandela was.
How does ice turn to water without that heat?
The fears of Jews is different than the fears of Afrikaners for that absence of consented principle leadership on the part of Palestinians.
Yeah Richard, that’s just how I remember it! Sure, I remember the agonised whites of South Africa, they was just all tore up inside cause they were “was improper, inhumane, unjust, unnecessary” And you know what, you are a lying bastard, Witty. Right up til the end white South Africans had no problem saying that apartheid was proper, just, humane and necessary. And they did everything they could, including imprisoning or killing it’s leaders, to suppress the ANC.
Hey Chaos, you call something that can change the perceptions of reality like it does for Witty a metaphor. I tell you ziocaine is a metaphor like murder is an argument. And, as we have seen over and over, murder is Zionism’s best argument.
Crystals of Witty’s subconscious in dissolution:
“NOT PARALLEL”
“careless analysis”
“NOT PARALLEL”
“Take it seriously”
“forgiveness and reconciliation”
“Hamas NEVER”
“fears of Jews”
Mmmmm, the Israelis do what they do to the Pals because the Pals are 50%, while the
white S Africans did what they did to the locals because the locals were 90%. So, ah, which is the better case for a defensive posture?
“Yet to say they had misread history was in itself misleading. For they read no history at all.”
Oh, I guess you are right after all, Witty. There’s no congruency between South African Apartheid and Zonism. After all, the Boers didn’t read history, and the ZIonists make a specialty of re-writing history. So, natch, they are completely different. Don’t know how I could have made such an error.
Thanks, Mooser, for your comments. RW ought to run this jive shit past Tony Karon, or better yet, read his blog for some common sense. His characterization of Mandela is off the charts, as any white South African who lived through it will tell you. They were terrified of his force after he got out of prison. Mandela used the threat of what he could do to get his way — there was nothing pollyanna-ish about it; he was more than prepared to resort to violence and they knew it — and engineered a transition that eventually caused the white South Africans, I’m talking the rich ones with power, to stand in awe of him. I heard this over and over and over again when I was in J’berg. Mandela is now revered among all classes and races; but the terror he invoked among the whites for the first two years of his leadership was almost crippling; it certainly caused major flight.
How many Blacks were killed by the White led South African goverment from 44 to 94.
I hear its less then 10,000.
Compare that to the surrounding African countries, where millions of Blacks have killed Blacks.
Nomi998 goose steps into the fray.
The situations still are qualitatively not parallel, whether there are some similarities or not.
That’s not to say that nothing is wrong. It is however NECESSARY to question one’s assumptions that methods that were successful in the past, would be again, or in fact would make the situation worse, and permanently.
What the hell would you know about it, you racist.
South African activists said Israel’s apartheid is WORSE. They have more credibility than some yuppie Jewish supremacist.
You don’t read past your “which side are you on” theme, do you?
“It is however NECESSARY to question one’s assumptions that methods that were successful in the past, would be again, or in fact would make the situation worse, and permanently”
Thats if you want to succeed at anything worth succeeding.
Cliff,
Perhaps you-know-who could get himself free airfare from some Zionist agency and spend a week in a Palestinian town in the occupied territories. There is no better way to change a person than to have him come to a realization on his own. Let him spend a week there and see if he comes back waxing lyrical about Zionism and the virtues of Israel.