I appreciated the historical perspective on student protests and violence that the always thought-provoking Naomi Kanakia provides in her recent piece entitled Books don’t cause violence: The Columbia protests have no implications for university curricula.
However, I felt compelled to object to her straightforward description of the protests as ‘antisemitic’ (and specifically the attempt to attribute it to some primordial anti-Jewish prejudice among Christians and Muslims: what percentage of Columbia students are sincere believers in the Nicene creed or the Shahada?)
Even though I have zero knowledge about the motivations of American college students, I feel confident in making some inferences based on first-hand interactions with a subspecies that drinks from the same memepool as aspiring girlbosses in New York: the London queer. There is zero self-conscious anti-semitism present in the gays I know with Palestinian flags in their windows, watermelon slices in their dating profiles and misgivings about Eurovision this year. Call me old-fashioned but I believe intent matters: it is a dangerous road to go down to start faulting people for hypothetical unconscious motivations.
But if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the students partaking in these protests are indeed anti-semitic in a non-trivial sense, how is this not an indictment of the quality of education that they have received? Have we given up on any hope that a liberal arts education can stop people from making the same mistakes as their forebears?
On the substance of the protests, it might be a cheap shot to say that there is no Palestinian Mandela, but I’ll say it anyway: there is no Palestinian Mandela, without which I can’t see how any n state solution can be effectively stage-managed. I will leave the question as to why there is no Palestinian Mandela to those who are better informed on these matters. Allow me to discuss two further complications to any straightforward analogy between current-day Isreal and Apartheid South Africa: the role of religion and the global Zeitgeist.
To a careful observer, the Afrikaner soul would not have seemed fertile soil for the growth of interracial compassion. To quote Wikipedia on the subject of ‘Afrikaner Calvinism’:
a cultural and religious development among Afrikaners that combined elements of seventeenth-century Calvinist doctrine with a "chosen people" ideology based in the Bible. It had origins in ideas espoused in the Old Testament of the Jews as the chosen people.
A number of modern studies have argued that Boers gathered for the Great Trek inspired by this concept, and they used it to legitimise their subordination of other South African ethnic groups. It is thought to have contributed the religious basis for modern Afrikaner nationalism. Dissenting scholars have asserted that Calvinism did not play a significant role in Afrikaner society until after they suffered the trauma of the Second Boer War. Early settlers dwelt in isolated frontier conditions and lived much closer to pseudo-Christian animist beliefs than organised religion.
Nevertheless, after their Exodus, the Boers eventually settled down and started the painful process of re-civilisation, with all the implied discontent. They shifted their Biblical focus to the New Testament. With the more forgiving love of Dear Jesus came the Pauline doctrine of universalism. The Dutch Reformed Church, the bastion of Afrikaner Calvinism, changed its stance on apartheid in 1986 after it was expelled from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1982. In 1992, the proposal to end Apartheid was supported by two thirds of all the white South Africans participating in the referendum.
Are there similar theological currents in mainstream Judaism and Islam that could point the way towards a more equitable and stable compromise on the competing national aspirations of two peoples? I sincerely hope that there are and that I in my ignorance am simply unaware of them.
In contrast to many struggle icons, Nelson Mandela does not appear to have been personally religious, but he had a great respect for public myth making (see the film Invictus). White Afrikaners still talk about Madiba Magic: is he a rare example of a Crowley-like mage for good? (Let’s not forget he used to be known as The Black Pimpernel.) But Apartheid was systematically undone by many hands that were more directly guided by the spirit of Christ.1 Among the most prominent was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliations Commission, which for all its faults was an admirable attempt at post-racial nationbuilding2
My use of the word post-racial shows that we are talking about that brief moment when history ended in the early 90s. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Communism was dead. Everything was possible. The Spice Girls were around the corner. In a work of Nietszchean genius, a bunch of neoliberals engineered the idea of a Rainbow Nation where Africans can have the political power and Whites can (for the most part) keep their wealth. This doesn’t sound like something that should have worked, but it did. Sort of. Notwithstanding South Africa’s dismal progress in addressing economic inequality while basic public infrastructure is falling apart, warnings of race wars by veteran South African journalists look more alarmist with each passing year (although let’s not forget the boy who cried wolf).
For now the centre holds: people grumble, mostly in private, but continue to find a modus vivendi. The first step towards reconciliation may indeed be the hardest. Which may be wise for pro-Palestinian protesters to keep in mind. To quote another Messianic Jew: “You got to give them hope”.
Lest I be accused of cryptofascist Christian supremacism, I still stand by my response to public Christian converts.
The Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog’s first-hand account of covering the TRC as a journalist for the public broadcaster, Country of my Skull, gives an unflinching account of the hearings and the atrocities for which public forgiveness was being sought.
I think you're right about "aspiring New York girlbosses" and "London queers" and perforce about the rank-and-file of student ceasefire protestors. And I agree that Palestinians particularly suffered for having been saddled with the ridiculous Arafat and the aloof Said instead of a Mandela. I have personally seen that into that spiritual vacuum, however, a lot of ready-to-hand detritus about Jews as impediments to universal justice or insidious corruptors of public morals has unfortunately flowed. The most ardent anti-Zionist in my grad program—a white Christian South African actually, though this may be incidental—wanted to ask an Israeli job candidate, who specialized in the 18th-century British novel, if she would denounce Zionism. This kind of fixation, which seems hysterical to me, is the kind of thing Naomi was talking about, even if I wouldn't go as far as she does. Nobody asked the several Koreans in our program if their parents had gone on the pro-democracy marches in '80s, because nobody knew or cared about Korean politics the way they cared about Israeli, though the U.S. was implicated in the former as well as the latter.
It’s curious to me why South Africa and Apartheid are often the go-to reference points for Israel/Palestine, when the Partition of India seems like it has more historical similarities. It’s not just that both involved the British Empire carving up what was formerly a multiethnic and multi-confessional Islamic empire, but they also happened almost simultaneously! And the reasons given by many of the actors were similar. And even today these seem to me persuasive: only a top-down empire can administer areas with competing religious and ethno-nationalist movements and different philosophies of state power and different aspirations for regional military/cultural alliances.