(BusinessDay, 16 October 2000)
SA MIGHT be thousands of miles away from the fire consuming the Middle East but the heat the decades-old conflict has generated was felt locally this weekend when Muslim communities took to the streets to pledge their solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
As government moved to set up a task group last week to monitor the situation locally and internationally, Jewish and Muslim religious leaders called on their respective followers at the weekend to remain calm.
Early reports yesterday indicated that a McDonald's outlet was attacked after a peaceful march in Cape Town. In Pretoria, another march by about 1200 to the US and Israeli embassies almost turned nasty when there was a brief stand-off between marchers and the police.
An organiser of the march in Pretoria, Imthiaz Jhetani, said a police superintendent provoked the stand-off by jumping into the crowd, "and then pandemonium broke out when police said they would not allow the march".
The situation, he said, was saved by foreign affairs representative Jerry Matsila, who offered to accompany the marchers to the Israeli embassy, where they made a political statement rather than hand over a memorandum to an "illegitimate Israeli government".
Jhetani said: "Israel is an imperial power (and) more than 50% of the people who have been killed in the conflict in Palestine are children. As an organisation we were educating people about that."
The African National Congress also organised a solidarity meeting in Lenasia, Johannesburg, last Saturday, where the Palestinian ambassador outlined the roots of the conflict.
The Palestine Solidarity Committee said at the weekend it was a travesty to reduce the struggle of the Palestinian people to a religious struggle "their struggle is a struggle for democracy", said its chairman, Salim Vally.
This followed the steady escalation of violence in the past weeks between Palestinian protesters and the Israelis, culminating in the latter bombing what they called military targets.
Domestically, Israel's action has been denounced by the Muslim community and sympathisers of the Palestinian cause, with several demonstrations organised in larger cities.
A senior Jewish student at the University of Cape Town, who asked not to be named, said a lunchtime march on the campus last Wednesday had been peaceful until the "about 50 or 60 marchers started shouting inflammatory statements".
She said: "It was something along the lines of long live Hezbollah and Hamas'. Basically, we are fully for freedom of expression because we want to keep the peace, but Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorists and these utterances go against what we as Jews believe."
She also said that while "there was not a huge turnout" for the march, "I believe that it was attended by people from outside the university".
Vally stressed in an interview that he does not speak on behalf of Muslims.
He said that many Muslims, Christians and a lot of Jewish people who did not support Zionism, supported the Palestinian cause.
"It is important to remember that the Palestinian struggle is a struggle for liberation, human rights and a struggle against racism. We in the committee believe that Zionism is racism.
"If we look at our own country, the Zionist government of Israel collaborated fully with apartheid SA. In the past they shared intelligence information, they collaborated militarily and went as far as developing nuclear devices as well," he said.
The committee believes Israel is an apartheid state: "it has been founded on pillage and is predicated on exclusivity. Rights in Israel flow from ethnic and religious identity." He said for almost five decades, Palestinians had faced numerous massacres.
"The point is that the Oslo peace accords are about setting a dependent Bantustan alongside an apartheid state, and it is a mockery of self-determination," Vally said.
"In SA, we fought long and hard," he said. "For us, minimum justice required the dismantling of the apartheid state and replacing it with a democratic secular state, so why should it be different in Israel?"
He said the committee was calling for the replacement of Israel with a democratic, secular Palestine, "where Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims live together with equal rights and opportunities".
"I think people are very clearly saying you cannot have peace without justice. Apartheid Israel cannot exist without the US treasury; since 1948 the US has spent more than $150bn of US tax money to finance Israel."
Israel, he said, was a state that had been built on expulsion, dispossession and subjugation.
"There is a real hypocrisy because Israel invaded another country, Lebanon, and the US did nothing against that. But look what happened to Iraq there were sanctions against Iraq," Vally said.
"The committee calls on government to suspend all diplomatic, trade, political and military links with apartheid Israel.
"We cannot remain neutral in this struggle. To be neutral means to be an accomplice to oppression. To be silent means complicity," he said.
The Jewish Board of Deputies said the domestic Jewish community did not necessarily feel threatened, "but we are taking the necessary precautions. We are concerned at what is taking place in Israel." Its spokesman, Yehuda Kay, said: "We pray for peace in Israel and we feel that the only way to end the violence is through negotiations."