The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), and other Zionist organisations, are outraged about the current visit of Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
So determined were these groups to oppose Khaled’s visit that they repeatedly stated on mainstream and social media that the PFLP was responsible for a gruesome attack on a Har Nof synagogue in Jerusalem – even though it is common knowledge that the Israeli authorities had already indicated that the attack was carried out by lone-wolf attackers, and not the PFLP.
What Khaled’s visit has achieved, though, is the re-awakening of the debate about the right of people to resist occupation – an inalienable right enshrined in international law. United Nations General Assembly resolutions, the Fourth Geneva Convention and its subsequent protocols, protect the right of people (including the Palestinians) to “fight against colonial domination and alien occupation” by all available means - including armed struggle.
It is this right which legitimates Palestinian efforts to lift the yoke of Israeli oppression. To this day Palestinians still have no state or armed forces. Their Israeli occupiers subject them to pass laws, curfews, expulsions, home demolitions, legalised torture, and numerous human rights violations.
Yet, the Palestinian pursuit for freedom is dismissed as “terrorism”. Palestinians are always expected to apologise for and condemn Palestinian resistance, despite the lack of agreement on a definition of terrorism.
The word “terrorism” is readily applied to Palestinian individuals or groups who use homemade bombs, but never to a nuclear-armed Israeli state that has used white phosphorous, dime bombs, and other internationally-prohibited weapons against non-combatants.
Palestinians are often taken to task, particularly in the West, for not embracing a non-violent Gandhi strategy. “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” is a question often asked in condemnation of Palestinian resistance. Palestinians will tell you their Gandhi’s are all either in prison, exile or dead. Gandhi, however, categorised forceful resistance in the face of impossible odds (such as those faced by Palestinian fighters in the face of the sophisticated Israeli military) as “almost non-violence” because it was in essence, symbolic. For Gandhi, forceful resistance registered “a refusal to bend before overwhelming might in the full knowledge that it means certain death”.
In the face of Israel’s high-tech slaughter and repressive measures against the Palestinians, it is difficult not to see indiscriminate and haphazard rockets falling into the category of token violence that Gandhi himself was reluctant to condemn.
Isn’t the right to resist oppression universal? Didn’t this right justify the American Revolution, the French Revolution and Africa’s wars of liberation in the 1950s and 1960s? Nelson Mandela is a hero because of his resistance to, not because of his subservience to, apartheid repression.
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising by the Jewish population against Nazi repression is a source of inspiration in the modern history of the Jewish people, and world at large. Jews who joined the resistance in Poland, and other places under Nazi occupation, were, and still are heroes, not just for Jewish people – but all justice-seeking people.
Why, then, is the right to resist domination absolute for some, but questionable for others? — Suraya Dadoo is a researcher for Media Review Network and co-author of “Why Israel? The Anatomy of Zionist Apartheid: A South African Perspective”
By DAVID SAKS
When writing about terrorism, one is immediately confronted with the problem of definitions. If, as the saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, then by extension what one person regards as an act of terrorism will be defined by another as a legitimate act of resistance. Such cynical moral relativism, however, is extremely dangerous, particularly at a time when global terrorism has emerged as the most pressing threat to peace and stability the world over.
It may be true that those who have reasonable cause to believe they are being oppressed have a right to resist such oppression, and even under certain circumstances to resort to violence in doing so. However, the right to resist oppression does not constitute a blank cheque to commit out and out atrocities, especially when innocent civilians are the targets.
Here, one must distinguish between civilian casualties inadvertently inflicted during conventional military operations (something unfortunately all but inevitable in modern warfare), and the targeting of non-combatants as a matter of deliberate strategy. Acts of terror, in other words, can best be defined as planned attacks aimed at killing or injuring unarmed and unprepared civilians, regardless of age or gender.
Even before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and certainly since then, the war conducted against its Jewish inhabitants has consistently included systematic attacks against civilian targets. With the defeat of the conventional military threat posed by Israel’s enemies, “armed resistance” against the “illegal Zionist entity” has almost exclusively taken the form of terrorism.
One of the organisations at the forefront of carrying out such atrocities is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Many South Africans have been justifiably outraged by the current visit of the PFLP politburo member and herself a notorious terrorist operative Leila Khaled who, to add insult to injury, has been feted as a heroine by some members of government and the ruling party. Among other things she hijacked one civilian airliner, which was blown up after its passengers disembarked, and a year later attempted to hijack another.
Coming at a time when the international community, in the wake of the recent horrors carried out in Nigeria, Syria, Iraq and France in particular, is struggling as never before to come to grips with an ever-escalating terrorist scourge, this country’s embrace of an unrepentant terror icon sends a message that is, to say the least baffling.
It is not difficult to see why the PFLP is proscribed as a terror organisation in the US, EU and Canada. Amongst its many “achievements”, its operatives have perpetrated such atrocities as the knifing to death of the Fogel family (including the decapitation of their three-month old baby) and suicide bombings in Ariel, markets in Tel Aviv and Netanya and at a Petah Tikva bus station in 2004. The PFLP most recently claimed credit for the hacking to death of four rabbis in a Jerusalem synagogue last November.
It speaks volumes for the true nature of self-styled “human rights organisation” BDS-SA that of all the people it could have brought to South Africa, it chose an unabashed proponent of terrorist violence.
By contrast the SA Jewish Board of Deputies, in common with the South African government and most of the international community, believes in a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are many in the Middle East striving to achieve peaceful co-existence between the two peoples. It is such people, and not violent extremists, who South Africa should be welcoming to these shores and engaging with. — David Saks is with the SAJBD
Terrorist or freedom fighter?
So determined were these groups to oppose Khaled’s visit that they repeatedly stated on mainstream and social media that the PFLP was responsible for a gruesome attack on a Har Nof synagogue in Jerusalem – even though it is common knowledge that the Israeli authorities had already indicated that the attack was carried out by lone-wolf attackers, and not the PFLP.
What Khaled’s visit has achieved, though, is the re-awakening of the debate about the right of people to resist occupation – an inalienable right enshrined in international law. United Nations General Assembly resolutions, the Fourth Geneva Convention and its subsequent protocols, protect the right of people (including the Palestinians) to “fight against colonial domination and alien occupation” by all available means - including armed struggle.
It is this right which legitimates Palestinian efforts to lift the yoke of Israeli oppression. To this day Palestinians still have no state or armed forces. Their Israeli occupiers subject them to pass laws, curfews, expulsions, home demolitions, legalised torture, and numerous human rights violations.
Yet, the Palestinian pursuit for freedom is dismissed as “terrorism”. Palestinians are always expected to apologise for and condemn Palestinian resistance, despite the lack of agreement on a definition of terrorism.
The word “terrorism” is readily applied to Palestinian individuals or groups who use homemade bombs, but never to a nuclear-armed Israeli state that has used white phosphorous, dime bombs, and other internationally-prohibited weapons against non-combatants.
Palestinians are often taken to task, particularly in the West, for not embracing a non-violent Gandhi strategy. “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” is a question often asked in condemnation of Palestinian resistance. Palestinians will tell you their Gandhi’s are all either in prison, exile or dead. Gandhi, however, categorised forceful resistance in the face of impossible odds (such as those faced by Palestinian fighters in the face of the sophisticated Israeli military) as “almost non-violence” because it was in essence, symbolic. For Gandhi, forceful resistance registered “a refusal to bend before overwhelming might in the full knowledge that it means certain death”.
In the face of Israel’s high-tech slaughter and repressive measures against the Palestinians, it is difficult not to see indiscriminate and haphazard rockets falling into the category of token violence that Gandhi himself was reluctant to condemn.
Isn’t the right to resist oppression universal? Didn’t this right justify the American Revolution, the French Revolution and Africa’s wars of liberation in the 1950s and 1960s? Nelson Mandela is a hero because of his resistance to, not because of his subservience to, apartheid repression.
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising by the Jewish population against Nazi repression is a source of inspiration in the modern history of the Jewish people, and world at large. Jews who joined the resistance in Poland, and other places under Nazi occupation, were, and still are heroes, not just for Jewish people – but all justice-seeking people.
Why, then, is the right to resist domination absolute for some, but questionable for others? — Suraya Dadoo is a researcher for Media Review Network and co-author of “Why Israel? The Anatomy of Zionist Apartheid: A South African Perspective”
By DAVID SAKS
When writing about terrorism, one is immediately confronted with the problem of definitions. If, as the saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, then by extension what one person regards as an act of terrorism will be defined by another as a legitimate act of resistance. Such cynical moral relativism, however, is extremely dangerous, particularly at a time when global terrorism has emerged as the most pressing threat to peace and stability the world over.
It may be true that those who have reasonable cause to believe they are being oppressed have a right to resist such oppression, and even under certain circumstances to resort to violence in doing so. However, the right to resist oppression does not constitute a blank cheque to commit out and out atrocities, especially when innocent civilians are the targets.
Here, one must distinguish between civilian casualties inadvertently inflicted during conventional military operations (something unfortunately all but inevitable in modern warfare), and the targeting of non-combatants as a matter of deliberate strategy. Acts of terror, in other words, can best be defined as planned attacks aimed at killing or injuring unarmed and unprepared civilians, regardless of age or gender.
Even before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and certainly since then, the war conducted against its Jewish inhabitants has consistently included systematic attacks against civilian targets. With the defeat of the conventional military threat posed by Israel’s enemies, “armed resistance” against the “illegal Zionist entity” has almost exclusively taken the form of terrorism.
One of the organisations at the forefront of carrying out such atrocities is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Many South Africans have been justifiably outraged by the current visit of the PFLP politburo member and herself a notorious terrorist operative Leila Khaled who, to add insult to injury, has been feted as a heroine by some members of government and the ruling party. Among other things she hijacked one civilian airliner, which was blown up after its passengers disembarked, and a year later attempted to hijack another.
Coming at a time when the international community, in the wake of the recent horrors carried out in Nigeria, Syria, Iraq and France in particular, is struggling as never before to come to grips with an ever-escalating terrorist scourge, this country’s embrace of an unrepentant terror icon sends a message that is, to say the least baffling.
It is not difficult to see why the PFLP is proscribed as a terror organisation in the US, EU and Canada. Amongst its many “achievements”, its operatives have perpetrated such atrocities as the knifing to death of the Fogel family (including the decapitation of their three-month old baby) and suicide bombings in Ariel, markets in Tel Aviv and Netanya and at a Petah Tikva bus station in 2004. The PFLP most recently claimed credit for the hacking to death of four rabbis in a Jerusalem synagogue last November.
It speaks volumes for the true nature of self-styled “human rights organisation” BDS-SA that of all the people it could have brought to South Africa, it chose an unabashed proponent of terrorist violence.
By contrast the SA Jewish Board of Deputies, in common with the South African government and most of the international community, believes in a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are many in the Middle East striving to achieve peaceful co-existence between the two peoples. It is such people, and not violent extremists, who South Africa should be welcoming to these shores and engaging with. — David Saks is with the SAJBD
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