Chronicle Editor
What is called the Shema is a prayer in Judaism that insists that God must be loved and obeyed. It begins with the exclamation: “Hear Oh Israel, the Lord Your God is one,” and therefore, affirms the monotheism (one God philosophy) that has characterised Judaism and Christianity. This solemn prayer is biblically located in Deuteronomy 6 verses 4 to 9. This prayer and or incantation is one of the marks of Judaist theology and philosophy of Israel as a biblically chosen nation that had Canaan as its promised land.
I briefly narrate this name and the history of the prayer because as I write the idea of Israel as God’s chosen nation with a promised land has become the centre of tragedy, misery, and what the Palestinians call, Nakba, a catastrophe, since 1948. The year 1948 itself is a pregnant year. It is the year when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made. The year when the National Party in South Africa achieved power and legalised apartheid. This is the same year that the nation-state of Israel was brought into being by the will of the United Kingdom and the support of the United States of America and the wider western world, at the expense of the Palestinian nation of the indigenous Arabs and Muslims of Palestine.
For the Palestinians, that event of conquest, defeat, and marginalisation became Nakba, the catastrophe. From Africa we know and feel what happened to the Palestinians because it happened to every other country in Africa and in the Global South. It is called colonialism and apartheid. Its modus operandi is based on indigenous people being displaced and dispossessed by the arrivants. Just like the colonisers in Africa claimed the name of God, civilisation, and modernity, the arrivants in Palestine cited God’s promise and the fetish of being chosen. The tragedy of knowledge and understanding here is that, even some of the learned people that I work with and that I know, have proven to be very innocent of historical truth that the Israeli nation state of the present might be composed of Jewish ethnics but has nothing whatsoever to do with the biblical Israel. The Israel of now is a composition of Jewish exiles that fled anti-semitism in Hitler’s Germany and the whole of Europe to seek refuge in Palestine, among indigenous Arabs and a few Jews. The colonisers of Palestine, since 1917, the British, deliberately constructed a Jewish nation and suppressed Arab nationalism before they left Palestine in 1947. Just as the colonisers of Africa abused the name of God and civilisation to conquer and to colonise, the colonisers of Palestine claim being chosen of God and having been promised the land by God as an excuse for their genocide and apartheid in Palestine.
It sounds like strong language, linguistic extremism, for me to state that what Israel assisted by the USA and the western world is doing in Palestine is genocide and apartheid. My sound is defended by authority. To start with, Suraya Dadoo and Firoz Osman, in 2013, writing from South Africa, published a telling book; Why Israel: The Anatomy of Zionist Apartheid- A South African Perspective. In this book, the writers clarify how what Israel is doing in Palestine, with the support of the West, is exactly what the apartheid regime was doing in South Africa, with the support of some western powers.
Post-Gaza, the United States of America will not have the political or moral authority to claim monopoly of human rights and democracy. What Vladimir Putin has been accused of as war crimes, Benjamin Netanyahu has done with impunity. Schools, churches, mosques, household houses, are being bombed by Israel with the support of the USA and the West. Palestinian civilians are directly targeted and killed for their being Palestinian. That the Palestinians have a genuine, historical and proven just cause concerning their land is ignored.
Role of the UN
Craig Mokhiber has resigned from his post at the United Nations in New York. He begins his resignation letter, addressed to the High Commissioner, with the telling words: “I write at a moment of great anguish for the world, including for many of our colleagues. Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the Organisation that we serve appears powerless to stop it.” A seasoned UN operative has just declared that the organisation is powerless in the face of a genocide that is backed by superpowers. Mokhiber is no political or legal virgin but a seasoned operative that has seen it all. He says it that, “I also worked in these halls through the genocides against the Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, the Yazidi, and the Rohingya.” So, when he says, “High Commissioner, we are failing again,” we must have no power to doubt that he knows what he is talking about. He says in Palestine now, “apartheid rules” and “this is a textbook case of genocide.”
Mokhiber notes how, the world over, “masses of people stand up against genocide, even at the risk of beatings and arrest, Palestinians and their allies, human rights defenders of every stripe, Christian and Muslim organisations, and progressively Jewish voices saying, “not in our name,” are all leading the way.” Many Jews in Israel and outside are protesting against the genocide in Palestine. In short, a multipolar world based on dissensus rather that politically correct consensus of the Euro-American Empire is being born.
What should Africa do?
Africa should unite. The new world order that will come after this new world disorder should find a united and solid Africa that speaks in one economic and political voice. Africa should minimise colonial borders, undo colonial divisions of the continent and unite the diversity of Africans into a solid pluriversal entity that can engage with the world in power and pride. Africa should also teach the world Ubuntu, as the continent that has never enslaved or colonised anyone. The war in Ukraine and that one in Palestine, and the many wars here and there in the world are all birth pangs of another world. Many powerful countries will emerge out of these wars much smaller than they were before. Empire is naked and its lies are dangling out and low to be seen.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]
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