Humanitarian and founder of aid organisation Gift of the Givers, Dr Imtiaz Sooliman is conferred Civic Honours by Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis in December 2023. Picture: Supplied / City of Cape Town
By Iqbal Jassat
Having read Tony Leon's long-winded article in News24 on Dr Imtiaz Sooliman and the Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF), I was not surprised that it was no less than an attempt to inject Leon's erroneous view by equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
Any equation of Zionism's racist expansionist ideology currently being "showcased" in the horrendous genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the Occupied West Bank and the barbaric war on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and the wider region, with antisemitism, is both faulty and misplaced.
Leon, as a former leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), ought to know the difference but despite overwhelming evidence by a legion of Jewish academics and scholars that dispute this false equivalence, he merrily implies that Sooliman's anti-Zionist stance fits an anti-Jewish trope.
US academic Peter Beinart who is well known, especially in Jewish circles for debunking the myth that anti-Zionism is antisemitic, makes a number of extremely succinct points, well worth for Leon to absorb:
"Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic — and claiming it is uses Jewish suffering to erase the Palestinian experience."
Leon however is adamant to pigeon-hole Sooliman: "It is clear into which circle Sooliman, on his own references, places the Jews."
He relies on the views expressed by David Baddiel's "Jews Don’t Count" theory about tropes such as "... Jews are moneyed, privileged, powerful, and secretly in control of the world…".
By injecting this, Leon chooses to evade the entire context of Sooliman's strong, principled and powerful public position against Israel's slaughter of Palestinians.
The pity is not only that Leon embarks on demonising Sooliman as an antisemite, but that he fails to condemn his beloved Israel for what the world at large is enraged and outraged about: racist ethnic-cleansing of Palestine's indigenous population.
Benjamin Moser, author of "Sontag: Her Life and Work", for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for biography, wrote a scathing rebuke of the US House of Representatives for resolving that "Anti-Zionism is antisemitism".
Referring to the vote as "lopsided" he asserted that it reflected the American government's absolute diplomatic, military and ideological support of Israel, while that state, under the leadership of the most right-wing government was in the midst of causing "catastrophic bloodshed in Gaza".
Surely by definition, the resolution impacts drastically on free speech, thus making a mockery of the First Amendment which Leon cites as prohibiting Congress from creating legislation that limits free speech or freedom of the media?
On the question of Helen Suzman's participation in an apartheid-infested parliament, the jury is still out whether or not it legitimised and gave credence to Hendrik Verwoerd's whites-only regime.
Leon's view that she was a "strong Zionist" and believed in the idea of a "Jewish homeland situated in today's Israel", conflicts with his opinion of her being a "champion of human rights". The paradox is glaring.
In any event none can deny that the violent imposition of Suzman's beloved Jewish homeland, came at a huge cost to the majority Palestinian population: the Nakba.
Renowned Jewish historian Ilan Pappe in his highly acclaimed "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" recorded that between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. (Emphasis added)
Richard Falk, Professor of International Law, described Pappe's book as extraordinary, and of profound relevance to the past, present and future.
Indeed, the world is witness to the ongoing Nakba/Genocide - now almost eight decades long - as gruesome killings of babies, mothers, entire families continue mercilessly and relentlessly, even though Zionists are in denial.
It is thus a misnomer to contend as Leon does that Suzman would have called out Sooliman, whereas the imperative is for those committed to fundamental human rights, to call out Zionists as Sooliman has done.
Ronnie Kasrils reminds us that in Gaza, six children are murdered every hour. More than 17,000 children have been butchered.
"None of us, not even the poets, can summon words adequate to the horror of the fascistic bloodlust of the Israeli regime and the society that backs it."
* Iqbal Jassat is an Executive Member of the Media Review Network.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.