Dear Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I write to you with a heavy heart.
You are
a revered leader in South Africa, but recently have added your iconic voice to
the campaign for sanctions against Israel.
Archbishop, I believe you are
making a terrible mistake. Without truth there can be no justice, and without
justice there can be no peace. The Talmud says: “The world stands on three
things: justice, truth and peace.” These three values are inseparable.
Archbishop, I am convinced that the sanctions campaign against Israel is morally
repugnant because it is based on horrific and grotesquely false accusations
against the Jewish people.
The truth, archbishop, is that Israel is
simply not an apartheid state. In the State of Israel all citizens – Jew and
Arab – are equal before the law. Israel has no Population Registration Act, no
Group Areas Act, no Mixed Marriages and Immorality Act, no Separate
Representation of Voters Act, no Separate Amenities Act, no pass laws or any of
the myriad apartheid laws.
Israel is a vibrant liberal democracy with a
free press and independent judiciary, and accords full political, religious and
other human rights to all its people, including its more than 1 million Arab
citizens, many of whom hold positions of authority including that of cabinet
minister, member of parliament and judge at every level, including that of the
Supreme Court. All citizens vote on the same roll in regular, multiparty
elections; there are Arab parties and Arab members of other parties in Israel’s
parliament. Arabs and Jews share all public facilities, including hospitals and
malls, buses, cinemas and parks. And, archbishop, that includes universities and
opera houses.
The other untruth is the accusation of illegal occupation
of Arab land. Like the apartheid libel, this is outrageously false. There is no
nation that has a longer, deeper or more profound connection to its country than
the Jewish people have to the land of Israel and the city of
Jerusalem.
Archbishop, you and I as religious leaders always turn to the
Bible as a source of truth. What does it mean that Israel is the “promised
land”? It means, as we both know, that it was promised by God to the Jews – the
descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This promise was first fulfilled by God
more than 3,300 years ago, when Joshua led the Jewish people into the land of
Israel. Since then there has been an unbroken Jewish presence in the land,
albeit small during the Roman exile.
All the books of the Old Testament –
Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc. – describe the deep
connection between the Jews and the land of Israel, including the West Bank,
known in the Bible as Judea and Samaria – the area that contained the great
cities of the two previous Jewish commonwealths, such as Jericho, Shiloh (where
the Tabernacle stood for hundreds of years), Beit El (where Jacob had his vision
of the ladder) and Hebron (where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are buried with their
wives Sarah, Rebecca and Leah).
Three thousand years ago, there was no
London or Paris, no Washington or Moscow, no Pretoria or Cape Town, but there
was a Jerusalem, capital of a Jewish state.
“If I forget thee O
Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning... if I fail to elevate
Jerusalem above my foremost joy.” Those words from Psalms are recited by Jews at
every wedding. At every funeral, the statement of comfort given to the mourners
refers to Zion and Jerusalem. Jews pray for Jerusalem three times a day, and
also after every meal.
Archbishop, the Arab/Israeli conflict is not a
struggle against apartheid or occupation. It is a century- long war against the
very existence of Jews and a Jewish state in the Middle East. There have already
been seven major Arab/Israeli wars since the birth of modern
Israel.
Today the front includes an alliance between Iran, Syria and
Hizbullah, the latter now with 40,000 rockets aimed at Israeli cities. Iranian
officers train Hizbullah forces, while Iran pursues nuclear weapons and openly
declares its intention to wipe out Israel. Hamas, the terrorist Palestinian
government in Gaza, sides with Iran and Hizbullah in rearming with the declared
aim of destroying Israel.
Since 1967, one aspect of this century- long
conflict has been the demand for a Palestinian state. In spite of the deep
historical and religious roots of Jews in all of Israel, generations of Jewish
leaders have been prepared, for the sake of peace, to give up ancestral and
covenantal land to establish a Palestinian state.
SO WHY has there not
been peace? The ANC taught us you can’t make peace on your own. No matter how
deeply the ANC was committed to a peaceful resolution of the South African
conflict, until the National Party was prepared to accept that black South
Africans had a place in their own country, there could be no peace. And so too,
until the Arab/Muslim world accepts that Jews have a right to a state of their
own on their ancestral land, there will be no peace.
In 1948, the Jews
accepted the UN resolution establishing a Jewish state and a Palestinian state,
but the Arab world rejected it and five Arab countries invaded Israel to destroy
it.
After that, the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab hands until
1967.
There was an opportunity then – every day for almost 20 years – to
establish a Palestinian state. It never happened. And since then there have been
numerous opportunities – each rejected by Arab leaders.
Why? Because this
war has been more about the destruction of the Jewish state than about the
establishment of a Palestinian state. Even today, so-called moderate Palestinian
leader Mahmoud Abbas denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
In
2000, the Palestinian leadership launched a massive wave of suicide bombers into
Israel, leading to more than 1,300 civilian deaths and 10,000 injuries.
Proportionately, such carnage in South Africa would mean more than 10,000 killed
and over 80,000 injured! Israel erected a security fence with checkpoints to
shield it from such attacks launched from the disputed
territories.
Archbishop, you compare these checkpoints to apartheid South
Africa. But they are not about pass laws, which don’t exist in Israel. The
checkpoints are on the border between sovereign Israeli territory and the
disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza in order to keep civilians from
being murdered, and have been very successful in doing so. These checkpoints –
like those found in all airports – are there to prevent suicide bombers from
blowing up innocent people.
Archbishop, do not bestow respectability on
an immoral sanctions campaign that is an affront to truth and justice, which
prevents peace and prolongs the terrible suffering of people on both sides of
this painful conflict. Archbishop, let us pray for an end to all this agony, and
for the fulfillment of the verse in Isaiah: “And the Lord God will wipe away the
tears from all faces.”
The writer is chief rabbi of South Africa.