JOHANNESBURG – The Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RToP), which held its third session in Cape Town last November, garnered surprisingly little coverage in South Africa.By its own admission, the Russell Tribunal has no legal basis. The tribunal's purpose was to investigate Israel's status as an apartheid state. International lawyer and Professor John Dugard's concluded that Israel “resembles” apartheid South Africa. In the tribunal's official wording, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians “amounts to” apartheid.But it does not.“The Tribunal finds that Israel subjects the Palestinian people to an institutionalized regime of domination amounting to apartheid as defined under international law. This discriminatory regime manifests in varying intensity and forms against different categories of Palestinians depending on their location.”In Judaism, the appearance of sin is equal to actual sin.But in the context of a one-sided, show trial, neither the RToP nor its participants are helping Israel figure out which political system would best address the needs of its Palestinian neighbors. Officially, the answer is a two-state solution. In other quarters, a confederation is proposed – though the inclusion of Jordan seems unworkable. A single, unitary state has been ruled out; Israel has no desire to rule over its neighbors.Predictably, the RToP’s analysis of Israel’s purported similarities with apartheid South Africa did not take into account terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, or wars waged against Israel – this includes the thousands of rockets fired at Israel from Gaza. These factors would also explain why Gaza is blockaded, walled-off, and littered with Israeli checkpoints.The results of the RToP would be laughable were it not for the coverage this "slander" has received in some Western European countries. "Slander" is the word Justice Richard Goldstone, who is known for accusing Israel of war crimes in a 2009 UN report, used to describe the RToP's unfounded allegations against Israel.This slanderous influence can partly be attributed to Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and his church affiliations. Gerald Steinberg, professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University and president of the Non-governmental Organization Monitor (NGO), points out that Tutu, professor Dugard, and several others have served as both witnesses for the RToP, and on the jury.For South Africans, the height of the RToP’s absurdity came when the tribunal invited “expert witness” Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – a convicted fraudster and member of the African National Congress’s National Executive Committee to testify. Given her orders, according to her bodyguard in 1988, to kidnap and murder 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi and her endorsement of necklacing (burning people alive using tyres and petrol) in 1986, it seems common sense prevailed in her decision not to attend the proceedings after all.The cast of other characters are well-known to South Africans: Ronnie Kasrils, a former minister of intelligence, took the stand to falsely accuse Israel of racism through its use of IDs – as in apartheid South Africa’s pass system. Kasrils did not know that Israeli IDs carry no indication of ethnicity.Another “expert witness,” Professor of Sociology Ran Greenstein, an Israeli, signed a petition to have the University of Johannesburg boycott its water research partner Ben-Gurion University. The petition failed.“Expert witness,” Israeli Arab MK Haneen Zoabi, has refused to answer these two questions from this writer: As a witness on the Mavi Marmara Gaza aid flotilla ship, who began the violence, was it the protesters armed with iron bars and clubs on the ship or the Israeli commandos alighting on it? In what way does she feel discriminated against in Israel? No response.The RToP raises a question for the South African Jewish community: Should Tutu be stripped of his title of patron of the Holocaust and Genocide Centre in Cape Town? Although there has been much debate, no decision has been reached thus far.As chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the only shred of credibility this body had was dispelled when Tutu dismissed the case against Winnie Mandela – after she admitted “that everything went wrong." The TRC was a miscarriage of justice. Black victims of apartheid themselves have said that forgiveness cannot substitute for justice in order to attain reconciliation.Tutu’s anti-Semitism was displayed in a 2002 US speech when he called for divestment from Israel. “People are scared in this country to say the wrong thing because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful. Well so what…the apartheid government was very powerful but today it no longer exists”.This also shows how anti-Semitic rhetoric is being defended and justified as “anti-Israeli” verbiage. In 2005, Tutu edited his speech to change the "Jewish lobby" to the “pro-Israel lobby.”In 1988 Tutu opined: “Zionism has very many parallels with racism” on the grounds that “it excludes people of ethnic or other grounds over which they have no control.”This is a bald lie. As early as 1959, Rabbi and Wits Professor Louis Rappaport wrote in Jewish Horizons that race has never been a determinant of character in Judaism. Similarly, Zionism does not discriminate on the grounds of race. Israeli citizenship is not reserved only for Jews; it can be acquired through naturalization. Furthermore, Israel fiercely protects the political and religious rights of both Arab Israelis and Palestinians.Israel’s accusers and those lacking knowledge about Zionism should acquaint themselves with Mitchell Bard’s Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab Israeli Conflict.In Kabbalah, an esoteric reference is made to Tzion – which normally connotes Mount Zion in Jerusalem – as the spiritual point from which reality emerges, located in the Holy of Holies of the First, Second and Third Temple.Tutu infamously uttered these words on exiting Yad Vashem in 1989: “Our Lord would say that in the end the positive thing that can come is the spirit of forgiving, not forgetting, but the spirit of saying: ‘G-d, this happened to us. We pray for those who made it happen, help us to forgive them and help us so that we in our turn will not make others suffer.’”The only reality is the absolute disgust and revulsion one feels for such a “jurist.”For all this, it would be remiss not to commend Tutu for once walking into a necklacing scene to save the life of the victim. Similarly, to his credit he criticized former President Thabo Mbeki for his silent diplomacy with regard to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe; the farm invasions in that country; and its human rights abuses.
In South Africa, he called for a Commission of Inquiry into the arms deal and for current President Jacob Zuma to appear before it, to "reach closure." A call for "justice" would have been more courageous.
What one requires of a just judge is one "in whose qualities no change exists" as Judah Halevi taught the Kuzari, a tribe that converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. And it is here that Tutu and his ilk have much to learn.The writer is a freelance journalist based in Johannesburg. She was the recipient in 1995 of the Sanlam Financial Journalist of the Year award for her coverage of the property, building and construction industries. She was then property editor of the Financial Mail.
