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Stan Goodenough is an experienced journalist who has written about politics in South Africa and the Middle East for such organizations as The Daily Dispatch of East London, South Africa, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, The Jerusalem Post, and the Virtual HolyLand website. He has been a South African gentile resident in Israel for 12 years. Stan is editor of and .
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This is the week |
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By Stan Goodenough
February 8, 2006
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Earlier this week I had a personal encounter with the Israeli police. It was nothing dramatic, but the reaction it set off inside made me aware that an ominous new reality has entered my life, one that I am going to have to battle in the coming days.
It happened while I was returning home from a large protest rally in downtown Jerusalem. The conservatively-estimated 100,000 people who flooded Zion Square came to demand an inquiry into excessive force used by Israeli police against Jewish civilians at the Amona outpost four days before.
I was at the rally to observe, not participate. I was curious to see the attitude of the crowds.
The violence between settlers and police at Amona exceeded anything that had gone before. Mind-searing footage filled Israel's television screens: Armor-protected men on horseback and on foot, their flailing clubs smashing the heads and bodies of defenseless men and women, old and young, some standing, others lying down, the vast majority passively resisting the massive force arrayed against them.
(I could not help it. My thoughts leapt to scenes from the award-winning movie, "The Pianist," in which Jewish police in Warsaw used their batons and boots to drive their own people into the Umschlagplatz and from there onto the Auschwitz-bound trains.)
Because of the intensity of violence and emotion, I expected fury at the rally; expressions of outrage in the capital's streets. Instead I pushed my way through milling, cheerful crowds of mostly young people, the vast majority of them religious, some dancing, some praying, many singing. Even when the filmed scenes from Amona were projected onto screens placed among the crowd the atmosphere barely changed. "Olmert is bad for the Jews" read the rally banners, but had the Acting-Prime Minister had the courage to come and face the people his forces had so cruelly abused, he would not have been harmed. There was surprisingly little evidence of anger to be seen.
Watching those images, I was transported back in my memory nearly three decades when, as a privileged and naïve white South African teenager, I spent a night in the squatters' camp at Crossroads, near Cape Town, and my life changed course.
The apartheid government had created a new reality, establishing homelands for the different black groups and declaring them no longer South African citizens but illegal aliens in the land of their birth. Hundreds of thousands of families were torn apart. When those who longed to stay together and who were unwilling to obey such unjust laws moved into camps near the cities, the full force of the racist regime fell upon them.
Together with my brother I broke the law myself that night, entering an area that was off limits to whites in order to hear and see for myself what was happening to the people of Crossroads. Huddled with about eight men and women under thin plastic sheeting that offered minimal protection against the miserable Cape winter, we listened late into the night as our hosts described the ordeal that made up their lives.
Two things struck us: The depth of sadistic cruelty that can motivate unjust leaders, and the driving determination of their victims not to hate in return, but to pursue a just and peaceful solution to their often unbearable circumstances.
Dawn was just graying the skies when the police came, attacking the camp from three sides, using vicious dogs and sjamboks (evilly-designed leather whips) to drive the people into the trucks that would take some to prison and others on the long road from home to "homeland."
That experience eventually led me into newspaper journalism. Like most reporters, I was motivated by a desire to expose and challenge things I believed to be unjust; I wanted to do my tiny bit to help bring down apartheid and open the way for a new, free future for the majority of my countrymen.
Hope that such a future did indeed await South Africa was inspired by the positive, vengeance-spurning attitude of the people we met at Crossroads that night, and in many black townships through the ensuing years.
When, with the crumbling of that system, I planned to leave South Africa for Israel, a fellow anti-apartheid worker assumed that I was coming to the Middle East to use my pen on behalf of the "poor Palestinians." I had to set him straight.
While there was no doubt that multitudes of Palestinian Arabs lived wretched lives, daily enduring hardship and much misery, I told him, the primary sufferers in the Arab-Israeli conflict were the Jewish people.
No people has been singled out for hatred, persecution and destruction through the millennia as have the Jews. Just a few decades before I came to live here the nation had been decimated by Hitler, who was determined to render them extinct. Those who escaped the Nazi maw came to the land they and their forefathers had ached to return to -- only to find more hatred, more anti-Semitism, more murder here.
Denied peace and security by the Gentile nations for hundreds of years, the remnant of the Jews were denied it once more -- this time in their own national home.
The world had shown that it would not rest until the Jews were no more. I was not going to sit quietly by and watch that happen. And I certainly was not going to be suckered into becoming a champion of the very weapon that was most effectively being wielded against Israel in our day -- the "Palestinian cause."
So I moved here. And for years I vociferously repulsed every effort being made to compare Zionist Israel with apartheid South Africa. There was no comparison at any level. I knew that for a fact and said so. Until last week.
At Amona I saw behavior I instantly recognized:
I saw the actions of an unelected man using his unaccountable police force to demonstrate his "strength" and "leadership" in the run-up to a national election.
I saw men whose duty it is to ensure the maintenance of law and order themselves break the laws of self-restraint, decency and respect. They turned viciously on their own people, beating old men bloody, pulling girls by their hair, even -- according to allegations carried on the Ynetnews website Tuesday -- sexually abusing these young observant women who live lives that are almost painfully chaste.
Olmert and his police have sowed the shredding seeds of sinat chinam -- the baseless hatred that has torn and decimated the nation of Israel before and which, unless recognized and addressed, could soon turn the yawning national rift in this country into a civil war.
These dark thoughts of mine were somewhat quieted by the positive and good (there's no better word) atmosphere at the rally. The settlers were demanding justice, a fair and honest inquiry into what had been done at Amona. They were using the combined tools of prayer and peaceful demonstration to make their point.
I left and was heading for home, hoping that somehow the tide (which feels like a torrent) could still be turned. Then a police car jerked to a stop and an officer leaped out to confront me. While his colleague checked my driver's license, the man in front of me fired questions brusquely, almost threateningly:
"Have you ever been arrested?" "No," I replied. "Have you ever been detained?" "No," I answered again. "Where are you going?" "Home." "Where do you live?" I told him.
As they drove away I sensed a feeling that had lain dormant for years rising inside me. I knew what it was. I used to feel it every time I saw the yellow-colored, deeply-dreaded vehicles of the South African Police.
Because of their behavior at Amona, my faith in Israeli policemen -- the men and women I always appreciated for helping to keep me and my loved ones safe from the threat of terrorism and other forms of violence and crime -- has been damaged, perhaps dashed.
How must it feel for Israelis, I wonder, whose own brothers and sons have joined the multifaceted ranks of their nation's enemies by so perversely turning against their own kind.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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