A story about D, his mother S, and the dehumanising denialism of genocide apologists

When a long-ago friend angrily lashed out at me on social media for posting an announcement of an anti-genocide protest march, what surprised me most was the utter unoriginality and cliché-ridden banality of the Hasbara talking points he was reciting so mechanically.

Last week I posted a message on Facebook and the site formally known as Twitter (some of us luddites still maintain a presence on these sites) to alert people to an upcoming protest march in Sea Point against the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, as well as the regime’s cold blooded assassination of journalists working in Gaza.

The negative responses – many of them in Afrikaans – came in thick and fast, mostly abusive, angry, and incoherent, with the usual sprinkling of homophobia in-between. “Fok jou,” (“Fuck you.”) wrote @Andrevdw123. “Julle klomp dom poese kan net raas. Fokof,” (“You lot of dumb cunts can only make a noise, Fuck off.”) sneered @WhiteLionII1. While @ArnoldMVermaak warned darkly: “Jy is besig om die antichris te ondersteun, weet jy hoe lank is vir ewig?” (“You are supporting the anti-Christ, do you know how long eternity is?)

I am pretty used to this kind of abuse from sad, raging, racist, or fearful Afrikaners (as well as everyone else), but in the past, these have almost always been in response to something I had written about racism or apartheid. Which is why, at first, I found this vehement response from some Afrikaners to no more than an announcement of a peaceful protest march about the genocide in Gaza, perplexingly over-the-top.

It was only when an old friend I will call D, posted an angry response to my announcement of the march on Facebook that I began to understand why this particular post might have enraged the type of white people who bristle at any suggestion that they or their parents might have been complicit in the crime against humanity we call apartheid, or might have (or continue to) benefit from it.

In his response D, someone I had met around 2002 through friends from the gay club scene and had not spoken to or heard from since he moved to London more than 20 years ago, accused me of “the worst blood libel against Israel and Jews imaginable” and complained that having a protest march against the Israeli genocide in Sea Point (apparently “a predominantly Jewish area”) was antisemitic. I was blindly taking “the side of the Islamists”, he wrote, and in a telling Freudian slip, complained that by doing so I had “indicted [my] Jewish friends”.

When I had met him, D was what the boys in the gay clubs back then would have called a “pretty young thing”, but he was far more interesting than that. He had a sense of drama about him, with a knack for using well-chosen Yiddish expressions to brilliant comic effect. He often amused us with his self-deprecating re-enactments of scenes from his life, mostly about his complicated but very close relationship with his mother S or the general foibles and absurdities of Cape Town Jewish life, always told with a knowing smile lingering between complicity and self-mocking.

The first Shabbat dinner I ever attended was at D’s parents’ house in, as I remember it, Table View. D’s mother S, who sometimes played the piano at the revolving restaurant at the top of the Ritz hotel (alternating with a blond blind woman rumoured to be a close relative of former President PW Botha), met us at the door in a revealing low cut dress. I have a memory of her being bare foot the entire evening, but I can’t imagine that can be correct. I do recall that she did us, her guests, five gay men of different ages, the honour of flirting with each one of us throughout the night.

That night, S leaned into her role as a larger than life (at least larger than life in Table View), femme fatale. She seemed to have great fun hamming it up for us, knowing that the gays always love a tragic diva. D looked both annoyed and, at times, sheepishly proud that his mother was living up to her pre-billing.

S, somebody joked in the car on the way back to town, was like an amalgam of May West, Marylin Monroe, and Shirly McClean (in her crystals and chakras phase). The next day, I wrote in my diary that I had felt at the dinner as if I was in a Tennessee Williams play, but one with at least a slight possibility of a happy ending.

I recall that when I laughingly asked D in mock outrage why he was leaving us all to go to London of all places, he rolled his eyes and laughingly replied in an exaggerated Kugel accent “because the country is going to the dogs, doll”, before asking about the crowd at Club 55 the previous Saturday night. I worry that I might be misremembering some of this, but if I am, it does not change the larger truth: that this is the kind of person I remember D being back then.

Which is why I was rather taken aback to read on Facebook that D was now a cheerleader for the crimes being committed by the Zionist state of Israel, taken aback not so much because he was defending the indefensible (something which Zionists have been required to do so since 1948), but because of the utter unoriginality and cliché-ridden banality of the Hasbara talking points he was reciting so mechanically.

The exchange made me wonder what might have happened to D over the past 20 years, and why he had changed so much, from the charming, witty and handsomely ironic person I knew back then, into the irrational defender of Palestinian dehumanisation that I encountered now on Facebook.

We may, of course, also turn the question on its head,  and ask what had happened to me and whether I was not perhaps the one who had changed from the fun loving but callous, sex-obsessed, club kid I was then, into a self-important, moralising party-pooper who takes the constitutional commitment to human dignity, equality and freedom far too literally, and care far too much – about the facts, about life and death, about starvation, about the dehumanisation of others?

(Had the exchange on Facebook not been so acrimonious, I would also have wanted to ask D what had happened to S, his mother, who had shown such kindness to the five strangers who arrived at her door for Shabbat dinner a year or two after the millennium. Is she alive and in good health? Is she happy? I sincerely hope that she is.)

I try not to respond to rants by other people on social media (what would be the point?), but given our shared history I did respond to D. I told D that his response represented “a catastrophic moral failure” which filled me with utter despair.

Despair, I said, about D’s inability to consider even the possibility that Palestinians were human beings with infinite and equal worth and thus like everybody else deserving of being treated as individual human beings and not as non-beings who could be starved and murdered for no other reason than that they are Palestinians and thus, by operation of what is a disastrously erroneous logic, by definition guilty of all the real or imagined crimes committed by Hamas and anyone else who have ever dared to resist Israel’s unlawful occupation.

I also wrote that as a white “Afrikaner” (whatever that may mean) who grew up under apartheid, I know how difficult it can be to acknowledge that one’s own people are the perpetrators of crimes against humanity (as apartheid was declared), and to have to acknowledge that you were not the powerless victim of communists and terrorists as your paranoid and racist (and at least relatively privileged) parents and teachers and politicians had claimed, that the “terrorists”, flawed as they might have turned out to be in government, were freedom fighters fighting a just war against unspeakable oppression.

The fact that many people find this difficult is also, of course, a catastrophic moral failure.

I further pointed out that ascribing the actions of the state of Israel to all Jews and thus assuming that Jews are collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel, as D did, was of course, a classic example of antisemitism, explicitly mentioned in both the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition on antisemitism and in the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.

As it is infuriating (and tedious) to have to repeat these points over and over again, I did not comment on D’s racist claim that the mere presence of a predominantly black and brown group of protestors in Sea Point (a Zionist on Twitter even instructed us to “go and march in Athlone”), posed a threat to all Jews (presumably including all those Jews who took part in the march).

But D’s furious response, so similar to the response of some white South Africans to any reports about acts of racism or any mention of (lingering) white supremacy, is nevertheless revealing. D felt I had “indicted” him by endorsing the conclusion reached (far too late) by David Grossman (widely considered one of Israel’s greatest living authors) and (also far too late) by two major Israeli human rights organizations, as well as by a number of leading international rights groups, foreign governments and scholars of genocide studies, much like white racists in South Africa feel indicted whenever racism is mentioned.

D’s response is what one would expect from any individual who has the capacity to feel shame, but is nevertheless unable or unwilling to change the beliefs or behaviour that cause the person such shame. As this is an unbearable state of affairs, people tend to push away reality and create an alternative universe instead, which explains why so many lash out at anything that threatens the story they tell themselves about themselves and about the world around them.

As far as the land between the river and the sea is concerned, this is an alternative universe in which Israel is not a colonial state established through ethnic cleansing, a universe in which it is a “blood libel” to state the now rather uncontroversial fact that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The most pressing moral question, though, is why some people seem to be incapable of changing the beliefs or behaviour that would shame them if they were to acknowledge reality. What makes it possible for such people to push away reality, and to dismiss the suffering of others out of hand?

Here I want to suggest that the dehumanisation of others plays a pivotal role in the process. If one is incapable of seeing others (Palestinians, Black people, Jews, woman, queers) as fully human, as people with infinite and equal moral worth, if one has been made to believe that your very existence depends on the extermination of others, and thus that the lives of those who you believe are not like you, are expendable, it becomes much easier to push away reality.

It is not for nothing that when Hannah Arendt finally concluded her famous trial report on Adolf Eichmann, that she insisted that Eichmann’s crime consisted above all in the fact that he refused to share the Earth with others. For Arendt, Eichmann’s crime was a crime precisely against the reality that she called ‘the law of the Earth’, the reality which consists in the fact of human difference and plurality.

In the context of the Gaza genocide, we are witnessing this in the dehumanisation of Palestinians, and in the casual assumption that Palestinian lives are expendable, which still underpin so much of the reporting in Western media about Gaza, and animates so much of the European (non)response to the catastrophe. Why, for example, political elites in Europe by and large continue to view the Israeli campaign against Palestinians in Gaza as a humanitarian crisis, as if Gaza was flattened by a natural disaster, and not by the weapons provided by the US and some European governments.

If one falls into the habit of dismissing others as not fully human, it becomes easier to imagine, as D did, that the sombre crowd of protesters who marched on the Sea Point promenade on Sunday, could at any moment turn into a raging mob posing an existential threat to those you love and hold dear.

I related my memories of D, and of his mother S, in some detail above, partly as a protest against this kind of dehumanisation.

I find D’s response to the Israeli genocide morally reprehensible, the kind of response that makes him morally complicit in the slaughter happening in Gaza. But, yet, I want to insist on the importance of trying to hold on to the belief (impossible as it may seem) that D like anyone else – including Hamas fighters, the white racists quoted above, and even Benjamin Netanyahu – remains a human being with infinite and equal moral worth.

I fear this is not something that anyone who embraces an ideology or political project that requires the dehumanisation of others – as Zionism does – is capable of doing.

And in the face of the horrors being committed in Gaza, it may feel unbearable for the rest of us as well. How can a refusal to turn away ever be anything but unbearable? But is this not the price we have to pay for the faltering attempts we are compelled to make to remain fully human?

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