Jeremy Rosen
Challenging Conversations: Desmond Tutu
Judge Dennis Davis and Jeremy Rosen - Challenging Conversations: Desmond Tutu
- So, today we’ve got a very, a hot topic, Bishop Tutu.
[Dennis] You can say that again.
Yes, a very hot topic and I think it’s very, very important that we do have this discussion because he’s very much part of our history, and I do want to have these challenging conversations on lockdown. I think it’s important to listen to different points of view that we open up our minds and that we’re able to have a discussion and that there could be discussions afterwards, because very often, you know, we’re just repeating what other people say or we’re just reading.
I take the point.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sound bites, sound bites. So, alright, so whenever you’re ready, over to you. Welcome everybody, this afternoon, this evening, this morning. And thank you, Jeremy, and thank you very much, Dennis, for agreeing to address this very sensitive subject. Thank you, over to you.
[Dennis] Jeremy, over to you.
Thank you. Dennis, it’s an honour to be on with you and I’m really looking forward to this session. And I’m going to take specifically a religious angle on Desmond Tutu, who I met several times, who I thought was a wonderful, delightful person to be with and I admired, and I admired his struggle and his battle. But at the same time, here was a man who had, in my view, a blind spot. And it’s not unusual, particularly with people who are brought up in various denominations of the Christian Church. And his blind spot was a failure to understand the nature of what Jews and Judaism was, which was hardly surprising because his education as a priest was within a Christian tradition, and in South Africa, a very specific Christian tradition. And he, as a result of this, absorbed many of the problems that Christianity had with Judaism from the very start. And his image of Jews was very much influenced by the New Testament. They were the Pharisees, the rigid, preoccupied with detail and pettiness, lacking a sense of spirit. And they were mean, nasty people who were prepared to see the founder of Christianity die on the cross. And this message, which to many of us seems, in a sense, so absurd, was part of, at any rate, the Catholic church until the 1960s when Pope John the XXIII removed the sin of deicide; that the Jews then and now were still guilty of the death of Christ.
And so this was the foundation in a sense of a certain Christian background that saw Jews as the other and saw Jews as a problem and saw Jews through their own perspective. So you have a fundamental idea that the Jews have been demoted because they failed carrying out their mission to God with the Old Testament. They were superseded by this new religion of the New Testament, and if they couldn’t see it, then in a sense it was their fault. A similar attitude came with Islam. Initially Mohammed hoped to enrol the Jews and when they didn’t enrol, he turned against them. And similarly with Martin Luther, who started off hoping the Jews would join him in his Protestant revolution, but in the end hated them more than anybody else. So the idea that the Jews were punished to wander and not to have a home of their own for rejecting Christ has been embedded in Christianity for thousands of years. And although it would be ridiculous to say that all Christians think that nowadays, of course not any more than you can say what all Jews think nowadays. But it is part of a certain tradition within the Christian world which saw the Jews through a very specific dimension. There was also the idea of turning the other cheek, the idea that one should not resort to violence and aggression in defending one’s position. And interestingly enough, one of his mentors, the famous Gandhi, was an example. An example of somebody brought up, initially born in India, but then brought up in South Africa, then went to London to study at the bar, and he absorbed at the time all the current antisemitism that was fermenting within British society and with the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa against the Jews. And remember there was a very, very powerful Nazi movement. Vorster, Verwoerd were part of it and supported it at a certain moment in time.
So all these things had an impact. Gandhi most notoriously said some horrible things about the Jews, even though he was far from being a horrible man. A man that, again, many people admired. But you know, when he said such things, and, you know, I quote, “The Jews should have offered themselves up to the Nazis, to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from the cliffs. It would’ve aroused the world and the people of Germany, but they succumbed anyway.” And similarly, he said that in the Arab-Israel conflict, “The Jews should offer themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a finger against their opponents”, which I understand in the context of pacifism and his particular pacifism. But it’s interesting that somebody can be so insensitive to another peoples’ desire to live. So the Christian element was an element in Desmond Tutu’s upbringing. Of course in South Africa he came into contact with Jews who supported, very much so, supported the ANC. But nevertheless his support for the ANC was also in effect a support against pacifism and towards the need to fight for one’s rights. And if he could understand the need for an African country to fight for its rights, why couldn’t he understand the need for another group to fight for its rights? And if the argument was the other group have made sins or done something wrong, then every single African country since it had independence has done something wrong. That doesn’t take away from them the right to make their mistakes as opposed to somebody else. So one of the pillars of his attitude towards Judaism was a Christian one.
It’s changed; certainly in Catholicism now it’s a lot, lot better, but it has remained very powerful, particularly in the Presbyterian and in the Protestant tradition. The, shall we say, more enlightened. And the question is how did that come about? And that came about because, fundamentally, the idea of the suffering servant, the idea of the person who suffers, Jesus suffered on the cross, Jesus was the suffering person, the suffering servant. Suffering is good, pain is good and necessary, and we have to take care of those who are suffering. Of course we have, everybody believes of any moral code, they’ve got to take care of the suffering. But traditionally Jews were recognised when they were suffering. People were happy to see them suffering, and in effect, when Jews suddenly started to fight for their rights, this created a problem. And this was a problem for many Christians, particularly in the church and they identified with the losers. The Jews for years had been the losers. Now, in a sense, the Palestinians were the losers. I am not going to defend for one minute everything that the state of Israel or Israelis have done, whether it was in Israel or whether it was coming into South Africa and helping the Apartheid regime. I am not going to defend for one minute. I’m just concerned with the fact that we as any other group have a right, a right to self-determination. And if we have a right to self-determination, we should be able to fight to defend it. And if we fight to defend it and the other side and we cannot make peace, we have a standoff in which, you might argue and I would agree, that both sides share a part of the guilt in this.
But what was it about Desmond Tutu that made him so, so violently opposed to Israel that he was prepared to call it apartheid? Now, those of you who have read Benjamin Pogrund’s famous book, “Drawing Fire: Investigating the Accusations of Apartheid in Israel”, published in 2014; well no, there’s no argument for apartheid. There’s an argument for prejudice, there’s an argument for preferences. But where you have a state of Israel in which you have Arab members of parliament, Arabs on the Supreme Court, Arabs with a vote, Muslims and Christians, Arabs with a vote, you cannot compare it to what apartheid was, where the whole nation was divided, denied a voice altogether. And what goes on on the West Bank at this particular moment is also something that disturbs me. I’ve never been happy about occupation. On the other hand, it is still a state of stalemate. There has been no deal, it’s not part of Israel yet, and until there is a peace agreement, I don’t see how a person who is objective can claim that this is apartheid. You can say a lot about it. And finally, the issue of race, which is, sorry, it’s not final. I’ve got one more point to make on this. The issue of imperialism; what is imperialism? Imperialism, colonialism is when a power, say, sitting in London takes over people in India, in Africa, or where the Germans or the French or indeed where the Americans interfere in the lives and the governings of nations around the world beyond their borders. But in the case of Israel, this is not an alien group coming back, although some of the people were living in the Western world. Most Jews at the time were living under the Arabs in the Arab world. They saw themselves as as as Arabic Jews, not as Western Jews. And this was something that over 2,000 years, Jews from all backgrounds, whether it was Spain, Africa, Northern Africa or the East, always wanted to come back to the land.
Or whenever they had a chance, like under the Ottoman Empire, which gave them a chance when they were expelled from Spain and they settled mainly in Sephar and Safed because there was industry that could support them there. Most of the time it was a backwater and it had no income, no industry, it was difficult to live there, but at moments when they could, they did. And the Hasidic movement in the 19th century came over whenever they could and whoever they could to live there. So there’d always been this constant train of Jews coming there, so you can’t claim they were totally aliens. The fact that the impetus might have come from Nazi Germany, the impetus to move to Israel during the 19th century, in 1870 and so forth, was prior to the whole question of imperialism and colonialism. And yet in the world today, in the West, these are dirty words. Once they were nice words, now they’re dirty words. And then we have the question nowadays of race. And as you know, poor Whoopi Goldberg got into trouble for saying Jews are not a race. Well, in one way, she’s quite right. It’s very difficult to call the Jews a race in the way originally race defined people physiologically by the way they looked and the colour of their skin. Jews have come from all around the world, all colours of skin. Just go to Israel to see that. And in a sense, we called ourselves a nation, a people, an Israel, not a race. Race is a relatively new term. There’s no such word for race in the Bible. There’s never been any bias against, on a halakhic basis, on anybody of any colour joining the Jewish people. There’d been prejudice, I’m afraid there is, prejudice against women too. But nevertheless, this important idea that we were imperialists is now part of the narrative of the left. And the narrative of the left takes its inspiration from Marx, and Marx totally rejected any Jewish identity, accused the Jews of being capitalists, of the upper classes oppressing the lower classes. No concession to the fact that most Jews were the lower classes and the working classes and the poor.
And this fed into his narrative in “Das Kapital” and it fed into the revolutionary system of Russia, which was opposed to all religions, which oppressed Christianity as well as oppressing Judaism. And it fed into the narrative that this, these Jews are imposing an alien culture and an alien right on the free, Marxist socialist world and, therefore, really have no place and should not be supported. So for all these reasons, the prejudices that we call antisemitism, whatever they are, whether they’re racist or socialist, have after a period of lying dormant after World War II and the Nazis have now come to the fore under the pretence of anti-Zionism. Now, most Orthodox Jews in Israel are anti-Zionist in the sense that they don’t believe in Zionist ideology. I have reservations about what we mean about Zionist ideology. I’d be much happier if we took Zionism in a sense out of the picture and talked about the Jews and the right of the Jews to a land of their own and to defend it and to protect it. And this was something that, for whatever reason, Desmond Tutu just could not take on board, and you can’t blame him. Culturally in a sense, you are the product of the environment you grow up in. And this was part, as I say, of the world he lived in and the crises he had to deal with. He was a wonderful man and as you know, his work on the Reconciliation and Truth Commission was incredibly important. But this word “truth” applies to other people too. Why is it so impossible to see truth in somebody else’s religion and value it or in somebody else’s nationalism and value it? And yet, if you look at the language he used to describe Jewish suffering, but he called it Zionist suffering, or how he dealt with the way the Jews supposedly control the media in America, this is one of his favourite things.
The Jews control the media, they control the wealth, they’ll control the American lobby, they’re behind everything wrong. That is not rational, it’s not fair, it’s not justified and it shows in the end that the man is human. We’ve all got our prejudices, we have got our prejudices. All I’m saying is let’s have a fair analysis of the spectrum of his personality, his character, warts and all. There’s a tendency to hagiography, I was just reading today in “The Wall Street Journal” the review of a book which says Nixon wasn’t such a bad guy, Kennedy wasn’t such a great guy. We should constantly be reexamining the sources, reexamining the positions and, as a result, keeping an open mind. I rest the case for my defence.
- Thank you, Jeremy. Firstly, I want to make a couple of introductory remarks if I can. By the way, I’m chuckling because compared to Donald Trump, Nixon wasn’t a bad guy. But that’s another matter. I want to first say what a thrill it is to share a platform with you, because although we’ve only met on Zoom, as I indicated to you when I first discussed matters with you, your brother David was a very instrumental character in my Jewish upbringing being our rabbi at the Sea Point Synagogue in the mid 1970s. And I think Claudette and I would probably regard Sharon and David as our friends. In fact, we even visited them in Ireland. And his form of Judaism, which I think is yours, which was a sort of broad kind of embrace of kind of modern Orthodoxy commended itself to us at the time and still does, I should say. It really shaped my life. And through him of course, I got to know about your father who clearly had an extraordinarily enlightened vision as to what Orthodoxy should mean in a modern world. So, firstly, I wanted to say that. Secondly, I find this a very difficult topic to talk about. When initially there was going to be a discussion about this and Wendy proposed it, somebody who I greatly respect in South Africa and his family has done the most extraordinary work in vindicating the Jewish vision of social justice for marginalised Black communities particularly in the Cape Town area where I am, sort of called me and said he didn’t think it was a wise thing to have this debate.
Partly because for all sorts of reasons, that Desmond Tutu was a moral icon in South Africa and he was worried that the whole issue would descend into the kind of, as it were, almost hateful sort of discourse of a kind which would not do much credit and joy for the Jewish community of South Africa. I thought about that deeply, and then of course, when you were going to be the other speaker, I thought, well, let us go ahead because, and for reasons which are apparent from your presentation, I’m perfectly happy to have done that. I’m going to exchange some views in a second. But I suppose why I was particularly interested in this is that just the way in which fake news develops in the world. When Desmond Tutu died, Alan Dershowitz, certainly not a friend of mine, I have to admit, certainly seems to be a friend of some rather more dubious people. Alan Dershowitz published an article in the newspaper about Desmond Tutu being the greatest antisemite since the Second World War. He made a series of allegations. None of them were referenced. There was not one reference in his article to one thing that Desmond Tutu had ever said. In other words, you know, quoting directly from some article newspaper and I’m going to be doing that this evening, ‘cause I want to be fair to the text of Tutu rather than what in fact may be considered to be the text of Tutu. This was then replicated by Melanie Phillips in England and by a journalist called in South Africa, again using Dershowitz as the authority without any substantiation for the arguments that they put forward, meaning no reference.
And I was fascinated by that because it seemed to me that that was basically one of the great problems we have in the world today, is that people essentially have these discourses without relevance to fact. And the fact is, if you are going to criticise somebody, please at least do them the credit and the courtesy of actually critiquing what they’ve said. Now, that having been said, there’s a lot of which I agree with you. Let me give you an example. I personally, I knew Desmond Tutu really well. He wasn’t a friend of mine, but I don’t think you could be involved in South African politics of any particular kind without having bumped into him on numerous occasions. I deeply admired his courage and his principle. He was a deeply religious man. I’ll come to the Christian point in a moment, but certainly it seemed to me that in all the interactions I ever had with Desmond Tutu, what inspired me about him was the fact that he really took his religious beliefs extraordinarily seriously and tried to vindicate them in an imperfect world. I had a big argument with him when at some particular point he had said, and this time I went because in order to deal with all of these questions, I actually went and read almost everything I could lay my hands on that Tutu had said about matters Jewish, matters Israeli. And a couple I will share with you now, but I’ve got many, many other articles that I’m prepared to share with anybody in the audience because that seems to me the way one should debate matters rationally. And the big debate I had with him, which supports Jeremy’s point, I think, in fact I know, is when Desmond Tutu said that he thought Jews, after going to Yad Vashem, that Jews should forgive Nazis in some way. I’m paraphrasing an article which appeared in .
And I remember having a discussion with him and saying, you know, that’s such a Christian theological position, it’s not ours. And he said, what do you mean? And I said, well, let me explain to you a little bit and for the purposes of this debate, I shall. Which is I said to him, we have a particular concept of teshuvah, of repentance. It’s very central to our weltanschauung, to our worldview. Because the whole idea of our tradition is that when God created the world, he created not just the concept of justice, but he also created a concept of compassion, repentance, as it were. And the teshuvah, the word meaning to return, really, is very central to all Jewish thinking. But that particular concept, if I could put it briefly, meant that to a large degree, it means by filling the elements of teshuvah by actually kind of reflecting on what in fact you’d done and committing yourself to act entirely the opposite way to the evil that you perpetuated beforehand, it’s possible that an offender may be able to earn the right to ask the victim for forgiveness. I’m simplifying, but you’ll see the point in a moment. So Jewish law states that a truly repentant returnee whose repeated requests for forgiveness are rejected on three occasions by his victim, has done all he can and need not make any further efforts at reconciliation. But the point, the sharp point about it is that if the perpetrator fails to perform these requirements, forgiveness has not been earned. And if a victim is no longer alive, is absent or otherwise unable to receive the perpetrator’s teshuvah, the possibility for the perpetrator to seek forgiveness is seriously impeded. For at no time can any person presume to offer forgiveness to a perpetrator of a crime of which he wasn’t a victim. And I pointed out to Tutu that it wasn’t for him or me to in fact demand that people who’d actually suffered under Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen should actually forgive. It wasn’t for us, that’s not Jewish theology.
And so I profoundly disagreed with his particular position and I think in that sense Jeremy’s analysis is correct, and I’m not going to even take issue with it because I accept that. The question, however, is when you look at the overall record of Desmond Tutu, it seems to me totally unfair to suggest that he was utterly obsessed by Israel at the expense of other evil regimes. And, may I say, evil that occurred or certainly malfeasance of the worst kind that occurred in post-Apartheid South Africa. I’m going to put up on the board here a series of Tutu quotes, which are what he said in his own words. It seemed to me that’s how we should start to judge it. So Lauren, if we can start rolling down the quotes. Ah, he said the following. “I come from a beautiful land, endowed by God with wonderful natural resources, wide expanses, rolling mountains, singing birds, shining stars out of blue skies, with radiant sunshine, gold sunshine. There is enough of the good things that come from God’s bounty, there’s enough for everyone, but apartheid has confirmed some in their selfishness, causing them to grasp readily a disproportionate share, the lion’s share, because of their power. They’ve taken 87% of the land, though being only about 20% of our population. The rest have had to make due with the remaining 13%.” That was of course a view which many shared at the time and was of course completely correct. Can we carry on? 'Cause I can’t see the rest, Lauren, ah. Now, in 1985 when there was necklacing, which were tyres were placed on people and they were burnt to death, Desmond Tutu actually went in to a completely raving crowd to demand to save a person who was in fact being burnt to death. “If you do this kind of thing, I will find it difficult to speak for the cause of liberation. If the violence continues, I will pack my bags, collect my family and leave this beautiful country that I love so passionately and so deeply. I say to you that I condemn in the strongest possible terms what happened in Duduza.” He condemned this and that there are occasions when he took his own life at risk in order to save people for that particular reason. Can we move on? Right, this is at Truth and Reconciliation. “They say those who suffer from amnesia, those that forget the past, are doomed to repeat it. It is not dealing with the past to say facilely, let bygones be bygones, for then they won’t be bygones. Our country, our society, would be doomed to the instability of uncertainty
- the uncertainty engendered by not knowing when yet another scandal of the past would hit the headlines, when another skeleton would be dragged out of the cupboard.” This is of course, reflective, as Jeremy has correctly pointed out, of the extraordinary work he did at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Can we continue? This is what he said about the ANC. “We should not too quickly want to pull rank and demand a sycophantic, obsequious conformity. We need to find ways in which we can engage the hoi polloi, the so-called masses, the people, in public discourse through indabas, town-hall forums, so no-one feels marginalised and their point of view matters, it counts. Then we will develop a national consensus. We should debate more openly - not using emotive language. We should not be browbeaten by pontificating decrees from on high. It should be possible to talk as adults about these issues without engaging in slanging matches.” This is about the ANC government, which in many ways he had fought to ensure that a democratic government be elected. But he was not one of these people who essentially was going to just put his hands behind his eyes and not do anything about it. About the Zuma administration he said, “This government, our government is worse than the apartheid government, because at least you were expecting it from the apartheid government. Mr. Zuma”, then the president, “You and your government don’t represent me. You represent your own interest and I’m warning you. I really am warning you out of love.
I’m warning you like I warned the Nationalists. I’m warning you. One day we will start praying for the defeat of the ANC government. You’re totally disgraceful. I want to warn you. You are behaving in a way that is totally at variance with the things for which we stood.” This is somebody in a country which at this particular point in time, trust me, very few people will say, and this is about the ANC government. Tutu was inspired, as I want to argue, by a particular form of perspective which came from his religious roots. And whilst I disagree, as I’ve indicated, with his theology with regard to the question of forgiveness, there can be no gain saying that in many ways he was a more moral figure than anybody else, including Mandela, in post-apartheid South Africa. Let us continue. When he spoke about Libya, he said “The manner of the killing of Muammar Gaddafi totally detracts from the noble enterprise of instilling a culture of human rights and democracy for Libya. The people of Libya should have demonstrated better values than those of their erstwhile oppressor.” And the point that he was making there was that, in fact, whilst the Gaddafi was an absolute abomination, just simply to kill people in that way was not going to restore a democratic country. He was concerned about ensuring that there should be democracy in Libya, and he constantly criticised what was going on pre-, during the Gaddafi period, and thereafter. So he wasn’t only talking about South Africa. Carry on. I think there’s another one. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair and George Bush. “The then leaders of the US and Great Britain fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They’ve driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us. The question is not whether the Iraq president Saddam Hussein was good or bad or how many people he massacred. The point is that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair should not have allowed”, I’m afraid my screen is stuck there, so I can’t read anymore. Lauren, can you just keep on going? Oh. Oh, it suddenly went further than that. Yes, “The point is that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair should not have allowed” and then you could just scroll on?
[Lauren] That’s the end of that quote.
Oh, is it? Okay. Well, okay. Is there another one still? Okay, I’ll leave Mr. Mandela again for the purpose of the thing. I think there might be another one. This is of course about, about him being rejected from the funeral, Mandela, because by then he was really no longer within the ANC. “I was quite astounded myself, but I tried to pretend I was humbled and didn’t really mind. It was not true, I was very hurt. Very dear friend. We made up for a little bit. I was asked to preach at a wonderful memorial held at Westminster Abbey. They have the right to say who would speak, but I think they shot themselves comprehensively in the foot in snubbing me. It was sad.” I think there might be another one.
Who snubbed him? Was it the ANC who snubbed him?
Yes, yes, they did.
[Jeremy] Yeah.
This is about Israel and I’m going to come back to this. So, Lauren, I’m not going to deal with this now 'cause I’d like you to the second section on “The Guardian” article, please. Oh, yeah, sorry, there was also, there I should have put the . Let me just add, there are also quotes there about his incredible criticism of the Chinese treatment of the Dalai Lama, of the conditions in Myanmar and the lack of democracy there, the various Chinese abuses of human rights. Tutu you spoke out consistently. There are quotes there as well. What I’m trying to suggest is this wasn’t a man who only spoke about Israel and South Africa. He was somebody who spoke about human rights abuses the world over. Now, this is the article he wrote about Israel. I’m turning directly to Israel now. This is the article he wrote in “The Guardian” in 2002, right, when he speaks about the struggle against apartheid and the Jews. “Instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised or the voiceless. I’ve continued to feel strongly for the Jews. I’m a patron of the Holocaust Centre. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.” I want to emphasise that. “What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee”, right, so I can’t read that entirely. “I’ve been very distressed in my visits to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what us Black people and in South Africa. I’ve seen humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoint roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about. On one of my visits to the Holy Land, I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?” And then he continues, and if we could just crawl down to the bottom, because I don’t want to, you can read the whole thing, but I want to just read the last paragraph.
[Lauren] There’s two more slides.
Yeah, that’s fine, yeah. Israel has three options. Injustice… I can’t remember, yeah, “We should put a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We’ll do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it’s God’s dream and you will be able to live amicably together.” And in this quote, we’re towards the end, he actually says, “Israel has the right to exist, but so do the Palestinians.” The simple proposition when you read the entire article, because I’m having difficulty in reading it, is that Desmond Tutu believed in the right of Israel to exist as an independent sovereign state. So the question is, well, what’s wrong with that? I certainly am totally with Jeremy, and one of the reasons that to a large degree, I vehemently oppose much of the BDS movement, which of course is fueled, I have to say sadly, by many people who are unquestionably antisemitic. But the point is that once you accept, it seems to me, that Israel has an inalienable right to exist but you also argue that Palestinians have a right to exist, I find that difficult to believe that somebody’s a raving antisemite who argues those particular points. I find it difficult to accept that that’s not different from many people who’ve argued that both within Israel and outside. I mean, it fascinates me just how quickly we attack people who say these things. Ari Shavit who wrote a wonderful book called “My Promised Land” and should in fact be a book which should be read by everybody, which is a very balanced book, was accused when the book came out of being a self-hating Jew.
But if you read the book, how on earth you get to that position seems to me extraordinary. And I do want to say here that, yes, it seems to me that if you argue, as some do in the BDS movement, that Israel has no right to exist, that there should be no Israeli state; then in fact you have perhaps crossed, not have, for me, you’ve crossed the boundary. But Desmond Tutu’s whole argument was that Israel has the right to exist, but they would never achieve peace without in fact achieving some settlement with the Palestinians. Now, how on earth that can be considered to be the worst form of antisemitism since the second World War, as Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips have claimed, you have to really be perverted to argue that. And it’s no good for us to do that, because the one thing I want to assert and which seems to me to be vital is that we shouldn’t, Jews should not be in fact supporting forms of closure of speech based on what we think somebody might have said, rather than what they did say. Now, is there room for criticising Tutu? Absolutely. Why? Because he went further than that and suggested that there should be sanctions and that, therefore, there should be sanctions because that would be the way in which Israel would come to the negotiating table and effectively achieve the peace that he thought was necessary to the Palestinians. Now, there are many, many people, and I suspect the vast majority of people who are listening to me this evening, who would argue that sanctions are in fact completely unjustified in this situation, even if they may be in other circumstances. And I should say that certainly for me, one of the proudest debates I’ve ever had was sharing a platform with the great South African artist, William Kentridge, which gave me a great deal of naches, I should tell you, where we actually argued that the academic boycott of Israel was wrong and against Zackie Achmat and one other, before the University of Capetown, a very large audience, and we won. So whatever my view is, is not the point. I accept that we won’t agree with him on that.
But why did he say that? And that does bring the point back to Jeremy’s point. It brings the point back that he saw, in a sense, all forms of oppression, as I think most of us do, from our own indigenous context. He saw the fact that sanctions in South Africa was a central feature of getting the National Party to the negotiating table and getting us to the transition, peaceful transition, which he heralded in the pieces that I’ve cited to you. And that’s why he responded in the way he did. You can argue about the tactic, you can suggest it was completely wrong. But it seems to me that what is not open to one is to say two things. One, that in fact that, well, he denied the right of Israel to exist within safe boundaries, which I do not think was his position. It wasn’t the article that he wrote in 2002, it wasn’t the article he wrote in 2014. I could carry on and cite two others. In fact, I could find no article in which Desmond Tutu did not assert the right of Israel to exist in independent state. That his tactics to achieve that might be ones that you totally and profoundly and completely disagree with, that is your right, absolutely. And those listening to me this this afternoon, this evening, I would accept readily that you disagree entirely and I’m not going to defend that position. The position I’m defending is a twofold one. I’m deeply concerned that if you criticise policy as opposed to the right to exist as an independent state A free people in our own land, I feel that if you go to the former as opposed to the latter, then it seems to me that you’re really stifling the kind of debate that one should have.
If you are of the kind of person, and a friend of mine of right-wing views sent me a t-shirt, copy of a t-shirt yesterday, which basically has, you know, a whole range of countries in which oppression takes place and the last line is, “I’m not interested any of them because the Jews aren’t involved.” I accept that, that if you actually turn a blind eye to oppression in other countries and only concentrate on Israel, I accept that that is an unacceptable position for me. But that wasn’t Tutu. Because whether it was China, whether it was Myanmar, whether it was the ANC, whether it was Gaddafi, whether it was Blair and Bush’s, basically, venture which changed the whole face of the Middle East and has created the chaos of terrorism that we know today; whether there was any of that, he was there arguing that. Whether it was the ANC which had become immoral, there was he, a moral voice in, I might add, a desert. It seems to me that Tutu is certainly the subject of legitimate criticism. It seems to me that as I’ve indicated to you, I disagreed with him about profoundly about the theological position with regard to the Holocaust. It seems to me that many of you are utterly entitled to say, why on earth would you want to in fact impose sanctions rather than looking for alternative deliberate means of seeking a peace within the area? All of that we can debate. But one thing I don’t think we can get away from is at least have the courtesy of looking at what he said and then criticising it accordingly. And I think it’s shameful that the pieces that I’ve spoken about, and that’s completely different from Jeremy’s position, which is an absolutely legitimate one, which I respect completely. But the positions where people put stuff in the newspapers without any reference to anything Tutu had said, seem to me be shameful and I don’t think are particularly conducive to our own interests. Jews are minority. We should in fact protect freedom of speech, but we should ensure that fake news isn’t the central feature of that which we shower upon others. Not for nothing is the idea of lashon hara, evil speech, so carefully circumscribed within our tradition.
And so whilst I think Tutu’s theology certainly was not mine, he was a man of great moral stature and I do not think that it is fair to have made the kind of comments that have been made by some people and to criticise him with pleasure. To actually use such hateful language that you close him down as somebody who has the right to speak, which is what you do when you say he’s the most hateful antisemite of since the Second World War, that’s another matter entirely. And it made me very sad to think that the man that I still regard as probably the most moral person that we’ve had in South Africa, basically was one moral voice in a country which so needs it desperately today, that we had to basically endure that kind of publicity on his death. That’s my piece.
Beautifully said.
Thank you so much.
Beautifully said.
[Dennis] Thank you.
[Lauren] So we have time for some questions. I will just kind of ask you guys a few questions that I’ve culminated based on what everyone has been writing in.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: The first question is, do you think that Tutu’s Christian perspective influenced his sense of logic as per Israel at times leading to a form of antisemitism?
My quotes, if I may just drop in here-
[Dennis] Yes, you carry on, Jeremy.
A: - You know, first of all, I I just want to say Judge Dennis, that was beautiful and I think there’s hardly anything that I would disagree with. I just want to say that my response was based on conversations that I had and of his addressing a meeting that he was invited to in London by my brother Mickey Yakar. So although I can’t produce the paper trail, I certainly can produce the verbal firsthand experience trail. And really the question is indeed, as you say, of nuance. So that what worries me is that when you are so convinced of one position that you can’t hear another argument, where you can’t hear, for example, that there is the declaration of Hamas that wants to see Israel destroyed. You have the Persian government, the Iranian government, you have Hezbollah, all of them saying we want to eradicate, we want to eradicate the Jewish state. I have not heard any statement that counteracts that or balances it. Of course we want peace, everybody wants peace, so of course I want to get rid of the occupation. However, peace comes from both sides and the problem is that the left and those Christian churches who are pro-Palestinian are subtly telling the Palestinians, “Don’t come to any deal. You hang in there, we’ll get you a better deal.” And it’s this that I expect some sort of counter-argument from him, which I never saw, I never heard and that’s my only reservation. That he was a great man, no question about it. That he was a lovely man to be in company with, no question about it. I don’t argue with that at all. But the point is that I do think he had this blind spot, which was based, I think intrinsically on that upbringing and the background and his own experiences, and that just has to be recognised. I certainly don’t identify with people like Dershowitz. I certainly don’t think anybody who criticises Israel is antisemitic. I’m in favour of total and open speech, but I do think that this is an area that I regret he didn’t take a stand on. And, unfortunately, you see this in the extent to which the present government of South Africa has taken such an anti-Israel stand on so many issues.
Okay, about the latter, you’re not going to get me, you’re not going to get me disagreeing with you. But I’m afraid the South African government seems to take an incorrect stand on so many issues these days.
[Jeremy] Yeah.
Where do we want to start? With regard to the question of the left, I’ll come there in a moment. On Tutu, it seems to me, when you read all his stuff, I accept readily that, well, firstly, I think there’s no doubt in my mind and a lot of questions is fact that, you know, he argued for a two state solution. It wasn’t that he was arguing for a one state solution. I think there very big differences, although as we all know, and Trudy’s asked me to do a lecture on Martin Buber, I’m going to have to talk about Martin Buber’s conception of binationalism, but that’s for another day. But was he strong enough in relation to the questions of some of the atrocities that were conducted on the other side? No, I suppose he wasn’t. Although in fairness, I can point to some articles where he suggested that in fact the whole question of violence was completely unhelpful in the, sorry, in Israel-Palestine entirely. The real question is there’s a conflation, it seems to me, Jeremy, even in your argument between Tutu and the left, because I want to come to the left. But it depends what left we’re talking about, but I mean there’s no doubt about it that there is a huge level of kind of antisemitism on a kind of pseudo-left. 'Cause I regard myself as a person of the left, but I certainly cannot possibly associate with what poses for the left these days on all sorts of levels. And I certainly think you’re right that, in fact, the kind of inconsistency of criticism, which I pointed out, which is why I was so desperate to point out that Tutu had criticised a whole range of different atrocities across the world marks him out as entirely different from those people who kept schtum, who keep schtum about everything. The left will not say anything about China. I bet that if Putin invades Ukraine, they won’t say a word about that either or any of these issues. So I think that’s true and I think that for me, that’s incredibly disturbing, and there’s no doubt that the rise of antisemitism in the world is not just fueled from the the right, although, my goodness, there are enough of those, but in certain people. The one debate I will have with you, not necessarily now, but it’s interesting, is there’s a recent book by Shlomo Avineri, the hugely distinguished political theorist from the Hebrew University; a new book on Marx. And I want to tell you he brings out a totally different perspective of Marx’s attitudes to Jews and Judaism, which is well worth the debate, but that’s for another-
Thanks for that, I’ll check it out. Do you remember what the title is? What’s the title?
It’s just called “Marx”. It’s in the Yale series, the Yale series on famous Jews. There are wonderful books-
Right, right.
About all sorts of people . But there’s one that Avineri did on Marx, absolutely fabulous. Lauren, are there other questions?
Q: - [Lauren] Yes, many. A lot of people are wondering if Tutu ever criticised the Palestinian government, if he’s so quick to address the others.
A: - He certainly criticised, he criticised acts of terror, but I will accept readily that his focus was more on the Israeli government, because I think, again, this comes back to context. It’s the context of a view, which was that when you compared Israel to the Palestinians, there was far more, in his view, far more, as it were, the power relationship was hugely imbalanced. Now, again, we can argue about that, but that was his position. So the answer is yes, there’d been far less criticism of that than perhaps some people are suggesting should have been the case.
Q: - [Lauren] Another question. Did Tutu also speak out on behalf of Jews oppressed in the Soviet Union at the time?
A: - I honestly can’t remember. I haven’t checked that out so I won’t be able to answer.
[Lauren] Alright, another question-
That goes back a long way and to be honest with you, when I did my literature search, I was looking, and this is for everybody’s, I was looking at basically everything that he said about Israel right through from as early as I could. Like, I can’t honestly answer that question.
Q: - [Lauren] This is an interesting question. In politics, it’s often said that leaders should be judged on the successor government they pave the way for. Is South Africa government today Tutu’s legacy?
A: - Sjoe. No, obviously, as I’ve indicated to you, he was probably the most courageous, outspoken. He said he wouldn’t vote for them. He criticised the Zuma government where other people kept completely quiet. You know, Tutu didn’t, it’s so difficult. One’s got to answer this question in the following way. What Desmond Tutu fought for was a non-racial, non-sexist South Africa. I should tell you on a very personal level, you know, he was one of the most non-racial people that I’d ever met and on a very personal level, I shared a platform with him shortly after I had been interviewed for the Constitutional Court position I did not get, which perhaps I’m quite thankful about now, but that’s another matter. And he actually came up to me and said he was so sorry I hadn’t got there. I totally deserved to be there and he thought it was a completely wrong decision, and, you know, his heart went out to me. And I just thought it’s in the act of complete kindness and the sense of him reflecting a non-racial view that he had of the world. And he was one of these people who I don’t think was, you know, the ANC were obviously the liberation movement in the sense, and he was right that they represented the vast majority of South African aspirations throughout that period, that’s been shown. But he wasn’t a sort of card-carrying member of the ANC. His line was, “I want to have a democratic country in which ordinary people can vote for whom they want and that’s what I’m defending.” And when the sheer horror of so much of the Zuma administration then in fact unfolded, he was a great critic of that, and in fact, let me say even further, that when the ANC wanted to stifle some of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which in a sense bounded very much to their lack, to their discredit, if I could put it that way, he insisted that the entire stuff would be published. There was a great setoff between him and Mandela, and at the end of it you kind of thought Mandela’s stature diminished as Tutu’s had increased over that period. So I think it’s wrong, you know, to say, aha, look, you brought about an ANC government. He was a contributing factor to a democratic government, and as bad as this government this today, it’s a hell of a better than anything we had in the 300 years preceding it. And at least this, everybody has a say now, which they didn’t have. That’s what he fought for and he was inspired to do that. And that’s why people across South Africa of all political spectrums were so sad, so desperately sad when he died. We felt we had lost a real moral voice in this country. Not for the ANC, a moral voice for a rich form of democracy, which is what I think his theology dictated should be the case.
Can I add something to this Lauren, if you don’t mind?
[Dennis] Yeah, sure.
I… Look around the world at this particular moment and I am so disillusioned, and disillusioned with political structures. Wherever the political structures are, wherever I look, whether it’s America or England, South Africa or Israel, not to mention China and Russia and everybody else, I’m so disillusioned. And the disillusionment is always, I’ve had problems with politics. In English they say, don’t play politics with me, means don’t lie to me. And it’s all short-termism and concerned with election and it is so combative. It is one extreme against another extreme, one party I’m right, and you’re wrong. And this seems to me to be the one contribution that in theory, in theory, religions ought to be making to this situation to try to bring about reconciliation. But you cannot have reconciliation if there isn’t balance, and it is this question of balance that depresses me and saddens me. I would love to get rid of politics and politicians altogether, but then who would run the place? Somebody’s going to run them. So I’m a failed anarchist in character. And so here I am, as I say, with a man who I was attracted to and liked and felt rather disappointed because he couldn’t understand my pain.
No, I understand that. I’m not sure, well, again, that’s hard for me to say what pain of yours or mine. I’m not sure if he was sitting here that we wouldn’t be able to reach the particular point that you’re talking about, irrespective of what he might have said. But I accept readily that the biggest challenge, or one of the biggest challenges we’ve got at the moment, is our inability to have the kind of conversation that we’re having this evening.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
So I’m very grateful for this evening, but very saddened that it’s an exception to the rule.
Yeah. No, you’re magnificent, if I may be so bold as to say, so.
Lauren-
[Lauren] Do you want to take one more question or do you want to wrap up?
Yeah, we’ll take a final question, yeah.
[Lauren] Alright, final question.
[Wendy] How many questions are there, Lauren?
[Lauren] There’s a million questions, but they’re not all relevant. So I think in the interest of time, I’m just going to read the most-
We’re entitled to our cup of tea.
Q: - [Lauren] Do you know what Desmond tutu’s views on the Soviet Union were, and can you speak to those a bit?
A: - Well, he certainly wasn’t a Marxist in any way, and I’m sure he would’ve been particularly, he certainly never, to the best of my knowledge, ever kind of supported anything that the Soviet Union had done. The ANC did, but I have to again, distinguish, because it’s a difficult question to answer for a reason that I wouldn’t really know if he really had particularly sympathetic views to that, because you had to be very careful if you were in South Africa. 'Cause we had a thing called the Suppression of Communism Act, which ultimately meant that if you showed any kind of sympathy for not just the Soviet Union, but for Marxism, you could get yourself into serious trouble. But I really think because of the conversations I had with him, that he was a deeply religious man, and, therefore, because he was really, I thought more than almost anybody else I’ve ever met, kind of influenced by his view of what God demanded of him, I’d be absolutely amazed if he had any other view than a critical one. But again, the questions that I think is presupposed on the basis, ah, but the ANC were inextricably linked to certainly the South African Communist Party with a sort of Stalinist ideological stuff that has really still become a millstone around our neck. But that wasn’t him. Again, I think you have to distinguish between the fact that whilst he saw the ANC as the most representative liberation movement, for him liberation was a God-inspired view that all human beings should be treated equal in this world. That was his line. And yes, Jeremy’s right, perhaps he didn’t emphasise that enough as he should have for all peoples, but that was certainly the view he took. And and I would, therefore, suggest that in fact he would’ve had nothing of particularly great, positive thing to say about the system of the Soviet Union.
[Lauren] Well, thank you so much and I’ll hand over to Wendy to wrap up.
Thanks very much, Jeremy, and thanks, Dennis. It was a very, very informative presentation and I hope that people see a different perspective now, because as we said earlier on, people become of a narrative and a belief system that’s well entrenched. And I’ve just been reading some of the questions and I just want to say to the people who’ve made comments, I’m going to reach out to you about other issues that you’ve raised because those same informed comments that you’ve made are also often incorrect. Because one really does need to know the facts and one should look at things with historical perspective and see it from a global perspective and a historical perspective. And I met Bishop Tutu on many occasions, and that is why I felt it was very important to have this discussion. So Jeremy and Dennis, I concur with what you had to say today. And yes, of course there is a different point of view, but in terms of a moral voice and in terms of South Africa, Bishop Tutu certainly stood out. So thank you very much and to all our participants, thank you for joining us today, and Lauren again, thanks very much.
Yeah, Lauren, thanks so much.
This forum is called Challenging Conversations and it is here to get to going. But we’re not combative, we are not political, but it’s very, very, very important for us to keep an open perspective. So thanks guys, and Dennis, I look forward to the next.
Pleasure.
Thanks, Jeremy.
Sure, take care.
Thank you, Wendy, bye.
[Dennis] Thanks, Jeremy.
Thank you, Dennis, thank you.
[Wendy] If we’ve got time.