What explains South Africa’s commitment to being the vehicle for the accusation of genocide against Israel?[1]. To listen to South African politicians and their supporters, you’d have to look no further than a selfless love of human rights, freedom and justice. The African National Congress’ (ANC) unwavering support for the Palestinian “resistance” would simply be a natural extension of Mandela’s party’s struggle against apartheid. But, as this essay by Howard Sackstein, a founding member of the Jewish Anti-Apartheid Movement, shows, there are good reasons to be wary of this idyllic narrative. The “rainbow nation” proclaimed by Mandela seems to have developed its dark side since then. At a time when South Africa is plagued by galloping poverty and endemic corruption, the ANC’s attempts to dress itself up as a paragon of virtue seem to be little more than a smokescreen. After all, it wouldn’t be the first to try and buy itself a progressive reputation on the back of Israel. And, by alienating the South African Jews who were its historic allies in the struggle against apartheid, is it not denying part of the heritage to which it lays claim?
In K., we have already questioned the way in which the October 7 massacres revived the memory of the European pogroms for Jews, that fatal repetition which the creation of Israel as a state of refuge for Jews was supposed to avert. This week, Anne Simon explores the mythological, religious, linguistic and literary imaginaries conjured up by the recent pogrom. However, her starting point opens up other perspectives and sheds new light on the events: that of the Flood. For how did Hamas conceive of its atrocious crime, if not as a retelling of this biblical myth? “Operation Flood of al-Aqsa” is the name they gave to the day when every creature on Israeli soil, including pets, became the target of a divinely-inspired will to annihilate. From then on, hope for the future was captured by the equivocal and scattered motif of the Ark.
Finally, as the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel presented its detailed report on the sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7 to the UN last week, we are republishing Julia Christ’s article on the subject from late November. At that time, after nearly two months of deafening silence, it was one of the first to shed light on the systematic nature of the rapes suffered by Israeli women during the massacre. Above all, Julia Christ questioned the stakes involved in their concealment by a significant proportion of international opinion, including so-called “feminists”.
