Writing in the South African Daily Maverick, Alexander O’Riordan makes some bizarre and unfounded claims concerning the relationship between the South African Jewish community and violence perpetrated by settlers in the West Bank.
According to his bio, O’Riordan is a freelance political analyst and associate faculty of Royal Roads University, Canada who “works on a freelance basis largely advising the US Government, European Union and UN institutions on development cooperation. O’Riordan has also been advising on the development of joint cooperation activities in Palestine intermittently since 2010.”
‘Settler Terrorists’
O’Riordan describes “settler terrorists.” But who are they? He refers to a UK Channel 4 video clip that features West Bank residents like these:
Hardly “terrorists,” particularly given the very same Channel 4 clip includes plenty of footage of balaclava-clad Palestinians armed with assault rifles.
And where does this movement of “settler terrorists” come from according to O’Riordan?
In South Africa, France, Russia and the US, the birthplace of many of these new settler terrorists, Israel is no longer supported on university campuses and has no factory floors to recruit from. Thus the logical solution is to recruit through religious institutions.
In South Africa, this was done by Israel and its political elites through the Jewish youth movements, namely Netzer Maginim, Habonim-Dror, Betar and to a different extent Bnei Akiva (more of a religious rather than Zionist youth movement).
O’Riordan demonstrates a serious lack of background knowledge about the aforementioned Jewish youth movements that he claims, without evidence, are producing a new generation of “settler terrorists.” Netzer is the movement of Progressive Judaism and is as ideologically far from Israel’s settlement movement as is possible to be on the Zionist spectrum. Habonim-Dror‘s ideology draws on Socialist Zionism, again far removed from active support for settling the disputed territories.
While Betar is a proudly right-wing movement, O’Riordan claims Bnei Akiva to be “more of a religious rather than Zionist youth movement.” BA describes itself, however, as a “pioneering Religious Zionist youth movement.”
‘Infiltrating’ South African Synagogues
According to O’Riordan’s bizarre analysis of South African Jewry, “largely secular Zionist youth movements were able to infiltrate the synagogues and temples and recruit youth activists and organisers in support of Israel.”
Jewish youth movements “infiltrating” synagogues? Rather than a conspiracy as O’Riordan suggests, the reality is far more mundane. In most diaspora Jewish communities around the world, synagogues operate as centers of Jewish community beyond just prayer. Hardly surprising that youth movements may hold their activities in or around synagogues and that the very same Jewish children and teens whose families are members of those synagogues would look to become members of the various youth movements on offer.
Infiltrating something implies entering by stealth and subverting. What O’Riordan is unable to fathom is that the South African Jewish community, including its synagogues, is overwhelmingly Zionist and not as a result of youth movement “infiltration.”
But O’Riordan’s conspiracy expands as he claims that the traditional entry points for Zionist activism have changed:
First with increasing threats of terrorism against Jewish communities in South Africa and across the world, a new Jewish youth movement was on the rise under the name of the Community Security Organisation (CSO). This youth movement, officially neither Zionist nor religious, excelled where all the others failed – it organised young Jewish adults and was associated with getting Jews to marry one another.
It’s entirely possible that some married couples may have met each other while volunteering for the CSO but O’Riordan’s description of the organization is laughable. The CSO is not a Jewish youth movement but a registered and recognized security organization reliant on a base of volunteers to protect the Jewish community and its communal facilities from the threats of antisemitism, terrorism and crime.
O’Riordan’s perversion of reality continues:
While CSO has no easily defined ideology, the unwritten rules are that to be a Jew means to carry arms and defend the community interests against outsiders. The rise of the CSO and a Jewish identity embedded in the ability to commit violence coincided with the demise of Israel as a point of pride for young Jewish intellectuals.
Over time, South Africa’s Jewish youth organising started to produce a new Jewish identity that was shaped by being armed and willing to use violence to defend one’s interests and religious leanings.
While CSO empowers and trains the community to look after itself, its staff and volunteers are only allowed to carry a gun after being certified and registered under South Africa’s Private Security Industry Regulation Act. The entire ethos of such an organization is not to create a Jewish identity “embedded in the ability to commit violence” but to defend against violence and teach awareness of the potential threats. Sadly, South Africa’s Jewish community has to be constantly vigilant given terror threats and threats of violence exacerbated by a hostile anti-Israel environment promoted by the local BDS (boycott, sanctions and divestment) movement, and even the South African government.
O’Riordan’s claim that to be a Jew means to “defend the community interests against outsiders” implies against anyone not part of the community. In reality, CSO is about defending against those who wish the Jewish community harm and not about cutting off South African Jews from the wider society.
‘Armed, young Jewish men’ moving to the settlements
In a final unsubstantiated theory, O’Riordan suggests:
disaffected, somewhat religious, and armed young Jewish men moving from countries like South Africa to Israel tend to have neither the skills nor the wealth to make a life in Tel Aviv, nor are they of the ideological bent to live in poverty in Mea She’arim.
Put together, the solution is obvious: move to the settlements, push the Palestinians further out and build, build, build.
While it is true that the state of the South African economy and the high cost of living in Israel have made it economically tough for South African Jews to comfortably immigrate to Israel, a conversation with Telfed, the Israeli organization that assists South African olim (immigrants) confirms that there are many more South Africans living within the Green Line than on settlements in the West Bank. And there is certainly nothing to prove O’Riordan’s claim that armed South African Jews are moving to settlements to “push the Palestinians further out.”
Ultimately, Alexander O’Riordan’s article is not only a libel against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), most of whom have not taken part in violent activities, but also a defamation of the South African Jewish community and those of its members who have chosen to live in Israel.
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