RW Johnson, a former leader of the Helen Suzman Foundation, criticises the invitation of Imtiaz Sooliman for a lecture, citing Sooliman’s anti-Israel statements and alleged anti-Semitic views. He emphasises Helen Suzman’s dedication to open debate and reasoned argument, contrasting it with what they see as Sooliman’s prejudiced rhetoric.
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By RW Johnson ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
As the person who resuscitated and then led the Helen Suzman Foundation from 1995 to the end of 2001 I have naturally followed the controversy over the invitation to Imtiaz Sooliman to give the Helen Suzman annual lecture. I was, until now, only aware of Dr Sooliman through the undoubtedly fine work of his Gift of the Givers organisation. However, in the last week I have seen both a video clip of Dr Sooliman venting his hatred of Israel (“ a terrorist, apartheid, genocidal state” etc) and also read a statement of his characterising the Jewish community as a bullying money power, attempting to rule the world. This is, of course, a classic anti-semitic theme.
I have also read with interest the articles published about this matter by the former HSF Director, Nicole Fritz, and by Tony Leon. I found myself sympathising with both of them. Ms Fritz rightly complained that there was always a chorus of people who had known Helen personally and who insisted that they knew exactly what she would have said about this or that. Even though I was lucky enough to be a good friend of Helen’s and to know her quite well, I too, when Director, always had to put up with being lectured by the same chorus. In my experience Helen could be quite waspish and would often make sharp remarks which the more bien pensants and consensus-minded would not have made. It was often not safe to predict what she might have said.
Tony Leon says, I think rightly, that Helen would not have agreed about de-platforming anyone. Her whole career, after all, had been one of reasoned argument often in the face of a whole Parliament full of racist opponents. I remember listening to her giving political speeches to Prog audiences and even there, amidst friends, she would be full of facts and figures, never relying either on emotional appeals or the force of her personality.
And over and over again she would go into the lion’s den – imagine her going to see Mandela and the other Robben Islanders in the 1960s amidst the hostility of every warder and prison officer. She always believed that you must go and see things for yourself and then, when you knew your facts fully, you must make your case to the responsible authority, no matter how hostile and forbidding they were.
When I knew her, Helen had an extremely warm friendship with Mandela but that would not stop her taking him severely to task over ANC policies she disagreed with. And she wasn’t sentimental. I remember going to see her one day and she described how she’d been round at Mandela’s house along with sundry other Northern suburbs admirers. “They kept fluttering around him as if he was God and all he did was boast on and on about how much money he’d raised from this or that person. It was completely tasteless and I just walked out”, she said. Not many people walked out on Mandela.
Helen, of course, had to deal frequently with anti-semitism. She utterly scorned it, regarding it as primitive and contemptible. Sometimes she would simply laugh at it. My own origins were, of course, different. I am a Gentile and so was my whole background. I don’t think I even knew any Jewish children until I was 13. But I was strongly affected by the fact that both my parents had struggled and suffered greatly during the War. They had both hated Hitler and regarded his treatment of the Jews as horrific and a full measure of what a monster he was. So I grew up believing that anti-semitism was a barbaric rejection of civilised values and I was proud that my parents had both played their part in vanquishing it. For me anti-semitism belonged to a shameful past, one I was pleased we had all left behind. It has been deeply upsetting to me to find that we need to re-fight the battle against anti-semitism again in our own generation. But we do.
This colours my feelings about the current Sooliman controversy at the HSF. All I can say is that in my time as Director this could not have happened. For a start, annual lectures are a mistake. Quite quickly you run out of interesting speakers and you have to worry that you won’t attract a good enough audience. But in any case I simply could not have imagined inviting any speaker who went on about the “Jewish money-power”. Such phrases and views are anathema. It would be the same with anyone who referred to Indians as “coolies” or black people as “niggers”. You don’t argue with such people, you simply shut the door on them. I remember a similar controversy at Oxford when Isaiah Berlin terminated a discussion about someone who’d made a similar remark. “Damnit”, he said. “That’s fighting talk.” Isaiah was such a jolly and delightful presence that you could never describe him as fierce, but he came pretty close to it at that moment.
It may be objected that Dr Sooliman nevertheless has a right to his hostile views about Israel and that one should not treat criticism of Israel as intrinsically anti-semitic. Fair enough – though, as we have seen, Dr Sooliman also has unacceptable prejudices against the Jews as a community. Moreover, Zionists are also right to argue that continually singling out the sole democracy in the Middle East for vituperation is indeed anti-semitic. And it is ridiculous to refer to Israel as “terrorist” or to insist that it is an apartheid state. Over two million Arabs live in Israel and are full Israeli citizens. They have the vote and are represented in the Knesset. We all know that apartheid South Africa was not like that.
It is also wrong to refer to Israel as “genocidal”. Part of the definition of genocide is that that there has to be genocidal intent. This was obvious enough when the Turks massacred two million Armenians in 1915 or when Hitler wiped out nearly two-thirds of Europe’s entire Jewish population. But there are over two million Gazans and at the end of a whole year’s warfare Israel has killed around 42,000 of them. (Demographers have shown that Hamas has greatly exaggerated these numbers, but let that pass.) Probably half of these fatalities were Hamas militants and the rest were sadly inevitable civilian casualties. But Israel is by far the strongest military power in the Middle East. If it had really had genocidal intent the Gazans would have suffered at least a million casualties by now. But note that Israel has at no point declared any genocidal intent, though this is exactly what Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran have done repeatedly, insisting that they wish to wipe Israel and its citizens off the map (“from the river to the sea”).
In 1941 America suffered a surprise attack, just as Israel did on October 7, 2023. At Pearl Harbour the Japanese killed some 3,000 people and as they swept across the Pacific they used all manner of cruel and barbaric tactics. Similarly, Hamas took hundreds of hostages and killed them if it looked like they might be freed. Such behaviour also belongs to a barbaric age, now centuries behind us.
Enraged by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour and by Japan’s barbarism, the Americans pursued the Japanese right across the Pacific. They fire-bombed Tokyo, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and then finished Japan off with two atomic bombs. All told, between 2.6 million and 3.1 million Japanese died in World War II. Does anyone accuse the US of genocidal behaviour ? No. Even the Japanese don’t say that. After all, the Americans were attacked first. They wanted to ensure that nothing like that could ever happen again and this was merely righteous retaliation.
It was exactly the same with the USSR. Hitler attacked them – again, a surprise attack – and he made clear his genocidal intent, referring to Slavs and Jews as “untermensch” and proclaiming the need to “clear” them from the land so that Germans could be settled in their place. The Nazis sent in their Einsatzgruppen death squads to murder huge numbers of civilians as part of that “clearance”. The Soviets reacted ferociously, killing millions of Germans and pursuing them all the way to Berlin but they declared no genocidal intent. Even the Germans did not accuse them of that. No one blames the Soviets for defending themselves and retaliating.
So. Israel too was attacked first and no one can blame it for defending itself or retaliating. To be sure Netanyahu is a deeply unattractive character and has his own reasons for prolonging hostilities, but that is not the principal issue. The Israelis too want to ensure that such a thing can never happen again. Who can blame them ?
To insist that by killing some 42,000 Gazans the Israelis have committed genocide is thus a very strange objection in the light of history. To keep insisting that Israel is uniquely guilty of genocide is not supported by the history or the numbers. Israel gives Gazans and Lebanese advance warnings of its military strikes and has no genocidal intent. It has a massive capability to commit genocide if it wanted to, but it has not used it. Which in turn suggests that the accusation is really based on something else, perhaps a prior hostility towards the Jews.
Put all that together. If you find someone describing Israel as a “terrorist, apartheid, genocidal state” you know he or she has a grossly unbalanced view and that he/she may well be an anti-semite. If you further find them going on about “the Jewish money power” you know for sure that they’re anti-semitic. They may have some fine counter-balancing qualities, of course, but in terms of human rights and civilised values, they’re already disqualified.
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