I don't understand, he gave amnesty to 3 million illegals which turned California forever blue.
www.latimes.com
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The cult of personality around Regan is quite low IQ
He also signed in the first no fault divorce law in 1967
Patt Morrison: California settled no-fault divorce decades ago. Why is it back in the news?
California, ever the pioneer, was the first state to legalize no-fault divorce in 1969, signed into law by none other than then-Gov. Ronald Reagan.
www.latimes.com
He too supported the sanctions on South Africa in the 1980s which basically helped Nelson Mandela & the ANC (Communists) to later destroy South Africa.
Mandela and MK
The late 1950s saw the first hints of an armed struggle occurring in certain parts of South Africa. Various types of armed resistance spread to urban parts of the country when more organised political groupings gathered to perpetrate violence against the repressive apartheid state. Succeeding the Sharpeville incident, a meeting convened by the South African Communist Party (SACP) in December 1960 in Emmarentia, Johannesburg, aimed to discern the way forward in light of the African National Congress’ (ANC) ban and the imposition of a state of emergency. Among those who attended were Mandela, Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Mhlaba, Kotane and a number of other ANC and SACP members. Those attending congruently agreed that the agenda of non-violence would have to be replaced by armed resistance in the form of the establishment of military units, with only a few attendees concerned that the liberation movement was not yet ready for a transition to military action. Presumably, it was taken for granted that the new military unit would be under the control of certain members of the SACP and ANC leadership. However, the condition for the establishment of an armed unit was that it was to be separate from and independent of the ANC. The drafted resolution, hailed as the starting point of uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) was a secret one, and was not recorded nor reported, even to members of the SACP.
At the time of MK’s formation, Nelson Mandela was a prominent ANC leader, and highly aware of the general unrest and wave of radicalism sweeping the country after the Sharpeville incident which had occurred in March of that year. While Mandela’s status as member of the SACP has been long-disputed and ambiguously answered by Mandela himself, testimonies by senior-level SACP members confirm that Mandela did in effect join the SACP, thereby cementing the alliance between the SACP and a number of militant ANC groups anxious to break free from the ANC’s previous policy of non-violence. Mandela was recruited straight to the SACP Central Committee, although his name never featured on the membership list. This is potentially due to the fact that, in order to avoid detection, membership to the Central Committee was known to a few.
1961 hailed a public campaign spearheaded by Mandela, urging the National Party (NP) government to hold a national convention to engage in talks with extra-parliamentary opposition. This would be the final attempt at negotiation prior to the undertaking of an armed struggle; as the government was not open to negotiations, supporters of the armed struggle won the internal debate.
The initial phase of the armed struggle called for the establishment of a military wing in 1961. After a series of meetings held within the decision-making organs of the ANC and partner organisations, Mandela summoned a meeting of the ANC working committee in June of 1961, presenting the proposal of the formation of an armed wing. This proposal received some opposition – notably from Moses Kotane, concerned by the potential backlash the announcement of an armed struggle would unleash. ANC President-General, Albert Luthuli, accepted the formation of a military wing, provided that it was separate from and independent of the ANC, thus allowing the ANC to pursue its policy of non-violence despite several high-ranking members engaged in preparations for violent struggle. While MK was intended as an autonomous organisation, a document in a Ghanaian archive written by Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Robert Resha in 1962 suggests that MK was, in fact, ‘an armed organisation formed by the ANC to carry out planned attacks.’ In a public statement in London, Resha referred to MK as the ANC’s armed wing. This considerably blurred the line between the ANC and MK, and soon the ANC’s commitment to nonviolence became a discarded policy. Luthuli’s position of authority waned to an extent once other leading ANC members had committed themselves to the undertaking of an armed struggle. Decision-making then quickly passed to those members who went into exile. Mandela was appointed to MK’s High Command on behalf of the ANC, while the SACP was represented by Joe Slovo.
The decision to launch an armed struggle paved the way for the recruitment of members and resources to be used in acts of sabotage. Both the SACP and the ANC had already established a number of sabotage units, which then merged to form the initial units of uMkhonto weSizwe. Mandela and Slovo worked to recruit members to the new organisation. Plans for training abroad in Moscow and Beijing were set into motion as the first batch of trainees were dispatched. The training in China was kept so highly secret, Tambo was not even aware of it. Those not sent to the Soviet Union or China were deployed to other African countries.
Militant groups which had previously relied on neighbourhood residents’ associations now reported to the MK High Command, chaired by Mandela. December 16, 1961, celebrated by Afrikaners as Dingane’s Day or the 1838 Battle of Blood River, was meant to be the official launch of MK hostilities against the apartheid state. Mandela, Resha and Tambo claimed that initially the plan was to sabotage symbolic and economic targets without loss of human life, this did not go as planned. In 1962 a group of militant ANC volunteers in the Eastern Cape, under MK Regional Commander Washington Bongco, firebombed the house of a councillor to the Xhosa royal house of Phalo for supporting the apartheid policy of self-governing homelands. This constituted one of several attacks unveiled on the MK launch date. By 1966, 15 deaths had been recorded as having resulted from the armed campaign.
Front page of the New Age newspaper from 28 December, 1961, shortly after the first MK missions. Image source
The MK High Command required a place which could act as a headquarters; where they could store documents and convene meetings. Thus, on behalf of the SACP Central Committee, Arthur Goldreich bought the Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia. It was here that the MK High Command, including Sisulu, Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Andrew Mhlangeni and Raymond Mhlaba began working on a campaign known as Operation Mayibuye, aimed at using MK members trained abroad to expand the sabotage campaign into a guerrilla war. The MK High Command largely took its cues and inspiration from the experience of Cuba, wherein a small number of guerrilla soldiers had spread through the Cuban countryside to raise popular support. Following this example, the intention of MK leaders was to establish bases in rural Transkei, from which they would then branch out and launch attacks.
In 1962 Mandela travelled to Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Guinea, Liberia, Ghana, Tanganyika (Tanzania), Ethiopia and a number of other countries, including Britain, to solicit support for MK from the international community and learn more about other experiences of wars of liberation against colonial powers. During this period he underwent military training in several countries where MK soldiers would subsequently be sent for their own training. As he travelled, Mandela began sensing that the ANC’s alliance with the SACP was not a universally popular one, and that several African countries were sceptical of the ANC’s ties with communists. Upon his return, Mandela’s communist sympathies had cooled considerably, and Slovo was quoted as saying that they had ‘sent Nelson off to Africa a Communist and he [had come] back an African nationalist.’ After his arrival, Mandela was arrested at a roadblock in Natal in August 1962; it was rumoured that the police had been tipped off by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who had been tracking Mandela’s movements.
In October of 1962, a meeting held in Lobatse, Botswana, confirmed that as the head of the ANC’s mission in exile, Oliver Tambo had the additional responsibility of overseeing MK military camps and the welfare of MK cadres. The MK High Command continued to operate in Mandela’s absence, utilizing Liliesleaf Farm as a base. Security on the farm was reinforced with the first batch of MK soldiers which had returned from training in China. However, an unknown informant had led the police to Liliesleaf Farm where a 1963 police raid found the majority of the MK High Command as well as several documents including the plans for Operation Mayibuye and documented meetings with Chinese officials. Wilton Mkwayi, who had managed to escape the rain on Liliesleaf Farm, assumed command of MK. In 1964, however, a new wave of arrests saw Kitson, Maharaj and Mkwayi, the new MK leadership, taken into custody. In the meantime, the majority of MK cadres sent for training abroad were either scattered or stationed in Tanzania.
Mandela’s Ideological Dispensation: Early Encounters
Despite having repeatedly denied his Communist Party membership, the SACP released a statement on the day of Nelson Mandela’s death which made the claim that “at the time of his arrest (in 1962), Mandela was not only a member of the then underground South African Communist Party, but was also a member of our Party's Central Committee.” While this leaves little doubt that Mandela was at a point in the 1960s (between 1960 and 1962) an official member of the Party, it remains unclear as to whether the former state president resigned from membership and at which point he did so. A further statement by the SACP simply commented that “after his release from prison in 1990, (Comrade) Madiba became a great and close friend of the communists till his last days,” which appears to suggest that some time after his arrest, Mandela ceased to be a card-carrying member.
At Mandela’s 1964 defence case during the Rivonia Trial, Mandela announced that at the time of joining the ANC in 1944 his own ideology was that of ‘African patriotism,’ and he harboured the belief that the ANC’s close ties and cooperation with the SACP would lead to a ‘watering down’ of African Nationalism. The exclusivity with which he regarded the ANC clearly altered, and by the time of his inauguration Mandela had become an icon of racial unity and reconciliation. At which point, then, did Mandela’s perception towards both communism and the SACP begin to change?
It was, perhaps, following Mandela’s enrollment at Fort Hare Unversity in 1943 when he found himself particularly close to communists, where his perceptions began to alter – if only incrementally. As the only Black African in the law faculty, Mandela soon found friendship in a multiracial group of leftist activists – among them was Joe Slovo, Ruth First, George Bizos, Ismail Meer, J.N. Singh and Bram Fisher, some of whom would become leading members of the SACP.
During this period a number of prominent Black communists such as J.B. Marks, Moses Kotane and Dan Tloome played an increasingly prominent role in ANC leadership. Walter Sisulu became particularly enamoured with the benefits of cooperation between the ANC and the SACP, although his arguments advocating for joint action were (initially) resisted. As Secretary General, Sisulu arranged for Mandela’s appointment to the ANC’S National Executive Committee (NEC) in 1950 and, in 1951, Mandela argued against a united racial front at an ANC national conference. However, Mandela’s increased exposure to the rhetoric of dialectical materialism and the revolutionary capabilities of mass movements coupled with close friendships with communists such as Ismail Meer, Moses Kotane and Ruth First eventually guided Mandela to explore the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Zedong. In 1952, Mandela was arrested briefly under the Suppression of Communism Act and found guilty of statutory communism. He was again arrested for high treason in 1956 although the trial took years to come to a verdict. During this time Mandela organised an All-In Africa conference near Pietermaritzburg in Natal. Following a verdict of ‘not guilty,’ Mandela travelled the country to organise a mass stay-at-home strike. He, like many other supporters of the resistance, had come to believe that violence was the last resort left to the liberation movements – particularly in the aftermath of Sharpeville – although Albert Luthuli remained unconvinced. Mandela nevertheless went on to help found MK prior to his arrest in 1962, utilising cell structures to undertake acts of sabotage on government infrastructure.
Mandela the Pragmatist
While Mandela’s SACP membership is no longer in dispute, his ties to the Party were perhaps not necessarily ideological; during his trial, Mandela argued that he did not ascribe to the theories of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Engels and thus was not a communist in his beliefs – but that did not exclude him from Party membership for other purposes. Despite a lack of absolute clarity, Mandela’s ties to communism and the SACP offer a number of relevant insights into the realpolitik of Mandela’s career and the trajectory of the armed struggle. While perhaps not ideologically committed to communism, Mandela undoubtedly saw merit in sustaining a ‘close friendship’ with the party which shared in the ANC’s vision of a future free from oppression and exploitation.
Mandela’s SACP membership presents us with new knowledge through which to assess not only Mandela the man, but also the way in which his SACP membership may have influenced the undertaking of the armed struggle and the decision to establish an armed wing. Both the ANC and the SACP have maintained that the organisations had arrived at the decision to launch an armed resistance simultaneously, having taken the official decision at the start of June 1961. Documents which have surfaced – including Mandela’s original autobiography written during his time in prison, minutes of meetings and statements from members of the SACP Central Committee – have, however, have led cast doubt on the insistence of the former alliance partners that the decision to take up arms was arrived at simultaneously, and have argued that the decision to launch an armed struggle was primarily initiative of the SACP, inspired by Fidel Castro’s 26th of July movement during the Cuban Revolution. Steven Ellis, professor at the University of Amsterdam, has researched the formation of MK extensively and has concluded that the decision to establish the armed movement was taken by the SACP, decided at a small conference in Emmarentia in December 1960. Mandela was among the 25 people in attendance.
The armed wing was thus co-founded by Mandela, Joe Slovo, and Walter Sisulu, semi-independent of the ANC, which preferred to play up its strategy of non-violence (the organisation’s president, Albert Luthuli, had won the Nobel peace prize in 1960 for his own commitment to non-violence). This undertaking required both international support as well as assistance in logistics and training for which the SACP, with its international connections, positioned to requisition. It was for this reason that in 1960 four members of the SACP travelled in secret to Beijing where they met with Mao Zedong, and to Moscow where they received, in both capitals, the assurance of support. However, the small membership of the SACP required a far wider support base within South Africa, rendering an ANC alliance crucial. Forging this alliance was a diplomatically and ideologically sensitive affair, which required Mandela to play an imperative role in pushing for a strategy of armed resistance – particularly because of several high profile opponents to this strategy including ANC president Luthuli as well as Kotane - and securing the support of several ANC committees for the undertaking of an armed struggle. Luthuli was informed that MK was separate from the ANC, which should be seen to retain its doctrine of non-violence, although members of the ANC who wished to join the armed resistance were not to be expelled from the ANC.
After the Sharpeville incident, all major liberation movements including the ANC, the PAC and the SACP were banned. At this time, coinciding with the long talked-about armed resistance, it made pragmatic sense for the ANC to ally themselves with the SACP for a mutually beneficial relationship; while the ANC had a mass support base necessary for a revolution, the SACP had access to the international communist strongholds of Moscow and Beijing. However, there was a definite unease among some African leaders regarding the alliance between the ANC and the SACP.
In 1962, Mandela embarked on travels across Africa to gain support for the movement and secure assistance for the liberation struggle as an ANC delegate to the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa (PAFMECSA) held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. During his travels Mandela encountered a widespread scepticism and anxiety surrounding the ANC’s alliance with the Communist Party. Presumably, Mandela realised that vocalising public connections with the Party would be potentially damaging to the ANC’s image; testifying against Mandela at his trial, former communist Bruno Mtolo had stated that it was Mandela who had urged the Durban Regional Command to caution ANC and MK members travelling to African countries not to reveal their communist sympathies or affiliations. Mandela returned from his travels with the idea that the ANC should assume a more decisive role in the struggle for independence and strengthen its image as an Africanist party.
Nelson Mandela (centre) in Algeria for military training from the Algerian FLN. He is flanked by Robert Resha (left) and an officer of the armed wing of the FLN, Mohamed Lamari (right) Image source Photographer: Robben Island/Mayibuye Archive
Relevance of the Communist Connection
The relevance of Mandela’s ties to the SACP remains open to dispute. Those that argue that the decision to form MK was made by the a small meeting of SACP members suggest that the issue of who really was in control during the murky exile landscape of the 1960s struggle when party lists were largely closed or non-existent and lines between party members was considerably blurred. Other historians disagree with this line and insist that the SACP merely won the strategic debate within the party, after the banning of the liberation movements after Sharpeville and the many failures of the non-violent strategy of the ANC during the 1950s.
A further influence of Mandela’s SACP connection could be seen in his commitment to non-racialism. In the 1950s ANC membership was restricted to Black Africans, and the Communist Party remained the only partner in the alliance with an open membership policy. Many ANC members (including Mandela, for a time) felt that an all-inclusive membership policy would dilute the Africanist sentiments. As Mandela’s suspicion and scepticism of the SACP waned, his alignment with the party certainly aided in the evolution of Mandela’s stance from unwavering Africanist to an advocate of non-racialism and inclusive party membership, and this commitment to non-racialism inevitably played a valuable role in post-apartheid racial reconciliation and peacebuilding.
Furthermore, the ideological influence of the SACP continues to manifest in the ANC, despite the decline of Communism after the fall of the Soviet Union. In particular, the Freedom Charter of 1955 – the ANC’s leading policy document to spearhead the strategy of the National Democratic Revolution – calls for the nationalisation of monopoly industries as well as the redistribution of land. The NDR, intended as an incremental, working-class-led, two-stage transition to socialism stemmed directly from the SACP’s programme for a democratic ‘bourgeois’ revolution to followed by a socialist one. This programme was eventually adopted by the ANC in 1969 in its Strategy and Tactics document during the party’s 50th National Conference in Morogoro, Tanzania. To this day the ideals of the NDR and the Freedom Charter are still inspire many impoverished, unemployed and dispossessed peoples in the post-1994 South Africa. These ideals have also most recently been taken up and championed by Julius Malema, former ANC Youth League president and current Commander in Chief of the Economic Freedom Fighters, a populist left-wing political party formed in 2014 after the expulsion of Malema from the ANC. Malema has continuously called for an exact implementation of the Freedom Charter and has worked to expose corruption within the ranks of the ANC, hoping, perhaps, to incite a working-class mass action against the inequalities that persist even 20 years after the apartheid regime has collapsed. The freedom charter is also at the core of the metalworkers union NUMSA’s attempt to form a socialist alternative to the ANC after breaking with the tripartite alliance and calling for a united front against neoliberalism and the formation of a movement for socialism.
After the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the SACP’s influence the ANC began to wane - the socialist ideology in which ANC and SACP intellectuals had steeped themselves during the struggle for freedom all but collapsed and the newly-elected ANC government found themselves emerging in a world of global capitalism which it was reluctant to accept. This was reversed as the SACP played a key role in bringing Jacob Zuma to power as part of alliance which eventually pushed Thabo Mbeki from the presidency, with many leading SACP members continuing to occupy key cabinet positions and have a significant presence at the heights of South African politics. Yet, the extent to which Marxist or communist ideology influences policy in South Africa is debatable.
Nelson Mandela with Fidel Castro in Cuba, July 1991. Mandela traveled to Cuba shortly after his release from prison in 1990. Image source
South African Jews Struggle With Legacy of Apartheid
Since the fall of apartheid, South African Jewry has struggled mightily with two specters from its past. Its central body, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, worked happily with the apartheid regime, even as that regime violated the civil liberties and human rights of many Jews who were...
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South African Jews Struggle With Legacy of Apartheid
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Image by the guardian
By Claudia BraudeSeptember 22, 2011
Bitter Legacy: Amos and Paul Goldreich are still bitter at the way their family was treated by South Africa?s Jewish establishment after their father?s arrest. Image by ilan ossendryver
Since the fall of apartheid, South African Jewry has struggled mightily with two specters from its past. Its central body, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, worked happily with the apartheid regime, even as that regime violated the civil liberties and human rights of many Jews who were key figures in the anti-apartheid struggle. And Israel’s secret and wide-ranging arms and security ties with apartheid-era South Africa, in violation of a United Nations Security Council ban, enjoyed that same board’s full backing until the day apartheid died.
It is a legacy the board of deputies has labored hard to put behind it by, among other things, developing strong relations with key leaders of the new South Africa. But within South African Jewry, a bitter divide persists between those who cozied up to the apartheid regime — saying they saw this as the only way to protect their own small and vulnerable community — and those who joined the struggle against the regime, often at great personal cost, seeing this path as the only one consistent with their sense of justice and, frequently, of Jewish values.
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Exiled in Israel: Anti-apartheid activist Arthur Goldreich had to flee to Israel from his home in South Africa over his support for African National Congress freedom fighters. Image by the GUARDIAN
On August 27, at its 46th national conference, the board of deputies took what it hoped would be an important step in dealing with these ghosts. But rather than salving old wounds, the SABJD’s posthumous granting of a human rights award to anti-apartheid hero Arthur Goldreich has torn at the community’s scabs.
The day before the award was given, the board hosted a preliminary event, at Liliesleaf, the legendary farm outside Johannesburg where, in the early 1960s, Goldreich sheltered fugitive guerrillas who belonged to the military wing of the anti-apartheid African National Congress, including Nelson Mandela.
Goldreich, who died in May, was a lifelong Zionist who fought in Israel’s 1948 independence war in a unit of the Palmach, the young country’s military shock troops, and then returned to South Africa to join the struggle against apartheid. With his Palmach training, Goldreich brought to Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s young underground military wing, a veteran’s invaluable expertise in warfare. As a white man free to come and go, he traveled to Communist China and elsewhere to obtain designs for homemade military weapons for the group, such as hand grenades and landmines. Meanwhile, in public Goldreich played the role of a prosperous designer for a Johannesburg department store who owned a rural estate maintained by an outwardly subservient black staff that included key ANC leaders. Mandela was a gardener known as “David.”
“Arthur was the convenor of our Logistics Committee of the High Command,” Dennis Goldberg, a senior ANC official and frequent Liliesleaf resident who helped organize the ANC’s guerrilla effort, wrote in an obituary to his friend.
Arrested in a raid on Liliesleaf in 1963, Goldreich and his co-conspirator, lawyer Harold Wolpe, escaped from prison before they could be put on trial with Mandela and other ANC leaders captured in the raid. Goldreich then eluded a nationwide manhunt and eventually returned to Israel, where he became the head of the Industrial and Environmental Design Department at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Art and Design — and a vigorous campaigner against the strong ties that grew between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa.
The SABJD sought to use its celebration of Goldreich — a centrepiece of its conference — to, among other things, reach out to the many Jewish veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle from whom the South African Jewish establishment has long been estranged. But many of those anti-apartheid veterans assailed the SABJD’s effort as but one more attempt at historical revisionism by a leadership that, at the time, disowned them and strongly distanced itself from the country’s black majority. Many of the activists who were invited boycotted the Liliesleaf gathering, which ended up being sparsely attended.
“The Jewish community abandoned my mother,” Nicholas Wolpe, who was sympathetic to the objectors, bluntly told the twenty-odd people, most associated with the board, who had gathered for the occasion, citing the period after his father Harold was arrested with Goldreich for sabotage. In a frank statement introducing the conversation, Wolpe said, “Jews in the liberation struggle were ostracised. The SAJBD has to look seriously at these issues, which still plague us today.”
Wolpe at least attended the event. So did South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, himself a veteran of Umkhonto we Sizwe. But the attendance of Yuli Edelstein, Israel’s minister of information and the diaspora, and a staunch defender of the West Bank settlements — which Goldreich bitterly condemned while alive — raised questions for some about just what message the SAJBD was trying to send.
“When I saw that the invitation to Liliesleaf was part of a jamboree, including an Israeli minister, I was even more infuriated,” said one Jewish anti-apartheid veteran who boycotted the event. “The SAJBD continues to play this role of supporting human rights violations in Palestine.”
Such comments laid bare an uncomfortable reality: Israel, particularly since its controversial Gaza military campaign of 2008–2009, continues to exacerbate the pre-existing intra-communal fault lines.
At the conference, Paul and Amos Goldreich, sons of Arthur Goldreich, accepted the posthumous award from the SAJBD on behalf of their father. Like Nicolas Wolpe, Paul Goldreich, who lived at Liliesleaf as a small boy, offered his audience scathing memories of the treatment of his family by members of the Jewish community — but also an olive branch of dialogue.
“Imagine living in a comfortable home and then being evicted overnight with nothing at all,” he told the audience. Just six when his father was arrested, Paul Goldreich and his family lost almost everything they owned when the apartheid government seized virtually everything it found at Liliesleaf. He had to listen to widespread talk about the possibility of his father being hanged. “We were on our own, shunned generally by all,” Goldreich recalled. “We got no support from either the Jewish community or the ANC.”
Nevertheless, Paul Goldreich, today a psycho-analyst based in England, was interested in promoting healing. “Trying to come to terms with the experience of living under apartheid as well as the experience of living in a post-apartheid environment is a very profound and complicated psychological process for everybody,” he told the Forward. “I’ve obviously been aware that for the past 40 years there’s been a problem between Jews involved in the liberation struggle and the more established Jewish community. I accepted the award on my father’s behalf because I thought it was about time this issue came to a head. If the board is prepared to so honor my father, it’s time to meet with them and talk about these things.”
Zev Krengel, the outgoing SAJBD chairman, grappled defensively with the issues raised by Goldreich and Wolpe.
“The Board was the structure to protect the Jewish way of life,” he said. “Its leadership did deals with the devil that they felt protected the Jewish community.” Still, Krengel said of his predecessors who led the SABJD, “I don’t judge them.”
“The board wasn’t set up to fight apartheid,” he said. But he added, “Morally we should have done something….Where we failed as the board is that we didn’t fight for the people who fought apartheid…. I’m saying we should have gone [to meet them], even clandestinely. The leaders still could have helped [them] in their individual capacities. They could have given clandestine parcels and made visits to their houses. Even if we don’t agree with certain individuals’ philosophies, we should still have stood up for them as Jews if their civil liberties were being corroded.
“This is where the leadership failed the people who fought the struggle. We can’t walk away from that,” said Krengel. “I apologise for this as the current chairman.”
It is not hard to understand why the SAJBD would seize upon a figure such as Arthur Goldreich in its attempt to heal the breach that will not fade. With his biography of heroism in the cause of both Zionism and a multiracial South Africa, he seems almost made to order for bridging the chasms confronting South African Jewry’s establishment. Yet both the board and its critics studiously avoided aspects of Goldreich’s biography that discomfited each.
Left largely un-noted at the SAJBD conference was Goldreich’s own unstinting criticism of Israel’s close relationship with apartheid South Africa — a relationship the SAJBD staunchly backed. Then, there was his equally unsparing condemnation of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Goldreich even compared some of these policies to certain aspects of apartheid — though he rejected equating the two.
In 2006, Goldreich denounced Israel’s practice of “bantustanism [which] we see through a policy of occupation and separation,” and “the brutality and inhumanity of what is imposed on the people of the occupied territories of Palestine.”
An advocate of giving up the West Bank and Gaza almost from the moment they were conquered in the 1967 Six Day War, he told the British newspaper the Guardian, “Don’t you find it horrendous that this people and this state, which only came into existence because of the defeat of fascism and Nazism in Europe, and the conflict [in which] 6 million Jews paid with their lives for no other reason than that they were Jews — is it not abhorrent that in this place there are people who can say these things and do these things?”
In 1973, Goldreich went into militry combat one last time, when he served as a reservist in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. But when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Goldreich was a central part of the Peace Now movement which led the campaign against that conflict.
Yet for all this, Goldreich never left Israel or renounced his Zionism— to the unhappiness of some of his South African comrades who decry the SAJBD for its support of Israel.
“There was a strong reaction in the ANC to my father living in Israel,” Paul Goldreich told the Forward at Liliesleaf. “The whole area of the tension with the ANC when my father moved to Israel is very difficult. It’s not something he would talk about.”
Immanuel Suttner, editor of a postapartheid collection of interviews with South African Jews on the left, confirmed on the basis of his interview with Goldreich in 1995 that “there was discomfort because of him being in Israel. People wouldn’t meet with him, and it wasn’t easy when they did meet. But he said he always felt comfortable living in Israel.” Goldreich was reluctant to go public with these sentiments, Suttner said, and ultimately he refused to give Suttner permission to publish his interview.
“My father’s position was quite complicated,” Paul Goldreich told the Forward. “He did have serious criticism of Israel, but nevertheless he was a Zionist to the end of his life in the sense that he believed in the existence of the State of Israel. He lived and worked and had a life in Israel…. He had a view that a different kind of Israel could exist. It’s not a Zionist position in the sense of Zionism at any cost, but he did believe in the validity of the State of Israel.”
The cult of personality around Regan is quite low IQ
