[Salon] Colbert King’s column about Alan Dershowitz’s attack on Archbishop Desmond Tutu

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

To the editor,
The Washington Post,

Colbert King has written an important column about Alan Dershowitz’s assault  on Archbishop Desmond Tutu.(Washington Post, Jan. 8, 2022) Dershowitz wrote that, “Tutu has a history of ugly hatred toward the Jewish people, the Jewish religion and the Jewish state.”  This, of course, is without any foundation whatever.

What Dershowitz characterizes as “anti-Semitism” is Tutu’s defense of the human rights of Palestinians. Speaking in Boston in 2002, Tutu declared:  “In our struggle against apartheid , the great supporters were Jewish people.  They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones fighting injustice.”  What was not “understandable” to Tutu was what the state of Israel “did to another people.”  He declared, “I’ve been deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land;  it reminded me so much of what happened to black people in South Africa.  I have seen the humiliation of Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when police officers prevented us from moving about.”

Archbishop Tutu is not alone in comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with the treatment of blacks in South Africa.  The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has used the term “apartheid” to characterize Israel’s policy.  Ronnie Kasrils, a leading South African Jewish anti-apartheid activist and later a Minister in Nelson Mandela’s government,  recently declared, “I fought South African apartheid.  I see the same brutal policies in Israel.  As a Jewish South African anti-apartheid activist, I look with horror at the far-right shift in Israel…During the South African struggle, we were accused of following a Communist agenda…Today, Israel’s propaganda follows a similar route, repeated by its supporters, conflating opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism.  This must be resisted.”

In the opinion of many Israelis and Jewish Americans, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians violates Jewish moral and ethical values.  For someone like Alan Dershowitz to condemn Archbishop Tutu as an “anti-Semite” is simply an attempt to silence legitimate criticism, something some of Israel’s defenders do on a regular basis.  It trivializes the real anti-Semitism which exists and which must be opposed by men and women of good will of all religious backgrounds.
                            Allan C. Brownfeld,
                                   Editor of ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the
                                    American Council for Judaism.  (www.ACJNA.org)