RICHARD PITHOUSE: Hopes for subordination to the West will be frustrated

SA Zionist Federation national chair Rowan Polovin hopes the entry of the DA into government means SA will now align with the West and cease its criticism of Israel (“GNU offers chance for foreign policy shift”, June 21). He repeats the bog standard line of the liberal right, which is that there is an obvious ethical imperative to affiliate with the “Western democracies” and suggests SA should abandon its criticism of Israel, “the only democracy in the Middle East” and see it as a “partner”.

But Polovin ignores the fact that “Western democracies” have an imperfect record of extending liberal rights to all within their borders and that this has frequently been intensely racialised. He also ignores three other salient factors.

The first is that the “Western democracies” have always supported authoritarian client regimes elsewhere in the world. Some of these regimes, such as the despotic government led by Sukarno in Indonesia, used organised mass murder as a form of political control.

Another is that “Western democracies” have often used coups and invasions to deny other countries the right to freely elect their own leaders. Well-known examples include Chile in 1973 and Haiti in 2004, but there are many others.

The “Western democracies” have repeatedly engaged in illegal and criminal wars that have left whole countries devastated, such as the destruction of Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2013.

Supporting “Western democracies” is not the same thing as supporting democracy as a universal principle. On the contrary, supporting democracy as a universal principle requires critique of many kinds of governments, including “Western democracies”.

Polovin expresses no concern for the people of Gaza and makes no acknowledgment of the injustices suffered by the Palestinian people since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Israelis appear as victims of Hamas, but no mention is made of the suffering of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces. An ongoing mass slaughter is simply ignored.

Throughout his piece, Polovin makes statements that are both unevidenced and indicative of a lack of adherence to universal principles. For instance, the department of international relations & co-operation is accused of exploiting the “war” in Gaza to “uncritically repeat and spread Hamas propaganda”. Polovin provides no evidence for this, and says nothing at all about the many statements by the Israeli state that have been shown to be untrue and that have been repeated by the US state, along with New York Times and other powerful institutions in the West.

Just as a commitment to democracy as a universal principle requires a critique of all governments that act in antidemocratic ways, a principled and therefore consistent critique of propaganda would require a critique of all governments that deploy propaganda, including the Israeli and US governments.

Polovin describes President Cyril Ramaphosa’s use of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a “genocidal call”. The slogan has been used with different intent by different people, but it is a plain fact that on the left it is widely understood and used as a call for a democratic state encompassing all of current Israel and Palestine. It is frequently used by committed anti-racists, who, of course, oppose anti-Semitism, and by progressive Jews. Polovin simply ignores this, as he ignores all kinds of empirical realities that do not accord with his uncritical support for Israel and the West.

Some of Polovin’s numerous tendentious and unevidenced statements veer towards conspiracy theory. He strongly implies that SA approached the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in support of Hamas while acting as a proxy for unnamed “oppressive regimes”. He gives no evidence for this and does not acknowledge the ANC’s long commitment to national liberation struggles or entertain the idea that its approach to the ICJ could have an ethical basis.

Polovin does not even acknowledge that large numbers of people all over the world — and many states, some of them democracies — see the ANC’s actions as a principled intervention. In Polovin’s contemptuous rendering, the ANC does not have a different world view from his own, a world view shaped by a different historical experience, but is simply evil. He is not willing to understand that other people hold different world views in good faith. This is a wholly unserious approach.

Many intellectually and ethically serious people, a good number of them learned in international law, hold the view that Israel is committing genocide. This view can be debated, but Polovin simply declares that Naledi Pandor’s view that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is false without offering any argument. Again, this is wholly unserious.

Polovin dismisses the idea that Israel is an apartheid state with the same contempt and lack of argument. He does the same with Pandor’s view that US leaders should be as liable for prosecution at the ICJ as leaders of any other country. His view in this regard is nothing but a strident declaration of the right of the West to rule the world, and to do so with impunity.

When Polovin makes an uncritical call for support for the “Western democracies” while simply ignoring their double standard of affirming democracy at home while often denying it abroad, he is not making an argument in support of democracy as a universal principle. He is really demanding servile support for the rule of West, for the planetary authority of white West. When he calls for a “democratic approach to SA’s international relations” he clearly means a pro-West approach and not a genuinely democratic approach.

When people who write in uncritical support of Western democracies say nothing about the internal limits of these democracies, when they remain silent on the many odious regimes allied to the West or when they say nothing at all about the countries, some of them democracies, that have been devastated by the West, they are engaging in propaganda, not reasoned debate grounded in evidence.

When people who are critical of Western imperialism refuse to criticise authoritarian regimes in conflict with the West, or even, as some do, shill for these regimes, they are also propagandists. Translating principled ethical consistency into global geopolitics is not rocket science. Any leader of any state who has committed war crimes should account for their crimes. This must include Vladimir Putin, of course. But it must also include George W Bush, Tony Blair and Benjamin Netanyahu. Every state, including Israel, must be held accountable for its actions.

We do not yet know if the government of national unity will hold. It faces a number of challenges, one of them being the overweening claim to moral superiority by many on the right of the spectrum of liberal opinion. This claim to moral superiority appears to many as a racialised claim to civilisational superiority.

It is also not clear where the new government’s position on foreign policy will settle. But we do know the DA did not win the election. We know hard-right views on foreign policy are anathema to many in the ANC, trade unions and other popular organisations. They are also offensive to many South Africans for whom an uncritical affirmation of a white right to rule the planet with impunity in the name of the moral superiority of the “Western democracies” is wholly unacceptable.

• Pithouse is an international research associate in the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut.