LETTER: Ignorant of the facts

Klaas Mokgomole, the deputy director of community relations of the SA Zionist Foundation, castigates Mia Swart for her defence of the use of the slogan as well as her lack of awareness of the origin of the slogan “from the river to the sea.” (“Mia Swart ignores context”, May 23).

However, Mokgomole in his letter shows an ignorance of many relevant facts such as:

• In 1948, when Zionists declared their statehood, they legally owned less than 7% of the land of historic Palestine.
• Zionists used terrorism, massacres and rapes to perpetrate the ethnic cleansing of about 750,000 Palestinians, which is well documented by eminent Jewish historian Ilan Pappe in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
• Until 1948, before their ethnic cleansing, Palestinians had been in the majority, and Britain as the administering power from 1922 to 14 May 1948 had the legal obligation to govern what was the Mandate of Palestine in the interest of the majority and to promote the self-determination of this majority.
• Britain and the Western world have since 1948 failed to ensure Palestinian Christian, Muslim and Mizrahim their human right to dignity and their right to their own state from the river to the sea.
• The West has for its own selfish reasons allowed Ashkenazi Jews (European Jews) to establish a colonial, settler, apartheid and genocidal state in historic Palestine.
• Zionism has been a threat to the peace and security of the Middle Eastern region and beyond as we in SA experienced the consequences of the appalling collusion between the apartheid regime and Israel.

As a South African, Mokgomole knows or should know that when people worldwide called for the end to apartheid in SA, they desired not annihilation, but the end of a racist state that practised internal colonialism and grossly abused human rights. In 1994, a new political dispensation ushered in a nonracial constitutional democracy that was warmly welcomed internationally.

Mokgomole needs to explain why he is opposed to the replacement of a racist settler colonial state by a nonsectarian democracy in historic Palestine.

Gunvant Govindjee
Ormonde

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