The hard question that goes to heart of a matter

22 Jul 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

Asking the right question often leads to moral clarity, even if it is not so easily answered, writes Tony Leon

MORAL clarity is rare and provides illumination on those shape-shifting moments in global events that remind us just how easily the world order is shattered by a missile that downs a civilian plane in Ukraine, or when Hamas rockets from Gaza, which largely miss their targets, are matched by Israeli air strikes that more often don’t. Moral myopia is, alas, far more common.

These past few days saw the death toll in Gaza rise as Israel invaded the territory for the second time in five years. One of the few commentators whose views added rather than subtracted from proper analysis was Nicholas Kristof in Sunday’s New York Times. He addressed the rooftop shouters, of whom there is no shortage in SA, where rallying against the perceived inhumanity of Israel’s long occupation is a much safer exercise than more pressing regional concerns such as the recent African Union decision to shield heads of state from being held accountable for their crimes against their own citizens.

Kristof asks whether, amid the renewed dance of death in Gaza, "this is a struggle between good and evil, right and wrong. We can’t relax, can’t compromise."

Moral certainty doubtless led the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) Jessie Duarte to label the Israeli attacks as "barbaric" and then to compare the occupation of the Palestinian territories to the Nazi "death camps". Not to be outdone in their seething outrage, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the ANC Youth League and sundry others (including a group of 50 Jewish South Africans) marched or called for a welter of sanctions and diplomatic and other punishments against Israel. Interestingly, no dissenting local Muslim voices have been heard against Hamas, but that’s another topic.

Kristof provides an elegant and, I think, unanswerable, rebuttal to the question posed and the moral furies aroused by recent events. Start by removing the binary good-versus-evil narrative, he suggests: "This is a war in which both peoples have a considerable amount of right on their sides. The failure to acknowledge the humanity and legitimate interests of people on the other side has led to cross-demonisation."

This is the primary cause of the military escalation. Placing this need for what the historian Simon Schama called "dual empathy" at the centre of a proper narrative leads to this conclusion: "Israelis are absolutely correct that they have a right not to be hit with rockets by Hamas, not to be kidnapped, not to be subject to terrorist bombings. And Palestinians are absolutely right that they have a right to a state, a right to run businesses and import goods, a right to live in freedom rather than be relegated to second-class citizenship in their own land."

Admittedly such self-evident truths would be difficult to fit on a protest poster. Indeed, such moral even-handedness lacks the fervent sloganeering of the protest marchers who massed last week on the Israeli trade mission in Sandton. But perhaps it illuminates the path forward to peace, not ever-escalating war.

Former US president Jimmy Carter caused no end of fury with the Israel lobby when he published a book in 2006 titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and then said in an interview that Israeli policy in the territories under its occupation "perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in SA".

After I returned from a visit to Ramallah for a meeting with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat more than 10 years ago, I was far less impressed with his self-serving observations than I was by the casual remarks of the Palestinian driver who took me to and from the meeting and described the daily ordeal of living under occupation. When I put them to an Israeli friend, a former cabinet minister, he said: "The only way to occupy a people against their will is with brutality."

But the facts leading to the occupation of the West Bank (Gaza is not occupied but is besieged), and the possibility of ending both peacefully, are also obscured by much of the present outrage.

On the eve of the failed Middle East peace conference in Annapolis in 2007, the acclaimed US orientalist Bernard Lewis asked an existential question: "What is this conflict about? Is it about the size of Israel or about its existence?"

He then suggested that if the issue was about the size or borders of Israel, then "it is not easy but is possible to solve in the long run, and to live with in the meantime".

"But", he said, "if the issue is the existence of Israel, then clearly it is insoluble by negotiation. There is no compromise between existing and not existing. And no conceivable government of Israel is going to negotiate on whether the country should or should not exist."

Asking the right question often leads to moral clarity, even if it is not so easily answered.

• Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela (Jonathan Ball) Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

South Africa Today-Some Home Thoughts Developed Abroad

29 Nov 2012 | Tony Leon | Speech to Cape Town Jewish Community

Thank you for this kind reception to welcome Michal and me back to Cape Town. We are enjoying our re-immersion in Cape Town and South Africa after more than three years abroad, representing South Africa in the southern cone of South America.

Tonight you have asked me to address a range of issues, captured by the title on the Board of Deputies’ poster advertising tonight’s event, “From Argentina to Zille”. That pretty much covers the table of both my past two jobs, formerly as leader of the opposition and the Democratic Alliance, and latterly as Ambassador to Argentina and surrounding countries.

Let me start locally and share with you some ‘home thoughts developed abroad’.

South Africa Today

You do not need to hear from me the litany of what is wrong or going awry in South Africa right now. You can read it in every newspaper or hear about it on every radio talk show. 

Following events back home from Buenos Aires was similar to watching a movie with the soundtrack switched off. We could read everything, without the background noise and context in which it was happening. Every morning, my embassy colleagues and I would scour the Internet and departmental media digests to track the news and developments in the homeland. It was easy enough to succumb to depression – given the mushroom clouds of venality and stupendous breaches of constitutional faith detonated by those in the highest reaches of government.

Yet even the worst events back home, and one became spoilt for choice in this category, seemed to suggest that some buds of a new spring were sprouting in even the harshest of political winters. The judiciary, for example, has been  under assault by the government and some very dubious characters were promoted to the bench while some excellent candidates, for reasons of race or intellectual independence, and usually for both factors, were passed over. Yet, the highest courts of the land still continues, in some very significant judgments, to find against the government. It had all been preordained before in the old South Africa. In the 1930s, the National Party minister of justice, Oswald Pirow, noted with disgust: ‘The problem with political appointments to the bench, is that six months after their appointment, they presume they were appointed on merit!’

I had told Michal as we set off on our foreign adventure, that there was unlikely to be – in the context of the uncontroversial diplomatic relationship with my countries of accreditation – any issues on which I would be obliged to advance a policy proposition that conflicted with my political principles. Fortunately, my optimism was justified by my real time experience. However, I added as an afterthought to her: ‘If the Protection of Information Bill [which had been introduced into parliament shortly before my departure] is enacted, I will have to reconsider my position here.’

This spectacular piece of legislative mischief as you know was  designed to inhibit severely, if not totally interdict, the media and prevent the exposure of corruption by giving ministers of state sweeping powers to classify information as secret and imposing sentences of up to 25 years in prison on those convicted of violating its muzzling provisions.

 

Yet, amazingly, the bill remained a work in progress even tonight, although the NCOP appears to have imposed its own version of it, despite opposition dissatisfaction with its processes. Actually, its slow passage and some significant amendments offered by government to ameliorate some, although not all, of its more extreme provisions, was not just due to executive lethargy. It was occasioned by an energetic pushback by a range of political and civil society actors, from across the racial and partisan divides. In fact, a decade or so before, I had strongly warned against the cronyism and constitutionally damaging acts embedded in ANC-sponsored concepts and practices such as the ‘national democratic revolution’, ‘cadre deployment’ and ‘black economic empowerment’. I was dismissed at the time (often, I noted with an amused irony, by the most stringent critics of ANC excesses today) as, variously, ‘anti-transformation’, ‘the voice of white privilege’ and ‘the fight-back king’. Now, an entire chorus, including some significant black intellectuals, media editors and trade unionists, was singing from the same hymn sheet, often in far more strident and less polite notes than any I had sounded from my perch as leader of the opposition.

Opposition stirrings

On the subject of the opposition leadership, I note with approval the strides made by my successors in title, to expand the reach and widen the diversity on the other side of South Africa’s political aisle, within the opposition, particularly in the party that I had devoted most of my life to serving, building and leading, now incarnated as the Democratic Alliance.

I do, however, get slightly irritated when I note anonymous ‘top leadership sources in the Democratic Alliance’ stating that the party’s new repositioning was a conscious effort to move away from the ‘conservative liberalism of former party leader Tony Leon with his fight b(l)ack campaign’, to quote from one media story I read while away. I do not intend to get into a bidding war as to my role in thirteen years as the party leader. I will simply say this:  I did what needed to be done in a very difficult set of circumstances, to create a viable and larger opposition; and, the very beneficiaries of the ‘fight-back’ era have entered the portals of power, in the Western Cape at least, through the platform that I, and at the time very few other colleagues, had built.

 

When I led the opposition in South Africa, nothing divided the parties comprising that side of the political aisle as much as questions of  unity. In the ANC we were going up against history, as that party held all the moral and political high ground and presented a formidable, often frightening, unity in the face of any opposition, external or internal. Today, the opposite is true: the opposition has the wind behind its back and the ANC juggernaut is showing signs of decay and sclerosis –the symptoms of a house divided whose inevitable right to rule is now under both question and strain.  You do not need to be an opposition partisan to appreciate that the constitutional and democratic health of this country depends on more competitive politics and less certain electoral outcomes in the future. When that happens, as it surely will pretty soon, then our fine constitutional prospectus will start to live and breathe again and be rescued from the torpor of one -party domination.

I do not believe, incidentally, that South Africa is about to fall off the cliff and plunge into a failed state scenario. There are simply too many countervailing forces, feedback mechanisms and significant institutions, corporate and civil, for us to follow the road to ruin of neighbouring Zimbabwe, for example. But equally “muddling along”, “hoping something will turn up” or ignoring the siren voices both at home and abroad will not get us onto the fast track we set out on, with brave determination, back in 1994. As The Economist editorialised in another context, “the ecosystem of a great country is a complex and fragile thing.” Our task as citizens is to engage with the complexity and interdict our weaknesses. As simple, and as complicated, as that.

South Africa and the Middle East.

One of my areas of profound disagreement with the department of International Relations, while serving in it, was over our policy in the Middle East. This is not because I am uncritical of Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and the misery and oppression occasioned by that fact. Indeed I (and my Israeli-born wife) am. But I am also mindful of the context of it, and recently returned from Argentina, I can say, with more feeling than most that “it takes two to Tango”. South Africa’s one-eyed, one sided approach to the question of Israel and its opponents is both monotonous and futile. Our equal determination( something  I engaged both the Minister and Director General of  Dirco about) to turn a blind eye to the oppressive regimes of Libya(under Gadhafi) and Syria under Assad and being so behind the curve on the Arab Spring simply undermined our moral capital and squandered our international credibility.

I recently was very struck when I addressed a large gathering of this community in Johannesburg at quite how alienated the Jewish community feels in its own country as a result of this approach. When I had the opportunity to engage, subsequently, with the highest reaches of our government I made the following point: the estrangement is due to the SA government (as they see it) singling out Israel for exemplary treatment (through labeling products from the occupied territories and travel avoidance notices etc). Simply put, I would estimate that 90% of the South African Jewish community has a very strong and positive identification, for reasons of culture and history, with the State of Israel. Their current estrangement is due to the fact that, in their experience, their own government has singled out Israel for negative treatment and attention applied by the government to no other country, or disputed territory, in the world.

Since I have no mandate (and I certainly do not seek one) to speak on this community’s behalf, I believe that the government should engage the community leadership directly on this issue and listen to their concerns.

Direct and robust dialogue between citizens and government is in fact the best approach on all the great issues South Africa confronts as we head into our nineteenth year of freedom under democracy.

 

 

Lesson to be learnt is that humility trumps hubris

Last week provided a study in contrasts between the use and exercise of power, at home and abroad.
In President Jacob Zuma’s rural redoubt of Nkandla, it was easy to be blind-sided by reports of black economic empowerment bling, relating to the helicopters and flashy cars that transported the ascendant elite to the head of state’s home village thanksgiving.
But Zuma’s speech was not aimed at the ostentatious. It suggested a sense of someone, who, whatever his past and future failings, remains absolutely rooted and secure in his identity and mindful of the communal ladders which lifted him to prominence.
Zuma assured his audience: “I will never forget my origins ... even as president, I will not change. I will still listen to you and do whatever you tell me to do ... Even if I live in a big house. You will tell me if I do wrong.”
Nkandla, in other words, will provide Zuma with the moral compass for his presidency.
My wife, Michal, who practises as an executive coach, drew my attention to a vast range of literature which differentiates between “external” or “hard” power and emotional intelligence, conveyed by “internal” or “soft” power. Most political leaders follow the first route, believing that the externalities of power, detached from emotion, are the ticket to leadership.
Yet, the more effective form of leadership often originates from your internal power: your own sense of identity based on the strength derived from your personal relationships and your ability to recognise, and manage, your emotions — and to empathise with others.
That’s a pretty tall order. But someone else whose soft power was on conspicuous display last week, in the cauldron of the Middle East, was US President Barack Obama. His masterful speech at Cairo University resulted in a standing ovation — no mean feat given that his immediate predecessor, George W Bush, on his last visit to the Middle East, had a pair of shoes thrown at him.
In place of the Bush rhetoric, made vivid with the formula “you’re either for us or with the terrorists”, Obama managed to draw on his own multicultural background, and his middle name “Hussein”, to navigate through the multiple minefields of Middle East politics.
The usually staid Financial Times exalted Obama for reaffirming his country’s “unbreakable” bond with Israel and for recognising the “intolerable” plight of the Palestinians. Obama “dodged the ambushes, without evading the issues”.
But it was another paragraph in the superpower leader’s speech, which caught my attention. He reached back to the words of President Thomas Jefferson: “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”
Of course, as one critic noted, the eloquence of action is more powerful than the eloquence of rhetoric. But the speech did provide a refreshing start to what is hopefully a new chapter in US-Middle East relations.
However, across the oceans, in London, Gordon Brown’s premiership appeared to be in a political death spiral.
Last weekend, as Zuma celebrated and Obama basked in his warm Egyptian reception, Brown faced up to the loss of six senior cabinet colleagues, and the slump of the governing Labour Party to third place in the European elections.
Compounding Brown’s misfortunes was the leaking, last weekend, of e-mails penned 18 months ago by the past master of the dark arts of political intrigue, Lord Peter Mandelson. In the hasty reshuffle of the cabinet, he effectively became Brown’s deputy prime minister.
Yet, when marooned behind the front line of British politics, Mandelson had cast doubts on his leader’s mental hygiene, describing him as “insecure”, “complex”, “self-conscious” and “angry”.
In Mandelson’s view, Brown “tries too hard to be a normal person”. But perhaps Brown is onto something.
Former British politician, and one-time neurological registrar, David Owen, has diagnosed a condition to which too many political leaders are prone.
In a recent book The Hubris of Power, he suggests — drawing on his observations of Bush and Blair, and framing them around the invasion of Iraq — that something happens to the mental stability of some leaders while in power.
He suggests that hubristic behaviour is an occupational hazard of high office. Exacerbated by isolation and deference, it can lead to patterns of reckless behaviour, bad judgment calls and a tendency to see the world as an arena in which the leader can exercise power, based on “a delusional sense of personal infallibility and divine exemption from political accountability.”
Let’s hope, for our sake (and the world’s), that Zuma and Obama remain grounded.
They could do worse than to follow, with the necessary updates, the Roman example.
Wise emperors apparently placed a slave behind them on their chariots. His purpose was to whisper: “Remember, you are only human.”

*Published in Sunday Times 14 June 2009