David Benatar is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He examines the denialism of Ronnie Kasrils, a former minister in South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) government, who has descended to new depths in his support for the Hamas pogromists.
In his dissenting opinion in the International Court of Justice’s initial ruling on the application brought by South Africa against Israel, ad hoc judge Aharon Barak stated that ‘it is doubtful whether South Africa brought this dispute in good faith’. For reasons that extend well beyond those cited by Judge Barak, this is a polite understatement. South Africa’s ANC government has a long record of support for the Palestinian cause in general, and of Hamas in particular. This is in keeping with its cosiness with a wide range of repressive regimes, and its increased distance from liberal, democratic states. One important architect of post-Apartheid South Africa’s warm relationship with Hamas is former cabinet minister, Ronnie Kasrils.
On 29 November 2023 Mr Kasrils gave a speech in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, at a meeting on the ‘International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People’. In that speech, he described Hamas’ 7 October attack on Israel as a ‘brilliant, spectacular guerrilla warfare attack … on the Israeli Gaza Division’, saying that Hamas ‘killed them. And damn good. I was so pleased, and people who support resistance applauded it, absolutely’.
Mr Kasrils has since denied that these comments were made with reference to the civilians who were killed. Careful attention to his comments bears out this interpretation. However, this is no exculpation of Mr Kasrils, because the only possible way to uphold this interpretation, is to deny that Hamas did what it did to the civilians. Such a denial is exactly what Mr Kasrils has engaged in.
He said that there ‘is no way that the resistance killed 1200 Israeli citizens, civilians, that day’. In his speech, he subtracted 350 soldiers from the total death count. In a later response to critics, he revised this number to ‘close to 400’, by including reference to Israeli police officers, whom he also judges to be legitimate targets.
He thinks this because, in his view, Israel is an oppressor. I have argued elsewhere that the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict does not justify Hamas’ attack. However, even if one thought that it did, there would still be restrictions on how Hamas could wage war against the Israel Defence Force. Raping female soldiers, for which there is at least some evidence, and mutilating them and their genitals, would not be permissible. Also impermissible would be torture, taking civilian hostages, and refusing to grant the International Red Cross access to any of their hostages.
He then explains away the balance of fatalities by attributing almost all of them to Israel. He speaks of an Israeli ‘helicopter pilot’ who ‘killed many of the Jews in the kibbutz’ and ‘most of the people at that dance festival’, and to Israeli tanks that, he claims, were ‘coming to the rescue and blindly opening fire and killing people’.
In support of such claims, he says that the ‘fires raging in those [civilians’] houses melted the people inside’ and that one ‘can’t do that with a hand grenade and an AK-pistol’, as though those were the only weapons Hamas bore. In fact, their weapons included thermobaric charges.
He claims that ‘only one baby died in that attack at Be’eri and the other places … – 10-year-old kid – shot in the crossfire’. (Notice the shift from baby to 10-year-old.) He also alleged that ‘no women [were] raped’, adding that ‘whatever you think of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, they are very religious people. They wouldn’t touch a non-Muslim woman’, let alone rape them. ‘This’, he says, is all the kind of exaggeration that Israelis are using, that the Zionists in this country [South Africa] are using’.
Mr Kasrils has claimed that the ‘IDF has already adjusted the numbers of people killed during the raid from 1400 to 1200״, implying that its numbers are not to be trusted. He does not mention that the original estimate of hostages had to be revised upwards – more than once. Nor does he show any awareness of how difficult it can be, in the early phase after an attack of this kind, to determine precisely how many people were killed and how many were taken hostage, especially when many of those killed were also mutilated and found in parts, often burned.
We still do not know all the details. In all probability we never will, because many of the individual atrocities had no surviving witnesses. There has also been some difficulty in acquiring perishable forensic evidence in the midst of what was still a battlefield in the immediate aftermath of the attack. We shall have a fuller picture in due course. It is also the case that some initial reports have subsequently proven to be inaccurate, and that there was one case of a tank firing at a house from which Hamas terrorists, hiding behind hostages, were fighting. (The facts of this case are unclear, and will still be the subject of a full investigation.)
However, even now we have more than enough evidence to treat Mr Kasrils’ claims with the contempt they deserve. Some of this evidence comes from the assailants’ own body cameras often live streamed on social media – and from telephone calls they made. At least one terrorist called his parents from the phone of one his (civilian) victims, to boast to his parents that he had ‘killed Jews’. Other evidence comes from survivors, from rescue teams, and from forensics.
It is absolutely clear that civilians were intentionally targeted and killed by Palestinian terrorists. These terrorists did, one way or another, behead at least some victims, including little children. [Viewer discretion is advised for photographic evidence of both adult and child victims.] In one case, there is video footage of terrorists attempting to behead a victim with farm equipment. Many other children were shot. One emergency team found twenty children, hands bound, shot, and dumped in two piles. Other victims were burned alive.
A Muslim Israeli paramedic at the music festival, who was administrating aid to some of Hamas’s early victims, was tortured to death by the terrorists. In one of the kibbutzim, first responders found a woman in her home with a bullet in the back of her head. When they turned her over they found that she had been pregnant. Her belly had been cut open. The foetus, still attached to the umbilical cord, had been stabbed. The first responders wondered which of these victims had been killed first.
A family was found bound and killed at their breakfast table. Each family member was mutilated in some way before being killed. The father’s one eye was gouged out, the mother’s one breast was cut off, the boy’s fingers and the girl’s foot were amputated.
And there most certainly were both rapes and also other violent sexual assault (including penetration of female genitalia with nails and other objects, and mutilation of one person’s genitalia to the extent that it was impossible to tell whether they were male or female). There were very many instances of sexual violence, as evidenced here, here, and here, for example. There were women whose pelvises were broken ‘due to repetitive rapes, their legs were split wide apart’.
The suggestion that the terrorists would not have raped their victims because they – the terrorists – are religious is inconsistent with Jihadi use of rape in other contexts. Has Mr Kasrils not heard of what ISIL members did to Yazidi women? All this evidence has been accepted by a wide range of reputable news sources, and has not been refuted.
Moreover, there are inconsistencies in Mr Kasrils’ account. Even if we set aside the foregoing evidence of atrocities within the kibbutzim, which is itself inconsistent with all these deaths being attributable to ‘cross-fire’, what were the terrorists doing in the kibbutzim in the first place, if their targets were only military ones? In short, Mr Kasrils is indulging in fantastical thinking.
Holocaust denial is now a well-known phenomenon. Such denial is typically motivated denial. That is to say, it does not arise from a fair evaluation of the evidential record. Instead, those who deny it, have personal reasons for wanting there to have been no holocaust. They may be Nazis or Nazi-sympathisers, and want to exculpate that ideology of atrocity. Alternatively, they may be antisemites of one stipe or another.
Mr Kasrils’ denial of the events of 7 October 2023 is most plausibly interpreted as a motivated denial (because there is no charitable interpretation). He and his fellow travellers in the far left opposition to Apartheid – unlike the liberal opposition to Apartheid – had alliances with the Soviets and those, such as the Palestinians, whom they supported. Their ongoing fellowship with the Palestinians is regularly flaunted.
Mr Kasrils himself was a leading member of both the South African Communist Party and the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. He, along with the ANC, has long expressed opposition to Israel and to Zionism, and support for not only the Palestinians, but also Hamas.
This is ironic because, despite the similarities that Mr Kasrils likes to draw between the anti-Apartheid struggle and the Palestinian struggle, there are many crucial differences. Among them is the fact that unlike the ANC which resorted to violence when peaceful opposition failed – and even then, by Mr Kasrils’ own admission, largely seeking to avoid civilian casualties – the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) resorted to peace only after violence failed, and Hamas has not yet resorted to peace.
In 2008, then Minister Kasrils invited Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh to visit South Africa – Mr Haniyeh’s first trip outside of the Muslim Word. The same month Mr Kasrils implausibly claimed that Hamas abjures violence. It beggars belief that somebody exhibiting this level of credulity could then have been South Africa’s Minister of Intelligence Services. Then again, by 2008 South Africa was already a failing state, unable to keep the electricity running.
A few years earlier, in 2001, Mr Kasrils had written a ‘Declaration of Conscience by South Africans of Jewish Descent’, which precipitated the so-called ‘Not in My Name’ campaign, in which some South African Jews sought to distance themselves from Israeli actions.
This too is ironic. Mr Kasrils makes much of his Jewish origins when criticising Israel, perhaps to give a ‘hechsher’ – a ‘kosher certification’ – to anti-Zionism. The implication seems to be that if Jews can be anti-Zionists, then anti-Zionism of his kind cannot amount to antisemitism. Unlike Mr Kasrils’ Jewishness, which is entirely accidental, his long-standing membership of, and leadership in, the South African Communist Party is an ongoing choice. We are much more likely to think that what communist states do is done in his name than to think that what the only Jewish state does is done in his name.
Yet, if he has engaged in any grand schemes to distance himself from the many millions of deaths and other human rights violations attributable to communism, I am certainly not aware of them. He is not a Zionist, but wants to make sure that nothing the state of Israel does might be thought to be ‘in his name’. Yet he is happy to advocate for communism in South Africa, when not one state that has embodied that doctrine has avoided being oppressive, often grotesquely so.
Mr Kasrils was criticised by Wendy Kahn, National Director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, a civil rights body that promotes ‘the safety and welfare of South African Jewry’. In his reply, he claimed that:
Zionists, and their backers across the West, including their local proxies, are only able to weep for their own kind. Those of us who insist on a universal recognition of humanity are now routinely slandered as ‘antisemites’.
Here we see that Mr Kasrils has a malignant case of what psychologists call ‘psychological projection’. It turns out that he is a Jew who is only able to weep for those who are not his ‘own kind’. His ‘universal recognition of humanity’ does not extend to the Israeli victims of Hamas, whose suffering he denies, against all the evidence. That is antisemitism, whether or not one is Jewish oneself.
Unfortunately, it does not end there. He says that Ms Kahn, ‘along with the Western political class and media, would be calling for an end’ to what he calls the ‘genocide’ of the Palestinians, if Palestinians had been ‘Israelis, or other white people’. Later in the same piece, he claims that the reason why ‘the Western media … and the local Zionists like Kahn’ can’t understand his own praise of the Hamas attack is ‘Racism’. He says that they ‘simply are brain wired in such a way as not to bear the audacity of a bunch of Arabs outwitting all the nice white people’.
It is evident that Mr Kasrils is so blinded by his own experience, and so willing to export it, that he fails to notice how many Israelis – including Jewish Israelis – are racially indistinguishable from many Palestinians. Many of those Jews are themselves Arabs descended from immigrants from Arab lands. Others are Iranians, Indians, or Ethiopians, for example. And many Palestinians are, or could pass for, ‘white’. For a man with a hammer and sickle, everything is either a nail or a tall poppy.
Israel is often accused of being an Apartheid state. That comparison has great currency in South Africa, especially on the far left, which dominates politics in post-Apartheid South Africa. Some years ago, I wanted to undertake a project in which I would do recorded interviews with prominent South Africans who had deployed this and related accusations, in order to test their views through the thrust and parry of an interview. With two exceptions, none of those whom I asked to be interviewed agreed to be. Ronnie Kasrils was among those who did not agree. He simply ignored repeated requests.
Mr Kasrils is happy to rant in friendly forums and rallies, and to pour out his poison in the press, but he was not willing to put his views to a live test, in which his claims could be engaged and shown to be found wanting. Perhaps such a test is no longer necessary. His latest rants have shown how little store we should put on his views.
