There has been a quite strange silence from South African journalism – from working professionals and the academy – about the Israeli military closing down Al Jazeera’s offices in Palestine. I may have missed commentary and/or criticism, but it has been a little strange – yet unsurprising. We’re all trying to save careers and income so we err on the side of not offending anyone in power.
I remember all too well, (and people of my generation should recall) our own protests against and resistance to the apartheid state and its security community shutting down and heavy censoring the Weekly Mail, now the Mail & Guardian, and the VryeWeekblad in the 1980s and early 1990s.
We cannot dismiss the idea that this censorship may (at the time) have been directed at the “Jewishness” of the Weekly Mail. As one of the founding editors of the Weekly Mail has said, the newspaper was “the most Jewish newspaper ever produced“. Similarly the VryeWeekblad producers were considered to be Afrikaner “veraaiers” (race-traitors), and were subject to a special brand of persecution and victimisation by the state. Today, I guess, we’re all simply too scared of being on the wrong side of power. What is difficult to accept is that this relative silence is part of what happens in the “fog of war”.
As a footnote: I found it quite bizarre that the Independent newspaper group reporter, Michelle Abrahams (the Lifestyle Editor) referred in the opening of her report on the difficulties a South African journalist had in getting her family out of Israel to, Hamas’s offensive on the Gaza Strip – suggesting that Hamas attacked Palestinians. I’m not sure Hamas is at war with Palestinians.