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MY FAVORITE ‘ANTI-SEMITE’ – ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU, AND ALL
THOSE WHO REFUSE TO BE SILENCED ON ISRAELI APARTHEID  
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Tony Karon
July 1, 2025
Rootless Cosmopolitan
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_ In honor of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and all those who
refuse to be silenced on Israeli apartheid and genocide by bogus
claims that denouncing those abuses amounts to hatred of Jews. Written
in 2007, re-posted by the author this past week. _

Archbishop Desmond Tutu,

 

_The media panic over Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic
Party Primary for Mayor of New York reminded me of this piece I wrote
18 years ago
[[link removed]], when the
same “anti-Semitism” charged was leveled at Archbishop Desmond
Tutu, a lifelong beacon of moral clarity. So, reposting the 2007 text
here, because (sadly) it never gets old:_

The utterly charming thing about the Zionist Thought Police is their
apparent inability to restrain themselves, even from the very excesses
that will prove to be their own undoing. Having asked sane and
rational people to believe that Jimmy Carter is a Holocaust denier
[[link removed]] simply
for pointing out the obvious about the apartheid regime Israel
maintains in the occupied territories, the same crew now want us to
believe that Archbishop Desmond Tutu is an anti-Semite. No jokes! That
was the reason cited for Tutu being banned from speaking at St.
Thomas University in Minneapolis
[[link removed]].
“We had heard some things he said that some people judged to be
anti-Semitic and against Israeli policy,” explained university
official Doug Hennes.

The “anti-Semitic” views Tutu had expressed were in his April
2002 speech “Occupation is Oppression”
[[link removed]] in which he likened
the occupation regime in the West Bank, based on his personal
experience of it, to what he had experienced as a black person in
South Africa. He recalled the role of Jews in South Africa in the
struggle to end apartheid, and expressed his solidarity with us
through our centuries of suffering. But then turning to the suffering
inflicted on the Palestinians, he issued an important challenge, one
that might just as well have been uttered by a Jewish biblical
prophet:

_“My heart aches. I say, why are our memories so short? Have our
Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they
forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their
own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound
and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares
deeply about the downtrodden?_

_“Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing
another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice.
We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the
corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the
violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the
inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured._

_“The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will
not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only
intensify the hatred._

_“Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated
situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or – and I hope this will
be the road taken – to strive for peace based on justice, based on
withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of
a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side with
Israel, both with secure borders._

_“We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our
madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same
everywhere else in the world. South Africa is a beacon of hope for the
rest of the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can
come to the Holy Land.”_

Tutu is absolutely right, of course, nor would those Israelis who
embody the same tradition of indivisible human rights
[[link removed]] that
Tutu personifies disagree with him.

Frankly, this case I think this case underlines precisely how absurd
the policing of discussion about Israel in the U.S. has become. As a
South African veteran of the liberation struggle, I can testify that
there are few, if any, more decent, humane, courageous and morally
unimpeachable individuals in the world than Bishop Tutu. Speaking
truth to power is what he’s always done, both to the old regime in
South Africa as much as to the new, when the latter has failed to live
up to the standards it professes on AIDS, crime and other issues.
He has spoken forcefully on human rights struggles around the world,
and his statements about the West Bank are based on what he has seen
there. The diminutive Bish is a moral giant of our times, and the fact
that he is condemning Israel for maintaining an apartheid system on
the West Bank should serve as a wake-up call to liberal Americans who
prefer not to think about these things. Yes, of course Bishop Tutu
makes people uncomfortable; that’s what he’s always done, like a
good cleric, challenging his flock to consider their own actions and
omissions against the morality they profess to embrace. Instead,
thanks to the atmosphere created by the right-wing nationalists of
AIPAC and the ADL etc., many mainstream institutions would now prefer
to shoot the messenger, if only to avoid incurring the wrath of those
who have stripped the very term “anti-Semitic” of its meaning (by
using it as a bludgeon in defense of behavior utterly abhorrent in the
Jewish tradition as much as anything else), and as such, commit a
great crime against Jews and Judaism.

Not that Tutu would have been surprised by this clumsy attack on him.
As he said in that Boston speech,

_“But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government
is placed on a pedestal [in the U.S.], and to criticize it is to be
immediately dubbed anti-Semitic, as if the Palestinians were not
Semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group.
And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the
apartheid government on security measures?_

_“People are scared in this country [the U.S.] to say wrong is wrong
because the Jewish lobby is powerful – very powerful. Well, so what?
This is God’s world. For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We
live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful,
but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet,
Milosovic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the
dust._

_“Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are
powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the
powerful: What is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the
voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment._

_“We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people
of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace
based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to
achieve this peace, because it is God’s dream, and you will be able
to live amicably together as sisters and brothers.”_

Tutu is challenging American institutions to put morality above the
power of a lobby. (Yes, I know he called it “the Jewish lobby” and
I don’t think of it as that; I think of it as a rightwing Likudnik
lobby open to right-wing jingoists of every religious and ethnic
stripe who share the Likudnik vision, but then again, I can understand
Tutu’s confusion here, because it’s not as if any mainstream
Jewish institutions have stepped forward and said no, these people who
would suppress honest discussion of Israel speak only for themselves,
not for the Jews…)

More power to him.

_Postscript: Seems that even the likes of the ADL realize that when
they’re seen to be trying to gag someone like Bishop Tutu, they’re
destroying their own credibility in the eyes of many Jews. Not least
in response to the efforts of the good people of Muzzlewatch,
[[link removed]] it seems that the university has
reversed itself and restored Tutu’s invitation, with the support of
even the ADL._

_[TONY KARON [[link removed]] is a
journalist from Cape Town, South Africa, resident in New York since
1993. He is currently a senior editor at TIME.com (although I do this
site on my own time, and am personally entirely responsible for its
content, which in no way reflects the views or outlook of anyone
else). He has worked there since 1997, covering the Middle East, the
“war on terror” and international issues ranging from China’s
emergence to the Balkans. He also does occasional op-eds for Haaretz
and other publications, as well as bits of TV and radio punditry for
CNN, MSNBC, and various NPR shows. He majored in economic history, and
'cut my analytical teeth in South Africa in the struggle years, where
I worked both as an editor in the “alternative” press and as an
activist of the banned ANC'.]_

* anti-Semitism
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* New York City
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* Archbishop Desmond Tutu
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* Desmond Tutu
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* apartheid
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* Genocide
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* Ceasefire
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* ANC
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* South Africa
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* International Criminal Court
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* ICC
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