‘This is the period of dark light – a time of disclosure, unveiling and transparency so that we can see evidently where nations, leaders, institutions, people and agendas stand in this time. This is a time of moral clarity – and we will each be remembered in posterity for where we stood in this time.’

BY PROFESSOR SA’DIYYA SHAIKH

We mourn a year of an unimaginable genocide, recognising the deep toll this year of unthinkable barbarity has on our collective humanity.

Like many of us, I am wrestling with the deeper questions on human nature, on how it is that only some lives are deemed valuable and ‘grievable’ and others become numbers in a bizarre calculus of ‘human shields’, or how it is that the world is watching this unfolding horror escalate for over a year without effective political intervention. This genocide presents a morally and politically incomprehensible time for the human condition.

Reflecting on this state of world, I tentatively and with some trepidation, suggest that this is a time of dark light. What do I mean by this?

Firstly, what might have previously been hidden or subterranean has been fully revealed. In this year the Israeli state has been rendered naked – it has exposed itself as a genocidal, ethnocentric, apartheid, settler colonial state in unadulterated terms.

There is no longer any pretences or subterfuge that it can hide behind, no longer can the hideous but popular lie in parts of the Global North that ‘Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East’ be sustained. It is now impossible for any regular decent person seeking to understand the world, to be ignorant of the working of the Israeli state, particularly in light of first-hand uncensored coverage of its diabolic violence on social media by brave Gazans.

Secondly, another layer of social deceit has been patently revealed: many of those who claim to be advocates of democratic process, human rights and social justice, whether groups of neo-liberal academics within South African tertiary institutions, or global political leaders in the USA or the UK, have all revealed themselves as hypocrites. Some are blatant genocide-deniers, and others are simply ethnocentric racists who value white Israeli lives above Arab lives.

At the University of Cape Town (UCT) we have a number of such Zionist neo-liberals scrambling around to weaponise definitions of antisemitism against those who have democratically passed Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) resolutions against Israel. At South African tertiary institutions, scholars invested in research grants and continued collaboration with Israeli universities who are all utterly implicated in the genocidal project, are revealing themselves. Those for whom money is more important than ethics are being unveiled. We see you in all your bare self-interest, in your unveiled racism and unconscionable defence of genocide.

Thirdly, the other group that is unveiled are those who keep silent, who think neutrality is an ethical option in a time of genocide.

To such folk, we remind you of Archbishop Tutu’s wise teaching, ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’ We see you in your quietism non-commitment and complicity.

Fourthly, there those who say that we need to listen to ‘both sides’. It is only deliberate blindness to systemic injustice that describes over 76 years of colonial Israeli occupation, land theft and apartheid policies as a narrative of two equally legitimate ‘sides’.

These leaders seek to listen to ‘both sides,’ and are sympathetic to Zionist pain. By doing so they provide space for the manipulation and weaponisation of Jewish suffering during the holocaust as an underlying legitimation for the slaughter and current holocaust of Palestinians. They thus reveal themselves as either profoundly uninformed or ethically untrustworthy. These same leaders need to ask themselves if they would have said during the apartheid era in South Africa that there were two sides to the story and that each side needed to be heard, understood and appeased. Yet they currently make such claims and reveal an ethically compromised and politically untenable position.

This is the period of dark light – a time of disclosure, unveiling and transparency so that we can see evidently where nations, leaders, institutions, people and agendas stand in this time. This is a time of moral clarity – and we will each be remembered in posterity for where we stood in this time.

However, this is also a time of beautiful unveilings. What is also revealed to us is the profound nature of solidarities between diverse groups of people – this is a time when those who value justice and freedom come together in love and solidarity. People of different religious faiths, atheists, agnostics, and decent folk from just about everywhere, are coming together in support of the Palestinian cause, protesting Israeli rapacious violence, and rejecting the exceptionalism of the Israeli state. A group that requires special mention is South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) who have demonstrated powerful integrity standing up consistently and courageously against Zionists, even at the expense of painful attacks from within their religious community and families.

All over the world, from the streets of Rabat to Washington DC, Jakarta to Berlin, London to Caracas, Cape Town to Dakar, thousands of regular people are mobilising and joining the Palestinian solidarity movement. They are making demands on their governments, naming and shaming Zionist complicities and joining the global BDS movement as a form of non-violent resistance. Most apparent too is the disconnect between the positions held by many Western governments and leaders supportive of Israel, and the majority of their citizens, as is evident in police violence against protestors in many countries in the Global North.

Across the planet, there is a growing majority who have finally seen the horror and true face of the violent apartheid Israeli state, and they categorically reject all complicity with Israel. In this revelatory time of sharp, dark light, the tide has turned globally. This is what some have called a ‘threshold moment’, the old order has been seen, revealed, and unmasked, and is being resisted across the world by ordinary people. Perhaps this year of unspeakable violence has hastened the death of an old colonial order. These are the birth pangs of a new order that we must herald into existence. So much now depends on the choices we make, the ways in which we remain steadfast in our commitments, the continuing activism in the spaces we occupy, and by using this experience as a way to broaden our solidarities across the globe to all spaces of violent conflict and oppression from Sudan to Congo to Yemen and Myanmar. As we recognise that as a human race we are standing at a threshold moment, illuminated by a dark light that reveals the nature of the world to us, we CAN choose differently. May we choose to create different worlds, futures inspired by freedom, justice, and the dignity of all lives, everywhere.

In this spirit, a poem by the extraordinary South African poet, Dr Athambile Masola, captures beautifully the pain of our current state and the possibilities of freedom-dreaming futures.

In Solidarity

Dear Palestine
You do not need my words
They are glib and empty
But they are all I have for now.
You are in my dreams.

Dear Congo
You do not need my shame
It is useless
My ignorance hollows me out
But I carry it with me anyway.
You are in my prayers.

Dear Sudan
You do not need my sadness
It is a weight that cannot hold a nation
But it is all I have.
You are in my heart.

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Dear Azania
You may never exist outside of our songs
Your presence is a promise that we should do better
You are in my spirit.

Dear World
You insist on breaking apart
Leaving nothing behind but tombs.
It is not inevitable: we will swallow ourselves and eviscerate.
But for now, we are here.
Breaking.

• Professor Sa’diyya Shaikh is Director: Centre for Contemporary Islam in the Department for the Study of Religions at University of Cape Town.
  This paper is based on a prayer presented at the UCT4 Palestine Vigil on October 7, 2024.