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- Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In Being There, Tony Leon goes behind the scenes, reflecting on how history is made, both here and around the world, through his unique mixture of anecdote and informed opinion. His vantage point ranges from a ringside seat in the recent formation of the government of national unity (GNU) – recounted in detail here for the first time – to close encounters with the likes of Harry Oppenheimer, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat and Boris Johnson, and reappraisals of FW de Klerk, Nelson Mandela and Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Leon writes of the dangers of modern politics, from the purgatory of social media to the perils of political fundraising in tough times. The challenge of leadership, in a world often led by populist grifters or uninspiring time-servers, runs like a golden thread through the book. Written with his customary blend of humour and flair, and with an eye to the future and what the present and the past can tell us about it, Being There is both important and highly readable.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Being There
Backstories from the political front
tony leon
JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS
JOHANNESBURG • CAPE TOWN
Praise for Tony Leon’s previous books
Future Tense
‘From the vantage point of years in active politics, Tony Leon provides a lucid analytical balance sheet of SA Ltd 2021. Eschewing political correctness, Leon tells it as he sees it.’ – Judge Dennis Davis
‘Anyone who wants to understand South Africa today – a country so beautiful, yet so broken – simply has to read this book.’ – Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money and Civilization: The West and the Rest
Opposite Mandela
‘In the confiding, winningly self-deprecatory style that defines Leon’s authorial voice, he offers us a unique personal insight into Nelson Mandela and guides us, engagingly and provocatively, through the most turbulent and exciting times in contemporary South African politics.’ – John Carlin, author of Playing the Enemy
‘A frank, fair-minded memoir of the Mandela years by a political opponent whom Mandela himself clearly liked and respected.’ – JM Coetzee
The Accidental Ambassador
‘As a fellow accidental ambassador, reading Tony Leon’s adventures in the land of the original Evita and the gauchos reminded me there are reasons to be grateful we live in South Africa after all.’ – Evita Bezuidenhout
On the Contrary
‘Magisterial … Written with effortless authority and with unique access.’ – Peter Godwin, author of Exit Wounds
Also by Tony Leon
Hope and Fear: Reflections of a Democrat (1998)
On the Contrary: Leading the Opposition in a Democratic South Africa (2008)
The Accidental Ambassador: From Parliament to Patagonia (2013)
Opposite Mandela: Encounters with South Africa’s Icon (2014)
Future Tense: Reflections on My Troubled Land (2021)
‘Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.’
– TS Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, from Four Quartets
Dedicated to the memory of three patriots who
helped build democracy in South Africa:
Dene Smuts (1949–2016)
James Selfe (1955–2024)
Greg Krumbock (1960–2024)
Contents
I
the idea
‘One doesn’t recognise the most important moments ofyour life until it’s too late.’
– Agatha Christie
Introduction
One of my favourite philosophers, Marx (Groucho), apparently said: ‘I have inner beauty, but no camera has yet been invented to capture it.’ The other, entirely humourless Marx (Karl) offered more profound thoughts, but since millions were killed in pursuit of his ‘scientific’ philosophy, all things considered I’d choose Groucho over Karl.
Being There was written to capture several often-elusive aspects from my life to date, both from a very public career and from earlier years before it commenced. It is my own camera into what happened at certain times and who starred on the stages described, and, entirely subjectively, I try to capture both personalities and places.
The idea behind this book, suggested by Jeremy Boraine, publisher-at-large for Jonathan Ball Publishers, is to tell the backstories and provide some colour on interesting, even dramatic events beyond the sepia-tinged mythology that encrusts many of them now.
In the stories I recount, I go back to personal events and some major political dramas in which I was involved to explore purpose and even a hidden meaning or two, hopefully without too heavy a touch. Some of them illuminate present and, perhaps, future times too.
In some cases, recent information offers new light on some famous personalities since I last wrote about them in earlier books (for example, my reappraisal of presidents FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela). I also explore more mundane singular experiences to excavate contemporary meaning from past times. For example, returning to my boarding school 50 years after matriculating conjured memories not entirely congenial about obedience to authority but also showed the adaptiveness of old institutions.
Sitting on a beach in Vietnam allowed contemplation of how one small nation, which was the graveyard of empires and poster child for left-wing anti-Americanism at the height of its war with the US, managed years later to embrace both an aggressive capitalism and admiration for Donald Trump. A visit to Japan and a political gathering in Berlin provided reminders of how two aggressor nations that engulfed the world in the greatest conflagration in human history later carved out very different peaceful futures after their near extinction in the world war they started.
Argentina, situated on the other side of the South Atlantic, provides this book with another lens for home thoughts from faraway. My work and life there were vastly different from anything I had experienced before. Yet political pathologies and siren songs, including the ‘hate as hope’ brand of populism, whether sung in Spanish by Evita Perón or in isiZulu by Jacob Zuma, are eerily similar.
In today’s ‘cancel culture’ world (also explored in this book) it is probably incautious to quote Woody Allen. But he offered the best one-line explanation of how timing, chance, circumstance and career can affect your life and the direction it takes – and not least the people you meet on the journey. He said: ‘Most of success in life is just showing up.’
I had a lot of encounters that happened when I ‘showed up’. One of these relates to journeys to the Middle East, where I met some of the leaders embroiled in the region’s never-ending conflicts. On one occasion, more authentic meaning was gleaned from the humble driver of the official car than from a president or prime minister whose private conversations mirrored the same clichés as their appearances provided on television. However, not every political leader is cut from this cloth and, as some of the pages following offer, there are those who inspire and innovate.
Politics has been memorably defined as ‘show business for ugly people’. And, looks aside, there are a lot of rum characters in the political world, some of whom – together with their enablers and funders – you will meet in these pages.
Although I left parliamentary politics and the leadership of my party in South Africa back in 2009, it was the unexpected call from the current leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) that led me back into the ring in June 2024. I retell here in some (necessary) detail precisely what happened when South Africa underwent the novel, often hair-raising experience of forming a coalition government, necessitated when, for the first time in 30 years, the mighty African National Congress (ANC) tumbled at the polls. I also explore how likely (or not) is the endurance of its second government of national unity (GNU) and the chokepoints on its fragile progress to date.
I have had five different, often intersecting careers: I was at different times, briefly, an attorney, an academic and a diplomat; for far longer I was a politician; and latterly I have been in business, chairing a strategic communications company.
For most of this time I have also been an inveterate scribbler of notes, diaries, journals and many newspaper columns and – to date – have published five books. This is the sixth.
Writing is a daunting, even haunting undertaking, whether it is each Tuesday morning facing a blank computer screen and a looming deadline for my newspaper column or setting out the first lines of this book and the long journey to its final chapter.
A few years ago, I hosted a lunch in Cape Town for a writer I greatly admire. Roger Cohen is the Paris bureau chief of The New York Times and the author of many fine books and erudite columns. His parents were South African, and he was partly raised in this country. Recently, he inscribed to me his latest work, An Affirming Flame: Meditations on Life and Politics. Its subtitle well describes this book. Then there is the wisdom he offers on the creative process:
A column needs a voice, or it is nothing. It requires an idea, and they do not fall to order from trees. The best columns write themselves. They come, all of a piece, a gift from some deep place. They enfold the subject just so, like a halter on a horse’s face.
Such inspiration is rare. Most columns resemble exquisite torture … but also live or die on their ability to establish an emotional bond with the reader.1
This book is not a series of columns, although Cohen’s testament to the process of writing fully resonates. I hope that Being There also establishes ‘an emotional bond with the reader’. But that, of course, is for you to judge.
Tony Leon
Cape Town
March 2025
II
the journey
‘Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.’
– Abba Eban, Israeli statesman
1
Lunch with Arafat
My late mother, Sheila, of imperishable memory, totalled three husbands in her 72 years of life. She noted waspishly, ‘If you get married three times, you choose each husband for a different reason.’ My father, Ray Leon, was followed in line by Dick Prior and then Paul Schulz. This led a friend to accurately pun her ‘Mrs Leon Prior to Schulz’.
Neither Dick nor Paul was Jewish – in contrast to my parents – and when, many years ago, Dick was asked by someone, ‘What is your opinion of Zionism?’ he responded, ‘I can’t really say, but I do embrace it every night!’
I had no such uncertainties, even though I was brought up in a very secular Durban home and attended Christian schools, and beyond the obligatory rituals of the faith – circumcision and a bar mitzvah – had only the vaguest knowledge about my religion. But Israel and its right and need to exist, and the price paid in blood and treasure for its existence, was hard-wired into my earliest memories. Even so, I was hardly an uncritical supporter of the expansionist aims of its right-wing governments, which dominated its polity from the 1990s onwards.
And then, of course, my own practical, as opposed to ideological, embrace of Israel came in 1996 when I commenced a relationship – soon to be consecrated by marriage – with an Israeli, Michal Even Zahav, my wife now for 24 years. (Incidentally our first meeting at a conference she organised in Jerusalem for an NGO, the Israel Forum, which she led, proved, in our case at least, that not every political jamboree is a waste of time, and this one had a happy real-life consequence.)
So, both matters of the heart and the swirl of political storms in the Middle East were a constant background to some immersive political journeys.
The American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem optimistically describes itself as ‘an oasis of tranquillity in the Palestine-Israel conflict’. Certainly, its Ottoman architecture – it commenced its existence in the late nineteenth century as home to a grand pasha’s harem – and distinguished guest list, which included TE Lawrence and Winston Churchill, give latter-day visitors wandering under its cool porticos and in its fragrant gardens the feeling of living history.
One day in early October 2002, it was the rendezvous point for my journey to meet the president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat.
That trip gave me a closer understanding of Israel’s existential angst and the human misery behind its occupation, since 1967, of the West Bank. It also offered insight into how South Africa then saw itself as some sort of mediator in the intractable struggle of Jew and Palestinian for the disputed sliver of territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan. This would explode again 20-plus years later, on 7 October 2023, when Hamas insurgents invaded Israel from Gaza, slaughtering and raping 1 200 Israelis and kidnapping some 240 others, unleashing a furious and predictably violent and deadly response from Israel.
Going to meet Arafat in his compound at Ramallah – I had briefly met him when he visited South Africa a few years before – comported with the adage of one of my favourite writers, John le Carré, who wisely advised, ‘a desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.’
But, beyond obtaining a first-hand view, there was a backstory to that visit, which centred on how South Africa’s governing party, the ANC, would weaponise this conflict for cynical electoral gain and also, into the bargain, burnish its very tattered and extremely one-eyed credentials as champion of oppressed peoples and enemy of Western colonialism and white oppression (the very inexact, historically questionable template it applied to Israel as overlord of the suffering Palestinians).
As the ANC ceaselessly reminded voters, I was a white South African. When President Thabo Mbeki took umbrage at my critique of his disastrous, in fact deadly, Aids denialism (an estimated 350 000 South Africans needlessly died of HIV/Aids owing to his decision to ban antiretrovirals from state hospitals, according to an authoritative study1), he branded me ‘the white politician [who] makes bold to speak openly of his contempt for African solutions’. This was in response to my jibe that his health minister’s suggestion that an industrial solvent, Virodene, was a miracle cure for Aids (it was later banned as unsafe for human use) amounted to ‘snake oil cures and quackery’.2
But the ANC got what is termed a ‘twofer’ (two for the price of one) by the fact that, added to my whiteness, I was of the Jewish faith (the first and to date only Jew to become leader of the official opposition) and – to cement a conspiracy of international dimensions – married to an Israeli.
This played itself out, a few months after Mbeki’s ‘white politician’ sneer, in the December 2000 local government elections when I led the DA to victory in Cape Town. During that campaign, a series of posters had appeared in the heavily Muslim area of Athlone proclaiming, ‘A vote for the DA is a vote for Israel,’ against a background of the Israeli flag dripping with blood and barbed wire. The posters were allegedly distributed in the name of the ‘Friends of Palestine’. While the ANC officially denied involvement, my party quickly found out that the printers responsible employed two brothers of ANC Western Cape leader Ebrahim Rasool, leading our strategist, Ryan Coetzee, to brand the ANC denial a lie.
I thus thought it both interesting and politically useful to meet Arafat in person and on home ground, reckoning that beyond going to see matters first hand, as Le Carré advised, it would rebut the stereotype of my alleged blind support for Israel and dismissal of any rights for Palestinians in this contested terrain.
The easiest part of the visit was to arrange it. My parliamentary office in Cape Town couldn’t believe how quickly and efficiently the Palestinian embassy in Pretoria both obtained the go-ahead from Arafat’s office for the meeting and then proceeded to interact with the South African diplomatic mission in Ramallah to fine-tune the logistics. I imagined that the prospect, and photo opportunity, of Palestine’s leader meeting the Jewish leader of the South African opposition was an opportunity too good to miss.
From my point of view, the October get-together was ideal as I would be visiting Israel for my sister-in-law’s wedding. But from the more vexed dateline of conflict in the Middle East, and between Israel and Palestine, getting to the rendezvous at that time was nothing if not hazardous.
The distance between East Jerusalem and Ramallah is barely more than 20 km, approximately the same as between Constantia and Sea Point – in normal times no more than a 30-minute drive in traffic.
But October 2002 was hardly a normal time in Ramallah and surrounds. There was something depressingly familiar about the cycle of violence and its endless doom loop. Earlier that year, Palestinian suicide bombers had concentrated attacks inside Israel, targeting civilians – including a gory Passover special when 30 Israelis were massacred during a celebratory dinner in Netanya. Israel responded by unleashing Operation Defensive Shield, something of a titular euphemism given that an estimated 500 Palestinians were killed and three times that number injured during the campaign in the West Bank.
By the time of my visit, Israel had banned Palestinian travel in much of the territory then under the notional control of Arafat’s regime. Just weeks before I arrived at his headquarters, Israeli forces besieged the building and smashed many of the surrounding structures with bulldozers, demanding that the Palestinian Authority hand over terror suspects. A few days before my meeting, Israel ended its siege of Arafat’s HQ after intense American pressure.
Surprised as I was that our meeting would proceed as scheduled, more surprises awaited me after my pick-up at the American Colony Hotel.
The first of these was meeting the young South African diplomat who headed the mission in Ramallah. She was around 30 years old and seemed both earnest and enthusiastic. Although like me a white South African, she had clearly ‘gone native’ – in the argot of British diplomacy – and shed the objective, even cynical detachment of the diplomat and was all-in on the Palestinian cause. She wore a keffiyeh – a scarf symbolising Palestinian resistance.
On meeting me, she gushed, ‘What an honour you have received to be meeting the President’ (Arafat). I had other ideas about it but kept my counsel.
After the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, the keffiyeh became a mandatory item of dress for President Cyril Ramaphosa, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula and sundry cabinet members. But by then both party and government – essentially indistinguishable – had given up all pretence at even-handedness in a conflict that had both curdled and massified in the intervening decades.
But it was the journey and the narrative provided by the embassy driver, an amiable middle-aged gentleman who advised me that he was a Palestinian-Armenian – an interesting ethnic combination imbued on both sides by decades of exclusion, marginalisation and worse – that was the most illuminating, arguably more so than the meeting itself.
The journey took about 90 minutes each way, with our progress – a generous description – at times glacial. Israeli checkpoints populated the route with ever-increasing frequency the closer we inched towards Ramallah. The South African pennant on the bonnet of the bulletproof car and the diplomatic number plates front and back had little impact on the young Israeli soldiers who interrogated our driver closely and held us up for some time at each stop. This allowed the driver to give a full and frank account of – for him – the horrors of living under Israeli occupation.
He no doubt assumed that, since I was both from South Africa (one of Palestine’s staunchest backers) and en route to an appointment with the hero of Palestinian liberation, I must be a strong sympathiser with the cause. He had no idea that I was in Israel to attend the wedding of my Israeli sister-in-law.
Many years before this drive, I received a useful tip from Michael Holman, the great journalist who was the Africa editor of the Financial Times. He advised, ‘I always get my most useful intel from taxi drivers; they know the local buzz best.’
Or, in this case, the embassy driver. Unbidden by me, he catalogued the daily difficulties and humiliations which the Israeli occupation caused the locals, ranging from hours spent at checkpoints and difficulty in accessing employment opportunities or even hospital visits in Israel to the disdain of the occupation forces for the elderly and the infirm. Of any culpability borne by the notoriously corrupt, and arguably feckless, Palestinian Authority, he said nothing.
Just two years before this visit, Arafat had spurned the Camp David negotiations, which would have seen around 73 per cent of Palestinian land returned in the West Bank and 100 per cent of the Gaza Strip, and the right to administration, though not sovereignty, of East Jerusalem. But that would be, imperfect in design perhaps, at least the two-state solution. US President Bill Clinton, who brokered the talks, heaped blame on Arafat for their failure, pointing out that he simply walked away and made no counteroffer. And in the aftermath of this failure, the unleashing by Arafat of the so-called second intifada in part accounted for the stringent nature of the Israeli conduct the driver was complaining about. Still, on the Michael Holman principle of listening to the buzz from the driver, I took careful note. It was also clear that his views were sincerely held and deeply felt.
In many ways, his views were far more useful than the self-serving justifications that were soon to be offered by Arafat. The driver had the ring of unvarnished authenticity.
The scene round Arafat’s compound, when we finally arrived, was extraordinary. I advised a journalist I briefed afterwards that it resembled in real time the photographs I had seen of the rubble in Berlin at the end of World War II. Only Arafat’s building had been spared bombardment or destruction, and the area around it was a wasteland, with even the Israeli bulldozers left in place outside.
After a very cursory security check by plainclothes Palestinian guards outside, I was led upstairs to the chairman’s office, where the world-famous figure, dressed in military fatigues and keffiyeh and sporting his familiar (if scratchy on embrace) facial stubble, warmly kissed me and gestured for me to take a seat, which I duly did.
I noted that his desk was covered with papers and files spread in towering quantity. He was accompanied by a senior Palestinian figure whom I had met on previous occasions, Saeb Erekat, whose volubility and fluency in English compensated for the quieter ways of his boss.
Nevertheless, after some opening pleasantries, I commended Arafat for managing an appearance of normalcy inside the building given the scenes of destruction outside. He countered that he had not left the building once during the Israeli siege, no doubt an explanation for the Israelis’ sparing it from the destruction visited on all the surrounding edifices. I was later advised that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel had given an undertaking to US President George W Bush that Arafat would not be harmed during the blockade.
I did venture to ask Arafat if he felt he bore any personal or political responsibility for the events in the immediate past – of which the wrenching scene outside bore grim testimony. He literally waved away the question, and any culpability, by airily stating that with the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin some seven years before (in November 1995), ‘I lost both my friend and my partner for peace.’ On hearing this I couldn’t help but recall when Bill Clinton basically forced the monosyllabic Rabin to shake hands with Arafat on the White House lawn back in 1993: the expression on the face of Arafat’s ‘friend’ was less a smile than a rictus.
I quickly realised that I would not glean much more from this encounter than I could see on CNN – it would be performative boilerplate – and there was no prospect that the Palestinian leader would unburden himself to a visitor such as me. His political lieutenant, the ever-mellifluous Erekat, then provided a drum roll of Israel’s malfeasance and double-dealing.
An interrogation of the failures at Camp David two years back, when Arafat and Erekat were facing a far more moderate Israeli prime minister (Ehud Barak) than Ariel Sharon, proved equally barren territory for any meaningful insights or acknowledgements. There was merely a recitation of how ‘you cannot compromise on an existing compromise’ (a reference, I imagined, to the idea that ceding more territory was off limits for the Palestinian leadership, despite it being the best offer yet received or seen since).
I kept thinking, but diplomatically not uttering, the famous remark of Israel’s long-time foreign minister Abba Eban that the ‘Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’.
There was one topic, when we reached it after more unrewarding back and forth on Israel and Palestine, which would soon loom large across the world and where Arafat’s warning that morning proved prescient. I asked the Palestinian leader how he viewed the ratcheting tempo of the American demand for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to surrender his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and the evidentiary value of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s dossier of evidence on this score.
Arafat said two things that morning which events just a few months later fully justified, although I tended at the time to dismiss them given his close affinity with the dreadful Saddam Hussein, whom he held in high esteem. He said he knew first hand that Saddam possessed no such weapons and then added words to this effect: ‘If America and its allies invade Iraq, make no mistake, it will be like taking a stick to a hornet’s nest. It will provoke local furies and sectarian enmities that Saddam Hussein has kept in check.’ Events soon enough would prove Arafat correct at least on this.
Before conversation could continue, the Palestinian leader advised, ‘You are in the Middle East, and you must eat.’
I had always enjoyed Arab cuisine – the hummus, felafels, lamb skewers and salads. And the feast of such delicacies, extraordinary given the siege conditions under which his headquarters operated, that Arafat’s aides laid out for us in the boardroom adjoining his office was an epicurean delight.
And so we continued over the mezze, with the Palestinian leader – seated directly opposite me – insisting that his servers pile more delicacies on my rapidly emptying plate.
The distinguished New York Times Middle East correspondent Thomas Friedman, in his magisterial book From Beirut to Jerusalem, described Arafat as a political thespian playing a role in a tragicomedy of violent absurdity. This was at the time of Israel’s 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon: ‘Beirut was a theater and Arafat thought he could star in it forever.’ The operation was masterminded by Arafat’s nemesis, Ariel Sharon, who was described by Friedman as ‘a big man, a fat man, and he did not understand the logic of the play … Sharon did not play games with his enemies. He killed them.’3 More on the ‘big man, a fat man’ anon.
I was to witness, that day in Ramallah, Arafat in full theatrical mode. I could scarcely believe my eyes when, just after the plates were cleared, ushered into our presence was a tall, black-frocked figure, complete with wide-brimmed hat and full beard, in all appearances with the bearing of a rabbi, which indeed he was. Arafat proudly announced him as ‘my dear Jewish friend’.
I discovered later that the rabbi was in fact a leading member of an extremist anti-Zionist sect, the Neturei Karta, a tiny group of ultra-Orthodox Jews who actively opposed both the principles of Zionism and the existence of Israel, on the basis that neither could exist until the Messiah arrived.
Absent any sighting of the Holy One during the long lunch (I was amazed that Arafat seemed to have all the time in the world for our get-together), said rabbi, with a strong North London accent, offered us several blessings as the meal concluded.
His presence added, in the same way as the old apartheid government used to trot out various obscure Black figures to endorse their own subjugation to visiting foreigners, a surreal endpoint to my Ramallah sojourn. As per Friedman’s remark about Arafat starring in ‘a theatre’, it also suggested that the stage for our encounter was tinged, like a play by Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett, with the absurd.
After warm farewells before a bevy of media, which the Palestinians had thoughtfully arranged, the return journey to Jerusalem was even longer than the morning trip, and the checkpoints seemingly multiplied – or each of them simply took longer to pass through.
The evening of my return to the safer climes of Tel Aviv, and in a modern high-rise apartment in one of its plush suburbs, I had a get-together with former Israeli minister of education Amnon Rubinstein. At the time, we were fellow vice presidents of Liberal International (a rather grand title for an umbrella body of minority parties worldwide, which I cruelly dubbed ‘the club of losers’, an accurate indicator of the limited electoral appeal of liberal parties in most places).
Amnon and his wife, Roni, offered warm hospitality. After my long journey to Ramallah, I rather hoped that, at 6 pm, a stiff libation would be on offer. (My late dad, a nightly whisky-and-water man, always announced, ‘The bar opens at six.’) But, as befitted Israelis of an older generation, such as my hosts, this was coffee, not drinks, time.
I recounted to Amnon, both a staunch liberal (in a polity where the creed was in danger of extinction) and a thoughtful jurist, a summary of my day with Arafat. ‘That man is a liar – he even lies in his sleep,’ Rubinstein exclaimed. But when I shared with him the remarks of the Palestinian chauffeur, he offered me perhaps the best one-line description of the moral compromises, or worse, embedded in the decades-long occupation of the West Bank: ‘The only way to occupy a people against their will is with brutality.’
The hideous mass slaughter of 1 200 Jews and Israelis on 7 October 2023 lay long in the future, and the terror there was unleashed from Gaza by Hamas, the implacable enemies of Arafat’s Fatah organisation. But on the dilemma confronting Israel, coarsening its society, threatening its long-term security and later nearly splitting it apart, the unresolved occupation remained at its core.
The incomparable Israeli author Amos Oz once described the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict as one where, as Howard Jacobson puts it, ‘both parties could be said to be in the right, and when the situation worsened, both parties could be said to be in the wrong.’4
2
Counting Jews with Sharon
For some time after my Arafat luncheon – both to balance the political books and out of a deep sense of personal curiosity – I wanted to meet with Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who was elected to the top post in February 2001.
But while one phone call from my office to the Palestinian embassy secured the Arafat confab, repeated attempts to obtain an audience with the Israeli strongman via the country’s embassy in Pretoria produced a nil return.
Enter Cyril Kern.
Kern, a wealthy British businessman, settled for the past few years in Cape Town, had become friendly with Michal and me. He was a passionate Zionist, and his long-time friendship with Sharon was the defining feature of his life. Kern had fought as a 19-year-old volunteer in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, and during that conflict had forged an adamantine bond with the Israeli statesman, then at the dawn of his career as one of Israel’s most famous and daring soldiers.
Sharon was also famously disobedient of his superiors’ orders and developed a reputation both for dissembling on some matters and for being opaque when it came to the sources of his wealth.
Kern achieved his own slice of notoriety in his entanglement in the weeds of Sharon’s finances, when the so-called Kern Affair burst across the media in both South Africa and Israel.
At the heart of the scandal – if that is what it was – were funds Kern had apparently lent to Sharon’s son Gilad, to the tune of around $1.5 million. But Israeli authorities, and a huge media storm, were suspicious that Kern was simply fronting for European businessmen who had illegally donated to Sharon’s campaign to become leader of the Likud party, which had secured his premiership. Sharon denied any knowledge of the funding and claimed to have no idea that Kern had loaned such a vast amount of money to his son.
It was also a matter of imaginative contemplation how Sharon – a career soldier turned professional politician – had accumulated sufficient funds to own the largest private ranch in the country.
Despite acres of media space and a series of criminal investigations, neither Sharon nor Kern was charged with any offence. But the affair proved just how closely the two men were tied to each other, even if its detail stretched the bounds of credulity.
Thus, one night at a dinner with Kern, when I expressed some frustration at the inability of the Israeli embassy to arrange a meet-and-greet with his friend, Kern responded, ‘Leave it with me. I speak to Arik [the universal nickname for Sharon] every Saturday and I will arrange it.’
Sharon had long held a fascination for me, and not just for his daring exploits on the battlefield. Most famously, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he had changed the course of the conflict by crossing the Suez Canal, against orders, encircling the Egyptian Third Army and occupying huge swathes of territory west of the Suez Canal and within 100 km of Cairo.
His bulldozer tactics in war were matched by his approach to politics too. Sharon was the political architect of the right-wing Likud party, a modernist project which in 1973 melded the so-called revisionist strands of Zionism, embracing an expansive version of the founding of the State of Israel. However, he was no party loyalist. When he found his pragmatic decisions as prime minister thwarted by hard-right Likud colleagues, he simply abandoned the party in 2005 and created another political home, Kadima (Going Forward). This related to his unilateral decision to end Israel’s occupation of Gaza, a decision that would reverberate with terrifying consequences when Hamas launched its brutal and barbaric attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, some eighteen years later.
Kern succeeded where formal diplomatic channels failed. And on a visit to Israel in 2004, accompanied by my wife and my speechwriter Joel Pollak, an impassioned Zionist, I found myself outside the rather modest offices of the Israeli prime minister in Jerusalem awaiting an audience with the big man.
On entering his office, the difference between the hard-edged Sharon and his nemesis Arafat could be discerned in the expansiveness of the latter’s welcome and long lunch and Sharon’s briefer, less effusive and more direct approach to matters. With his mountainous frame sprawled behind his efficiently neat mahogany desk, we commenced the talks, or rather he gave a one-way lecture.
Sharon did not engage in niceties much, beyond a perfunctory enquiry about his friend Kern, and proceeded to deliver to us, an audience of three, a 30-minute monologue on how he saw his role as prime minister of Israel and the challenges confronting the country. Again, it was familiar stuff that could have been downloaded from the internet. I rather had the impression that when the prime minister granted audiences to political tourists, such as our trio, he would, like a tape recorder with the repeat button pressed, provide each with the same spiel.
But there was one line in his remarks that did surprise me, coming as it did from a famous Israeli nationalist and Sabra (Israeli-born Jew) who, like me, did not have much interest in religious observance or ritual. He told us, ‘I see my essential task as the guardian of the Jewish people in this corner of the world.’
Many years later, I had the opportunity to interview, via video link, the famous British Jewish comedian and commentator David Baddiel at a community fundraiser in Cape Town. He had written an influential polemic titled Jews Don’t Count. During our exchange, he highlighted a comment in the book on the difference between Israelis and the rest of the Jewish tribe: ‘Israelis aren’t very Jewish anyway … They’re too macho, too ripped and aggressive and confident. [Israelis are] Jews without angst, without guilt. So not really Jews at all.’1
Yet here was the macho supreme Israeli prioritising his task as safeguarding all Jews, not just Israelis.
I did manage to probe Sharon on one issue not in his script. But first, recall that our encounter took place in a far-off time when South Africa still held pretensions to being an honest broker and promoter of a two-state solution between Palestine and Israel. To this end, perhaps rather pretentiously given our lack of heft in the region, President Thabo Mbeki had initiated the Spier Initiative (named after the Stellenbosch wine farm where meetings were held), in which his government would arrange meetings for delegations from Israel and the Palestinian Authority to discuss using the template of the vaunted ‘South African miracle democratic transition’ as a basis for consideration in the Middle East cauldron.
I was intensely sceptical of the exercise of trying to panel-beat the vastly different circumstances of South Africa’s democratic transition and the Israel-Palestine model of conflict.
For Mbeki and his successors, it provided an opportunity for much posturing. I remembered well the judgment of statesman Abba Eban on ‘the perils of analogy’, warning that ‘history is baroque’ and does not admit of replication in most circumstances. In a lecture he used the example of a red rubber ball and a shiny red apple: ‘This apple is round, red, shiny, and good to eat. This rubber ball is round, red, and shiny. Therefore, there is at least a strong probability that it will be good to eat.’2
I imagined, correctly, that Sharon would have had no truck with red apples and red rubber balls. So, when I asked him if he saw any role for South Africa in peacemaking in the Middle East, he dismissed the question: ‘Your government is completely pro-Palestinian. It has no role to play here.’ Long after this, some 16 years after Mbeki had been ejected from office, and a decade after Sharon’s death, South Africa’s infamous decision to place Israel in the genocide dock before the International Court of Justice would provide posthumous vindication for Sharon’s view.
After an official entered the prime minister’s office to indicate that our audience was at an end, Sharon bustled up from behind his desk to warmly shake hands and pose for the obligatory photos, and then off the cuff (and off script) he asked me how the South African Jewish community was getting along. And how sizeable it was. I responded then (but would certainly give a different and far more negative answer today) that the community was fine, though reduced in number (from a high in my youth of around 120 000 to a 2004 estimate of half that number). I added that while there were only around 60 000 Jews in the country, ‘many assume there are at least a million of us given the influence the community appears to have.’
Sharon stopped, eyes a-twinkle, and, half smiling, told us a story from his time on an officers’ course in England in the 1950s: ‘At the mess one day, I was asked by one of the British officers, “How many of you chaps live here in England?” (meaning Jews).’ Sharon said he responded, ‘I think about 200 000.’ ‘Good heavens,’ the officer remarked, ‘I thought there were millions of you here.’
‘You see,’ the Israeli prime minister intoned as we made our way to the door, ‘everywhere in the world, they assume we are far larger and more influential than is the case.’ A classic antisemitic trope, in other words.
That subtle form of antisemitic profiling would give way to a far more overt Jew hatred, in both South Africa and the United Kingdom and across much of the world, after Israel launched its ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and the body count mounted in that densely inhabited territory in the wake of the 7 October massacre.
The difference, of course, was that while most Western governments allied themselves with Israel, despite the strong feelings of many protesting citizens, in South Africa the government implicitly backed Hamas. This included refusing to label Hamas as a ‘terror organisation’ and welcoming its leaders to the country, while the pompous and preening international relations minister, Naledi Pandor, engaged in diplomatic initiatives with its chief backer, Iran. And demanded that Israel abandon any attempt to defend itself.
Does the South African government hate Jews? Is the ANC funded by Hamas sponsors Iran and Qatar? Is South Africa attempting to replace the existing international order? These were three of several questions that percolated through the local discourse on why the otherwise rights-delinquent South African government placed Israel on the rack of international justice and condemnation and managed to filter out far worse violators of regional and international peace, from Sudan and Syria to Russia and many centres of despotism in between.
I thought the best single explanation for South Africa’s moral blindness in conciliating Hamas and condemning Israel, a sort of grotesque inversion of both morality and cause and effect, came from the British columnist Daniel Finkelstein, writing in The Times of London. He located exactly where the ANC placed itself, the blind spot or several of them that created the one-eyed approach of the ‘progressive left’. This, in his view, derived from ‘the left’s idea that it should ally with anti-colonial resistance movements, whatever the broader politics’. All, from Castro’s Cuba to Chávez’s Venezuela and Khomeini’s Iran – a triptych of ANC favourites – ‘were at the front line of the battle against global capital. And this is the only battle that really matters, the one from which all freedoms derive.’3
‘Bingo,’ I thought on reading this, and the plus factors for the ANC demonisation would be that they viewed Israel through the lens of being a white, Western, pro-American outpost in a sea of Araby. Never mind the details of history and the inaptness of the colonialist template. Israel was shoehorned into an antique world view that hadn’t advanced much since the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, or since the end of the Cold War 30 years later.
And if Hamas and the rulers of its sponsor Iran, or indeed the government of Cuba, are among the most repressive, barbaric and murderous regimes in the world? Finkelstein’s explanation was on the money here as well: ‘So it doesn’t matter if a group jails opponents or rapes women or throws gay people from buildings [Hamas being affirmative on all of these]. As long as they help bring down capitalism – which, as anti-imperialists, they do – they are liberating forces and their other faults will dissolve once capitalism dissolves.’4
Doubtless the ANC, which also viewed itself – 30 years after being installed in government – as a revolutionary liberation movement, also saw an identity of interest with the Hamas leadership, which enjoyed luxurious lifestyles (in the safety of Qatar) while its subjects lived in Gaza in conditions of immiserating poverty.
This too had a local resonance: ANC ministers walled themselves off from the sufferings of ordinary people with taxpayer-funded homes, blue-light police escorts to stop traffic and generators to obviate electricity blackouts. Lavish top-ups accrued to personal bank accounts via an army of state contractors and middlemen, often closely related to this or that cabinet minister.
Two years after my meeting with Sharon he was felled by a massive stroke and remained in a vegetative state until his death eight years later, in 2014.
The enigma that Sharon took to his grave was this: he gave no clue whether his brilliant and brutal military tactics and political iconoclasm were part of an overall strategy for peace in the region or the limits of it. And viewed through the depressing and clouded lens of today, under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu – once Sharon’s ally and later his great foe – we can only speculate whether Sharon would have altered the trajectory on which his country now seems set.
And of Arafat, beyond his rejection of the Camp David plan for a sovereign independent Palestine – was he simply holding out for a time when, ‘from the river to the sea’, a Palestinian state would occupy and engulf the current state of Israel? Did he have the imaginative courage, or would circumstances have conspired to force him, to compromise on a maximalist approach and obtain the three-quarters of the loaf that was on offer from the US and – for a time at least – the government of Israel?
This riddle, too, was unanswered at the time of his death in 2004, just months after my meeting with Sharon. But the two, as Thomas Friedman noted in 1989, certainly loathed each other. Unto death in their case. Indeed, and without evidence, many in the Arab world, including the Palestinian’s widow, suggested that Sharon had ordered the poisoning of Arafat, leading to his death. (The Arab Middle East is awash with conspiracy theories, especially those implicating Jews.) Sharon, by contrast with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres – two of his predecessors in office – never once met Arafat face to face.
3
Winning Lessons from ‘Loser’ Peres
Shimon Peres, the Israeli politician who died in 2016, aged 93 (fully healthy until the very end), left behind no unfinished business. On many encounters, over three decades, he offered up no end of personal and political paradoxes and some of the most compelling thoughts. These were delivered in such memorable metaphors and imaginative phrasing that, but for his heavy accent, it was easy to forget that English was only one of at least six languages he spoke after his native Polish, alongside Hebrew, French, Russian and Yiddish. In his storied career, Peres held every important office of state – prime minister, foreign minister, defence minister and president.
To me, Peres offers a leadership portrait etched by resilience, imagination and vast amounts of creative eloquence, and humanised by petty-minded low politics and scheming, all inspanned to the service of nation and self. Very often, the two sides were intertwined and indistinguishable. Benjamin Netanyahu, his great contemporary rival and the man who beat him in elections for the highest office, observed on the morning of Peres’s death: ‘Today is the first day of the State of Israel without Shimon Peres.’
I first met Peres in 1991, when I was a 34-year-old backbench MP, and many engagements followed over the next decades. That first occasion was during a visit arranged by my (future) wife Michal’s NGO, the Israel Forum.
