Sidra Behar – Truth and Reconciliation 25 May 2024

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 30 May 2024

On Wednesday, Norway, Spain and Ireland announced their intention to recognise the State of Palestine. Somewhat premature, perhaps, but doesn’t ‘premature’ only mean that the birth is before its due time?

But if that recognition is merely premature and not some sort of outlandish futuristic prediction, then the question is neither academic nor unrealistic. The Israelis and the Palestinians are going to have to learn to live with each other, because any other option – especially since October 7^th – is too unbearable to contemplate.

But just how do two peoples, living on the same patch of land, closely connected by a common history, which has all too often been one of tension and conflict, manage to find a way to move beyond that history to a new, more peaceful relationship?

Bitter, violent and apparently intractable as it is, these are not the first two peoples who have managed to find some modus vivendi for continued co-existence.

With a General Election in South Africa next week, I am reminded that next year will be the 30^th anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established after the end of apartheid. Does it offer any guidance for how Israelis and Palestinians could deal with their common past when they finally arrive at some resolution of their conflict?

I remember discussions about South Africa in my youth group days. Most of us thought it could only end in a bloodbath: the blacks would reach such a point of anger, despair and frustration that they would rise up against the whites, and massacre them all. It wasn’t a happy prospect, but there seemed no other way out.

One of the amazing things about the end of apartheid, therefore, was that it didn’t end like that. In very large measure that was due to the statesmanship of people like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and others. Whatever their failings, they still managed to display a breadth of spirit which enabled them to reject bitterness and revenge as their guiding principle, even after a lifetime of living under apartheid.

They knew that a non-violent handover of power would be unacceptable if the whites didn’t somehow acknowledge what they had done; but they were also realistic enough to know that the whites would resist the handover of power every inch of the way, if they thought they were going to be subject to Nuremburg-style war crimes trials. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an attempt to resolve that apparently irresolvable paradox.

The end of apartheid meant the end of a sort of ‘civil war.’ Victims and perpetrators would have to go on living together in a very different relationship, building a new South Africa. The real conundrum was how to manage that new relationship?

Extremely bitter enemies do manage to live together. Poland and Germany, Germany and France after WWII; Israel and Germany from the early 1950’s.

Perhaps the real questions the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was grappling with were something like, “what do you do with memory?” and ”what does ‘justice’ mean in these circumstances?”

The Nuremburg Trials provided one model: you put the major perpetrators and a few lower level ones on trial, punish the guilty with death sentences or imprisonment and then, as they say, you move on.

France, immediately after 1945, took its major leaders – the Lavals, Petains and so on – put them on trial and punished them. Having punished the culprits – the few bad apples in the barrel, so it was claimed – everybody else could say they had been in the Resistance and nobody had collaborated with the Germans or the Vichy government. Only in the 1970’s did the truer picture begin to emerge. Even now, 80 years later, it remains a shameful, explosive and divisive issue.

After 1945 – and more or less through to the present day – Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave Japan ‘reasons’ for not needing to look at their treatment of POWs, the rape of Nanking in 1938, the use of captured women as ‘comfort women,’ and so on.

East Germany provided another model of arriving at the truth. The Stasi, the secret police, enlisted hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans as informers, collaborators, spying on family, friends and colleagues. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Stasi files were more or less thrown open. Shameful truths emerged: parents and children had informed on each other; as had husbands and wives. Friends and neighbours proved not to have been such good friends and neighbours after all.

A few of the perpetrators in the Yugoslavian civil war were sentenced in the Hague; and 30 years ago this month, the Ruandan genocide was in full swing. The same questions come up again and again: what do you with those who commit atrocities against other populations or their own? how can victims and perpetrators find a way of living together?

Men like Mandela and Tutu, with a few of the white population, created a structure whereby memory was honoured, but didn’t necessarily follow a punitive model, with the perpetrators being executed or imprisoned.

“Forgiveness,” said Desmond Tutu, “does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what has happened seriously and not minimising it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence………….those who do not consciously acknowledge any sense of guilt are in a way worse off than those who do. Apart from the hurt it causes to those who suffered, the denial by so many white South Africans even that they benefited from apartheid is a crippling, self-inflicted blow to their capacity to enjoy the fruits of change …. When we look at some of the conflict areas of the world,” he concluded, “it becomes increasingly clear that there is not much of a future for them without forgiveness, without reconciliation.”

Might something like the model of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission be helpful at some point as Israelis and Palestinians try and work out a way of living with each other? I live in hope, encouraged by what I heard Abba Eban say, in this very synagogue, nigh on 50 years ago: “people do eventually make peace but sadly,” he added, “only when they have exhausted all other possibilities.”

There are, of course, real questions about memory. The question, “what do we do with memory?” begins to transmute into: “what you do with the ‘mythology’ on which you grew up, the things you believe about yourself which have guided and nourished you, provided you with your raison d’être, your sense of identity and therefore, by implication, defined the identity of the ‘other’?”

For in Hebrew, the ‘other’ is the ger, “the stranger who lives among you” the same stranger we read about so often in the Torah, just as we did this morning, in our sidra, where we were enjoined: lo tirdeh bo befarech “you shall not treat the stranger ruthlessly.” (Leviticus 25:43)

One observer of the Truth and Reconciliation process said that “it enabled the citizens of South Africa to begin to understand why people participated in such grotesque actions and what must be done to prevent such things from happening again….. for the TRC, justice is about uncovering what really happened, about establishing reality in all its conflicting perspectives. This essential form of justice would not have been found in the work of adversarial court cases, but required an amnesty process.” (Colleen Scott, People Building Peace)

Hardly surprisingly, not everybody was happy with the Commission. Some of the victims and some of the families of those murdered wanted the culprits to be punished or that victims should receive compensation – some acknowledgement by the whites of what they had inflicted. Tutu and others argued that ANC people also had to confess to crimes they had committed. Questions of ‘moral equivalence’ were raised: was a human rights violation committed by a black African fighting for freedom ‘less,’ in some way, than the beating and torture South African police inflicted on blacks?

A 2000-year old rabbinic statement has it that if you show yourself merciful where you should be pitiless, in the end you become pitiless when you should have been merciful. (Tanchuma, Metsora 1) The terrible stories that have emerged in the Post Office Enquiry show the truth of that so clearly, so tragically.

The TRC worked because people were able to tell their stories, what they experienced, even the perpetrators. Of course they were the ‘guilty’ ones; yet they, too, were brutalised by apartheid, albeit in a very different way from the true victims. And while there is a factual truth that needed to be made public, the emotional truth of what people experienced needed to be heard. The establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recognised that this was the only way South Africa could have moved forwards without an actual civil war breaking out.

Wherever such things occur, the record must be made clear – however unpalatable, whatever the circumstances. Truth and memory are hard enough to grasp at the best of times, but without that truth, without people telling their stories, everybody in a conflict knowing something of the factual and emotional truth of what the ‘other’ experienced, can true peace ever be a reality?