JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - It is a brief document, occupying less than half a page in a local newspaper here. But since the "declaration of conscience" was published 10 days ago, it has polarized South African Jews like no issue since the collapse of white-minority rule seven years ago.
Written by two Jewish heroes of South Africa's liberation struggle against the white government's apartheid system, and signed by 220 Jews, the document asserts that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories is the cause of the escalating violence in the Middle East and denounces Israel's campaign of violence. Titled "Not In My Name," the declaration acknowledges Israel's right to exist and its valid security concerns but compares Israel's treatment of Palestinians to the oppression of South Africa's black majority under apartheid.
"It becomes difficult," Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky write, "particularly from a South African perspective, not to draw parallels with the oppression experienced by Palestinians under the hand of Israel and the oppression experienced in South Africa under apartheid rule."
The document has triggered a raging debate among South Africa's 80,000 Jews that many here said is unrivaled in the years since South Africans of all races went to the polls for the first time and abolished apartheid. Lifelong friends have stopped speaking to one another. Supporters and critics have fired off hundreds of letters to newspaper editorial pages, each more emotional than the last. Dinner parties have ended abruptly following terse exchanges, and Kasrils and Ozinsky have been labeled both traitors and patriots.
Stephen Friedman, one of the declaration's signatories and executive director of the Center for Policy Studies here, said: "There's never been a debate in the South African Jewish community quite like this. This is raw stuff."
What most here do agree on is that the dispute owes its vitriol to the complicated history of South Africa's Jews, many of them descendants of Lithuanian immigrants who fled poverty and pogroms beginning in the 1870s. The world view of South Africa's Jews is shaped by two epic movements and the sometimes competing impulses they inspire. One is the Holocaust; the other is apartheid.
Coupling appeals to racism with anti-Semitism, the National Party made the apartheid system of racial separation -- modeled partly on Nazism -- the law of the land when it took power in 1948, the same year the state of Israel was created. But National Party leaders classified Jews as white and essentially assured them that they would be left alone as long as they left the government alone.
But while many Jews accommodated the apartheid system with silence, many others were instrumental in its downfall, surrendering lives of comfort and privilege to financially support and even join the black majority's preeminent liberation organization, the African National Congress. Kasrils, who is now minister of water affairs and forestry, was a commander of the ANC's armed militia, and two Jewish ANC members were arrested on treason charges alongside Nelson Mandela in 1963. Of the seven whites elected to the ANC's executive committee following Mandela's release from prison in 1990, five were Jewish.
"As a South African Jew, there are these uncomfortable parallels which you are constantly confronted with," said Friedman.
Many black South Africans regard Palestinians' impoverishment, overcrowded living conditions and portrayal as terrorists by the West as similar to their own fortunes under apartheid. They resented Israel's support of the apartheid government even while Western countries imposed sanctions on the white-minority government. Close alliances between blacks and South African Jews, Friedman said, make it "impossible for you to not see that the machine guns used to mow down children in Soweto and other townships were Israeli-made weapons."
But many Jews here said the declaration of conscience misreads the situation in Israel and the occupied territories.
"I can't get around Kasrils's opening stance that Israel's denial of Palestinian rights is the root cause of the conflict," said Selwyn Sundelowitz, a Jewish resident of Johannesburg. "To me, the root cause is the long-standing refusal by the Arab-Islam world to accept the right of Israel to exist."
Cyril Harris, chief rabbi of the Union of Orthodox Synagogues in South Africa, said comparisons between apartheid and Israel are misguided.
"It's quite ridiculous," Harris said. "Kasrils doesn't know what he's talking about, and I'm afraid this has not gone down well at all."
Harris said that Israel, unlike South Africa in the apartheid era, is merely defending itself from hostile neighbors committed to its destruction. Israel's state-sanctioned assassinations, he said, target known terrorists, while the apartheid government killed anyone considered a threat to its rule, regardless of whether they were involved in violence.
"Israel is a democracy," he said. "It has tried to broker peace, and it has been rejected by a population that is determined to see Israel destroyed.
"Apartheid was an evil all to itself."