By: Clyde Ramalaine
Yesterday news broke that Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng was found in breach of an ethical code for the office he holds and is, therefore, instructed to apologise and retract his statement within a stipulated period of the next ten days. The history of this case and verdict dates back to June 23, 2020, when CJ Mogoeng participated along with Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein as invited in a webinar hosted by an Israeli newspaper, the Jerusalem Post. Under the theme: Two Chiefs, One Mission: Confronting Apartheid of the Heart.
Let me upfront put my disclaimer. It is impossible to have been subjected to and evil apartheid system of governance and not automatically identify with the Palestinian struggle. So, I do not entertain chicken-coop blackmailed minds who think if I critique the Palestinian solidarity groups and their chameleon identities for a justified Palestinian Struggle I automatically support Israel, the Israel that they advanced must be hated.
Africa for Palestine a pro- Palestine lobby group among others petitioned the Judicial Services Commission, who in turn tasked the Judicial Conduct Committee to investigate if Mogoeng was not in breach of an ethical code or any article for his utterances in both the webinar and the prayer. The findings against Mogoeng as communicated is that he involved himself in political controversy as an activity. The Committee also considered the prayer Mogoeng made on another ocassion.
Mogoeng is on record to have said, “So, whatever I have to say should not be misunderstood as an attempt to say the policy direction taken by my country in terms of their constitutional responsibilities is not binding on me, But, just as a citizen is entitled to criticise the laws and policies of South Africa or even suggest that changes are necessary and that’s where I come from.”
Mogoeng further notes: “The first base I give is in Psalm 122 verse 6, which says Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. They shall prosper that love thee. And see, also Genesis s 12 verse 1 to 3 that’s said to me as a Christian that, if I curse Abraham and Israel, God the Almighty God, will curse me. So, I am under obligation as a Christian to love Israel, to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, which means the peace of Israel. And I cannot as Christian, do anything other than love and prat for Israel because I know hatred for Israel, by me and for my nation, can only attract unprecedented curses upon our nation.”
Mogoeng continued “So what do you think should happen? I think, as a citizen of the great country, that we are denying ourselves a wonderful opportunity to be a game-changer in the Israeli- Palestinian situation.” Judge Phineas Mojapelo said: “the offending utterances made by the respondent CJ at the virtual prayer meeting and repeated in his Response 2 are particularly aggravating. They are brazenly defiant. Those utterances must be unreservedly retracted and withdrawn to return and maintain the public image of the judiciary to its rightful place.” According to Mojapelo, “Mogoeng may wish to criticise the policies of the executive he cannot do so publicly without raising controversy, that is, involving himself and his office in political controversy.’
Mojapelo about the complaint said, ’this was done on the eve before the appropriate SA executive authority was to make a statement on the same issue in the UN Security Council”
I find the ‘case’ and its subsequent verdict as yet another part of our jumbled perplexing and complicated space where we are held hostage to narratives that are so polarised that meaningful communication is sacrificed. In this sense the theory of utopia as advanced by Thomas More may assist in pointing us to detangle these meshed narratives with the hope of a transformative new paradigm where we can hear each other in meaningful engaging. Our stuck paradigm in which discourses often breaks down to a point where we cannot hear each other in clarity of thought.
In a sense, it is another moment that shows our unwillingness to engage in an attempt at the objectivity of subject matters, themes and topics that naturally cuts at our collective hearts and make our collective blood boil.
The case and verdict in its own right raises a coagulum of messages. Firstly, the context of the meeting CJ Mogoeng participated in his private capacity while he cannot escape his designation and function as the SA Chief Justice is a subject for discussion as not unique to him but a reality for all of us. That appears, deliberately ignored, misdirected and conflated for narrow metanarrative interests. If we prefer to sacrifice the context of this meeting, we might as well opt to let our 7-year-old pre-conceived notions of a man that hails from for some an obscure North West Province stands, who never was accepted by the chattering class, who from the start denigrated him by extending him a political identity immanent in being a Zuma lackey only because their anointed messiah Moseneke was overlooked. The CJ, therefore, was extended a political identity less of his own doing but as an orchestrated attempt by a section of the South African society.
At the time, Mogoeng, a less publicly known jurist not without due relevant experience and more than befitting academic credentials befitting who had the temerity to unashamedly told South Africa before his ascendancy to the office, if I get appointed it will be because God wanted me in the position. Herein lies the fundamental epistemology of CJ Mogoeng in his central convictions of his God that details his faith. This stance from the start invited critique and condemnation from some who often arrogate a custodianship of a SA constitution that in the minds are under threat. I call it deflection they always pretend the constitution is fragile.
Interwoven and intertwined themes of what makes for constitutional imperatives defines another layer of this complexity. One of the fruits of the South African liberation struggle history is the enshrined bill of rights that includes freedom of speech as an anchor tenant of our constitutional diaphragm. It simply cannot be that we are in sync with a notion to unilaterally deny citizens with diametrically opposite views to ours, their essential right to be. Meaning robbing them of what we treasure for ourselves in the fullness of meaningful life because we find it offensive for our chosen causes. There are at least two tenants of our constitution that are at risk here. Freedom of speech and the freedom to associate, cornerstone tenants of our constitutional society. Mogoeng is entitled like all of us to a constitutional right of actualising his freedom of speech and he is entitled to his right immanent in freedom of association in which religion explicitly stands central.
South-African solidarity lobby groups for a Palestinian Cause which details a similarity, though not exact, to our historical apartheid experience, reality do not automatically extend to us a right of denying people their rights to be pro-Israel particularly if their faith is factored into the equation since the latter is often the premise for such view, no different to those who may protest offence.
As part of the meshed and complex context of our current, it appears the Pro-Palestine lobby group[s] in many ways depict tendencies and characteristics akin to what we have seen in both LGBTQI… and Feminist lobby groups. What do I mean, in SA the LGBQTI lobby group and constituency often prove highly intolerant of the heterosexual community and often perceives the latter as the enemy. Meaning heterosexuals cannot in constitutional afforded right be part of the discourse unless they agree with the alternate life. They thus have to first deny themselves and identify with the dictates of the group for them to be having a public opinion. It is the same for the feminist lobby group they have made men natural enemies and write them out of participating since men resembles the natural enemy for this group. I have lamented the fact that in SA our discourses are weaponised to define enemies more than recognising congruence informed by an upheld constitutional imperative. This idea of excluding people from the necessary debates in abuse of victimhood is not sustainable and threatens the fibre of our very constitutional life experience.
The pro-Palestine solidarity positions like most lobby groups confirm blind spots in which they arrogate a right in the superlative to dictate from a victim reality while denying others their rights to associate and an opinion. They desensitised to see these blind spots, at times obdurate in wanting to direct because they define their square world notion as the order for all. There is a need to ask for the group to do its self-critique since it cannot be assumed that they naturally define what we all must comply with.
We must also similarly admit the issue of Palestine is not exclusively a land issue but vibrates a plethora of themes in which religious messaging and tones stand central, nothing wrong with that, let us just also admit it. Support of Palestine is inherently a support for Islam. There is nothing wrong with Islam which like all other faiths must be respected. The right to support however is upheld, while, it is also the right of others not to support a faith contrarian to their own faith persuasion must also be respected.
Another dimension of the conflated and complex and muddled space that define the subject of the Palestinian Cause and its support details the less stated reality of the hypocrisy of the South African elites regardless of faith persuasion as immanent across all sectors who publicly claim solidarity with a Palestinian cause when they deep in bed with Israel until even Mossad has a presence in SA. We know that part of the ongoing tension between Ramaphosa and Lindiwe Sisulu was directly linked to her principled stance. Her giving effect to the ANC decision to downgrade the SA embassy in Israel raised the ire of Jews who have more than the ears of Ramaphosa. Sisulu was subsequently removed from her position as DIRCO Minister. It is also in some circles claimed that in the aftermath of Trump’s move to have the USA embassy moved to Jerusalem that Ramaphosa was lobbied for the same and he had shown an appetite for such. To, therefore, pretend South Africa is so principally loyal to a Palestinian Cause that Israel is by extension an enemy of SA is a complete sophism.
To pretend the Palestine cause is exclusive of a cardinal religious aspect is again to be disingenuous. We owe it to ourselves, to be honest, to admit that the global religious economy in strange sanguinity to a much later capitalism invention conforms an undeniable contestation in which one informed by a Sacred Text believes he/she is right which automatically translates to someone else is wrong. From that prism and confirmed Sacred Text positions faith streams ascribes identities of a ‘sinner, heathen an infidel, suggesting not righteous. I have long said while we take simple comforts in assuming our faiths imbibes peace, therefore, implying a dictate of non-violence, our chequered collective histories confirm the opposite.
The Palestinian struggle like most struggles details anchor themes in which land may be the flagship but it does not exclude the necessary social life to be actualised on that land. We warrant keeping our eyes on all the oft shifting paradigms that define the struggle. So as much I always share in solidarity with the pain of Palestine, the Sacred Text from which I am privileged to pontificate is necessarily unequivocal in its kerygma that Christians must pray for the peace of Israel.
Now our plethora of contesting views detailing a slew of interpretations of the identity of Israel is our right. Likewise, our apprehensions and derision and mistrust on what some call a Zionist State as not remotely the Biblical Israel is a matter of debate as to where you determine your departure point may be. The average Christian devoid of all theological training and textual criticism and exegesis daily pray for Israel and to pretend you with your view on who the real Israel is will educate and fix their prism is not to appreciate how personal faith is.
We have heard of Muslim scholars who arrogated a right in the attempt of directing Mogoeng as to how wrong he interprets his Sacred Text. I have often wondered how they would react if non-Muslims would do the same of them on their Sacred Text. Faith is personal, faith is essential and faith is an integral part of being human. Yet faith is communal. It is often the sum totality of the morality of what dictates humanity. Since faith is so personal and yet communal its followers are naturally prone to have the propensity to be blinded, intolerant and even violent.
CJ Mogoeng as I have previously advanced, therefore, is on trial for his faith persuasion, his conscious choices to articulate his prism which is for us controversial but essential. My critique of the Palestine Solidarity crowd is their tangible absence to rally and call for land redress in the very SA from where they shout. There must be some measure of consistency if we want to be respected as principled. If it is about land for Palestine, why are they silent about the land of the South African aboriginals? What is so different from land lost by the aboriginals in the violence of colonial quest and brutalised by apartheid dehumanising? Is CJ Mogoeng targeted because he has shown an independent mind and not willing to be s stooge for a political agenda?
A closer reading of the JCC on this matter vibrates a wider political agenda. In the end, we must ask is the Judicial Conduct Committee not used as a means to an end to give effect to the factional political agenda of some that are to deal with what we can accept is a forthright CJ, one who owes no allegiance to the economic powers that be, and one who is above capture, despite a concerted initial intention to link him to former President Zuma.
I need to know why the case of intolerance and practising of double-standards cannot be made of the Palestine solidarity groups. On another level will the same lobby group have the same view and charge us if we advance a religious view such as Mogoeng did? Where does it leave us since we remain a deeply entrenched religious society? I simply can’t support the narrow mindedness of this verdict against Mogoeng. I think this in itself constitutes an injustice that our constitution which is used to red card Mogoeng cannot support. I find this case and subsequent verdict in its totality as very intolerant necessarily encroaching and not remotely in support of the constitutional democracy we claim.
CJ Mogoeng is finally charged and found guilty, you can’t but wonder is he not tried for his faith, the product of intolerance in this convoluted context of contesting narratives where transformative communication is not heard because we are blindsided to defend narratives with our lives .
This is necessarily political and polemical and hardly sincere.
A Lifelong Social Justice Activist Political Commentator & Writer is a SARChi D. Litt.et. Phil candidate in Political Science with the University of Johannesburg. Chairperson of TMoSA Foundation – The Thinking Masses of SA
