The Voices in My Head: Reflections on South Africa, Israel, Palestine, Gaza

by Stephen Clingman

June 24, 2025

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Alon Confino.

At around 7 pm on October 7th, 2023, I arrived at Oliver Tambo Airport in Johannesburg; I was on my way to Bloemfontein to present the Bram Fischer Memorial Lecture, a talk I had titled, “Bram Fischer, or What Happens When the World Becomes Inhospitable.”[1] By the time I made it to my hotel room at the airport—I was traveling on the next day—I was exhausted after something approaching twenty-four hours in transit. Like any overnight patron, I turned on the TV, and news had broken of the Hamas attack and massacres in southern Israel of that day. I was hallucinatory enough, but this was quite something to go to bed on. When I went down to breakfast the next morning before travelling on, what was on TV in the hotel dining area was probably, for the most part, sport.

So there I was that week in Bloemfontein, the city where Bram Fischer had been born and where he died a political prisoner, released with incurable cancer in his last weeks to his brother’s house. He had come from an eminent Afrikaner family. His grandfather had been a leader of the Orange Free State during the Boer War and first (and only) Prime Minister of the Orange River Colony after it; when Louis Botha formed his first cabinet in 1910 as South Africa became a Union, Abraham Fischer was a member. Bram Fischer’s father, Percy, had been Judge President of the Orange Free State, and Bram, like father and grandfather before him, became a lawyer. Charismatic, principled, quiet-spoken, it was said of him that he would be Prime Minister or Chief Justice.

Instead he followed a different path. During the early 1930s he took up a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. He witnessed the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler, and travelled with a small group of student friends to the Soviet Union, writing letters back to his family in English and Afrikaans. Some time after his return to South Africa—most likely after the Nazi invasion of the USSR during the war—he joined the Communist Party. Thereafter his life was insistently linked to the history of political resistance in South Africa. He took part in the major political trials of the era, and led the legal defense of Nelson Mandela and the other accused at the Rivonia Trial. Soon after, Fischer was hunted down, arrested, put on trial, and after a series of dramatic events, including ten months underground and in disguise, was sentenced to life in prison. After his death in 1975, the South African state refused to release his ashes to his family, on the grounds that they were property of the Prisons Department.

That day, October 7th, 2023, I flew from Johannesburg and landed in Bloemfontein at the Bram Fischer International Airport. It was—and is—small and unprepossessing for a place with such a grand name. Bram Fischer had been an icon of the anti-apartheid struggle, a white man who identified with all of South Africa’s people. He never denied his identity as an Afrikaner, but it prompted him towards that larger identification. Indeed, in his speech from the dock he said he had undertaken his actions precisely because he felt a supreme duty, that at least one Afrikaner should fight against the policies his people had instituted. He also said he had done this so that one day blacks and whites could live together in South Africa in peace.

Bram Fischer, Mandela, and their comrades had fashioned a liberation movement that was not about black versus white but about the transformation of an iniquitous system so that all could live freely in the same country.

Now there was October 7th. What would I say in my lecture? This, to say the least, was not the point, though it was hardly what I had planned for. As the news unfolded there was the obvious shock of a tumultuous moment. As some of the early details emerged, I felt what I had felt before but now even more strongly. This was a horrific symptom of a morbid situation. Reinforcing a thought that had been in my mind for some time, I felt that Gaza could only be solved on the West Bank. What this meant to me was clear. Israel had to become a different kind of state, it had to get out of the business of occupation and discrimination and find a way to peace.

That was what I believed then, and I believe it still. I was, in a way, seeing Israel through South African eyes, perhaps even through Bram Fischer’s eyes. I didn’t say any of this directly in my lecture, but I’m sure if I had done so, to most Jewish Israelis it would have sounded callous and unfeeling in the extreme.

*

Growing up in Johannesburg in my formative years in the 1960s, then heading on to university in the 1970s, I had never been through some of the experiences around Israel and Jewish identity that had such an impact on others. Yes, my great-grandfather had been one of the first rabbis in Johannesburg, the founder of the Beth Din in the early city. I went to shul when I had to, there were glorious Pesach seders at my mother’s parents in Kempton Park where the children played marbles with the nuts and the older cousins managed to get nicely inebriated on the four cups of wine. But I never went to Habonim or any of the other youth movements. Come Saturday morning, all I wanted was to be outdoors playing sport, because I was good at it and loved it. So I never had the affiliation that others did, the experience of the end-of-year Habonim camp in the Cape where a generation got its political education, a left-Zionism. To be honest, Zionism meant little to me. If I dreamed of going anywhere when I was ten, it was to Australia, because that was where the world’s greatest batsman, Don Bradman, had emerged from the alluring hinterlands of New South Wales. I wanted that dimpled green cap the Australian cricketers wore in their national team. By the time I got to high school, for complex reasons I felt alienated and alone. University and study became a home for me, an affiliation to the world of ideas. Apartheid was the challenge, how to live with it, through it, and against it, though I was by no means as courageous as others.

Israel? That was another world. Not mine. Living in the USA, my heart has stayed with South Africa. The paradox is that I, who have lived outside of South Africa for so long, still yearn for it at some level. But as the repercussions of October 7th have gone on and the war in Gaza taken over, I have reflected on Jewish Israelis who may in some respects be like me. I have no difficulty imagining searing inner conflict. They may passionately hate Netanyahu for what he has done to Israel, whether to prolong his own political survival or reshape the Middle East, for the imperial vision, proto-fascism and incipient civil war he has introduced. They may feel that the rest of the world is hypocritical, that there are vicious and oppressive regimes elsewhere that don’t draw the same attention, that there is a rising antisemitism everywhere. They know what it’s like to take refuge in their safe rooms while missiles fly towards them from Iran, and also what it’s like when someone is trying to kill you. They may visit the south to see the somber record of the massacres, the sexual violence and abductions. They will go out to the massed weekly demonstrations and demand a different plan to bring back the abandoned hostages. Sometimes, no doubt, they feel despair, that the Israel they once believed existed is disappearing, destroyed from within as well as without.

These are powerful imagined voices in my head. But I also have an ongoing dialogue with them. What are they not thinking about—or not allowing themselves to think?

*

There are other voices.

I have a friend from Lebanon, a former student and now colleague. He is of mixed Muslim and Christian parentage. When he first walked into my office more than twenty years ago we formed an immediate bond, not least over music which we played together. For myself, I have always been interested in versions of identity that do not retreat to the center but lead outwards, towards others. That is where the challenge lies, that is where the promise lies, that is where something unexpected and sometimes magical happens in the space between people. Putting it this way makes it sound cerebral and deliberate, but that wasn’t the case with my friend. It was, and has remained, a true friendship, one of the most precious I have. It means a lot to me that the two of us, born into such different circumstances in such different cultures, can connect on a human level and find something rich and fulfilling there. My friend sometimes comes to us on Friday night, drinks the wine, eats the challah with us. It means a lot to me that we have this kind of understanding.

He talks to me too, sends signals from the world of his affiliations and loyalties. He is always sure to distinguish between being Jewish and the policies of Israel. But as for those policies, my reading is they strike him to the core. It is not only now the occupation, but the daily pounding of Gaza, the killing of women, men, grandparents, children, the obliteration of life there. He has no illusions about Hamas and condemns all war crimes no matter the source, but he understands the desperation and hopelessness that generate such a movement. As he says, he follows the evidence as determined by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and reports at the United Nations among others that what is going on in Gaza is genocide.[2]

My friend has also seen what occurred in Lebanon as buildings in South Beirut were bombed. His brother-in-law was three blocks away from one that was blown up from the air. He has his own experience of that. Growing up he lived through the Lebanese Civil War. He also remembers the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, how the Israeli planes would fly overhead breaking the sound barrier to shatter windows and nerves, missiles coming down. He remembers that well.

My Lebanese friend thinks of the women and children of Gaza, of the occupied in the West Bank expelled from their villages, their homes pulverized by military bulldozers, the settlers from Brooklyn or Chicago who somehow feel entitled to move in and claim this place as their home. He thinks of starvation used as a weapon of war. How could he not?

I talk with my Lebanese friend. I hear voices representing—or claiming to represent—Israel. I hear in stereo, a dissonant and sometimes almost schizoid experience. I think of South Africa, of Bram Fischer. These are all voices in my head.

*

I have Israeli friends who are by no means forgiving of what is happening in Gaza. One takes walks in the neighborhood near my home wearing a t-shirt saying “Free Palestine Now.” He and I have spirited discussions on everything, not only Israel-Palestine.

My dear friend, Alon Confino, who passed away at a tragically early age in 2024, was the director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts. Alon started his professional life as an historian of Germany and then turned to the rise of Nazism in relation to Jews. His iconic book, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (2014), has become a classic study of the Nazi political imagination that enabled the Holocaust.[3] Alon himself came from a longstanding Israeli family, of Italian descent. His grandfather Enzo Sereni, who parachuted into central Italy behind Nazi lines during the war and was captured and murdered in Dachau, was regarded as a Zionist hero. Alon grew up in the Jerusalem quarter of Talbiyeh. He would see the Arab names on the houses and streets there, but living an idyllic life, never questioned why that was.[4] 

Over time he focused his professional attention on Israel, on the history of its birth and the Nakba, and began to see it through the lens he had previously turned on Germany. What had happened to the Israeli imagination? How were the histories of the birth of Israel and the Nakba profoundly linked? In his last years—he did not know they were his last—he was writing a book on 1948, which would have told both the Jewish and Palestinian story leading up to the creation of Israel in the way only he could, mixing the political and the personal. It was to be centered on one Zionist and one Palestinian family.

My favorite essay of Alon’s tells the story of Genya and Henryk Kowalski, two survivors from Germany after the war who arrived in Israel in 1949. They had emerged from the concentration camps, and landed in Haifa where they were put in tents. In the cold and rain life was miserable. Genya went to the Jewish Agency which had promised them apartments, and they told her she was in luck, because a house had just become available. They gave her the key, and the Kowalskis went off to Jaffa to take possession. The house, said Genya, was beautiful, but they never even went inside. In the garden they saw a round table set with plates, everything laid out. They felt fear, but besides the fear there was something else. The house had clearly been owned by a Palestinian family. How could they live there? They remembered how it felt when the Germans arrived and put them in the ghetto. “I did not want to do the same thing the Germans did,” said Genya.[5] She and Henryk turned around, went back to Haifa and returned the key.

The story tells a counter-history, of what might have been—of how people, refugees themselves, would have recognized the humanity of others and refused to turn them into refugees. Recognizing the intricate entanglement of the Holocaust and the Nakba, in Alon’s words, does not diminish either of them. “Rather, it makes us more and not less human: fallible and vulnerable, as we all are.”[6]

What if this little gap opened up by the Kowalskis, this counter-history, had become generalized, if it had become actual history? Where would we be now? In understanding the history of his country, Alon underwent his own transformation. What he earlier wrote of as the forced migration of Palestinians he later termed ethnic cleansing. As for his Zionist grandfather, he discovered more about him that put his story in a different light.[7] He also understood the nexus between Jews fleeing Europe and settler colonialism, quoting the Palestinian-Israeli scholar Raef Zreik on the topic: “The Europeans see the back of the Jewish refugee fleeing for his life. The Palestinian sees the face of the settler colonialist taking over his land.”[8] Alon’s closest friend and colleague, the historian Amos Goldberg, was clear in calling what was happening in Gaza genocide.[9] I have read of the Israeli policy and practice of making Gaza “unusable” and of the chilling ethical betrayals of the Israeli medical establishment.[10] During 2024 I desperately wanted to get Alon’s guidance on it all, but that wasn’t possible. He died in June of that year, and his absent voice will always echo in my head.

*

I have other voices in mind.

One is that of Nadine Gordimer, South African, Jewish by birth but without much in the way of affiliation to Jewish religion or culture. She was a fiction writer, and won the Nobel Prize for her work. At the same time, she was profoundly committed to telling the truth as she saw it. In one of her iconic essays, she wrote, “nothing I say here will be as true as my fiction,” but whether in fiction or non-fiction, the truth was her lodestar.[11] Specifically, in her life as a citizen she spoke out against apartheid, and it was not only a matter of speech. In the dangerous days of the 1980s—the interregnum, as she called it—she put her body on the line, along with other whites attending funerals in the black townships to protect the students from the police, giving evidence in court on behalf of ANC accused. In the 1970s, at the height of the Black Consciousness movement, when she was told that whites had no right to write about black characters, she insisted that they had not only the right but also the obligation. Whites could write about blacks, blacks about whites, women about men, men about women. In circumstances that were often fraught, she had courage. What would she be saying about Gaza now, I sometimes wonder. I suspect I know the answer. She would, in the title of one of her essays, insist on the need to “Speak Out.”[12]

Then here is Hannah Arendt, writing in the 1940s before the foundation of Israel but analyzing its future trajectory with extraordinary prescience. Herself a refugee, she was by no means insensitive to the conditions Jews in Europe had faced.[13] But in her view, a nationalist Zionism was not the solution to that predicament. Not least, she distrusted the nexus between Western imperialism and Zionism. The imperialism she distrusted at that point was British, but her analysis could be extended to the present day in the form of the US-Israeli alliance. Such an alliance, she pointed out, never ends well for the dependent party. Protection by these interests, she remarked, “supports a people as the rope supports for hanging…. [T]ill we achieve the bliss of messianic times, an alliance between a lion and a lamb can have disastrous consequences for the lamb.” What were among those consequences? The most important was a refusal to negotiate or interact in a meaningful way with the local peoples among whom one settles. “But only folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbors.”[14] Those who live in the shade of imperial power may in the end pay the price in that margin. Certainly others will.

There is also Peter Beinart, American, Jewish, with South African connections, whose book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, I read with admiration.[15] Beinart is devoutly religious, and can quote chapter and verse for his views. As for those views, when it comes to the matter of Gaza, his commitment is based on key Jewish principles. When he lists all the ways of “not seeing” what is happening that many Jews and Israelis are prone to—the rationales and deflections, sometimes the outright lies propagated by the Israeli government—I know I have heard versions of them myself, all by way of deflecting the reality of the relentless pounding of human beings in Gaza, the way it is being made unlivable. Bram Fischer acted not despite the fact that he was an Afrikaner but because of it. Peter Beinart does not face the risks that Fischer did; still, he speaks out not despite the fact that he is Jewish but because of it.

*

Where then do I stand? Where do I find my own voice?

If I have loyalties, they are not to some abstract idea of Israel or the Jewish people. At a meeting in our local Jewish community to discuss October 7th and the war in Gaza, one of those present said “We are all one people.” I disagree. We are not one people, and this is not a problem. It is the notion of singular identities that is the problem, that has caused many of the problems in history; witness South Africa; witness Germany in the 1930s. I am not drawing equivalences here, though there are overlaps to be sure. Rather, recognizing the multiplicity of identity by its nature is a form of constructing other solutions, both within “a people” and among peoples. Recognizing faultlines in yourself—perhaps with all the meanings of “fault”—will make you more receptive to the faultlines in others, and to relationships with them. It certainly enables compassion.

If I do have loyalties, more likely they are to people I know. It is hard to contradict those one is close to, but care can act as a constraint on speaking out, on saying the truth as one sees it. Care cannot stop at the borders of Jewish lives.

One can consider this in practical terms. All that Israeli policy is doing both on the West Bank and in Gaza is unifying the world against it as well as reproducing the conditions that generate Hamas. Maximalist ethnic extremism produces maximalist ethnic extremism. It has also made life for Jews outside of Israel that much more vulnerable. But beyond the politics, the practicality, and the consequences there is simply the morality, there is the question of justice. Killing children en masse: can that ever be right? Will it solve anything? How can you use starvation to press people into submission? Do you have no sense of history? In the blink of an eye former victims can become perpetrators; the history of the world tells us this.

I do know a few things. Hamas is not a liberation movement. I come out of South Africa, and for all the disappointments and even betrayals of the postapartheid world, I know what a liberation movement is by its philosophy, what the ANC stood for in its classic anti-apartheid years. Its philosophy was one in which the aim was the liberation of all, both the oppressed and the oppressors. As a white South African I felt a weight lift with the ending of apartheid.

It would be good if there were such a liberation movement in Israel-Palestine, and there are hints of it—Israelis and Palestinians doing the work of engaging together, planting the seeds of a different future. This is hard and difficult work, especially in current circumstances, and no less precious for that.

To the extent I support anything, that is what I support. In my dreams I imagine a country called Israel-Palestine or Palestine-Israel where all can live in freedom, equality, dignity and peace. There are many ways of working out the technicalities, but in truth that is what most people in the world want: to live in peace, to have food to eat, to be able to bring up and love their children. The rest, as they say, is commentary. The technicalities can be worked out, but first must come the vision, the imagination and the commitment. End the occupation, end the war, focus on repair and reparation. Establish a state of justice and fairness for all; not just for some, and certainly not on the basis of identity, the accidents of birth. That is the peace I would like to see. Do this before it is too late. That is the voice in my head.

Notes

I am grateful to James Simpson for meticulous reading and for friendship in the final stages of this essay; also to Amos Goldberg for corrections and important perspectives. I take full responsibility, however, for the views I express here. The essay was completed shortly before Israel initiated its latest bombing raids against Iran in June 2025, with whatever foreseen and unforeseen consequences. I send it off nonetheless with the hope that its vision is intact.

[1] Stephen Clingman, “Bram Fischer, or What Happens When the World Becomes Inhospitable.” Law and Critique 35.3 (2024), 571-86. Video of the lecture, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf6Z_PAPPs4.

[2] For respective reports, see the following: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/; https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-extermination-acts-genocide-gaza; https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976.

[3] Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale UP, 2014).

[4] Alon Confino, “Afterword: Between Talbiyeh and Me,” in Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples, ed. Omer Bartov (New York: Berghahn, 2021), 402-25.

[5] Alon Confino, “When Genya and Henryk Kowalski Challenged History—Jaffa 1949: Between the Holocaust and the Nakba,” in The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, ed. Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (New York: Columbia UP, [2018]), 135-36.

[6] Confino, “When Genya and Henryk Kowalski,” 145.

[7] Alon Confino, “My grandfather, Enzo Sereni” (August 2024), translatable into English using Google translate at https://hazmanhazeh.org.il/enzo/.

[8] Quoted, Alon Confino, “Afterword: Between Talbiyeh and Me,” 416-17.

[9] Amos Goldberg, “Yes, It’s Genocide,” Shicha Mekomit, 17 April 2024, https://www.mekomit.co.il/ps/134005/. English translation at Swiss Policy Research, 9 May 2024, https://swprs.org/professor-amos-goldberg-yes-it-is-genocide/.

[10] See, respectively, Meron Rapaport and Oren Ziv, “‘Render it Unusable’: Israel’s Mission of Total Urban Destruction,” +972 Magazine, 15 May 2025,  https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-total-urban-destruction/; and Neve Gordon, Guy Shalev, and Osama Talous, “The Shame of Israeli Medicine,” New York Review of Books, 31 May 2025, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/05/31/the-shame-of-israeli-medicine/.

[11] For the quotation, see “Living in the Interregnum,” in Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. and intr. Stephen Clingman (New York: Knopf; London: Jonathan Cape; 1988), 264.

[12] Nadine Gordimer: “Speak Out: The Necessity for Protest,” in The Essential Gesture, 87-103.

[13] See, for instance, “We Refugees” in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), 264-74.

[14] These quotations: Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” in The Jewish Writings , 364, 372.

[15] Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (New York: Knopf, 2025).