South African anti-apartheid politician, activist and Jew Ronnie Kasrils, a man with a long history of support for the Palestinians, spoke on 24 October at the National Association of Democratic Lawyers of South Africa about the Goldstone Gaza report:
The reason for the hysteria against Justice Goldstone’s Report goes far deeper than the findings. Goldstone is a self-professed Zionist, of liberal persuasion. Some like him believe that Israel can and should live up to its founding ideals and commitment to justice, equality and the rule of law – and act as an inspirational “light unto the nations.” He clearly and sincerely hopes that Israel will reform its ways. Unfortunately this commonly held view of the past sixty years hides the reality of the expropriation by force of an indigenous people’s land, and their dispersal in a bloody process of ethnic cleansing from 1948 to present times. In their place a colonial, racist state has been installed which has become more militaristic, morally bankrupt and grotesque with time. Quite naturally those who have been dispossessed will fight for their land and rights as has happened in all other such cases of dispossession and injustice, including South Africa. Liberal Zionists like Justice Goldstone, and many governments and people particularly in the West, succumbed to the confidence trick that projects the establishment of an ethnic home for the Jews in another people’s land as a righteous act of national liberation and independence. It is like saying that an untamed South Africa was liberated by the white settlers.