Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer
Revisiting the Zionism/Racism Debate in the Present Climate, Part 2
Summary
In this follow-up to the first discussion on Zionism and racism, a deeper dive into the concept of prejudice, differentiating between anti-religion, anti-race, and anti-nation sentiments, highlighting how these have evolved over time and converge in the present. Scapegoating emerges as a central theme, explaining the historical and contemporary scapegoating of Jews. The presentation touches on expressions of these ideas in the West and from some Muslim countries. Part 2 of 2.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
I wish that anybody could see into the mind of two remarkable, brilliant, possibly amongst the best writers in English language. I love their works but it’s impossible to speculate their minds and it could well have been that they were fitting into the times.
That’s exactly the whole proposition that I was trying to deal with, and what I suppose is particularly worrying to me is that we often essentially just throw these insults out at people that we don’t like, rather than actually interrogating their views.
I think that’s the challenge. I don’t have an answer to it, but I think we have to face the question, and I was saying there’s a tradition, which is not just face the question, but sought to answer it in the best possible way.
I do think there’s a problem with the question of settlements. I do think there’s a very big difference between Israel proper, if I could put it in the ‘67 borders, and some people wouldn’t regard that as Israel proper at all and what’s going on in the occupied territories, which is an entirely different proposition.