antisemitism – Bulletproof Truth

David Teeger has been Jewish all his life. His publicised views on Israel are far younger …

Something has changed since Teeger was CSA’s under-19 captain of choice just weeks ago, and it’s not his Jewishness.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

DAVID Teeger was born Jewish. He was Jewish when he first passed through the gates of King Edward VII School (KES) in Johannesburg, where prominent Jews like Ali Bacher, Ronnie Kasrils and Richard Goldstone have also walked. He was Jewish when he was named KES’ head boy and captain of the first XI.

Teeger was Jewish when his non-Jewish KES teammates walked with him from his home to cricket matches on a Saturday, when he was keeping Shabbat. He was Jewish when he made his debut for South Africa’s men’s under-19 cricket team — as the captain — in Bangladesh in July last year.

He was Jewish on November 10, when CSA’s under-19 structures decided he should keep the leadership for the coming World Cup, which starts on Friday. He was Jewish when CSA said the same thing on December 8, when the final squad for the tournament was named with him as captain. And he was Jewish last Friday, when the same CSA stripped him of the privilege of leadership citing security concerns. Few believe that is the real reason.

Teeger is, as he has always been and likely always will be, Jewish. South African cricket has known this for as long as he has been part of the game. Just like they know his father, James Teeger, who played seven first-class matches for the team now called Gauteng — then Transvaal — is Jewish.

Yet CSA have been accused of antisemitism for taking the under-19 captaincy away from Teeger, of demoting him “because he is a Jew”. Did CSA also appoint him “because he is a Jew”? Of course not. Could they have, by not making him captain “because he is a Jew”, averted the bother they have caused? Of course, and that would have been antisemitic to a degree obvious to semites and non-semites alike. Is what has happened an act of antisemitism? As is the case in all other accusations of racism — and antisemitism is this cancer’s most ancient form — the victims are the only legitimate arbiters of the question.

Clearly, something has changed since Teeger was CSA’s under-19 captain of choice just weeks ago. Was the switch flicked by Teeger’s decision — his alone — to express a view that millions worldwide would find abhorrent, especially coming from one so young? If you decline to take seriously CSA’s vague and unsubstantiated explanation, was he sacked because of what he said he believed?

CSA have denied that Teeger’s comments led to his axing. To believe that assertion you would also need to believe their claim about security concerns, which they have yet to turn into something close to believable. If you’ve had to put up with CSA, particularly their board, for long enough, you would be forgiven for lumping this saga on the heap of their other disasters.

Yes, Teeger has freedom of speech. He also has a responsibility to countenance the consequences of exercising that freedom. That he should punch down on people who are defenceless and under extreme attack will strike many as despicable. Yes, he was just 18 when he made his feelings known. Most of us who have seen 30 would shudder if our 18-year-old views came back to haunt us. But most of us have not been entrusted with a duty of care at the same level as Teeger.

What did Teeger say? This, at a ceremony where he accepted a Rising Star award at a Jewish Achiever Awards function in Johannesburg on October 22: “But more importantly, yes, I’ve been awarded this award, and yes, I am now the rising star, but the true rising stars are the young soldiers in Israel … So I’d like to dedicate this award to the South African family that married off one son whilst the other is still missing. And I’d like to dedicate it to the state of Israel and to every single soldier fighting so that we can live and thrive in the diaspora.”

When Teeger spoke, Israel had slaughtered 4,651 Palestinians in Gaza in bloody vengeance for the 1,139 Israelis murdered by Hamas during a cowardly terrorist attack on October 7. More than 200 were taken hostage, many of whom have been brutally raped and mutilated. Teeger didn’t deplore the overall violence. He picked a side; the wrong side in the view of the legions of all creeds and cultures who consider the Israel Defence Force an occupying force doing the bidding of a dangerous regime.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s feared and loathed right wing government have pushed Israel so close to the edge of civilisation that South Africa have brought a case of genocide against them at the UN’s International Court of Justice. South Africans didn’t need their government’s prompting to be disgusted by Israel’s behaviour, but many have been heartened by this rare bolt of integrity from their leaders.

In that context, Teeger’s words can only have had a disastrous impact on his perceived ability to lead people from different backgrounds. As Zizi Kodwa, South Africa’s minister of sport, rightly told the squad on Friday after Teeger learnt of his axing: “Whatever you do now, you are no longer yourselves. You are ambassadors for South Africa.” How could Teeger, considering what he had said, be considered fit to captain?

Did Teeger say what he said because he is Jewish? No. Kasrils, a stalwart of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid, would not have agreed with him. On November 28, at a meeting in Johannesburg to finalise plans on the eve of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Kasrils described Hamas’ massacre, in which the elderly were gunned down as they waited at bus-stops and homes were set on fire because they were occupied, as “a brilliant, spectacular guerrilla warfare attack. They swept on them and they killed them and damn good. I was so pleased and people who support resistance applauded.”

In September 1992 Kasrils was among the leaders of a protest in the Eastern Cape at which 28 were shot dead by soldiers. A judicial commission found that Kasrils’ reckless decision-making was instrumental in the catastrophe. The judge who led the probe was Kasrils’ KES contemporary: Goldstone.

Formerly a judge on South Africa’s highest court, Goldstone would also likely not be of the same mind as Teeger. In his report for the UN on three weeks of violence in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009 during which more than 1,430 were killed, Goldstone accused both sides of targeting civilians and of possibly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. In a piece for the Washington Post published in April 2011, Goldstone wrote: “If I had known then what I know now the Goldstone report would have been a very different document.” But he stood by his report.

Wim Trengove, a renowned barrister, was given a less taxing brief than Goldstone when CSA — having received formal complaints, not all of them from Muslims — asked him to decide whether what Teeger said breached their code of conduct. CSA revealed Trengove’s report on December 7. It didn’t say Teeger had “been cleared of all wrongdoing”, as has been reported. It did say he had not violated the code of conduct. The next day, CSA named the under-19 World Cup squad. Teeger’s name was at the top of the list as captain.

And that despite, in his responding affidavit to Trengove, Teeger apparently not understanding why he had angered enough South Africans to justify an investigation: “It was therefore hurtful to read that my personal reflection on 22 October 2023 of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack has been equated to supporting genocide or condoning hatred based on race, ethnicity or religion.

“Judging the conduct of the different sides during this war is a highly contested and complex matter with strongly held views on both sides. My personal and honestly held view is that Israel and its soldiers have not committed genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity. In addition, this view is held by many people and democratic governments around the world, like the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, India, Australia and many countries in the European Union. Thus, my statements were not in support of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity because in my view Israel is innocent of all these allegations.

“On the other hand, I accept that many people and governments, including the South African government, hold an opposing view. Disagreeing in a respectful manner on a contested and emotionally charged matter is a fundamental pillar of our democracy and Constitution. I respect the right of others to disagree with my view on Israel.”

There is no acknowledgement in those words that perhaps he got this wrong, no attempt to learn, no recognition that he should be relieved he wasn’t booted out of the squad. By Tuesday, the Gaza death toll, which was already climbing when Teeger originally spoke, soared past 24,000. And still he has said nothing, publicly, that might make us think he has empathy. He’s only 19 — his birthday was the day before he discovered he had been sacked — but how old do you have to be to say you feel for your fellow humans?

CSA would have been within their rights to relieve Teeger of the captaincy immediately they became aware of his October 22 comments. Nobody, as Quinton de Kock and Dean Elgar would attest, has a lock on the leadership of South Africa’s teams. That logic wasn’t apparent during a South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) press conference on Tuesday, which followed a SAJBD meeting with CSA. The presser was billed as an opportunity to “discuss [CSA’s] decision to strip … Teeger of his captaincy”. His captaincy? There is no such thing. The leadership of all teams under CSA’s aegis is theirs, and theirs alone, to bestow and remove as they see fit.

Teeger isn’t exempt because he is Jewish, just as he shouldn’t be sacked because he is Jewish. Tuesday’s presser offered no evidence of the latter. It snowballed into bombast about political interference, bald accusations of antisemitism wielded like weaponry, and shrill threats of further action. It took us no closer to the truth. Instead it veered into hubris: you might have thought Teeger was the next Donald Bradman, not someone who has played only eight 50-over games for South Africa’s under-19 team and passed 50 just once.

The truth will only be known if CSA explain why they retained Teeger even after what he told Trengove. The vacuum left by their failure to lead has been filled by fuel for a fire. It could burn long after the under-19 World Cup.

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South African cricket without Ali Bacher? Unthinkable …

“There weren’t any ashtrays in ICU.” – Ali Bacher on why he stopped smoking.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

A small boy stares not quite down the barrel of the camera’s lens. His thatch of thick, dark hair has been subdued. A side path suggests itself demurely above the inside corner of his left eye, but a renegade faction of follicles on his right plots a rebellion.

His forehead stretches wide, open, ambitious. His eyebrows are serious, a murmur of a furrow between them. The tops of his ears tend towards horizontal, like an annoyed cat’s. His eyes brim with the shine of good days. His earlobes acquiesce to the upper reaches of the sheer determination of his jaw.

His ample cheeks are ripe with promise. A hint of dimple lurks above his sturdy chin. His nose is simply a nose. The focal point is his mouth. It is an almost straight line of silence. Closed. Tucked at the corners. Unsmiling but not unfriendly.

He wears a light-coloured jacket, a white collared shirt, and a tie, knotted four-in-hand style by a right-hander, of flat, bold, contrasting stripes. He is alone, corralled in closely cropped black-and-white, in front of a plain background a shade or two darker than his face.

Anyone who has been a small boy made to comb his hair properly, wear adults’ clothes and sit still while someone skulks behind a black box pointed at you knows how he feels. Another stultifying second and the intensity held between those purposefully pursed lips will surely burst into the studio.

The photograph is of Aron Bacher, aged five, in his first year at Yeoville Boys’ Primary School in Johannesburg. It was taken two years after World War II, the year before white South Africans elected the party that would legislate racism, and three years before the father of a friend of our small boy referred to the gaggle who gathered to play football and cricket at the man’s house as “Ali Baba and his 40 thieves”. Only then did Ali Bacher arrive, eight years old and all grown up.

The picture was part of an exhibition at the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town: The Life of Ali Bacher: from the cricket Field to the Boardroom. Seventy-six years it was taken, Bacher is still with us; he turns 81 on May 24. He is unarguably the father of modern South African cricket, who shaped the game in the wake of the abolition of apartheid. In other countries that would be an unalloyed accolade. In this country it comes loaded and laden with complexities and whataboutery.

Bacher is far more complicated than the Mr Cricket he was throughout the 1980s and 90s and until after the 2003 men’s World Cup, of which he was the executive director. At 16 his batting was compared favourably, by noted Australian journalist Dick Whitington, to no less than Donald Bradman’s. He made his first-class debut at 17, and at 21 he captained what became under his watch the strongest provincial team in the country despite being the youngest player in that side. He led South Africa in the last four Tests they played before isolation started in 1970. Bacher guided Transvaal to five Currie Cup titles and won all of his Tests in charge.

About the latter he still jokes: “All I had to do was win the toss.” He did. All four times. Another of his jokes is the punchline to his story of surviving a heart attack, aged 39 in 1981, which he claims was not the reason he went from smoking 60 cigarettes a day to none. That happened because “there weren’t any ashtrays in ICU”.

Bacher had retired in 1974 with 18 first-class centuries and an average of 39.07 in 212 innings along with only a dozen losses among his 78 first-class captaincies. By 1981 he had ended his career as a medical doctor to run a pharmaceutical company. He also chaired the Transvaal Cricket Council (TCC), which governed white cricket in and around Johannesburg. His health crisis prompted a rethink about his future, and months later he was the TCC’s — and South African cricket’s — first managing director.

Modernising mayhem ensued, including South Africa’s first player contracts, season tickets, Sunday matches — a shock in a then severely Calvinist white society — and a better relationship with the press. Bacher lured prominent players, which brought top dollar sponsorships, and built the Wanderers’ first corporate suites. The game in this country had never known anything like what he brought to what had been the slow, sleepy business of cricket.

Bacher’s executive style might be called frequently chaotic, furiously efficient micro-management. Or everything everywhere all at once, long before it was the title of an Oscar-winning film. Somehow, despite that, sometimes it seemed despite himself, things got done. And done well. And on time. And within budget. And to the satisfaction of even his most vocal and powerful detractors.

So effective was he that a vast coordinated international boycott couldn’t stop him, as managing director of the white South African Cricket Union (SACU), from bringing rebel teams to marooned South Africa to play against a so-called national side — only the white team were accepted, by whites at home and by all abroad, as “South Africa”.

The emphasis on race is significant. Every racial group in the country played cricket to what has since been recognised as first-class level, and every separate group had set up structures much like the SACU. But, because of the crippling social and economic restrictions that apartheid put on black and brown South Africans, only white cricket made money and could be called an industry. Hence only white cricket needed to keep making money to survive in the manner to which it had become accustomed. Thus only white cricket was threatened by the political pressure and economic sanctions applied to the apartheid state. Unsurprisingly white cricket saw itself and was seen as relatively liberal-minded but firmly part of that state’s establishment.

To Bacher fell the job of raising the funds required to keep it alive as a major white sport. Knowing that even complete and genuine racial unity in the game wouldn’t earn South Africa the green light from the ICC to return to the international arena while apartheid remained on the statute books, Bacher turned to rebel tours. He has admitted that the last of the seven ventures, by an English team led by Mike Gatting, was “in retrospect … the wrong decision”.

But he has steadfastly argued that without the rebel tours cricket would have died in South Africa. White cricket, he might have said. And why would that have happened if black and brown cricket managed, albeit barely, to survive? Did white cricket consider itself more important? Did it think it was the only cricket in the country? Or the only cricket in the country worth saving?

The rebel tours, which were staged from 1982 to 1990, put the game on the wrong side of history. While much of the world and millions of South Africans were fighting apartheid, white cricket was actively and selfishly trying to flout that fight. Essentially, white cricket said it was more important than justice and a better life for oppressed black and brown South Africans.

In some circles Bacher remains detested as the embodiment of that notion. Because, despite the unity achieved at the level of the suits in 1991 and the growing number of black and brown players in the national teams, cricket in South Africa remains racially polarised. That’s why Newlands, for instance, isn’t graced by pavilions named after Basil D’Oliveira and Eddie Barlow. Instead anodyne appellations abound, like the Wanderers’ Unity, Memorial and Centenary stands. The sole exception — the Graeme Pollock Pavilion at St George’s Park — proves the rule: Pollock is among the most reactionary of his generation of privileged white players, a serial complainant about efforts to ensure South Africans of all races have the opportunity to make the most of their talent.

You will not hear acknowledgement, outside of a certain circle, of Bacher’s borderline obsessive driving of the 1980s development programme to find black and brown talent. Nor that the West Indian rebels he brought to the country were a rare example of whites paying money to watch their white team play black opponents, who won nine of the 17 decided matches. Nor that Bacher himself intervened physically when matters became heated between police and protestors during the Gatting tour, to the point of him securing from the authorities permission for a legal protest at one match in exchange for no action by protestors at the remaining games of a curtailed schedule. There is no defending rebel tours, just as there is no point pretending they never happened. Or that people like Bacher are all good, all bad, or not to be spoken to or of.

There is also no getting away from Bacher’s Jewishness. He was born into a war started by a man who would oversee the systematic murder of six-million Jews and into a country where support for the Nazis was not uncommon. Bacher now lives in a country where the third-largest parliamentary party, a vicious far right rabble masquerading as left wing called the Economic Freedom Fighters, spew antisemitism and have shown a lust for violence. White South Africans regard Jews as of the same race, but do not spare them casual racism; usually dog whistle tropes about money. Black and brown South Africans also stoop to this behaviour. Had Bacher not been Jewish he would not have attracted the levels of suspicion, distrust and negativity that have come his way.

Complexities? We have a few. That’s why a comprehensive South African cricket museum does not exist. It cannot. The game does not know what to do with the artefacts of its history because that history is, as it always has been and will be for the foreseeable future, bitterly contested.

In 2012 CSA decided to begin forming a collection with a view to curating it into a museum. That idea lasted a few months, or as long as the hopelessly limited administrators needed to realise they didn’t have nearly enough maturity or sensitivity for the task. Maybe not enough of them were equipped to treat with fairness figures like Bacher — neither a monster nor a messiah but a man of his time and place who dared, in good and bad ways, to make a difference.

The exhibition dedicated to his life and career was a wonderful example of what history can do if we would only let it. You could feel the care that went into getting all this stuff into the space, see the love in its meticulous curation.

The displays were almost devoid of banal bits and bobs like bats and balls. Instead they were awash with photographs and documents — a letter from Bradman to arrange a private dinner during a visit by Bacher and his wife, Shira, to Adelaide before the 1992 World Cup has its typed coldness warmed by a poignant postscript: “We are Don and Jessie to you.”

The photographs were of some of the myriad lives Bacher’s has touched and been touched by. It was difficult not to be moved by the image of him in his first year at school, most of his remarkable life still to be lived. Asked, by text message, when the picture was taken, Bacher didn’t reply “1947”. Instead, he did what he always does — the human thing. He called: “Well, let’s work it out. I was born in 1942 and I was five when I started school …”

Ali Bacher has been working things out for almost 81 years. So far, mostly, so good.

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