Missed chance to unite against slavery

At the Passover-Seder Jews eat maror (bitter herbs) which reminds us of the bitterness of Jews being slaves in Egypt. A few days ago (on March 25) the Israeli Ambassador at the UN voted against the resolution calling slavery a crime against humanity.

By PHILIP VEERMAN

The reason that Israel voted at the UN General Assembly against this resolution initiated by Ghana, was (according to the online media portal MG Modern Ghana of March 30) “that Israel said it supported efforts to acknowledge the historical impact of slavery, but it had reservations about specific wording in the text”. Also the members of the European Union found the wording of the resolution problematic and they all abstained. Modern Ghana quotes an Israeli statement: ”While we fully recognize the unparalleled scale and cruelty of these crimes, we cannot accept language that effectively established a hierarchy among crimes against humanity”. “Such wording”, the quote continues ”could undermine the significance of other atrocities, including the Holocaust”. The Ghanese resolution at the UN General Assembly called “transatlantic slavery the gravest crime against humanity”. Ghana had good reasons for the wording: the transatlantic slave trade lasted several centuries (mainly between 1500 to 1800). More than 12,5 million (several sources say even 15 million) African people where taken by force from their homes and shipped (in terrible conditions, like if they were cattle, and not human beings) to Brazil, Suriname, Haiti, America and many other places. The Ghanese Foreign Minister Ablakwa (quoted by the BBC-website on March 25 in a report by Wedaeli Chibelushi) has a point when he stated that the Ghanese Goivernment “was not ranking its pain above anyone else’s, but it was simply documenting historican facts”. And it is a fact that centuries slave owners could have slaves with impunity and on this other grave crimes against humanity (such as the Holocaust) could be build. Jennifer Martinez, (the author of The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law published by Oxford University Press in 2014) argued that efforts to suppress the transatlantic slave trade in the 19th century laid the foundations for the concept of crimes against humanity.
Since Donald Trump is the President of the United States, African States are afraid of whitewashing crimes such as the slave trade. The Trump government recently stopped the federal grant to the Underground Railroad museum, in the former house (in Albany N.Y.) of Stephen and Harriet Myers, who rescued thousands of slaves. No surprise therefore that the United States voted against the resolution.

Slave owners
I remember my visit to the ile de Goré, several kilometers from the capital of Senegal, Dakar. It made a deep impression on me. From the 15th to the 19th centuries It was a major slave-trading center respectivelyb for the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English and the French. I remember standing in front of the building where men were separated from the women and women were separated from the children. Here they where loaded onto the ships. Seeing this, I realised the enormity of this crime. Shipped from there were also many children.
During the voyage many would die. Child-slaves were registerd by the Dutch not with their parents, but with the “owners”. Those who were shipped as slaves were treated very cruel at their new destinations and branded upon arrival.
If you visit the Jodensavanne (Jewish Savannah) in Suriname where Jews settled from 1640 on, on the banks of the Suriname river, you see remnants of this Jewish settlement. In the year 1700 there were on these plantations more than 1300 slaves (some say thousands more) and about 500 Jews. Remnants of the Beracha ve Shalom Synagogue (erected in 1685) can be visited and the Jewish cemetary is ajecent to the African-Creole cemetary with the many Jewish names.

Reparations
The African Union pleaded in 2025 for Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations. That we as Jews (who once were slaves in Egypt) owned also slaves is for me a reason to propose that we should help descendents of slaves how to get reparations-money. From the time that David Ben Gurion and the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer negotiated about wiedergut-machung (and the Germans started to pay victims of the Holocaust) we gathered a lot of experience with which we can help the descendants of slaves. For some States the wording of the resolution of March 25 is just an excuse not to take their responsibility and pay reparations. To help African, Caribbean, South American countries and the Afro-American community in the United States do more effective lobbywork to obtain reparations (for for instance their educational institutions) can help also to improve the relations of descendents of slaves with the Jewish people. We should make from this missed opportunity a challenge.