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Category: Uncategorized
The past week or so has seen strong responses to Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s full page ads in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, in which he made a number of claims about Jerusalem being ‘above politics’, or that Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran.
I thought this commentary demonstrates how terrible is the divide between geographically adjacent communities, even though there are such enormous possibilities for conflict resolution. Joharah Baker often has very, very strong opinions, but this one seems to offer a lot of possibility for bridging that gap through getting Israelis to take the lead in breaking the culture and practice of occupation and all that goes with it. Joharah works in Palestinian media in Jerusalem.
Don’t Tell Them, They Already Know
Well, it’s all over the internet, that the South African Zionist Federation, and others, have heavied a ‘shul’ in Sandton, Joburg, not to let that mortal enemy of the State of Israeli, Richard Goldstone, attend his grandsons’s Barmitzvah. It makes the Australian Zionist leadership look like a bunch of pussies.
For details, it’s worth a straight link to Magnes Zionist for all the pathetic dirty detail.
The cat is well and truly out of the bag concerning the attempt to prosecute the journalist Anat Kam for revealing state secrets. She has been under secret house arrest since December and is to be put on trial on treason and espionage charges. She is accused of appropriating 2,000 documents, 700 of which were classified as “top secret” while serving in the IDF’s Central Command in 2007.
The minuscule Workers Party of NZ is opposed to the establishment of an Israel Embassy in NZ for all the usual rejectionist reasons, and news reports are filtering over the internet.
This is dumb dumb dumb and reinforces stereotypes about Kiwis not always having good political sense.
The minuscule Workers Party of NZ is opposed to the establishment of an Israel Embassy in NZ for all the usual rejectionist reasons, and news reports are filtering over the internet.
This is dumb dumb dumb and reinforces stereotypes about Kiwis not always having good political sense.
I’ve been searching for words to express what I see as a fault in much of the current criticism or campaigning against the occupation and other actions of Israel, because it offers no positive, detailed option for the future that brings all communities forward. This seems to be the case, for example, in the websites and publicity in Australia produced by Palestinian advocates.
In a recent report published in the Forward, Nathan Guttman reports that ‘delegitimization’ is being used at the buzz-word against critics of Israel, particularly those involved in the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement such as Naomi Klein. It is a term that has been picked up in the US and the subject of extensive study and promotion by the well-resourced and apparently influential Reut Institute in Israel, which also goes for ‘Brand Israel’ (see Tikkun Olam for Reut’s bizarre world).
The image to the right of this post is taken from the Facebook site of the Melbourne University Jewish Students Society and sent out very recently. Click on it for details. It was sent out to several hundred students. It was forwarded by a concerned member of the society.