Naomi Chazan spoke to a packed hall at the Marrickville Synagogue in Sydney on Monday 12 June (the Chilean ash cloud means that I was trapped in Sydney so Fortuna allowed me to tape the recording). Click the link below to listen to or download the first mp4 which is only 13mg. There is an introduction, then she starts talking at 7’15”. The first few minutes are about the New Israel Fund and local politics. Depending on your POV, you may find these remarks helpful or unhelpful. The second mp4 is a very short answer by her to a question which sums up many of her views.
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This is a drawing by a child in an Australian detention centre/Lager ” and I won the detenshen sente be clos”. Notice how the houses are placed, everyone is crying including the child (name blurred), and ‘oficers’ (no faces) at the bottom. Wire/bars over everything.
Another document concerning the psychiatric assessment of a child was also displayed. It called for the child’s release. Philip Ruddock, the minister responsible at the time had scrawled across it ‘Bucklies’ (misspelling for Buckley’s–an Australianism meaning–no way!)
One year ago Lex Wotton was released from jail after serving two years behind bars as a political prisoner. Lex got a 6-year sentence after being found guilty of riot with destruction by an all-white jury. He took part in a justified community protest against the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee. In contrast, Chris Hurley, the police officer responsible for the death in custody, has been promoted and compensated. The whole response to the 2004 death in custody has been scandalously flawed.
The torture and murder of a Syrian child by agents of the regime is unconscionable, but typical of such a dictatorship which has outlived its usefulness.
As the SMH put it, “His head was swollen, purple and disfigured. His body was a mess of welts, cigarette burns and wounds from bullets fired to injure, not kill. His kneecaps had been smashed, his neck broken, his jaw shattered and his penis cut off.
What finally killed him was not clear, but it appeared painfully, shockingly clear that he had suffered terribly during the month he spent in Syrian custody.
“Beneath the legal arguments, the fate of Lifta brings up some of the most contentious points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the right of return and the struggle to control the historical narrative.”
Litfa is an Palestinian village abandoned in 1948 on the western edge of Jerusalem, hungrily eyed by developers. Everyone who comes to Jerusalem on the highway from the airport passes it, but most people are unaware of what it represents, other than apparent ruins. It is still alive in the memories of many Palestinians who lay claim to it.
Australian Jewish community politics when it comes to Israel and dissenting views is explosive, and a current controversy is no exception. (See, for example, what I wrote for New Matilda in 2009, but there have been episodes since then).
Limmud Oz 2011 has recently banned two speakers, known as supporters of BDS from the conference, even though they were not going to talk about BDS. Why it has happened at such a late stage is interesting–is it another case of the people with the money making not so subtle hints…
Australian Jewish community politics when it comes to Israel and dissenting views is explosive, and a current controversy is no exception. (See, for example, what I wrote for New Matilda in 2009, but there have been episodes since then).
Limmud Oz 2011 has recently banned two speakers, known as supporters of BDS from the conference, even though they were not going to talk about BDS. Why it has happened at such a late stage is interesting–is it another case of the people with the money making not so subtle hints…
Ben Saul who teaches International Law in Sydney has a very good article in which I think he points out some of the flaws of a blanket BDS approach because it actually works against allies on the Israeli side (No matter what ideologues say, and left Israelis are more than the well-known names that are trotted out to demonstrate ‘cooperation’). This does not mean that there is going to be an attempt to white out or blanket the problems of Palestinians with an ‘equal’ narrative. Far from it. But for whatever reason (pride? denial of Israel/Israeli Jewish presence? or a rightful fear of colonization-in-struggle, there appears to be reluctance to do so). If there is a lesson to be learned from the anti-apartheid movement is that it reached out to all communities, including those who were technically members of the oppressor class.
And Saul has this great line to those who refuse to accept the fact that Israel is a nasty occupier ” At the same time, those who naively oppose any action against Israel need to open their eyes to what is being done in the name of an Israel which has fallen so far: the paradoxically brutal, yet cavalier, plundering of another people’s inheritance.”
Something very strange is going on, where commentary upon commentary replaces what is said.
Goldstone, after the first report in the Washington Post said if more information had been forthcoming, one part his report, concerning a deliberate policy of killing civilians by Israel, would have been different. Good–but Israel at the time, refused to cooperate.
But what of the rest of the report? Is that too ‘disowned’? No.
“I have no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time.”
Yet the spin doctors have gone crazy. Now what does Btselem have to say, in response, in the Washington Post, where Goldstone wrote about his qualifications to the report’s findings:
“Now Goldstone himself acknowledges that the report was flawed. In a Post op-ed that has created a media storm, he conceded that Israel did not willfully target civilians as a matter of policy. Yet the column, while acknowledging that Israel has opened criminal investigations into the allegations raised, by no means absolves Israel of all the grave allegations regarding its conduct, as official spokespeople rush to conclude.”
It is all too easy to forget this, and start screaming total innocence and total guilt for Hamas.
It is clear that Goldstone has been under incredible personal pressure, which might account for the way he has handled this issue (I suspect that he doesn’t have a team of spin doctors). A full-scale guilt trip had been laid on him, particularly in South Africa. The Forward has a very good discussion of the pressures on him, including the ins and outs of the issue–and the writers still by and large take the Goldstone report very seriously.
This article by an American rabbi probably expresses the sentiments of many people who are accused of being ‘disloyal’ ‘self-denying’ or any number of other pleasant appellations by those who oppose Jews on the left of the Israel/Palestine issue.
“Having just returned from a ten-day human rights trip to Israel and the West Bank, I am faced with the painful and inevitable question: What’s the point? Do the goodwill efforts of North Americans really matter there? Does our solidarity with the beleaguered (and dwindling) Israeli Left have any impact at all?”
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