Bringing together those committed to opposing anti-Zionist activity and boycotts that target the people and supporters of Israel
Archive for the ‘anti-Zionism’ Category.
Following the shocking murders of the Fogel family, where a baby and a toddler were knifed to death, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office has published a dossier of incitement against Israel and Israelis, propagated through official and unofficial channels of the Palestinian Authority.
You can see a summary here.
The full report is in Microsoft Powerpoint format and can be downloaded here.
There is currently a public debate in South Africa about boycotting Israel. As part of this debate, Rabbi Warren Goldstein, Chief Rabbi of South Africa, wrote an open letter to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It was published a few days ago in the Jerusalem Post. We reproduce it in full below:
Dear Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I write to you with a heavy heart.
You are a revered leader in South Africa, but recently have added your iconic voice to the campaign for sanctions against Israel.
Archbishop, I believe you are making a terrible mistake. Without truth there can be no justice, and without justice there can be no peace. The Talmud says: “The world stands on three things: justice, truth and peace.” These three values are inseparable. Archbishop, I am convinced that the sanctions campaign against Israel is morally repugnant because it is based on horrific and grotesquely false accusations against the Jewish people.
The truth, archbishop, is that Israel is simply not an apartheid state. In the State of Israel all citizens – Jew and Arab – are equal before the law. Israel has no Population Registration Act, no Group Areas Act, no Mixed Marriages and Immorality Act, no Separate Representation of Voters Act, no Separate Amenities Act, no pass laws or any of the myriad apartheid laws.
Israel is a vibrant liberal democracy with a free press and independent judiciary, and accords full political, religious and other human rights to all its people, including its more than 1 million Arab citizens, many of whom hold positions of authority including that of cabinet minister, member of parliament and judge at every level, including that of the Supreme Court. All citizens vote on the same roll in regular, multiparty elections; there are Arab parties and Arab members of other parties in Israel’s parliament. Arabs and Jews share all public facilities, including hospitals and malls, buses, cinemas and parks. And, archbishop, that includes universities and opera houses.
The other untruth is the accusation of illegal occupation of Arab land. Like the apartheid libel, this is outrageously false. There is no nation that has a longer, deeper or more profound connection to its country than the Jewish people have to the land of Israel and the city of Jerusalem.
Archbishop, you and I as religious leaders always turn to the Bible as a source of truth. What does it mean that Israel is the “promised land”? It means, as we both know, that it was promised by God to the Jews – the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This promise was first fulfilled by God more than 3,300 years ago, when Joshua led the Jewish people into the land of Israel. Since then there has been an unbroken Jewish presence in the land, albeit small during the Roman exile.
All the books of the Old Testament – Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc. – describe the deep connection between the Jews and the land of Israel, including the West Bank, known in the Bible as Judea and Samaria – the area that contained the great cities of the two previous Jewish commonwealths, such as Jericho, Shiloh (where the Tabernacle stood for hundreds of years), Beit El (where Jacob had his vision of the ladder) and Hebron (where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are buried with their wives Sarah, Rebecca and Leah).
Three thousand years ago, there was no London or Paris, no Washington or Moscow, no Pretoria or Cape Town, but there was a Jerusalem, capital of a Jewish state.
“If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning… if I fail to elevate Jerusalem above my foremost joy.” Those words from Psalms are recited by Jews at every wedding. At every funeral, the statement of comfort given to the mourners refers to Zion and Jerusalem. Jews pray for Jerusalem three times a day, and also after every meal.
Archbishop, the Arab/Israeli conflict is not a struggle against apartheid or occupation. It is a century- long war against the very existence of Jews and a Jewish state in the Middle East. There have already been seven major Arab/Israeli wars since the birth of modern Israel.
Today the front includes an alliance between Iran, Syria and Hizbullah, the latter now with 40,000 rockets aimed at Israeli cities. Iranian officers train Hizbullah forces, while Iran pursues nuclear weapons and openly declares its intention to wipe out Israel. Hamas, the terrorist Palestinian government in Gaza, sides with Iran and Hizbullah in rearming with the declared aim of destroying Israel.
Since 1967, one aspect of this century- long conflict has been the demand for a Palestinian state. In spite of the deep historical and religious roots of Jews in all of Israel, generations of Jewish leaders have been prepared, for the sake of peace, to give up ancestral and covenantal land to establish a Palestinian state.
SO WHY has there not been peace? The ANC taught us you can’t make peace on your own. No matter how deeply the ANC was committed to a peaceful resolution of the South African conflict, until the National Party was prepared to accept that black South Africans had a place in their own country, there could be no peace. And so too, until the Arab/Muslim world accepts that Jews have a right to a state of their own on their ancestral land, there will be no peace.
In 1948, the Jews accepted the UN resolution establishing a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, but the Arab world rejected it and five Arab countries invaded Israel to destroy it.
After that, the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab hands until 1967.
There was an opportunity then – every day for almost 20 years – to establish a Palestinian state. It never happened. And since then there have been numerous opportunities – each rejected by Arab leaders.
Why? Because this war has been more about the destruction of the Jewish state than about the establishment of a Palestinian state. Even today, so-called moderate Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
In 2000, the Palestinian leadership launched a massive wave of suicide bombers into Israel, leading to more than 1,300 civilian deaths and 10,000 injuries. Proportionately, such carnage in South Africa would mean more than 10,000 killed and over 80,000 injured! Israel erected a security fence with checkpoints to shield it from such attacks launched from the disputed territories.
Archbishop, you compare these checkpoints to apartheid South Africa. But they are not about pass laws, which don’t exist in Israel. The checkpoints are on the border between sovereign Israeli territory and the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza in order to keep civilians from being murdered, and have been very successful in doing so. These checkpoints – like those found in all airports – are there to prevent suicide bombers from blowing up innocent people.
Archbishop, do not bestow respectability on an immoral sanctions campaign that is an affront to truth and justice, which prevents peace and prolongs the terrible suffering of people on both sides of this painful conflict. Archbishop, let us pray for an end to all this agony, and for the fulfillment of the verse in Isaiah: “And the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces.”
by Jeremy Newmark
The matter-of-fact Office of Judicial Review ruling, reprimanding Judge Bathurst-Norman for making observations based upon personal political views, may seem a little lame. Despite the involvement of the Lord Chancellor and Lord Chief Justice, this will not overturn the trial verdict itself; it is very hard to retry people once they’ve been found Not Guilty.
Nevertheless, coupled with last week’s confirmation by William Hague that Parliament will now consider new laws to prevent abuse of Universal Jurisdiction, this decision represents a significant setback to those working to import the Israel/Palestine conflict into our judicial systems by engaging in what has been aptly described as “Lawfare”.
Groups including the Board of Deputies and Zionist Federation were right to pursue a series of official complaints against Bathurst-Norman. This was always about more than the grotesque comparison between Israeli actions and Nazi atrocities. This was the thin end of the wedge. It opened the possibility of UK Foreign Policy being made in our courtrooms, circumventing the democratic process.
This is not just a matter of Israel Advocacy. Lawfare also threatens to impact upon our lives as British Jews. Other recent cases have used legal justifications which argued that vandalism and disruption in the UK can be legalised by political anger at events in the Middle East. Ironically, they claim that international law gives them the right to commit these crimes. This trend surfaced in the assault on BICOM’s office during Operation Cast Lead, the attacks upon Carmel Agrexo warehouses, and vandalism of Starbucks branches during anti-Israel protests. Less dramatically, but arguably more significantly, attempts to challenge the legal status of Jewish schools based upon their teaching of Zionism show how prevalent Lawfare is starting to become.
The Office of Judicial Review may appear to have only slapped Bathurst-Norman on the wrist. In fact it has established an important precedent – that political attitudes to the State of Israel will never be an acceptable defence for criminal activity. This is a serious setback for those who seek to institutionalise the delegitimisation of Israel in the UK.
Jeremy Newmark is Chief Executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, and a member of the Board of the Fair Play Campaign Group
This is a cross-post from UJS’s blog, by Mark Woolfson
And so it ends. The double-standards, rhetoric and indoctrination that characterises the alliance between radical student Leftist groups and extremist Islamists have pushed Manchester University to the brink of totalitarianism.
Last week, the Manchester University Islamic Society and Action Palestine played host to Azzam Tamimi, decried by Dr. Denis MacShane MP as a ‘preacher of hate’. He was one in a long list of Israel haters at the Palestine Conference. A supporter of Hamas and proponent of terror, this man is doing the rounds on university campuses nationwide. Two days ago he appeared in a veritable who’s who of Israel-haters at Queen Mary, University of London. In the esteemed Oxford Union last week, the Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel was verbally (and nearly physically) assaulted. At every rally and in every hall, Tamimi roars ‘I hate Zionists’.
Let us be quite clear: Zionism is a legitimate political ideology to hold. It is a liberal-democratic ideology, it is the belief that the Jewish nation, like every other nation, has the right to national self-determination. Israel, falsely vilified as an ‘Apartheid’ state, a racist state, is a legitimate member of the international community, with a progressive and vibrant civil society.
And yet, Zionism and the Jewish state have become toxic. Uniquely, the Hard Left harbours a resentment so deeply ingrained, so virulent and so violent that Jewish students are increasingly contacting the Union of Jewish Students and the Community Service Trust to convey their fear and – at times – panic. No other ethnic group faces such consistent denigration.
The Hard Left and the Islamic Society in Manchester today began enforcing an illegitimate boycott of the Jewish State in the Manchester University Students’ Union. The Deputy Ambassador has been invited by the Politics Society of Manchester to speak on Thursday. Despite passing all of the rigorous freedom of speech checks and all the democratic institutions of the University and Union, the “Unholy Alliance” is enforcing its ideological totalitarianism on the UK. Utilising a spurious argument that the Student Union’s ‘solidarity’ with the global Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement permits them to enforce a boycott of anything Israeli, they are acting Ultra vires. And the Manchester University Students’ Union Executive is NOT calling them out on this lie.
Last year, amidst the Left’s incessant misinformation during Operation Cast Lead, the Students’ Union affiliated with the BDS movement. Radical students are now using this affiliation to claim that they can institute a ‘No Platform’ policy against any representative of the Israeli Government. One wonders where this tyranny will end: will any expression of support for Israel be No Platform-ed? A mass demonstration, likely to be highly intrusive and physical, is expected tomorrow by Action Palestine and the affiliated organisations.
Let us not forget that it was the very same members of Action Palestine and the Islamic Society who so artfully defended their invitation of the terrorist-endorsing Tamimi last week. We are witnessing disconcertingly deceitful tactics being employed: using arguments of Freedom of Speech on the one hand and yet with the other enforcing ideological absolutism on anyone who dares challenge their falsehoods. Whilst these advocates of extremist absolutism are free to do as they will, defenders of liberal democracy seem to be amputating themselves at every opportunity: apologetic for their high ideals, self-loathing and now seemingly self-harming.
In 1923, the ‘philosophical godfather of Nazism’, Carl Schmitt, wrote in ‘The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy’ that democracies will fail, because their adherents “suspend decisive [ideological] battle through endless discussion”. Meanwhile, Liberty’s enemies will utilise our weaknesses against us.
Banning the Jewish state is a significant shift in the ideological battle being waged within the student movement. This event is the culmination of years of silence from those who should have spoken out in favour of the only democracy in the Middle East.
Ideological totalitarianism is here: the abyss lays before us. Now is the time to speak out and bring us back from the edge.
Baroness Tonge, a Liberal Democrat peer was fired from her front-bench health role after calling for an investigation into wild allegations that Israeli rescue teams had stolen Haitian organs while responding to the earthquake.
The following joint reaction to the sacking of Baroness Tonge by Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg was issued by the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies of British Jews:
“Baroness Tonge’s support for an investigation into baseless accusations of organ harvesting by the Israeli rescue teams are outrageous and a calumny.
Baroness Tonge has promoted this libel against Israel by utilising historic themes that are classically deployed to attack the Jewish People. She has dishonoured the noble efforts of Israeli soldiers and civilians who engaged in a selfless humanitarian effort to save lives in Haiti.
Whatever her motives, Jenny Tonge’s persistent use of Antisemitic tropes has no place in British politics. Nick Clegg has responded swiftly and correctly. We welcome this. Nevertheless, any further use of antisemitic rhetoric must result in Tonge’s expulsion from the party and loss of the whip.”
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