Happy holidays from us all at NZ Friends of Israel. Back on deck in the New Year (Jan 10).
Thanks to everyone for their support through 2015. It has been a difficult for many but much to celebrate too.
To the Students for Justice in Palestine, a Letter From an Angry Black Woman – Tablet Magazine
The student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is prominent on many college campuses, preaching a mantra of “Freeing Palestine.” It masquerades as though it were a civil rights group when it is not. Indeed, as an African-American, I am highly insulted that my people’s legacy is being pilfered for such a repugnant agenda. It is thus high time to expose its agenda and lay bare some of the fallacies they peddle.
• If you seek to promulgate the legacy of early Islamic colonialists who raped and pillaged the Middle East, subjugated the indigenous peoples living in the region, and foisted upon them a life of persecution and degradation—you do not get to claim the title of “Freedom Fighter.”
• If you support a racist doctrine of Arab supremacism and wish (as a corollary of that doctrine) to destroy the Jewish state, you do not get to claim that the prejudices you peddle are forms of legitimate “resistance.”• If your heroes are clerics who sit in Gaza plotting the genocide of a people; who place their children on rooftops in the hopes they will get blown to bits; who heap praises upon their fellow gang members when they succeed in murdering Jewish school boys and bombing places of activity where Jews congregate—you do not get to claim that you are some Apollonian advocate of human virtue. You are not.
• If your activities include grieving over the woefully incompetent performance by Hamas rocketeers and the subsequent millions of Jewish souls who are still alive—whose children were not murdered by their rockets; whose limbs were not torn from them; and whose disembowelment did not come into fruition—you do not get to claim that you stand for justice. You profess to be irreproachable. You are categorically not.
• If your idea of a righteous cause entails targeting and intimidating Jewish students on campus, arrogating their history of exile-and-return and fashioning it in your own likeness you do not get to claim that you do so in the name of civil liberty and freedom of expression.
• You do not get to champion regimes that murder, torture, and persecute their own people, deliberately keep them impoverished, and embezzle billions of dollar from them—and claim you are “pro-Arab.” You are not.
• You do not get to champion a system wherein Jews are barred from purchasing land, traveling in certain areas, and living out such an existence merely because they are Jews—and claim that you are promoting equality for all. You do not get to enable that system by pushing a boycott of Jewish owned businesses, shops, and entities—and then claim that you are “against apartheid.” That is evil.
• You do not get to justify the calculated and deliberate bombings, beatings, and lynchings of Jewish men, women, and children by referring to such heinous occurrences as part of a noble “uprising” of the oppressed—that is racism. It is evil.
• You do not get to pretend as though you and Rosa Parks would have been great buddies in the 1960s. Rosa Parks was a real Freedom Fighter. Rosa Parks was a Zionist.Coretta Scott King was a Zionist.A. Phillip Randolph was a Zionist.Bayard Rustin was a Zionist.Count Basie was a Zionist.Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. was a Zionist.Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Zionist.Indeed, they and many more men and women signed a letter in 1975 that stated:
“We condemn the anti-Jewish blacklist. We have fought too long and too hard to root out discrimination from our land to sit idly while foreign interests import bigotry to America. Having suffered so greatly from such prejudice, we consider most repugnant the efforts by Arab states to use the economic power of their newly-acquired oil wealth to boycott business firms that deal with Israel or that have Jewish owners, directors, or executives, and to impose anti-Jewish preconditions for investments in this country.”
You see, my people have always been Zionists because my people have always stood for the freedom of the oppressed. So, you most certainly do not get to culturally appropriate my people’s history for your own. You do not have the right to invoke my people’s struggle for your shoddy purposes and you do not get to feign victimhood in our name. You do not have the right to slander my people’s good name and link your cause to that of Dr. King’s. Our two causes are diametrically opposed to each other.
Your cause is the antithesis of freedom. It has cost hundreds of thousands of lives of both Arabs and Jews. It has separated these peoples, and has fomented animosity between them. It has led to heartache, torment, death and destruction.It is of course your prerogative to continue to utilize platitudes for your cause. You are entirely within your rights to chant words like “equality” “justice” and “freedom fighter.”You can keep using those words for as long as you like. But I do not think you know what they mean.
Source: To the Students for Justice in Palestine, a Letter From an Angry Black Woman – Tablet Magazine
About the Author:
Chloé Simone Valdary is a pro-Israel political activist and a Zionist. As of 2015, she is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal.
Debating Against BDS – and Winning
Alan Dershowitz at Oxford Union. (Image source: Embassy of Israel in London)
When I was invited to debate in favor of the motion “Is BDS Wrong?” at the Oxford Union, I fully expected to lose the vote of the 250 or so students and faculty who are members of the oldest debate society in the world. “Israel always loses at Oxford,” I was warned by colleagues who had debated other Israel-related issues. Nonetheless, I decided to participate, hoping to change some minds.
I proposed as my opponent Omar Barghouti, the Qatari-born, Israeli-educated, co-founder and spokesperson of the BDS movement, but he refused to debate me. The Union then selected Noura Erekat, a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, who has been a vocal supporter of BDS.
When she backed out at the last minute, I began to get suspicious: was the BDS movement boycotting me? After all, BDS advocates have called for “common sense” academic boycotts against individuals who they feel are too vocal in their support for Israel, in addition to a blanket boycott of all Israeli academic institutions. After speaking with the organizers of the debate at Oxford, I continue to believe that I was in fact being boycotted.
The Union then selected Peter Tatchell, a distinguished and popular British human rights activist who has participated in 30 Union debates, most of which he has won. I knew I was in for a difficult time, especially when the audience applauded his points more loudly than mine and when many of the questions seemed hostile toward Israel, though polite.
Mr. Tatchell’s main argument was that BDS was a nonviolent form of protest against Israel’s occupation and settlement policies that mirrored the boycott movement against apartheid South Africa, and followed the principles of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He was articulate in arguing that boycott tactics generally were a non-violent alternative to war and terrorism. The force of his argument was somewhat weakened by the recent spate of terrorist knife attacks by Palestinians against Israelis, which leaders of the BDS movement such as Barghouti have justified as resistance to the “decades-old regime of occupation.”
I argued that BDS was not an alternative to war but rather an alternative to peaceful negotiations by the Palestinian leadership. This is because the BDS movement is firmly opposed to the two-state solution. Omar Barghouti confirmed as much when he said, “definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.” Thus, the BDS movement makes it more difficult for the Palestinian leadership to accept the kind of painful compromises that both sides must agree to if there is to be a negotiated resolution.
Together with other efforts to delegitimize and isolate Israel, BDS also sends a false message to the Palestinian street: namely, that international economic and political pressure can force Israel to capitulate to all Palestinian demands, without any compromise on territorial issues. In turn, this disincentivizes the Palestinian leadership from accepting Prime Minister Netanyahu’s offer to begin immediate negotiations with no preconditions.
Such discussions are particularly important now, to halt the gruesome cycle of violence that has intensified in recent weeks. Both sides must return to the negotiations table, and both must be willing to make concessions. For the Israelis this means rolling back settlements, and granting greater autonomy to the West Bank; for the Palestinian Authority, it means renouncing violence against Israeli civilians, disavowing Hamas and other terrorist organizations, and accepting the need for territorial compromise with land swaps.
BDS opposes any effort at negotiation that isn’t premised on the recognition that Israel is an apartheid state. Indeed, many of its leaders refuse to recognize the right for Israel to exist as a nation-state for the Jewish people. In so doing, they are empowering radicals on both sides of the issue who have no desire to see a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
Many liberal activists such as Mr. Tatchell—whose advocacy on behalf of LGBT rights I greatly admire—have made common cause with BDS, hoping to pressure Israel to end the occupation, and afford greater self-determination to Palestinians in the West Bank. They seem to believe that a movement advocating non-violent tactics is necessarily the best way to achieve a lasting peace. But BDS is radically opposed to any negotiated settlement, and has increasingly begun to regroup bigots of all stripes who feel comfortable with the language used by its leaders, such Mr. Barghouti.
Mr. Tatchell and many pro-BDS academics also feel that Israel has committed human rights violations both in the occupation of the West Bank, and in its prosecution of the armed conflicts in Gaza. During the course of the debate, I issued the following challenge to the audience and to my opponent: name a single country in the history of the world, faced with threats comparable to those faced by Israel, that has a better record of human rights, compliance with the rule of law or seeking to minimize civilian casualties.
I invited audience members to shout out the name of this country. Complete silence. Finally, someone shouted “Iceland”, and everyone laughed. When the best is treated as the worst, in the way the BDS movement singles out Israel for accusation, the finger of blame must be pointed at the accusers rather than the accused. In the end, the case against BDS won not because of the comparative skill of the debaters but because I was able to expose the moral weakness of the BDS movement itself.
*This op-ed originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post online.
Alan Dershowitz is an emeritus professor of law at Harvard Law School.
Unlikely Hero
Taisia Kharchenko, left, with one of the Jewish women she helped save, Sonya Bershtein.
Saturday, 17 October 2015
By Anne Marie McDonald
Taisia Kharchenko [nee Melnik] is a small, frail woman in her late 80s, who is living out her twilight years in a rest home in Wanganui. She seems an unlikely hero; but as a teenager Taisia risked her own life to save the lives of 13 other people.
Taisia’s name – along with that of her mother Aleksandra Melnik and brother Viktor Melnik – is inscribed on the wall of the Garden Of The Righteous in Israel, memorialising the three as Righteous Among The Nations. This is an award given to non-Jews who risked their own lives to save Jews persecuted by the Nazis during World War II.
Taisia received the Righteous award in 1994, for hiding, providing forged documents for, and smuggling to safety, 13 Jews.
Taisia is not well enough to be interviewed but one of her daughters, Natalia Brown, was happy to share her mother’s courageous story.
From a young age, Taisia knew that life could be hard.
She was born in 1926, the second of four children, in Vidoshnya, a small village in western Ukraine [then the USSR]. When Taisia was 12, her father was declared “an enemy of the people” by the Stalin regime, and killed.”
It was very hard for my grandmother because she had never worked before,” Natalia said.”
She was left with four children, and she had no way to earn any money.”
Locals rallied around to help the family – but, because of the political scandal, it was not relatives or Ukrainian friends who came to their rescue, it was the Jewish community.”
Vidoshnya was a very Jewish place; it was more Jewish than Ukrainian. The Jews felt very sorry for my grandmother because of what had happened to my grandfather, and they helped her,” Natalia said.
Life became precarious for Ukranian Jews in 1941 when the Germans began moving into western Ukraine. Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars, which immediately identified them as Jews, and to hand their valuables over the Germans. In the town of Proskurov [now known as Khmelnytskyi], near Vidoshnya, the Jewish population was forced into a ghetto and made to do hard labour. Many were killed outright, and others died through overwork. In November 1941, several thousand people from the ghetto were taken outside the city and murdered by the Germans.
“My mother had a Jewish friend called Sonya Bershtein. She was the same age as my mother’s older sister, but she was friendly with my mother and with the whole family. My grandmother said, ‘Sonya, please come to us and we will hide you from the Nazis.’
“Sonya said, ‘I cannot go without my mother.'”
SO IN DECEMBER 1941 Taisia and her brother, who were just 15 and 12 years old at the time, were able to rescue Sonya and her mother Faina and bring them safely to the family home. There they stayed hidden for 11 months.
Natalia said the family knew only too well the consequences of their actions.
“If they had been found, [the Nazis] would have killed the Jewish family and the Ukrainian family – everybody. Sonya’s cousin’s family had been hidden by a Ukrainian family, but they were found and all of them killed. They were taken to the town square and killed in front of everybody. Another family was burned alive in their house when Jews were found there.
“It was a warning that this is what will happen if you are found with Jews in your house.”
Undeterred, the family took in four more Jews: Faina Bershtein’s sister, Polya Kreizman, and her three young children. The Kreizmans stayed for a month, until Taisia was able to obtain false Ukrainian papers for them. These papers allowed Polya to find safe employment on a kolkhoz, or collective farm.
Towards the end of 1942 the Nazi efforts against Ukrainian Jews intensified, and they began searching houses for hidden Jews. The Melniks contacted two Russian men who were smuggling Jews out of Ukraine, and they agreed to take Sonya and Faina into Romania.
Later, Taisia arranged for the smugglers to take other Jewish people into Romania. As a German ally, Romania was a relatively safe place for Jews.
Natalia Brown with her mother’s Righteous Among The Nations award.
Natalia Brown with her mother’s Righteous Among The Nations award.
All 13 Jews Taisia and her family helped survived the war, and most of them emigrated to the United States.
Ukraine’s Jewish population suffered greatly under German occupation. More than a million of them were killed by the Nazis or their Ukrainian collaborators between 1941 and 1945. The most notorious massacre of Jews in Ukraine was at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kiev, where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on September 29, 1941.
By 1959, the Jewish population in the Ukraine had declined by 70 per cent compared to what it had been before World War II. Besides the widespread murder by the Nazis, many Jews emigrated to Israel after the war.
SONYA BERSHTEIN was among those who went to Israel. As for Taisia, she stayed in Ukraine, became a nurse, married an engineer, and had two daughters.
She and Sonya maintained a life-long friendship, and in 1996 Taisia and her husband joined Sonya in Israel. They were able to do so because of Taisia’s status as a Righteous Among The Nations. Taisia’s husband lived for just one year after they emigrated, and Taisia stayed in Israel for another decade.
“It was easier for her in Israel. Ukraine was separating from Russia during Perestroika [a programme of widespread reform of the USSR], and it was a poor country. But Israel is a very religious country, and it’s very much for the Jews,” Natalia said.
As Taisia got older it became more difficult for her to live on her own so Natalia, who had emigrated to New Zealand from Russia in 1995 after the death of her only son, arranged for Taisia to join her in New Zealand.
Sonya died earlier this year.
“Even after Mum came to New Zealand they talked on the phone every week. They were very old, and they couldn’t remember anything, but they were always talking on the phone,” Natalia said.
Natalia was an adult before she knew the true story of how her family had helped Jews during the war.
“In my childhood I never heard this story. I knew that Mum and Grandma had saved Sonya, but with the Communists in power people couldn’t talk much. After Perestroika, people started talking more openly.”
Natalia believes her mother has always been haunted by the fear and terror of those times during the Nazi occupation.
“She told me when I visited her in Israel once, that sometimes she couldn’t sleep because of all the memories. And she said she didn’t understand how she and Sonya both survived. Life was so dangerous.”
Taisia’s only descendant is her granddaughter, Natalia’s niece, Polina, who lives in Russia and is very interested in her family’s history.
“Polina is making a family tree and wants to know as much as she can about her grandmother’s experiences during the war,” Natalia said.
“She wants to know the stories so that she can pass them on to her children, when she has them, so that they are never forgotten.”
Source: Unlikely Hero
Juliet Moses: I’m for peace
Palestinian students shout slogans during an anti-Israel protest in the city of Khan Yunis in the Southern Gaza Strip, on October 18, 2015. Photo / Getty Images
Monday, 19 October 2015 The New Zealand Herald
I’m pretty sure most, and probably all, of my friends in New Zealand would say that peace is something to aspire to. And if they turned their minds to it at all, they would probably say that they want peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
I certainly want that. I am sure most New Zealanders would want that. And to me, every other Jewish person I know, and every other non-Jewish person I have talked to about this, that peace comes in the form of Israel and a Palestinian state, co-existing peacefully side-by-side. The so-called two state solution.
Source: Juliet Moses: I’m for peace
Uruguay elected to UN Human Rights Council?!
Often Israel is criticized for flouting UN Resolutions. Such critics assume that all that the UN does, is true and noble. If you ever wondered how dysfunctional the UN can get, then check this out:
“It’s a black day for human rights,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental human rights group.
UN Watch, together with two other human rights groups, released a report yesterday urging UN member states to oppose the election of nine countries committing egregious human rights violations. Only two of those were defeated: Pakistan and Laos.
“The election of even more rights abusing regimes — on a body that already counts China, Russia, Cuba and Saudi Arabia as members — marks another severe blow to the credibility and efficacy of a body that was supposed to improve on its discredited predecessor.”
Virtually the entire EU voted for Ethopia and Togo as world judges of human rights.
UN Watch presented the report at a press briefing yesterday at UN headquarters, together with the Human Rights Foundation and the Lantos Foundation.
“With three out of the five regional groups having run uncontested slates, the elevation of oppressive governments sends the message that politics trumps human rights. The UN today is letting down millions of victims worldwide who look to the world body for protection.”
“If we allow Venezuela to be in charge of freedom of assembly, Burundi in charge of police accountability, and UAE in charge of labor rights, we are simply turning the UN into a laughingstock.”
Global Jewish Groups Outraged over UNESCO Western Wall Resolution | Jewish & Israel News Algemeiner.com
The Birkat HaCohanim (“priestly blessing” in Hebrew) at the Western Wall in 1995. Photo: Moshe Milner/the Israeli government press office via Flickr.com.
OCTOBER 20, 2015 5:46 PM 17
Author: Algemeiner StaffJewish groups around the globe roundly condemned a proposal introduced by six Arab countries at the U.N.’s cultural arm that would strip Israel’s cultural and historic ties from the Western Wall plaza.
Senior officials at the Simon Wiesenthal Center held a conference call with UNESCO’s director-general,the Bulgarian diplomat Irina Bokova, who had already condemned the incendiary nature of the Arab proposal.
Hamilton student heard Nobel Prize winners at World Science Conference | Stuff.co.nz
Hamilton student heard Nobel Prize winners at World Science Conference
There were 15 Nobel laureates speaking at an international science conference in Jerusalem that Hamilton student Alex Kennedy, right, attended. He’s pictured discussing the experience with Hamilton Boys’ High School headmaster Susan Hassall, left, and ambassador of Israel to New Zealand Yosef Livne, centre.Five days of listening to science lectures isn’t every high school student’s idea of fun, but Alex Kennedy loved it.The 18-year-old Hamilton Boys’ High School student was one of five Kiwis chosen to attend the World Science Conference – Israel in August.Along with students from 70 countries, there were fifteen Nobel Prize laureates at the Jerusalem conference.
Source: Hamilton student heard Nobel Prize winners at World Science Conference | Stuff.co.nz
NZ government urged to stop “pressuring Israel” – J-Wire » J-Wire
Pastor Nigel Woodley, Flaxmere Christian Fellowship
NZ government urged to stop “pressuring Israel” October 22, 2015 by J-Wire News Service
11,685 people have joined Pastor Nigel Woodley in urging the New Zealand Government to cease from pressuring the State of Israel to give up its rightful and God-given Land.The Clerk of the House informing Parliament of the PetitionThe petition also urges the Government to support Israel’s right to have sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria (West bank) and all of Jerusalem.
Source: NZ government urged to stop “pressuring Israel” – J-Wire » J-Wire
