NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
The Zionist Federation has kindly prepared a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) resource suitable for teens who may be confronted by pro-Palestinian relatives, friends and acquaintances.
You can download it from here.
Feel free to share it with friends and family.
NZFOI: Most NZ media mention the Sheik Jarrah property dispute as “the Sheik Jarrah evictions” as if they had come out of nowhere and implying they were just an Israeli abuse of power and a demonstration of all that is unjust about Zionism. In fact it is the subject of a long running legal dispute that has been through several layers of the legal system over nearly forty years. Here is a background article to help put some perspective on those who have open and enquiring minds.
(May 10, 2021 / The International Legal Forum) The case of Sheikh Jarrah is a complex and long-running legal matter, subject to competing property claims by Jewish owners and Palestinian tenants over a small area of land in Jerusalem. The affair also incorporates the area’s religious significance and spans a history dating back to the pre-1948 British mandate era. The case has been subject to legal proceedings since 1972 and is currently before Israel’s Supreme Court, where a final decision is expected in the next month.
This particular case has garnered unprecedented attention in the wake of the recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report accusing Israel of engaging in “apartheid” practices, the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation of alleged Israeli war crimes and a concerted campaign by the pro-Palestinian BDS and NGO network, as well as the Palestinian leadership, to exacerbate and inflame the currently tense situation in and around Jerusalem.
Where is Sheikh Jarrah?
Sheikh Jarrah is a predominantly, though not exclusively, Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem, located about a mile and a half from the Old City.Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate
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What is the historical significance of the area?
Jews refer to the area as “Shimon Hatzadik,” “Simeon the Just,” a revered third-century BCE Jewish High Priest whose tomb is located there. The neighborhood is often visited by Jewish pilgrims.
Palestinians claim the area derives its name from Sheikh Jarrah, a physician to Saladin, the Islamic military leader who fought the Crusaders in the 12th century. His body is believed to be buried there.
What is the claim against Israel?
The pro-Palestinian community is claiming that Israel is unjustly evicting four Palestinian families from their homes in the neighborhood and that this exemplifies accusations against Israel in the context of the broader conflict with the Palestinians.
In response, the owners of the property (a private Israeli NGO, Nahalat Shimon), claim they have the legal title to the property in question and that, in the absence of rent being paid by the tenants, the tenants ought to be evicted for breaching the law.
What is the chronology?
Sheikh Jarrah is an Arab neighborhood that developed outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem in the 19th century.
According to Israel’s Supreme Court, the land in question was purchased by the local Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities from its Arab owners in 1875, primarily because of the area’s religious significance in housing the tomb of “Simeon the Just.” The property was registered in the Ottoman land registry as a trust under the name of rabbis Avraham Ashkenazi and Meir Auerbach.
A small Jewish community lived there peacefully in co-existence with the local Arab community until 1948, when the War of Independence broke out.
The Jewish owners had tried to register ownership of the property with the authorities of the British Mandate in 1946.
When the War of Independence broke out in 1948, the Old City of Jerusalem and its surrounding area, including Sheikh Jarrah, was captured by Transjordan (now Jordan) and the Jewish families were forcibly evicted. Custodianship of the property was transferred to the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Properties. In 1956, the Jordanian government leased the property to 28 families of Palestinian “refugees,” while maintaining ownership of the property.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel regained control of Jerusalem, it passed a law allowing Jews whose families were evicted by Jordanian or British authorities in the city prior to 1967 to reclaim their property, provided they could demonstrate proof of ownership and the existing residents were unable to provide such proof of purchase or legal transfer of title.
In 1973, ownership of the property was registered by Sephardic Community Committee and the Knesset Israel Committee with Israeli authorities pursuant to the above law.
Subsequently, in 2003, the owners sold the property to “Nahalat Shimon,” an Israeli NGO that seeks to reclaim property for Jews evicted or forced to flee as a result of the 1948 War of Independence.
Beginning of legal proceedings
In 1982, the Jewish owners (Sephardic Community Committee and the Knesset Israel Committee) sued the Palestinian families residing in Sheikh Jarrah and demanded their eviction on the basis that they were squatters on the property. The Magistrate Court determined that the Palestinian families could not demonstrate their ownership of the property, but that they enjoyed Protected Tenant Status. As protected tenants, they would be able to continue living on the property as long as they paid rent and maintained the property. This arrangement was agreed upon mutually in an agreement signed by the parties, in which the tenants recognized the trusts’ ownership in exchange for protected tenant status.
Beginning in 1993, the trusts began proceedings against the residents based on their non-payment of rent and of illegal changes to the property.
In 1997, Suliman Darwish Hijazi, a Palestinian man, attempted to challenge the trusts’ ownership of the property, based on a kushan (Ottoman title) that he allegedly purchased from a Jordanian man, al-Bandeq, in 1961. The court ruled that Hijazi failed to demonstrate that the kushan refers to the claimed property in Shimon HaTzadik, and that forensic evidence raised the likelihood that the kushan had been altered or forged. Furthermore, Hijazi failed to prove that al-Bandeq had ever owned the property and thus had the right to sell it.
Finally, Hijazi had never acted to protect his property rights, both during the Jordanian and Israeli periods, by registering it, charging rent, or paying property tax.
Prior court rulings
Key points:
• The residents are protected tenants and must pay rent to the property’s owners.
• The residents never paid rent and carried out illegal construction on the property. The court previously ordered the residents to pay the outstanding rent and to immediately evacuate the illegally constructed additions.
• The court rejected claims that the Jordanian government had committed to transferring ownership to the residents and that this commitment never came to fruition due to the outbreak of the Six-Day War. The only document ever provided as evidence was a copy of an unsigned standard Jordanian Department of Housing form, that did not contain any agreement regarding the transfer of rights.
• The court rejected claims that a resident purchased ownership rights from a man named Ismail. The claimant could not demonstrate that Ismail had been the property’s owner, that he had purchased the property from him or that the claimant had ever been a protected tenant at the time of the alleged sale.
The current state of legal proceedings
Following the judgment of the Jerusalem District Court in February 2021, upholding an earlier court decision that, in the absence of payment of rent, the Palestinian residents must vacate the premises, the tenants appealed to the Supreme Court, with a final verdict expected in the next month.
Arsen Ostrovsky is chairman and CEO of the International Legal Forum, an Israel-based legal network of more than 3,500 lawyers and activists in 30 different countries committed to the fight against anti-Semitism, terror and the delegitimization of Israel in the international legal arena.
Folks,
Please find attached their latest press release on the current violence in Israel:
UPDATED PRESS RELEASE AND FACTSHEET – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 14 May 2021
In Light of the Continued Wave of Terrorism from Gaza
Israel is protecting its citizens from a wave of terrorism instigated by Hamas. Israel has taken steps to restrain and de-escalate the situation for a number of weeks. These steps have been answered by a wave of rockets and acts of terrorism from the Gaza Strip.
Israel is currently experiencing a large-scale wave of terrorism that is being directed entirely at civilian population centers throughout the country. No country would tolerate such extreme levels of terrorism and aggression.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist organisations are committing double war crimes. Hamas is indiscriminately launching rockets at civilian population centers and is launching them from within civilian population centers. Every rocket that is launched at Israel is an act of terrorism and a war crime. Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist organisations have carried out over 1,500 war crimes in the past three days.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist organisations have situated their terrorist infrastructures (launch bases, weapons arsenals, manufacturing sites, headquarters) in the heart of the civilian population, including within multi-story buildings. In doing so, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist organisations have turned the civilian population of Gaza into a human shield. Between 20-30 percent of the rockets launched by Hamas and the terrorist organisations fall in the territory of the Gaza Strip. Indications suggest that at least nine Palestinian children were killed by these rocket landings.
The IDF is only acting against terrorist targets in Gaza that are directly connected to the rocket fire on Israel’s cities and civilians. Israel is acting against the terrorist attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist organisations in a measured and accurate manner and on the basis of unequivocal intelligence information, adhering to the principles of international law.
Strengthening of Hamas is a mistake. The strengthening of Hamas is destructive to the effort to achieve regional stability. Hamas instigated the escalation in the current situation in an attempt to seize control of the Palestinian agenda and to weaken and replace the Palestinian Authority. Hamas’ strength in the face of the
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Palestinian Authority opposes Palestinian interests, harms Palestinian society and is not in the international community’s interests, and certainly harms the State of Israel’s interests and security. Hamas is exploiting the heightened religious and nationalist sentiments surrounding the holy days in Jerusalem in order to encourage terrorism and violence. Unequivocally condemning these acts of terrorism and supporting Israel’s steps to protect its citizens will help to prevent this radical terrorist organisation from being further emboldened at the expense of pragmatic and moderate actors.
The internal tension in Israel arising from the current situation is indeed worrisome. The State of Israel is a law-abiding country and the police will maintain law and order throughout the country. These are difficult days of polarisation and violence within Israeli society. The President, Prime Minister, and other public leaders have condemned the violence on all sides and have called for de-escalation. The Prime Minister called on the country’s citizens to unite in order to reinstate governance, neutralize the anarchy, and preserve and restore the security and calm that we all deserve.
It is important to note that Sheikh Jarrah is not the story. Hamas is attacking Israel for its self-declared goal of eliminating Israel. Hamas has exploited the tensions surrounding the Sheikh Jarrah legal matter and turned it into a nationalist and religious issue in order to bring about an escalation, violence, and terrorism. Whoever links Hamas’ terrorist attacks and hundreds of rocket launches against the civilian population in Israel to the issue of Sheikh Jarrah is playing into the hands of the terrorist organization and granting legitimacy to terrorist activities. We condemn these acts of terrorism in the strongest terms and hope to return to our lives of coexistence and peace soon.
End.
NZFOI: The NZ Government has released a statement regarding the current escalation of violence between Israel and the Arabs. In her statement, she is implying the root cause of the violence is Israel’s forced evictions occurring in East Jerusalem. However the matter she is referring to is an ongoing legal dispute between Arabs who occupied those properties after Jordan’s illegal invasion of Israel and Israelis who fled during that conflict and want them repatriated. In the 1970s Israel passed laws that legalised the repatriation of such properties provided there was sufficient proof of ownership. In NZFOI’s opinion, MFAT’s root cause analysis is flawed. Here is the NZ government’s full statement:
BEGINS
Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta today expressed Aotearoa New Zealand’s grave concern at the escalation of violence in Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Gaza.
“The growing death toll and the large numbers of casualties, including children, from Israeli airstrikes and Gazan rockets is unacceptable,” Nanaia Mahuta said
“Senior officials met with the Israeli Ambassador yesterday. Officials underlined the concerning loss of life and strongly urged Israel to de-escalate to prevent the prospect of a widening conflict. They also raised their concern at the continued violation of international law and forced evictions occurring in East Jerusalem.
“The launching of rockets towards Israel by Hamas is unacceptable and must stop. At the same time any response from Israel should be restrained and must avoid civilian casualties. All sides have a responsibility to de-escalate, stop the violence and prevent further suffering and loss of life.
“Aotearoa New Zealand stands ready to assist in any constructive way we can to support urgent de-escalation of the situation.” Nanaia Mahuta said.
ENDS
Questions over just how much influence the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has in New Zealand are being voiced following the NZ Super Fund’s recent divestment from five Israeli banks.
In March, the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation, an autonomous crown entity and manager of the NZ$50 billion NZ Super Fund, announced it was ending its NZ$6.5 million investment in the First International Bank of Israel, Israel Discount Bank, Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, and Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot.
The NZ Super Fund said it was doing so on responsible investment grounds as there was “credible evidence” that the banks provide finance for the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
“In our view, based on the information available to us, the companies’ activities are inconsistent with the UN Global Compact, the key benchmark against which the Guardians measures corporate behaviour,” it said.
Predictably, well-known opponents of Israel, like the Palestinian Solidarity Network chaired by anti-Israel advocate John Minto, greeted the news enthusiastically.
Green Party foreign affairs spokesperson Golriz Ghahraman told the Spinoff the decision “exemplifies compliance with domestic and international (sic) in terms of investment in Israeli occupied Palestine, which all NZ institutions and companies should be meeting.”
However, National Party MP Nicola Willis reportedly said at a select committee meeting that the fund’s decision was controversial and “viewed by some groups as potentially aligning New Zealand with an antisemitic movement (i.e.: BDS).”
NZFOI: No surprises here.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Friday postponed planned elections amid a dispute over voting in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem and divisions in his Fatah party.
Abbas, 85, issued a presidential decree postponing the May 22 parliamentary and July 31 presidential elections, the official news agency WAFA said.
He blamed Israel for uncertainty about whether it would allow the elections to proceed in East Jerusalem as well as in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
But many Palestinians regarded the Jerusalem issue as an excuse to avoid elections that Fatah might well lose to its Islamist rivals Hamas, as it did in the last parliamentary ballot in 2006.
The delay drew immediate criticism from opponents and from would-be voters – no Palestinian under 34 has taken part in national elections.
It also came on the day that campaigning was due to begin – preparations were already well under way, with thousands of new voters and three dozen party lists registered.
“As a young Palestinian citizen, I call for conducting elections, and I want my right to elect so I would see new faces, young faces, and see new political stances,” said Wael Deys, from Hebron.
The untold story of a former Waffen-SS soldier who lied his way into New Zealand — and got away with it.
By Andrew Macdonald and Naomi Arnold
Cover illustration by Ross Murray
Charlie Upham, in his mid-50s and reserved, was an infantry legend, the holder of the exceptionally rare Victoria Cross and Bar for battlefield valour in Greece, Crete and North Africa. Brian Rawson, a more sociable man of a similar age, had commanded Sherman tanks in North Africa and Italy. The third man was Willi Huber, a charismatic Austrian in his 40s with blond-brown hair and grey eyes, and he had a very different kind of war story.
Rawson, by then a banker in Christchurch, and Upham, who’d taken up farming in Hundalee, had hired Huber as a ski instructor for a few weeks at Amuri Ski Lodge near Hanmer Springs. Huber had emigrated to New Zealand in the 1950s, and told people he had been roped into the German army as a teenager — meaning he had fought for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in World War II. Upham and Rawson accepted this. “We might have been shooting at one another,” Rawson joked to Huber.
“Soldiers understand that soldiers get called up, and that it’s all political,” recalls Debbie Rawson, Brian’s daughter, who Huber taught to ski. To the two Kiwi veterans, Huber was just a regular “good guy”, popular with the ski-lodge crowd and one of thousands of Europeans starting a new life in postwar New Zealand. Debbie remembers the three men drinking and chatting together in the lodge’s common room, “telling jokes and roaring their heads off with laughter”.
The Austrian went on to build a name for himself in the clannish Canterbury outdoors scene as an expert skier and alpine hiker. He took an interest in people and pitched in to get things done, in the Kiwi way. His crowning achievement was helping establish the internationally known Mount Hutt ski field, which memorialised him with an advanced 821-metre ski run named Huber’s Run as well as a plaque in his honour. Huber’s Hut restaurant served Huber’s Breakfast Burger, Huber’s Smoked Salmon Salad, Willie’s Angus Burger, and Willie’s Midweek Breakfast Special. His achievements were celebrated in a string of articles over the years in local and national media that only briefly touched on his past as a “war hero” in the “German army”.
Then, in 2017, came a shocking admission: Huber told TVNZ’s Sunday programme he had served in Hitler’s feared elite guard, the Waffen-SS. This was at stark odds with the narrative he had carefully maintained for 65 years. Far from being a naive conscript, Huber had volunteered for one of the most notorious criminal organisations the world has ever known. Following the interview, and particularly after his death in August 2020, pressure mounted to strip Huber’s name from Mt Hutt.
Nearly a year after Huber’s death, his past has never been fully unravelled. Many of his stories remain accepted without scrutiny. Now, for the first time, drawing on interviews with people who knew him and official documents from archives, libraries and private collections in five countries, North & South has pieced together the life of this Nazi warrior turned Kiwi alpine legend. We discovered that the true nature of his role in the war was very different from what he claimed, and that he lied on his immigration application in order to enter New Zealand. On multiple occasions over the years, he spoke of his service for Nazi Germany with pride.
In the 1960s, Huber and Upham’s paths crossed at Craigieburn Valley Ski Area, in inland Canterbury. Huber overheard some skiers talking excitedly about the presence of a double Victoria Cross winner. He later told his friend Len Vidgen that he became quite “peeved” at all the attention Upham was getting. “He thought, ‘Fuck that, I’ve got an Iron Cross’,” Vidgen says. Huber told Vidgen that he got into his car and drove the four-hour return journey to retrieve the medal from his home in Christchurch. When he got back, he showed it to Upham: a black cross pattée of iron with a silver frame — and in the middle, a swastika.
Read the article in the June issue of North and South Magazine. Available through your library or nearest bookseller.
A stampede at a religious festival attended by tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews in northern Israel killed at least 45 people and injured about 150 early Friday, medical officials said. It was one of the country’s deadliest civilian disasters.
The stampede began when large numbers of people thronged a narrow tunnel-like passage during the event, according to witnesses and video footage. People began falling on top of each other near the end of the walkway, as they descended slippery metal stairs, witnesses said.
Israel is partying like it’s 2019. With most adults now vaccinated against the coronavirus and restrictions falling away – including the lifting this week of outdoor mask requirements – Israelis are joyously resuming routines that were disrupted more than a year ago and providing a glimpse of what the future could hold for other countries.
Restaurants are booming outside and in. Concerts, bars and hotels are open to those who can flash their vaccine certificates. Classrooms are back to pre-covid capacity.
The rate of new infections has plummeted – from a peak of almost 10,000 a day to about 140 – and the number of serious coronavirus cases in many hospitals is down to single digits. The emergency Covid-19 ward at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv resumed duty as a parking garage, and waiting rooms are suddenly flooded with non-Covid patients coming for long-deferred treatments.
New Zealand’s $36 billion sovereign wealth fund divested $4 million from five Israeli banks last month because of their West Bank operations. This could cause reputational and financial problems for New Zealand and for companies managing its sovereign wealth fund.
Flawed information and analysis spurred the fund’s decision. In a letter explaining the move, the Guardians – the government entity that runs New Zealand’s sovereign wealth fund – cites concern about Israel’s plans to annex portions of the West Bank. However, Israel agreed to suspend its annexation plans in September 2020 as part of its peace deals with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Subsequently, UAE-based Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank signed a memorandum of understanding with Bank Leumi, one of the Israeli banks subject to divestment.
The letter erroneously describes United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which declared that Israeli settlement activity “has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law,” as “binding.” However, the council passed that resolution under the non-binding Chapter VI.
The Guardians’ letter also relies on reports by the UN Human Rights Council, a body composed of numerous autocracies that has passed nearly as many resolutions criticizing Israel as the rest of the world combined. This reality undermines the credibility of the council’s reports.
Thanks to the Guardians’ decision, Israeli companies now comprise 11 of the fund’s 53 divestments not related to tobacco or cannabis. Two of these are Israeli construction companies from which New Zealand divested in 2012 for building West Bank settlements. The Guardians excluded the others for manufacturing certain weapons or for alleged labor or unethical-conduct issues.
Yet even as they condemn Israel, the Guardians invest in one of the world’s leading human rights abusers. The fund holds nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of investments in 625 Chinese companies, including two companies blacklisted by the United States for violating the rights of ethnic minorities. China has detained up to 1 million Uighurs from Xinjiang province, suppressed pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, and continues to occupy Tibet.
Likewise, while the fund divested from Israeli banks, it invests in companies extracting natural resources from another disputed territory. On March 15, New Zealand’s High Court upheld the sovereign wealth fund’s right to invest in companies operating in Western Sahara, a non-self-governing territory occupied by Morocco.
Two New Zealand companies included in the fund import around $30 million worth of phosphate from the disputed territory annually. Morocco’s alleged facilitation of the extraction of natural resources from an occupied territory appears to contravene Article 55 of the 1907 Fourth Hague Convention.
Israeli banks have faced divestment in the past. In January 2014, Dutch pension firm PGGM announced it was divesting from the same Israeli banks that New Zealand’s fund excluded. The Financial Times reported that several senior PGGM executives later regretted the decision because it inadvertently thrust the company into the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the same month, Denmark’s Danske Bank terminated operations with Israel’s Bank Hapoalim, prompting Illinois’ Investment Policy Board to bar investment in Danske.
Accordingly, U.S. states such as Illinois that impose restrictions on the investment of public funds in companies boycotting Israel should prohibit investment in financial management firms implementing the Guardians’ anti-Israel divestment policy.
On their website, the Guardians state that avoiding reputational damage is one of their guiding principles. The fund’s exclusion of Israeli companies while continuing to invest in problematic businesses elsewhere could damage the fund’s reputation if members of Congress voiced their displeasure. This would carry significant weight, since the United States is New Zealand’s third-largest trading partner.
David May is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he also contributes to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from David and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow David on Twitter @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
