NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
Sheree Trotter
The Balfour Declaration has been exploited for political purposes by both supporters and opponents of the Jewish state. The following historical narrative situates the Balfour Declaration within the context of a small Jewish community at the ‘ends of the earth’, considers what it meant in its day and lessons for the present.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration was greeted with enthusiasm by the New Zealand Jewish community who believed it heralded a solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’.
An Iranian diplomat has been accused of fuelling radicalism with a fiery, anti-Israel speech at an Auckland mosque.
Jewish community leaders want Hormoz Ghahremani, first secretary of the Iranian Embassy, to be expelled after he appeared alongside speakers who denied the Holocaust and called for the “surgical removal” of Israel.
In his speech, Ghahremani said Israel was trying to “deceive the world” by pretending to be an advocate of peace when in fact it was fuelling terrorism and extremism in the Middle East to divert attention from the Palestine issue.
Theresa May and Benjamin Netanyahu
Theresa May has said she will celebrate the centenary of the Balfour declaration, which paved the way for the creation of Israel, with “pride” next week.
After welcoming Benjamin Netanyahu to London, Ms May and the Israeli Prime Minister will dine together at an exclusive event to celebrate the historic promise made in 1917 that the British Government would use its “best endeavours” to facilitate the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, will not be attending the high-profile event but the party’s Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry will be taking his place.
It’s not as if Diana Wichtel doesn’t give the reader notice that things aren’t going to end well. In the opening lines of this remarkable memoir, the Listener journalist is reading the autopsy report from November 1970 of her father Ben, dead at 60 in a Canadian psychiatric hospital. He had pneumonia. He had bruises on his face. He had been psychotic for years. The note about the funeral states: “Family and friends: none.” He had stayed behind in Canada when his Kiwi wife had taken 13-year-old Diana and her two siblings back to New Zealand. They were told their father would be following soon, but he didn’t. Five years later, he was dead.
So, as the subtitle puts it, this book is “A long search for a lost father”, an account of Wichtel’s attempts to learn the truth about her father’s demise, including a guilt-stricken examination of her own culpability. But then there’s the actual title, with the name of the Nazi extermination camp in Poland where 900,000 people, almost all Jews, were murdered.
Read more: Book review: Driving to Treblinka by Diana Wichtel | Stuff.co.nz
British and ANZAC troops enter Jerusalem after it is taken from the Turks.
The horrors and futility of the battles of Gallipoli and Passchendaele, their human cost and consequences have been examined exhaustively as their centenaries have arrived.
We are reminded of Aucklanders who died in overseas wars by the mighty presence of the Auckland War Memorial Museum erected in 1929 on a hill known by Māori as Pukekawa or “hill of bitter memories”.
Battles, or countries in which New Zealanders fought, are engraved around the building. On the eastern wall is a striking inscription of the Gallipoli conflict and equally prominent on the western side is a memorial fountain which commemorates the campaign in Palestine.
New Zealanders fought and died in places with very familiar names – Jerusalem, Gaza, Jericho, Beersheba.
A billboard in Toulouse commemorating the victims of Mohammed Merah’s gun attack on the Ozar Hatorah school in March 2012
Chaotic scenes broke out on Wednesday at the trial in France of the brother of an Islamist extremist who carried out a spree of terrorist attacks around the southern city of Toulouse in March 2012, including a gun assault on a Jewish school that resulted in the brutal murders of a rabbi along with three young children.
Shouts and jeers erupted from the gallery at the court in Paris during the testimony of Zoulika Aziri — the mother of 35-year-old Abdelkader Merah, who could face a life sentence if he is found guilty of having aided his brother, Mohammed, in carrying out three separate terror attacks between March 11-19, 2012. Mohammed Merah was shot and killed by French police on March 22 of that year at the culmination of a 30-hour siege after he was tracked down.
Tempers at the court flared after Aziri’s lawyer, Eric Dupond-Moretti, justified her decision to lie in some of her statements to the court by describing her as a grieving mother. “This woman is the mother of the accused, but she is also the mother of a dead man,” he said, when urging prosecution lawyers to be less aggressive in their questioning. At this point in the proceedings, the brother of Sgt. Imad Ibn Ziaten — an off-duty French-Moroccan paratrooper shot dead by Mohammed Merah on March 11, 2012 — cried out “Are you not ashamed?” before leaving the courtroom sobbing in the arms of his relatives.
On October 16, 2017, Dr Itzhak Gerberg gave a briefing to the NZ Institute of International Affairs at the University of Canterbury.
Israel’s neighbours can be divided into four axes or camps. Most of them characterised by instability, failed states and active terrorist groups motivated by religious extremism.
The action or inaction of the Western Powers throws another spice into the mix.
Yet there are reasons to be hopeful.
Here is an audio recording of the briefing.
Field of Vision – A Night at the Garden from Field of Vision on Vimeo.
Footage has been discovered showing 20,000 people cheering on the idea of a white supremacist USA in New York’s Madison Square Garden – in the guise of a “pro-American rally”.
The footage, shot on February 20, 1939, shows the audience throwing Nazi salutes as the American flag is carried to a stage bedecked with a 30-foot-high painting of George Washington flanked by swastikas.
The Pledge of Allegiance is then read out before the group’s leader, German-American Fritz Kuhn, gets up to denounce the “Jewish media” and call for America to be “returned to the American people … a white, gentile-ruled United States”.
PARIS – Audrey Azoulay’s election Friday night as UNESCO’s next director-general marks an unexpected victory for French diplomacy.
Her name first came up as candidate for the spot at the twilight of François Hollande’s presidency when she served as culture minister.
But the end of Hollande’s political career risked ending her political ambitions, as well, as new the new president, Emmanuel Macron, found himself in an uncomfortable position with a candidate he did not choose, to a post he did not seek.
In fact, countries hosting UN agency headquarters rarely seek to also conquer the agencies’ leadership.
Still, Macron took it upon himself personally to advance Azoulay’s candidacy – a gamble that paid off.
