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.
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.
Benjamin Steiner died in Auckland last week at the age of 81, and as Mark Jennings writes, his life story was unique in many ways
Benjamin Steiner cut a distinctive figure with his dapper clothes, trilby hat and twinkly eyes. But belying that appearance, his body covered in scars and the number A-421734 tattooed on his left forearm, was a terrible truth.
Steiner was a survivor of Auschwitz, and the subject of the notorious Dr Josef Mengele’s experiments.
The small, softly-spoken man lived in New Zealand most of his life. He was a professional and passionate saxophonist and worked as chief purser for the airline that became Air New Zealand.
Born in 1935 in Budapest, he was 8 years old when he was transported to Auschwitz – Birkenau in a railway wagon. By 1944, 12,000 Jews were being delivered to Auschwitz on an average day.
Winston Churchill once described the treatment of Hungarian Jews as the “greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world…”.
NZFOI: Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah
My Zayde told us about his childhood in Kazimierz, and about burying half-alive bodies in Buchenwald. What it means to be the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, and to lose them.
He and his father were imprisoned in Plaszow concentration camp, where he said every day brought a new tragedy. He would tell us, in unadorned language, that he saw young boys being hanged for stealing bread, and that’s when he learned you say the Shema prayer before you die. He piled earth over bodies, after they were shot dead, and was haunted by watching the soil shiver – the victims were still alive, and slowly suffocating.
“Facts,” the English philosopher and writer Aldous Huxley once observed, “don’t cease to exist because they are ignored.” Yet, in his recently released memoir, A Promised Land, Barack Obama both ignores and omits key facts about the Middle East. In particular, the former president gets relevant Israeli history wrong.
Perhaps most disturbing, however, is Obama’s tendency to minimize Palestinian terrorism. For example, he refers to Hamas as merely a “Palestinian resistance group.” Yet, Obama doesn’t tell readers what exactly Hamas is “resisting.”
Obama’s inability—or perhaps unwillingness—to see Hamas for who they are is part and parcel of a broader trend evidenced in his memoirs. The United States’s 44th president repeatedly strikes a false equivalency between Israel and the terrorists who seek the Jewish state’s destruction.
Obama’s tendency towards striking false equivalency between Israeli security measures and Palestinian terrorist efforts is buttressed by an understanding of relevant history that is rooted in inaccuracies and false assumptions.
And contrary to what the 44th president implies, Jews didn’t take the land. Rather, most of the “settlements” were purchased—and often from the Arabs themselves. As the historian Benny Morris noted in his 2008 book 1948: “A giant question mark hangs over the ethos of the Palestinian Arab elite: Husseinis, as well as Nashashibis, Khalidis, Dajanis, and Tamimis … sold land to the Zionist institutions and/or served as Zionist agents or spies.” These families, many of whom would lead opposition to the existence of Israel and the right of Jewish self-determination, secretly sold land to the very movement that they denounced.
[NZFOI: For background reading and future reference; and relevant to be aware of to contextualise the upcoming general elections]
Abu Abbas is not prepared to countenance Muhammad Dahlan as his successor.
The PA chairman’s two sons, Tareq and Yasser, own an economic empire in the territories worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and they rely on their connection with their father.
Mahmoud Abbas’ main endeavor is to find a fitting successor who will ensure both the continued existence of his sons’ businesses and their wellbeing.
The succession battle in the Palestinian Authority has become very elemental since Mahmoud Abbas rejected the request of four Arab states – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – to mend fences with his bitter rival Muhammad Dahlan. Some of those states want to see Dahlan as the next PA chairman.
Although some in Fatah view Abbas’ rejection of the Arab request as an act of “political suicide,” Abbas does not show signs of stress. At the urging of Egypt and Jordan, which fear Hamas, he called off the elections in the territories and consented to a return to Fatah by some of Dahlan’s people. As far as Abbas is concerned, he has complied with most of Egypt and Jordan’s requests. Yet, still, he is not prepared to countenance Muhammad Dahlan.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled Friday that it has jurisdiction over crimes committed in Palestine. The ICC was established in 2002 and prosecutes genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed around the world. In 2018, Palestine referred possible crimes to the ICC Prosecutor for investigation. In 2020, the Prosecutor sought a ruling of jurisdiction from the Pre-Trial Chamber.
According to Article 12 of the Rome Statute, which governs the ICC, the court may exercise jurisdiction over a crime if “the State on the territory of which the conduct in question occurred” is a party to the Statute or otherwise accepts the jurisdiction of the court. Israel argued that Palestine cannot give jurisdiction to the ICC because Palestine is not a sovereign state with jurisdiction over its own territory and nationals.
If you’re looking for examples of spin in B’tselem’s latest anti-Israel document, in which the organization slings around the inflammatory terms “apartheid” and “Jewish supremacy,” there are plenty.
Consider, as one small example, the report’s charge that Israel has built “hundreds of communities for Jewish citizens – yet not a single one for Palestinian citizens.” The sentence was written to sound as damning as possible, which increases its shock value, but also left the authors in the uncomfortable position of having to immediately rebut their own falsehood. “The exception,” B’tselem admits in the very next sentence, “is a handful of towns and villages built to concentrate the Bedouin population.”
The town of Ararat an-Naqab, which Israel built for the Bedouin community.
Which is to say, Israel built “not a single” community for Palestinians, except for all the ones it did build: Rahat, Kuseife, Shaqib al-Salam, Ar’arat an-Naqab, Lakiya, Tel as-Sabi, Hura, Tirabin al-Sana, Mulada, Abu Krinat, Bir Hadaj, Qasr al-Sir, Makhul, Umm Batin. It’s Orwellian newspeak: None, but many. A lie, but with the truth appended as a throwaway-line.
This is far from the worst distortion in the document.
In matters of culture my late mother, Claire, took her lead from the great Times columnist Bernard Levin and described herself as a “pantry Jew”. She understood herself not through religious faith because, like me, she had none, but through the crumbly chopped liver she sometimes made. She liked to cook gefilte fish, both boiled and fried, following her grandmother’s recipe. The boiled, I hated. Once cooled, the fishy jelly had the texture of phlegm and the mixture of white fish, matzo meal and a little sugar tasted of carelessness.
But the deep-fried, an idiosyncrasy of the Anglo-Jewish community, was entirely different. I loved the outer crunch and the fluffy interior, and knew that it would be even more delicious if I were allowed to eat it hot, straight from the bubbling oil, but I was not. Claire insisted it had to be eaten cold and could not explain why, other than to say it was “better that way”.
I did not get an answer until 1997 when Claudia Roden’s Book of Jewish Food was first published in the UK. In the introduction to the fish section, Roden explains that “because it was always cooked in advance for the Sabbath, fish was usually eaten cold”. I read this to my godless mother. I pointed out that her insistence I should eat it cold was therefore a vestigial stump of childhood religious observance. She was delightfully livid.
It’s fitting that my first interaction with Roden’s masterpiece should not have been to consult a recipe, or check a cooking technique, but to nail a point of cultural practice. Although it sits on my cookbook shelf, and includes many recipes, The Book of Jewish Food is not really a cookbook at all. “In many ways it was the first great encyclopedia of Jewish life,” says the historian and keen cook Simon Schama. “I love it for the narrative embroidery around the recipes. That had been done before, but Claudia did it in more detail and with more sophistication than anyone else.” The chef, writer and restaurateur Yotam Ottolenghi agrees. “It’s timeless but also academic. It has a thoroughness that you don’t really see any more.”
