NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
In the past 24 hours, Israel has been attacked by the terrorist organization Hamas. More than 400 rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip. This number is the highest recorded on any day since Hamas began firing rockets into Israel more than 10 years ago. The previous record was 192 which fell in one day during Operation Protective Margin.
A new round of hostilities triggered by a botched Israeli covert operation into the Gaza Strip pushed the territory’s fragile security situation to the brink today.
Palestinian militants launched hundreds of rockets towards Israel and Israeli jets carried out bombing raids.
Israel’s military said it had rushed extra infantry troops and air defences to the boundary with Gaza as at least 200 projectiles were launched towards Israeli territory in less than three hours.
At least two projectiles hit houses, while an anti-tank missile hit a bus transporting soldiers near the border, the military said, critically injuring a 19-year-old soldier.
Justine Sachs and Nadia Abu-Shanab
An Israeli court this month ordered us to pay NZ$18,000 (£9,000) in damages for harming the “artistic welfare” of three Israeli teenagers. This ruling came after New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde heeded the call of activists, including a letter from the two of us, and cancelled her show in Tel Aviv. The teenagers claimed they suffered “damage to their good name as Israelis and Jews”; their legal action was possible because of a 2011 Israeli law allowing civil lawsuits against anyone who encourages a boycott of the country.
This is no farce. It may sound laughable, but the political implications are deadly serious. The lawsuit is a vivid example and extension of Israel’s suppression of dissenting voices.
Donald Trump
‘But I gave them Jerusalem!’ A recent report warned of a ‘growing frustration’ in the White House for U.S. Jews’ lack of appreciation for his policies toward Israel. Perhaps because they’re too grown up, and informed, to supply such unfounded adulation
The annual assessments of the Jewish People Policy Institute rarely tell us stuff we don’t know. But the latest report, presented to the Israeli government and published on the JPPI’s website earlier this month, did include a paragraph that caught the eye of some journalists.
“Israel and U.S. Jewish organizations should sharpen their awareness,” the report noted – “of a trend of growing frustration within the Trump administration that the president’s pro-Israel moves (especially the transfer of the embassy to Jerusalem) are not sufficiently appreciated by large segments of the American Jewish community.”
UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
‘Corbyn has said and done things that can reasonably be described as antisemitic,’ writes Dave Rich
A little over three years ago, shortly before Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, this newspaper set out seven questions for him to answer regarding people and organisations who he had supported, assisted or spoken alongside. It was a gruesome list of terrorists, Holocaust deniers and antisemites, and it was vital and urgent for Mr Corbyn to answer these questions satisfactorily, the JC urged, lest he “be regarded from the day of his election as an enemy of Britain’s Jewish community”.
Ambassador Gerberg presents a certificate to Milla Batten
The New Zealand Model United Nations 2018 has just concluded and the Israel Embassy in Wellington sponsored a pair of bright and determined students at the event.
Participants at the Model UN learned about debate strategies, negotiations and ethics, and listened to many keynote speakers discuss their respective fields. The four-day event also gave participants lessons in public speaking and ethical decision-making in order to make better-prepared global citizens.
After Donald Trump announced that the US would unilaterally pull back from the historic 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, Iranian forces in Syria fired rockets into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights for the first time. The Israelis retaliated by targeting Iranian forces and positions in Syria. That attack, which killed 23 people, was the biggest Israeli assault on Iranian positions in Syria since the civil war there started in 2011.
For a moment, it looked like two of the Middle East’s major political and military players to the verge of a full-scale military conflict. An Israeli-Iranian war could throw the Middle East into one of its most destructive clashes in modern history, one that could polarise the world’s powers, dragging in the US, a reliable ally of Israel, and Russia, Syria’s strongest ally and hence Iran’s strategic ally. And yet, neither has so far chosen to escalate further. Why?
Joanna Wane
Joanna Wane finds herself amid tumultuous times on a two-week trip to Israel and discovers…well, it’s complicated.
Jerusalem “returns the love” to Donald Trump for relocating the US Embassy from Tel Aviv, with mayor Nir Bakat announcing a nearby roundabout will be named in his honour.
That distinctive guttural rasp, described as a “backward snore”, seems at least one thing the Jewish and Arab worlds have in common, to the ears of an outsider, anyway. Later, I come to wonder if both sides might find such an observation offensive. It’s the differences that define and divide people here.
Don’t bother with Tel Aviv, I’ve been told by friends who did the hippy trail back in the 1970s. A lot has changed since then. The city itself was founded barely a century ago, but we’re staying in the old Yemenite district near the market, with its narrow, cobbled streets and chill hipster vibe; even the street art has serious attitude. The beach is a five-minute walk away. I love it, instantly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joanna Wane started out as a cadet on the Auckland Star in the days of manual typewriters, carbon copies, photographers’ darkrooms and hot-press printing. She still misses some of that. For the past 10 years, she’s been deputy editor at North & South, after working in newspapers and magazines in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, and dipping her toes briefly into TV documentary making before regaining her senses and finding her way into long-form journalism. She was judged Feature Writer of the Year (long-form) at the 2017 Canon Media Awards.
Yitzhak Rabin Memorial, Harris St, Wellington, New Zealand
On Wednesday a letter was published in Wellington’s Dominion Post. The writer wanted to know why there was a memorial to former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin – a man he described as leading “a bloodstained life” – on public land in the central city’s Harris St.
It may have been an honest inquiry, and there have been a few such similar letters in the five or so years since the memorial – a piece of Jerusalem stone acknowledging Rabin as a Nobel Peace Prize winner beside an olive tree – was dedicated.
A close up of the memorial
A reply yesterday pointed out the memorial was for Rabin’s efforts to break a deadlock between Israelis and Palestinians and that “soldiers sometimes make the greatest peacemakers, and to urge us to reflect on whether his violent death really means that we must descend again and forever into the abyss”.
The original letter came as no surprise to some.
The IL-20 “Coot” is an electronic reconnaissance aircraft similar to the RNZAF’s P-3 Orions. The Syrian theatre of war has been described as one of the intense electronic warfare environments currently on the plant.
MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian reconnaissance aircraft was shot down by Syria forces responding to an Israeli airstrike, killing all 15 people aboard, in what President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday was “a chain of tragic accidental circumstances.”
The downing of the Il-20 highlighted the dangers posed by the conflicting interests of various powers in the crowded skies over Syria and threatened the close security ties between Russia and Israel.
In an effort to maintain that relationship, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly called Putin to express sorrow over the death of the plane’s crew, blamed the plane’s loss squarely on Syria and offered to send Israel’s air force chief to Moscow to share information about the incident.
