Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council

Hypocrisy frequently rears its ugly head in the Middle East, but the Palestinian Authority (PA) has just succeeded in producing something close to a new examplar on the issue of media freedom. As a Jerusalem Post editorial ("Palestinian responsibility", 2/4/2012) has documented, the Palestinian Authority is intensifying an ongoing crackdown on journalists operating in the West Bank, while at the same time it's introducing a new award honouring press freedom.

In its first story since December 2011 looking at Iran's nuclear program, ABC TV "7.30" (21/3) reporter Michael Brissenden described the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as "the most powerful Jewish lobby group in the United States". This may surprise the many non-Jews who attended AIPAC's recent annual conference, including pro-Israel Latinos, African-Americans and Christian delegates.

The last sentence in Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth's introduction to the organisation's 2012 annual report, titled "Time to Abandon the Autocrats and Embrace Rights," reads: "It is a global responsibility to help see a positive conclusion to the Arab people's brave efforts to demand their rights, and to ensure that the toppling of one autocratic regime does not lead to its replacement by another." If one were to read the essay backwards, this could have been a very promising start. Unfortunately, reading the essay from beginning to end, it is hard to avoid a certain sense of cynicism and irony when reaching this concluding sentence. This is mainly because Roth's piece should have been titled "Time to Abandon Autocrats and Embrace Political Islamism".

As has been widely reported, there has been controversy over support by World Vision and AusAID for a Palestinian group with alleged links to a terrorist organisation. While the current complaint is now being investigated by World Vision, it is worth recalling that this is not the first time that World Vision has been accused of making a controversial funding decision in the Palestinian Authority areas.

In the latest complaint, the Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Centre) wrote letters to AusAID and World Vision requesting that they discontinue their support of the Palestinian aid organisation the Union of Agricultural Work Committee, which it alleges is a subsidiary of the terrorist organisation the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine...

This Update features two pieces on the crisis between Egypt and the US sparked by the Egyptian government's crackdown on pro-democracy NGOs in the country, and more importantly, what these events say about Egypt's potential for progress toward genuine liberal democracy.

Stephen McInerney, director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, discusses the politics of the NGO case in some depth and makes a strong case that the future of Egyptian civil society may be at stake. He details the clear disingenuousness of the claims against the NGOs, and the way Fayza Abul Naga, minister of planning and international cooperation, is clearly using the case - along with a strategy of brinksmanship - to promote her agenda, with at least the acquiescence of the ruling military council, SCAF...

This Update focuses on the growing prevalence of conspiracy theories that seem to be coming out of countries affected by the Arab Spring, especially Egypt, and the possible consequences.

First up is Washington Institute scholar David Schenker, who looks at the background to the Egyptian decision to prosecute 16 US citizens who lead NGOs in Egypt for accepting foreign funding to promote democracy. This decision risks the loss of $1.3 billion in annual aid from the US which Egypt desperately needs in order to import food for its citizens, but Egyptians overwhelmingly want  this aid to end anyway...

To its great discredit, the Melbourne Age has republished a Guardian newspaper feature that alleges mistreatment by the Israeli judicial system of West Bank Palestinian youths detained on suspicion of terrorism.

As a previous AIJAC blog post revealed, many allegations of Palestinian children being tortured, kept in solitary confinement, denied legal representation, and forced to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, rely on half-truths, manipulation of facts and figures and unsubstantiated claims by anti-Israel organisations.

That is, organisations with anti-Israel political agendas that extend beyond the remit of the specific goals they profess to be concerned with and into areas of delegitimising the Jewish state.

According to a recent AP report, after facing criticism from Israeli Knesset members for hosting two Hamas MPs at its recent conference, the International Parliamentary Union (IPU) has reportedly apologised to Israel.

Israel objected because the militant group has killed hundreds of Israelis in attacks over the years. Hamas is considered a terrorist group by the EU. and U.S.

The union's secretary-general, Anders Johnsson...

Both Palestinian groups and pro-Palestinian Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) often accuse Israel of seeking to "Judaise" Jerusalem. For instance, following their admission to the UN cultural organisation UNESCO in October, one of the things the Palestinian Authority said they wanted to do was sue Israel in international forums for supposedly "systematically destroying and forging Arab and Islamic culture in Jerusalem." Similarly, at a controversial rally in Cairo on November 25 at which there was also recitation of a hadith [saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad] about killing all Jews, Sheikh Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of al-Azhar University, proclaimed, "we shall not allow the Zionists to Judaise al-Quds (Jerusalem)."

Watching the debate, both in Israel and elsewhere, surrounding the proposed new NGO (Non-Government Organisation) laws in the Knesset, it is hard not to be struck by the hyperbole being employed. Some Israelis, primarily from the political left, are railing about "threats to the very foundation of Israel's democracy" whereas others, mainly on the right, are decrying the "diplomatic warfare being waged by foreign governments against Israel". Looking past this rhetoric, however, the two proposed laws as discussed below are neither revolutionary nor unreasonable. In fact, they are in many ways following the example of other democratic countries, Australia included.

In another example of UN dysfunctionality, Syria has been admitted as the Arab representative to UNESCO's human rights committee, just a day after a UN report criticised the country's massacre of 3,500 anti-government protesters.

The decision is even more bizarre in light of the Arab League suspension of Syria over the Assad regime's human rights' abuses.

Following up on the post Tuesday concerning controversial Israeli proposals to limit or tax foreign government funding to "political' Non-Governmental Organisations in Israel, a Jerusalem Post editorial on the subject has an interesting fact that may help explain why some Israelis are so concerned about the issue:

...European governments spend more on left-wing NGOs operating in Israel - between $75 million and $100m. a year - than their total contributions to nonprofit human rights groups in other Middle East countries, according to NGO Monitor.

There has been some controversy in Israel over a proposal coming out of Israel's Ministerial Committee for Legislation which would limit or tax the ability of foreign governments or international bodies like the UN to fund Israeli NGOs...

American law professor David Bernstein has an excellent post challenging the idea that such a law (and it is by no means clear that such a law can get through the Knesset, Israel's parliament, or what its provisions would be if it did) would be undemocratic...

South African Judge Richard Goldstone has written an op-ed in this New York Times on 31 October condemning the false allegation that Israel is an ‘apartheid' state. He writes:

"The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony."

This is the same Goldstone who did a great deal of damage to Israel by lending his name to the biased UN fact-finding mission into the Gaza conflict in 2009 which condemned Israel for deliberately killing civilians and war crimes while all but ignoring the Palestinian rocket attacks into Israel.

Goldstone later recanted his support for the report after realising that much of the information relied upon in the ‘Goldstone Report' was not credible and biased. In an op-ed in the Washington Post in April this year he stated, "if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document."

In the wake of Gilad Shalit's release overnight from captivity in Gaza, major international NGOs have come in for criticism for not publicising his illegal incarceration by Hamas, an organisation on whose behalf these same NGOs have tirelessly campaigned to pressure Israel to lift its legal blockade of Gaza.

Today's Update looks at last week's controversial approval for a proposed plan to build 1,100 homes within the boundaries of the Jewish suburb of Gilo in Jerusalem. Gilo lies just over the Green Line and is now home to 40,000 Israelis. As Commentary's Jonathan Tobin explains, Gilo is a symbol for many Israelis, having been a target for numerous terrorist sniper shootings during the Second Intifada and "was the laboratory where Palestinian terrorists sought to discover whether they could force Jews into abandoning their homes. They failed".

It was late evening in Sydney.

Not many hours earlier, I had arrived home from South Africa, having participated in the World Conference Against Racism ("Durban I") and the NGO Forum which had preceded it.

The Jewish community in Sydney had asked me to provide a first hand account of the events, given the reports which they had heard of antisemitism, anti-Israel extremism, bullying and thuggery.

So I found myself giving what I had thought was a dry, unemotional recounting of the lows and highs of my previous two weeks.

If called upon to march on Israel's borders from the West Bank in the event a Palestinian state is unilaterally established on the 1967 borders come September; are Palestinians going to spoil their leaders' party by not providing the numbers?

But what do you do if you hold a rally and the main beneficiaries of the event won't show?

Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh reports that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is worried because his own people are currently disinterested in attending anti-settlement protests.

Contradicting local boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) supporters who claimed their actions in preventing customers entering a Max Brenner chocolate store in Melbourne last month were peaceful, a prominent supporter of the campaign has condemned their behaviour as "indefensible" and "pretty stupid".

In an interview with the Australian, the president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, Reverend Jim Barr, warned that heavy-handed tactics which resulted in 19 activists being arrested had backfired.

Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the Second Lebanon war, fought between Israel and Lebanese terror group Hezbollah. Since the conflict concluded, Hezbollah has been systematically consolidating power in Lebanon and amassing arms for the next round of violence. However, there has not been a shot fired from Southern Lebanon into Israel for which Hezbollah has taken credit. This is in stark contrast to the situation before the incursion, when Hezbollah would periodically fire rockets and mortars into Israeli territory in order to raise tensions.

To mark the anniversary, Israeli academics Abraham Bell and Gerald Steinberg have written a piece in Ynet about a study that they are conducting on different NGO responses to the 2006 conflict, which has some rather disconcerting findings...

The United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) - set up in 1949 to look after the humanitarian needs of Palestinians - has long been the subject of controversy, with critics accusing it of deliberately perpetuating the refugee problem....

Now Israeli researcher Arlene Kushner has written, in the latest edition of Middle East Quarterly, a detailed compendium and deconstruction of many recent examples illustrating, in her words "The propensity for senior UNRWA staff to make inappropriate, incendiary, and highly politicized statements - in stark contrast to the organization's mandate."...

A new article at the Jerusalem Post offers an interesting example of what might be done if UNRWA's insistence that Palestinian refugees must never be resettled, but must stay in refugee camps until the conflict is over, could be bypassed.

Probably no document in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict has done more damage to the reputation of Israel, nor contributed more to the international campaign to boycott and delegitimise it, than the Goldstone Report. That is why Justice Goldstone's mea culpa in a Washington Post op-ed on 1 April was so breathtaking.

Richard Goldstone, chair of the commission which authored the UN Human Rights Council's (UNHRC) Goldstone Report into the Gaza War of 2008-09, has now conceded that, regarding Israel, "if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document."

In particular, he now agrees that the most inflammatory and absurd of the report's conclusions - that Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians "as a matter of policy" - is baseless. He also concedes that Israeli authorities are reasonably investigating every specific allegation of misconduct by its soldiers during the Gaza war. Hamas, by contrast, he points out, has done "nothing."

Unfortunately, Justice Goldstone's change of heart cannot undo the massive, irreparable damage he and his co-commissioners originally inflicted through their report. This damage is not only to Israel's reputation but also to Middle East peace prospects, and to the very notion of a responsible and universal system of international law.

Today's Update contains some comments on the latest exchange of complaints between Washington and Jerusalem regarding an Israeli approval of one stage of plans to build new apartments in Jewish neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem.

Today's Update features three pieces alleging abuses of international law and institutions, as well as human rights norms, with respect to Israel.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's tirade on April 20 to the United Nations' Durban II "anti-racism" conference in Geneva should not have surprised anyone.

As readers will no doubt be aware, the UN Durban Review Conference in now under way in Geneva. This is designed as a follow-up to the infamous 2001 Durban "anti-racism" conference, which was marred by large-scale antisemitism, as well as the singling out of Israel as the only country named as "racist."

The United Nations' Review Conference for the 2001 "World Conference Against Racism" is shaping up to be as unworthy of its name as was its predecessor. The 2001 conference (Durban I) was hosted by South Africa in Durban and its legacy as a hate fest of antisemitism and anti-Israel thuggery has blighted the city's reputation.

This Update features a couple of pieces highlighting the problems and biases of international Non-Governmental Organisation (NGOs), particularly those supposedly devoted to human rights, with respect to Middle East issues.

On Sunday, June 11, a boycott of Israeli academics, which had been adopted a few weeks earlier by the UK University and College Lecturers Union (NATFHE), was lifted after the move threatened to derail a merger plan with the larger UK Association of University Teachers.