Antony Loewenstein

The following letter appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Jeremy Gilling’s assertion (Letters, March 20) that Robert Magid’s reason for pulling an ad promoting talks by Jeff Halper “doesn’t cut it” is irrelevant. Magid is not answerable to Gilling or to the Herald.

Extending Magid’s first reason (Halper’s promotion by groups that Jews find offensive), one would not find an ad for condoms in a Catholic publication. Gilling’s claim that Magid’s second reason (Halper’s argument that Israel should be dissolved as a Jewish state) is “calculated to misrepresent” does precisely what it accuses Magid of doing. Web searches and listeners to Halper confirm Magid’s impression.

Your editorial (“With friends like these …”, March 13) and subsequent letters criticising Magid are discriminatory. They imply that unlike any other publication, a Jewish one must accept an ad offensive to its readership; that the Jewish community’s opposition to Halper’s views makes it a supporter of cruelty and oppression; and that the all-powerful “Israel lobby” suppresses dissenting views.

Paul Winter Chatswood

President Barack Obama’s message to the Iranian people is an intriguing way to affect change in the toxic relationship between the Islamic Republic and the United States:

The following letter appears in today’s Melbourne Age:

Last week a major Jewish newspaper refused to run an advertisement publicising talks by prominent Israeli academic and peace activist Professor Jeff Halper.

This week Jewish leaders are campaigning against talks with former Iranian leader Mohammad Khatami at La Trobe University’s Centre for Dialogue. While it is stated that for every two Jews, there are three opinions, it seems that the Australian Jewish community is being corralled into a very narrow concept of Israeli nationalism and colonisation by a centre for non-dialogue, equivalent to a theocracy.

Mark Braddbeer, Brunswick

Once again, the Zionist lobby shoots itself in the foot, proves to be utterly intolerant of anybody who doesn’t subscribe to its Likud worldview and shows the wider community that Jews don’t really like to debate. Which many of us do.

Zionists: 0

Stupidity: 1

The following letter was submitted this week to the Sydney Morning Herald but remains unpublished:

It seems that we are again witnessing a distortion of facts in Australia when it comes to the Palestine/Israel question.  I refer to the visit of Israeli Professor Jeff Halper and the refusal of the Australian Jewish News to print an advertisement promoting his speaking tour.  Robert Magid the publisher, gives a long explanation in his letter (SMH 18/3) that is disingenuous and provocative.

The ad listed the speaking engagements of Jeff Halper in Sydney.  To suggest that it was offensive in the same vein as an ad promoting “female genital mutilation” insults the reader’s intelligence. However, it leads the reader to make an unsavoury connection between Jeff Halper’s ad and hatred of Jews because of a huge rally in January condemning Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Magid associates Antony Loewenstein – who spoke at the rally and is a promoter of Jeff’s Sydney events – with some of the fringe elements who then compared Israel to Nazi Germany.  Magid draws a long and tenuous bow: Loewenstein, like other fair-minded Australians present, had no control over that public crowd.

As for Jeff Halper’s views on Israel, he has been explicit in his assessment of the current situation. Where once Israel could have lived as a Jewish state side by side with a Palestinian state (the Palestinians accepted a two-state solution in 1988), Israel’s expansionist policies, in defiance of international law, have driven the Palestinians into Bantustans à la South Africa with little or no hope of them ever having an independent and viable state of their own. All that is left now is a bi-national reality that will require a reconciling between the two peoples in a political entity that will have to be decided between them if this conflict is ever to be resolved.

Judging from Magid’s spurious speculations, he has no interest in providing diverse views, but rather favours one failing political ideology that can only be sustained through the use of force, intimidation, character assassination and baseless accusations.

Sonja Karkar
Australians for Palestine
Women for Palestine
Organisers of Jeff Halper’s tour

The Israel Lobby co-author, John Mearsheimer, on his argument in the London Review of Books that the Zionist lobby is declining in power:

An even more important reason for the lobby to drive Freeman out of his job is the weakness of the case for America’s present policy towards Israel, which makes it imperative to silence or marginalise anyone who criticises the special relationship. If Freeman hadn’t been punished, others would see that one could talk critically about Israel and still have a successful career in Washington. And once you get an open and free-wheeling discussion about Israel, the special relationship will be in serious trouble.

One of the best anti-Zionist blogs in the US, Mondoweiss, on the real danger in the Middle East; the fundamentalist settler movement:

In a speech at a New York synagogue Wednesday night, Nadia Matar, a leader of the Israeli settlers’ group “Women in Green,” called for the assassination of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, as a way of bringing peace to Israel.

Just as Churchill understood that in order to bring peace to Europe, “he had to destroy the Nazi beast,” Matar explained, “today we must destroy all the terrorist organizations. We must kill all the terrorist leaders, starting with Mahmoud Abbas and all others…Nobody had any moral qualms at destroying the Nazi regime. We have to abolish the Oslo Agreements, there’s no difference between the PA, the Islamic Jihad, the Hamas, whatever names you have, they’re all terrorists and we cannot have peace with them.”

I look forward to the Zionist lobby loudly condemning this call to terrorism.

We’ll be waiting a long time. Remember, in their worldview, only Arabs are terrorists and Jews are pioneers and leaders.

My following letter was not published in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

As an Australian Jew, I stand alongside the Palestinians with millions of other Jews around the globe. The tragedy of their situation, inflicted by Israel and the Western powers, requires a simple moral reasoning; Jews are no longer the victim.

Judaism is not Zionism. A far deeper understanding of human rights is necessary, not least because the Jewish state insists on invading, occupying and destroying the Palestinian existence, a reality rejected by the vast majority of the civilised world.

Visiting Israeli/American scholar Dr Jeff Halper is part of this noble tradition. We are among a growing number of Jews in opening the eyes of the Jewish establishment, who believe any public criticism of Israel is tantamount to treason and anti-Semitism.

I was proud, with countless other Jews and Palestinians in January, to speak out against Israel’s illegal and brutal bombardment of Gaza, which has resulted in a strengthened Hamas. It was just the latest futile war waged by Israel against a defenceless population.

It is time for the Zionist community to realise, as New York Jewish writer Anna Roiphe wrote recently, that there is “nothing normal about a state that cannot tolerate a minority within its borders and treat them as it would have wished its people to have been treated in the centuries of Diaspora life.”

Has occupation become a feature of modern Zionism which Jews can support?

The following letter appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Robert Magid’s defence of his decision to refuse an advertisement in the Australian Jewish News promoting the tour of Jeff Halper doesn’t cut it (Letters, March 18). He offers two grounds. First, someone promoting Halper’s tour spoke at a demonstration where other people said and did objectionable things. That’s two full removes from the visiting speaker, and reeks of disingenuousness.

His second ground is that Halper “has repeatedly called for Israel to be dissolved as a Jewish state”. Halper, with many other Jews, favours Israel reconstituting itself as a secular state for all its people (including its dispossessed indigenous population), just like Australia. Magid’s use of the apocalyptic term “dissolved” is calculated to misrepresent.

But more to the point, Halper’s is a legitimate argument. That it is denied an airing by the AJN is a sorry reflection on the openness of the publication, and its publisher, to debate.

Jeremy Gilling Sydney

The New York Times can’t quite bring itself to explain why the Jewish state has become so hatred around the world; actions speak louder than words. Talking about peace is easy; occupying and killing Palestinians shows the globe the country’s true face:

Israel, whose founding idea was branded as racism by the United Nations General Assembly in 1975 and which faced an Arab boycott for decades, is no stranger to isolation. But in the weeks since its Gaza war, and as it prepares to inaugurate a hawkish right-wing government, it is facing its worst diplomatic crisis in two decades.

Examples abound. Its sports teams have met hostility and violent protests in Sweden, Spain and Turkey. Mauritania has closed Israel’s embassy.

Relations with Turkey, an important Muslim ally, have suffered severely. A group of top international judges and human rights investigators recently called for an inquiry into Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Israel Apartheid Week” drew participants in 54 cities around the world this month, twice the number of last year, according to its organizers. And even in the American Jewish community, albeit in its liberal wing, there is a chill.

The issue has not gone unnoticed here, but it has generated two distinct and somewhat contradictory reactions. On one hand, there is real concern. Global opinion surveys are being closely examined and the Foreign Ministry has been granted an extra $2 million to improve Israel’s image through cultural and information diplomacy.

“We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater companies, exhibits,” said Arye Mekel, the ministry’s deputy director general for cultural affairs. “This way you show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.”

That’s because the “prettier” face is fundamentally rejected by millions of Palestinians, Jews, Arabs and the civilised world.

Ronnie Kasrils fought for decades against apartheid in his South African homeland, and with victory served in the governments of Nelson Mandela and later Thabo Mbeki.

His latest article is titled, “Who said nearly 50 years ago that Israel was an Apartheid State?”

…a colonial racist mentality which rationalised the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, in Africa from Namibia to the Congo and elsewhere, most clearly has its parallels in Palestine.

The following article appears in this week’s Sydney-based Inner-City Courier newspaper:

History has a strange way of evolving:

The DuMont Media Group in Cologne has become the first newspaper consortium to publish a historical account of its own activities in the Third Reich. The work is a portrait of a dark age for freedom of the press…

The Dumont group, whose holdings include a number of prominent papers in western Germany and stake in the Israeli daily Haaretz, was recently involved in a high-profile takeover of leading newspapers in Hamburg and Berlin.

Haaretz is Israel’s finest newspaper and regularly publishes damning indictments of the Jewish state’s occupation policies.

Hitler may be turning in his grave. As he should.