An academic boycott of Israeli universities isn't an attack on freedom of speech. The evidence tells us these institutions are key battlegrounds for breaches of international law towards the Palestinians, argues Antony Loewenstein.

New Zealand's $20 billion national pension fund announced this month that it was divesting from three Israeli companies that were complicit in the building of colonies in the West Bank and the annexation wall that runs deep into Palestinian territory.

"Findings by the United Nations that the separation barrier and settlement activities were illegal under international law were central to the fund's decision to exclude the companies," the responsible fund manager for investment, Anne-Maree O'Connor, said in a statement.

The companies targeted were Africa Israel, Danya Cebus and Elbit Systems. The last firm has a deep relationship with the Australian Government and recently scored a large contract with the Australian Defence Force. Canberra has no hesitation in assisting the corporation despite its troubling legal and ethical record of working on occupied, Palestinian land.

"If one of your Jewish friends calls you, there is nine chances out of ten that it is to ask you for a favour."

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is "insoluble" and most Israelis "couldn't care less about it any more", according to Naftali Bennett, the surprise star of the election campaign, whose extreme rightwing nationalist and pro-settler Jewish Home is within sight of becoming the country's second biggest party.

In an interview with the Guardian, Bennett said he did not intend to waste the next four years "babbling about Israel and the Palestinians", and defended his plan to annex most of the West Bank in the face of international opposition, which was the "result of ignorance".

"There is not going to be a Palestinian state within the tiny land of Israel," he said, referring to the area from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean. "It's just not going to happen. A Palestinian state would be a disaster for the next 200 years."

Bennett acknowledged that Binyamin Netanyahu was almost certain to continue as prime minister following the election on 22 January, but added: "The big question is the question of power. If we get enough seats in the next Knesset [parliament], we'll become the biggest and most influential partner in Netanyahu's next government."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/07/naftali-bennett-interview-jewish-home

The calumnies perpetrated by cartoonists against the only democracy in the Middle East, surrounded by barbarous neighbours, increases daily, writes Evan Jones.

The calumnies perpetrated by cartoonists against the only democracy in the Middle East, surrounded by barbarous neighbours, increase daily. It is a global phenomenon. There is no respite from it. How can we explain it? Are those who take up cartoonery (or as some friendly wit termed it, ‘toonerism’) genetically predisposed to the hatred of valiant Israel?

How has the stupendously resourced Hasbara enterprise failed to capitalise on selling the magnificent edifice that is the current state of Israel? We remain open to enlightenment on this fundamental vexing question, in which the future of our self-image is encapsulated.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/art/cartoons/cartoonists-and-israel-the-heinous-slander/

Bugger, I fell through the cracks in that article... Gus Leonisky shall be ignored... What's worse: being ignored or being challenged?... Now tell me: Is the cartoon at top so wrong?...

Remember Mama Leonisky (née Levy-Gustemberg)'s lesson for kids: "If you tell a lie without your nose getting longer, you're a smart Jew with a big enough nose. If you tell a porkie and your nose lengthens, you're a silly wooden puppet."

I'm afraid I always felt like a silly wooden puppet... see toon at top...

May be, the article by Evan Jones was tongue-in-cheek?...

Leunig, your provocative use of Nazi analogies is so tiresome

Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.

The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically.

One of the Ethiopian women who was interviewed is quoted as saying: “They [medical staff] told us they are inoculations. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.” It is alleged that some of the women were forced or coerced to take the drug while in transit camps in Ethiopia.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-gave-birth-control-to-ethiopian-jews-without-their-consent-8468800.html?printService=print

Israeli jets have attacked a "military research centre" near Damascus, killing two people, according to Syrian state TV.

"Israeli fighter jets violated our airspace at dawn today and carried out a direct strike on a scientific research centre in charge of raising our level of resistance and self-defence," the army's general command said in a statement carried by state news agency SANA.

The strike came "after terrorist groups made several failed attempts in the past months to take control of the site" at Jamraya, the statement added, referring to rebel groups fighting the regime of president Bashar al-Assad.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, citing unnamed US officials, said the attack was aimed at a convoy carrying "'game-changing' strategic weapons" to a Shiite militant group.

The AFP news agency said security officials said Israeli aircraft carried out the bombing raid on a weapons convoy heading out of Syria. But it said it was unclear if the strike took place in Syrian or Lebanese territory.

The Syrian army has denied those claims.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-31/israeli-jets-attack-syrian-research-centre-syrian-army/4492426?WT.svl=news2

Israel today is not the Soviet Union of the '30s. But that attitude of turning a blind eye to obvious injustices is all too familiar from the history of Stalinism, writes Jeff Sparrow.

In the 1920s, Harry Pollitt, a key leader of British Communism, fell in love with a young activist called Rose Cohen. By his own reckoning, he proposed to her (unsuccessfully) 14 times.

Cohen later moved to the Soviet Union, where, in 1937, she was arrested as a spy. The Russians never reported her fate but we now know that in November that year, guards dragged Cohen to the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka prison and shot her in the back of the head.

Coincidentally, Pollitt was in Moscow when the secret police came for Cohen. Behind the scenes, he lobbied on her behalf with high profile officials, including, it seems, Stalin himself. Yet when Pollitt returned to London, he and his Communist Party colleagues refused to call publicly for Cohen's release, going so far as to denounce others who did.

'Any charge that may be brought against [Cohen],' wrote the Daily Worker, 'will be tried according to the forms of Soviet justice. The British government has no right whatever to interfere in the internal affairs of another country and its citizens. It is not surprising that the reactionary press is in full cry in support of the British protest ...'

The Cohen affair comes to mind in the reaction to the extraordinary tale of Israel's 'Prisoner X'

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4524478.html?WT.svl=theDrum

Sure, we're talking here of flull blown socialist zionism... The main zionist second wave came directly from Russia, where anti-semitism was painful... Lenin was part Jewish and had many jewish friends... Trotsky was Jewish as well, though both were not religious...

From Trotsky himself:

And how, you ask me, can socialism solve this question? On this point I can but offer hypotheses. Once socialism has become master of our planet or at least of its most important sections, it will have unimaginable resources in all domains. Human history has witnessed the epoch of great migrations on the basis of barbarism. Socialism will open the possibility of great migrations on the basis of the most developed technique and culture. It goes without saying that what is here involved is not compulsory displacements, that is, the creation of new ghettos for certain nationalities, but displacements freely consented to, or rather demanded by certain nationalities or parts of nationalities. The dispersed Jews who would want to be reassembled in the same community will find a sufficiently extensive and rich spot under the sun. The same possibility will be opened for the Arabs, as for all other scattered nations. National topography will become a part of the planned economy . This is the grand historical perspective that I envisage. To work for international socialism means also to work for the solution of the Jewish question.

You ask me if the Jewish question still exists in the USSR. Yes, it exists, just as the Ukrainian, the Georgian, even the Russian questions exist there. The omnipotent bureaucracy stifles the development of national culture just as it does the whole of culture. Worse still, the country of the great proletarian revolution is now passing through a period of profound reaction. If the revolutionary wave revived the finest sentiments of human solidarity, the Thermidorian reaction has stirred up all that is low, dark and backward in this agglomeration of 170 million people. To reinforce its domination the bureaucracy does not even hesitate to resort in a scarcely camouflaged manner to chauvinistic tendencies, above all to anti-semitic ones. The latest Moscow trial, for example, was staged with the hardly concealed design of presenting internationalists as faithless and lawless Jews who are capable of selling themselves to the German Gestapo.

Since 1925 and above all since 1926, anti-semitic demagogy, well camouflaged, unattackable, goes hand in hand with symbolic trials against avowed pogromists. You ask me if the old Jewish petty bourgeoisie in the USSR has been socially assimilated by the new soviet environment. I am indeed at a loss to give you a clear reply. The social and national statistics in the USSR are extremely tendencious. They do not serve to set forth the truth, but above all to glorify the leaders, the chiefs, the creators of happiness. An important part of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie has been absorbed by the formidable apparatuses of the state, industry, commerce, the cooperatives, etc., above all in their lower and middle layers. This fact engenders an anti-semitic state of feeling and the leaders manipulate it with a cunning skill in order to canalize and to direct especially against the Jews the existing discontent against the bureaucracy.

read more: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/jewish.htm

Here the Jews have learnt well from their comrads, the old Ruskies like Stalin....

In summing up the malign influence of the Murdoch media in the UK, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger commented: “We’ve allowed something really ugly to happen in this country…” The same has to be said about the ugliness of Australian foreign policy, with the Murdoch media bearing some responsibility for uncritical support of nefarious practices.

Early last month, on February 5, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Gambian lawyer Fatou Bensouda, announced that the court, after five long years of examination, had the legal right to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israelis and by Palestinians.

Israel’s foreign ministry immediately instructed its overseas ambassadors to get foreign affairs ministers to issue public statements of opposition and to tell Bensouda personally “not to move forward”, threatening that “if an investigation against Israel starts it will create a continuous crisis between Israel and the Palestinian Authority …”

Two days later, Australia and the US had complied. Foreign Minister Marise Payne announced that the ICC “has no jurisdiction in relation to “the situation in Palestine” and that “Australia does not recognise a “state of Palestine”.

Ironic, since it was an Australian, Bert Evatt, who presided at the United Nations when the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and a Palestinian state was approved. Some 138 of 193 UN member states now recognise the State of Palestine, after the UN General Assembly voted to upgrade Palestine to a “non-member observer state” in 2012. If Palestine is not yet a fully sovereign state it is because Israel, the US and Australia have made every effort to prevent it.

Bensouda and the ICC have been under sustained attack from the US and Israel ever since its Israeli investigation was first mooted, after about 2000 Palestinian civilians were killed in Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014, and more than 200 unarmed civilians had been killed in rallies held at the Gaza border from 2018.

As revenge against the ICC’s impertinence, in 2020 the Trump regime imposed sanctions on Fatou Bensouda and another African national heading the ICC’s prosecution jurisdiction division. They are forbidden entry to the US, any assets or property is frozen, and US citizens and companies are banned from doing business with them. Secretary of State Pompeo added that any who “materially support those individuals risk exposure to sanctions as well”.

 It’s been noted that out of the five top officials in the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor, sanctions have only been imposed on the two who happen to be African nationals. That a black woman dares to challenge the male rulers of white colonial settler states is no doubt unbearable.

As a result of the sustained personal abuse, Bensouda has announced her retirement in June. This will be a loss to that vague entity called the ‘international community’. She is an award-winning international jurist and was included in the BBC’s list of the world’s 100 most inspiring and influential women. She works for gender equity in a leadership network group; is on the board of the African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights; and works on a Gambian committee tackling “harmful traditional practices” such as female genital mutilation.

But for Marise Payne, Minister for Women, sisterhood with Bensouda was out of the question. Australia is always ready to make a mockery of international law and norms. This was again obvious last year when Israel requested the Morrison government to tell the ICC that Israeli perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity should not be prosecuted. To Australia’s shame, Morrison and Marise Payne obliged, and of course the ICC rightly refused this disgraceful bid for impunity.

In September 2020 the European Union not only urged the US to drop the sanctions against ICC staff, calling these “unacceptable and unprecedented measures that attempt to obstruct the Court’s investigations and judicial proceedings”, but also added that “impunity must never be an option”. What were our leaders thinking? As the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands commented, “The ICC is crucial in the fight against impunity and upholding the international rule of law.”

Our government’s disregard of international law follows the disgraceful rip-off of East Timor, conducted over decades by Foreign Ministers and DFAT bureaucrats. Whistleblowers and witnesses are facing prison, and are embroiled in secret trials at the behest of the Morrison government and Attorney-General Christian Porter: proceedings described by the Law Council of Australia as an offence against open justice.

Top silk Bret Walker SC’s offer to represent Bernard Collaery, former ACT Attorney-General and counsel for East Timor’s leader Xanana Gusmao and ‘Witness K’ from ASIS, was impeded, and Collaery was warned not to publish his book outlining the facts.

Nevertheless Oil Under Troubled Water: Australia’s Timor Sea Intrigue came out last year, and this jeremiad should be read by all Australians. Collaery’s book is a blow-by-blow description of the struggle of East Timor to gain independence and then, as one of the world’s poorest countries, to gain its fair share of the oil and gas produced in the so-called Timor Gap.

Collaery names and shames politicians and bureaucrats and takes aim at the hypocrisy embedded in our foreign policy with its “self-deluded claims of Australia’s long-standing support for a ‘rules-based’ order” as against its actual breaches of international law and norms:

“Australia, in both foreign policy and many areas of international humanitarian and civil liberties law, is one of Western democracy’s least “rules-based’ societies.”

 Most of the benefits of Australia’s plundering didn’t even accrue to Australia but went to foreign-owned corporations:

“Australia is now marked in history as a pariah state that lacked even sufficient skill to benefit its own citizens with the proceeds of its plunder in the Timor Sea.”

 There has been no effective parliamentary control over maverick foreign policy, which remains emboldened “by government and opposition sharing a common outlook that is contrary to rules-based order” and with decisions made “in the confidence that international law could be ignored.”

 Bernard Collaery is on the mark in his analysis of Australia as pariah state. I can only fault him for his representation of moral decay in foreign policy as a downhill run from what he imagines was a golden age of moral vision and integrity in the days of Labor PM Curtin and Foreign Affairs Minister Evatt, only ending when they were ousted from office in the election of 1949.

In very recent posts on this web site, I outlined Evatt’s callous disregard for Indigenous Australians, Palestinians and other non-white colonised peoples coming into his purview.

Evatt’s conduct when successfully pushing for the partition of Palestine at the UN was a template for the ongoing deceit, deviousness and amoral dealings of subsequent Australian Foreign Affairs Ministers and bureaucrats.

Evatt spent his final year at the UN in a mammoth effort to secure recognition of Israel and approval of its membership of the United Nations, although UN mediator Count Bernadotte had been assassinated by Jewish terrorists for his plans to enact fairer partition boundaries  and to allow the return of refugees to their properties.

In 1948, while Evatt was President of the UN General Assembly, well-publicised massacres of Palestinian villagers were taking place and the new state was already in breach of UN Resolution requesting the return of Palestinian refugees “wishing to live in peace with their neighbours.”

As well as his blindfold where the rights of Palestinians were concerned, Evatt also supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, and did not go along with postwar efforts to reform the labour contract system in PNG as colonial planters flooded back to their plantations from wartime havens.

We never did have a golden age of moral foreign policy, quite the reverse.

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/pariah-state-something-really-ugly-about-australias-foreign-policy/

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/8155

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/36394

And plenty more in this site...