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5 Responses to “Jerusalem Post, Australian Zionists Dump Chazan”

1. Sol Salbe says:

   February 5, 2010 at 1:36 AM

   Your readers may enjoy this letter to this morning’s (5 Feb) Age newspaper from David Langsam (Disclosure: a friend)

   Shooting messenger

   IT IS ironic that Victoria’s State Zionist Council has achieved that which the Australian Friends of Palestine could not (”Welcome mat pulled from Israeli academic”, The Age, 4/2).

   The AFP failed to win support for its proposed boycott of Israeli academics, artists and a female tennis player, but a few inflammatory remarks from the State Zionist Council has forced the cancellation of a visit by Israeli academic and former Knesset member, Naomi Chazan, hosted by the Union for Progressive Judaism.

   This “victory” of being the first organisation to successfully impose a boycott of an Israeli academic – coming here to raise funds for Israel – ranks on par with its sister-organisation the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council’s May 2009 victory in preventing Jewish actor Miriam Margolyes providing free entertainment for elderly Jewish citizens because she had also performed in the critical play Seven Jewish Children.

   The council says the reason for undermining Chazan’s visit is that her New Israel Fund funded bodies that spoke to the UN’s judge Richard Goldstone and his staff for its report on Israel. They clearly don’t understand the dictum of not shooting the messenger.

   David Langsam, Flemington

   Reply
2. cborg says:

   February 5, 2010 at 6:48 AM

   I agree with you that Derfner and Baskin should resign from JPOst. Their continued presence provides a fig leaf of impartiality for J Post

   Reply
3. Nahum Barnea: How US Jewish leaders stepped in to block the Knesset anti-NIF bill « Coteret says:

   February 5, 2010 at 8:39 AM

   [...] The Reform Movement in Australia, which invited Chazan for a lecture tour in Sydney and Melbourne, canceled its invitation.  The timing is not right, the Australian Jews [...]

   Reply
4. fiddler says:

   February 5, 2010 at 12:20 PM

   Meanwhile, the storm provoked by the campaign has reached the Knesset. The Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee rushed to set up a subcommittee to look into how foreign foundations sponsor Israeli organizations.

   Perhaps they’ll want to start with the JNF. Have the MKs forgotten that the entire Zionist enterprise, without which there would be no Israel, was sponsored from abroad from the very start?
   Of course it’s “an attempt to eradicate legitimate protest and opposition”, as Chazan said, and hardly the first one.
   Bradley Burston, with whom I’ve rarely agreed as much, sums up the mind-set nicely:

   The right is terrified of peace. And, in the end, the right’s fear of peace will be the death of Israel.

   They are afraid of peace, in part, because it threatens the core of what has come to replace other values as the goal of Judaism: permanent settlement of the West Bank. But that is only a part of it.

   They are afraid of peace because they are afraid of the world. They dismiss fellow Jews who want to see a two-state solution – a majority of Israelis – as unrealistic, as living in a bubble. The name of the bubble these moderates live in, however, is planet Earth.

   The right, meanwhile, wants to wall off Israel as the world’s last remaining legally mandated Jewish ghetto. A place where all the rules are different, exit and entry, citizenship and human rights, because the residents within are Jews. A place where non-Jews, dehumanized as congenital Jew-haters, are rendered invisible. A place which, if suffocating and insufferable, still seems safer than the scary world outside.

   A place which, because of its walls and its politics and its cowardice, is losing its ability to function as a part of the world, reveling in cheap-shot humiliations of key foreign ambassadors, deliriously proud of its sense that of all the world, including most of its Jews and Israelis – only the right sees the real truth.

   This braid of thought was venomously endorsed this week both by an uncharacteristically Kahane-sounding Alan Dershowitz, and the obscenely infantile Im Tirtzu movement. According to them, where Cast Lead was concerned, the real war criminals are Richard Goldstone and Naomi Chazan – two people who are open about their love of Israel, and who have worked their whole adult lives for its well-being.

   One doesn’t have to share Goldstone’s and Chazan’s love of Israel to agree with that.

   Reply
5. Bringing Zionism Back to Israel | Dan Illouz says:

   April 6, 2010 at 7:42 PM

   [...] Jerusalem Post, Australian Zionists Dump Chazan [...]

   Reply