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Why is the story of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands so little known?
Lyn Julius
Jerusalem Post • November 24, 2018
Seventy years ago, the newly-established State of Israel opened the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees. Many were Holocaust survivors from the displaced persons camps or remnant communities of Eastern Europe, but the biggest contingent seeking refuge in Israel came from Arab and Muslim countries.

The official day to remember the exodus of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran is November 30, but Jewish institutions and organizations around the world, in association with Israeli embassies, are holding commemorative conferences, film screenings and lectures throughout November and into December.

More Jews (850,000) fled Arab countries than Palestinian refugees (approximately 711,000), and their exodus was one of the largest movements of non-Muslims from the region until the mass flight of Iraqi Christians. Although they were non-combatants, Jews had to run for their lives from persecution, arrests on false charges, mob violence and executions. Their property was seized and they were left destitute. The Arab and Muslim world has neither recognized, nor compensated them. 
Read more.
Capitulation to anti-Israel thuggery
Professor Chaim Hames
Haaretz • November 28, 2018
The cowardly refusal of Stellenbosch University officials to stand up for academic freedom and intellectual honesty ahead of next week’s "Recognition, Reparation, Reconciliation: The Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma" conference is shameful, if not altogether unexpected.

The decision to remove Professors Shifra Sagy (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Arie Nadler (Tel Aviv University) and Raya Morag (Hebrew University) is only the latest "victory" in South Africa for the Boycott Israel crowd, for whom intimidation and threats have long been the tools of choice.

But the main victims of demands by (so-called) pro-Palestinian activists to disinvite the Israeli researchers from the 5-8 December gathering are not Israeli academics. They are the people of South Africa itself, and the country’s values of intellectual honesty and academic freedom.
 
There is little reason even to address the calumny of the comparison between modern Israel and apartheid South Africa. The comparison bears little resemblance to Israeli society, but does violence to the millions of black and coloured South Africans who suffered under decades of pass laws, separate beaches, "Bantu education" requirements and a thousand more violations of civil rights and of basic human dignity on a daily basis.

Furthermore, as in other places, Stellenbosch’s boycott of Israeli researchers will have little effect on the ground-breaking research happening in Israel, in every field and at every university.

Despite the best efforts of a small cadre of activists, academic journals are hungry for research from Israel, and academics from virtually every country in the world – including South Africa, and including the Arab world – actively pursue collaborative projects with our scholars. None of that should come of a surprise: It is the natural outcome of a societal norm where the free exchange of ideas is sacrosanct.

Rather, the main victims here are South Africans themselves.
Twenty-five years after Nelson Mandela was elected president, and nearly 30 years after he was released from prison, South Africa remains mired in inequality.

A cursory glance at the country’s major cities confirms this: The leafy Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, located a short distance from the sprawling poverty in the Alexandra township, is still inhabited almost exclusively by whites. Same for Cape Town, where the mostly white residents of Hout Bay enjoy private swimming pools and luxury cars, adjacent to the Imizamo Yethu township where black residents are largely poor and lack basic sanitation and education infrastructure. 

According to a 2017 government report, white people - nine percent of the total population - still own 72 per cent of the country’s farmland. Nearly 30 percent of black youth are unemployed, as opposed to fewer than 10 percent of their white counterparts.

Socially, too, black and white South Africans have failed to capitalize on Mandela’s vision of a Rainbow Nation, offering opportunity, security and equality to all. To the contrary.
The ANC's rural affairs minister Gugile Nkwinti says openly that the ANC "unequivocally supports" the expropriation of white-owned land without compensation. The Yes4Youth website, a government-sponsored initiative founded by President Cyril Ramaphosa to work with businesses to improve youth employment, says openly that the service "is only available to Black, Indian or Coloured South Africans." 

How ironic, then, and how sad that the one of the subjects of this week’s boycott Israel protests was Professor Emerita Shifra Sagy, the chair of the Martin-Springer Center for Study of Conflict Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and former chair of our Conflict Management and Resolution Program. Professor Sagy’s research would seem to be particularly relevant to the challenges facing South Africa today. 
"We drafted a program to bring together Palestinian and Jewish Israeli students for a project we called: 'Can we empathize with the narrative of our enemy?'" says Prof. Sagy. "The Palestinian students were pressured and threatened not to participate in the project in the name of not 'normalizing' ties with Israel, so we were left without their input.

"What we found, however, was astounding. We studied the Palestinian narrative, met with residents of the Deheisha refugee camp near Bethlehem to hear their stories, heard lectures from Palestinian academics.

"The data we collected was astounding: The interaction with the Palestinian narrative forced our students to consider viewpoints they hadn’t encountered before, which in turn forced them to sharpen and clarify their own beliefs. We found that the students were able to empathize with their enemies’ story, even while remaining proud Israeli citizens," Prof. Sagy said.  

Pro-Palestinian activists may well feel they have won this latest round of anti-Israeli thuggery. But their "victory" is a stolen one, wrested from South African students and society who would certainly have benefitted from drawing on the expertise of the Israel delegations personal experience and professional scholarship.

While the conference will probably go ahead, it will be much the poorer, morally and intellectually, for not having Israeli academics there.

Professor Chaim Hames is the rector of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel
Palestinian leaders panic over Israel's warming ties with Arab States
Jack Khoury
Haaretz • November 26, 2018
Palestinian Authority officials are seeking emergency sessions of the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation over Israel's increasingly close ties with some Arab countries and what is seen as the normalization of relations with Israel.
 
The developments include this week's visit to Israel by the president of Chad; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit last month to the Gulf state of Oman; and reports that Israel is working to establish diplomatic ties with Sudan and Bahrain.
 
 
Former Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Sha'ath, an adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas, told Haaretz that the Palestinian leadership is monitoring Israel's development of diplomatic ties. The closer relations that some Arab countries have developed with Israel run counter to declarations and resolutions adopted by the Arab League and Organization of Islamic Cooperation summits, Sha'ath said.
 
"There are a number of Arab and Islamic resolutions and declarations stating explicitly that there will be no process of normalization with Israel without a resolution of the Palestinian issue based on the Arab Peace Initiative and decisions of the international community," Sha'ath said.
"What we have been seeing in recent weeks – beginning with Netanyahu's visit to Oman and the visit to Israel by the president of Chad, and now there is talk of Bahrain and Sudan and ties of one kind or another with Saudi Arabia – raises question marks, and there is therefore a need to clarify the Arab and Islamic position," he said.
 
At the most recent Arab summit, in the Saudi city of Dhahran in April, a closing statement was issued to the effect that there would be no conciliation with Israel without a bilateral agreement with the Palestinian leadership, and that Arab countries were committed to acting in the spirit of the statement, Sha'ath said.
 
The Israeli prime minister's visit to Oman and possible future visits to Bahrain and Sudan don't constitute the establishment of full diplomatic relations, Sha'ath said, but he described the developments as "the beginning of a worrisome process that needs to be stopped."
 
Sha'ath said he did not believe closer relations between Israel and Arab countries was evidence of a Palestinian foreign policy failure, adding that that the Trump administration has been applying pressure on African and Arab countries to forge closer ties with Israel to isolate the Palestinian Authority.
 
Asked whether the Palestinian leadership has undertaken contacts to convene an emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers, Sha'ath said preliminary contacts have been made but most of the efforts at this stage have focused on an attempt to advance reconciliation between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
 
"In Israel, and also in the United States, they are exploiting the opening presented by the [internal] Palestinian rift to draw closer to Arab and Islamic countries," he said.
 
Palestinian officials involved with the anti-Israel boycott have expressed concern over the recent developments but said the position taken by Arab regimes doesn't necessarily reflect sentiments among the populations in these countries. Mustafa Barghouti, the chairman of the Palestinian National Initiative and a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's executive committee, told Haaretz that Arab and Islamic governments should be punishing Israel rather than rewarding it.
 
"This requires widespread diplomatic activity and an end to these steps, not only with Arab and Islamic countries but also with countries that historically have always been by the Palestinians' side, such as India, China, and countries in Latin America." Recent developments are not a sign of failure on the Palestinians' part, and support for the Palestinian cause in the region and around the world is actually on the rise, he added.
Trump Is Wrong: Israel Doesn’t Need MBS
Zev Chafets
Bloomberg • November 29, 2018
On Thanksgiving Day, President Donald Trump held a video press conference from his resort in Florida. Unsurprisingly, he was asked why he continues to stand up for Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, even though the CIA believes he personally ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Read more.
Smear campaign against Shaked seeks to stop extradition
Eli Senyor
Ynet News • November 28, 2018
Campaign planned to dissuade Justice Minister Shaked from signing extradition order for Malka Leifer, a former school principal charged with sexual crimes against children, to Australia; 'We will expose Shaked's reprehensible conduct in the Leifer case, and the questionable connection between the minister and people of wealth and power in Australia,' campaign organizers write.
 
A smear campaign has been launched against Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked to dissuade her from signing off on the extradition of Malka Leifer, a former school principal charged with sexual crimes against children, to Australia. 
Read more.
The deadly threat of far right antisemitism
Julie Nathan
Times of Israel (Blog) • November 29, 2018
Over the last year or so, far-right groups in Australia, mimicking those in the US, UK and Europe became increasingly open and virulent in expressing hatred of Jews as a group, and increasingly brazen in calling for their murder and genocide.
 
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) Report on Antisemitism in Australia documents both antisemitic incidents and antisemitic discourse. The ECAJ report for 2018 recorded a 59% increase in antisemitic incidents over the previous twelve month period, far outstripping the 10% annual increase over each of the two previous twelve-month periods. In the 2018 period, there were 366 incidents, up from 230 in the previous period. 
Read more.
Education and Antisemitism
The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal • November 28, 2018
Americans rightly complain that their public schools teach too little history, and two new surveys in Europe show the results of such failures. A poll by ComRes for CNN finds that awareness of the Holocaust is starting to fade among younger Europeans. While only about 4% of respondents overall reported they had never heard of the Holocaust, the figure is 20% of French aged 18-34. And 30% of all respondents said they know “only a little” about this defining event in recent European history.

Ugly stereotypes about Jews also persist. Some 20% of respondents believe Jews exercise too much influence over global media and politics, and nearly 30% believe Jews exercise too much influence over global finance.
 
Some 35% of respondents strongly or tend to agree that “Israel uses the Holocaust to justify its actions.” This false equivalence between Nazis and Israel is a trope on the left, where anti-Zionism and antisemitism elide. As Britain’s Labour Party has shown under Jeremy Corbyn, these attitudes encourage abuse of Jews and politicians who support Israel.
 
A separate survey of Jewish community leaders by the Joint Distribution Committee’s International Centre for Community Development shows where such attitudes lead. The proportion of leaders who expect antisemitism to increase has grown to 66% this year from 54% a decade ago. The percentage who feel “very safe” as Jews in their city fell to 20% from 36%, while the proportion who feel “rather unsafe” has risen to 13% from 6%.
 
This survey found that Jews now feel safer in countries of the former Soviet bloc than in Western Europe. One explanation may be immigration, since Western Europe has accepted and then failed to assimilate large numbers of Muslim migrants while Eastern Europe has not. Radical Islamists are responsible for most recent high-profile attacks against Jews in Europe, and CNN found that 15% of Muslims in Europe had never heard of the Holocaust.
 
Civilizations that fail to teach the lessons of their own brutal history to the young are, well, you know.
Antisemitism never disappeared in Europe. It's alive and kicking
Clarissa Ward
CNN
 November 27, 2018
What does antisemitism look like in Europe in 2018?
 
It's a 17-year-old boy, too frightened to wear a kippa (a religious skullcap) on the streets of Paris. It's an Israeli restaurant owner in Berlin who is told that he will end up in the gas chambers. It's a 24-year-old Austrian who knows nothing about the Holocaust. It's the armed guards outside synagogues and Jewish schools across much of Europe. It's the online chat rooms where people peddle conspiracy theories that Jewish "globalists" run the world.
 
It can be violent or subtle. Overt or insidious. Political or personal. It can come from the right or the left. It exists in countries that have large Jewish populations, like France, and it also flourishes in places with smaller Jewish communities, like Poland. 
Read more.
Jewish Dual Loyalty: The Classic Antisemitic Stereotype
Manfred Gerstenfeld
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,018, • November 28, 2018
Accusations of dual loyalty are the main antisemitic hate motif worldwide, as well as in the US. Extrapolating from poll data, it can be inferred that up to seventy-five million Americans might believe their Jewish co-citizens are more loyal to Israel than to the US. If that were true, the great majority of American Jews would likely have voted for Donald Trump, who is proving so far to be one of the most pro-Israel presidents in history. Yet only 24% of US Jews supported him in the 2016 elections, and in the newly elected Congress, a host of Jewish Democrat committee heads are expected to attack the president. Read more.
How Israel is turning its high-tech into global political power
David Rosenberg
Fathom Journal • November 2018
Israelis are justifiably proud of their country’s high technology industry. It is a testament to their entrepreneurial abilities and a source of well-paid employment. It has attracted tens of billions of dollars in foreign investment and is environmentally friendly. It’s the industry of the future in which Israel is not only globally competitive but, in terms of pure innovative prowess, one of the world’s leading countries. ‘Start-Up Nation,’ as the sector has come to be called, is the envy of much of the world.
 
What most Israelis don’t appreciate is that technology is also a source of global political power in a way that was unimaginable a decade or two ago. That is most obviously manifested in Israel’s growing relationships with the world’s up-and-coming powers, including China and more recently India. In addition, Israel’s research and development capabilities, and the presence of some 300 multinational companies in Israel, has put the country in a central position in the global technology supply chain that makes the efforts of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement all but hopeless. 
Read more.
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DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in the foregoing articles are not necessarily those of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, its officers, councillors, or employees. The ECAJ Policy Platform can be accessed here

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