Kiwiblog

On Tuesday I flew from Tehran to Tel Aviv via Turkey. Iran will not let you enter if you have been to Israel previously, so I guessed they would not be that keen on me heading there straight afterwards, so I had been very careful  not to mention the Israel part of my trip publicly.

I got a bit nervous at the airport though when I realised that as I was on the same airline from Tehran to Istanbul and Istanbul to Tel Aviv, they could see the next leg, as they asked me if I wanted to check my bags all the way through. I very quietly said yes.

The flight to Istanbul was a nightmare as the airport fogged in, and we circled for an hour then diverted to Ankara, refueled and then went back to Istanbul. A two hour flight took almost six hours, and I missed my connecting flight. Got transferred onto a later one okay though.

Just as Iran is not that keen on visitors who have been to Israel, Israel is not that keen on people who have just flown in from Iran. At the gate in Istanbul, I was taken aside and questioned for around 10 minutes about why I had been in Iran, how long would I be in Israel etc.

Eventually got onto flight. When we went through passport control at Tel Aviv, I thought it would be even worse, but the officer accepted my story straight away, and took only a couple of minutes.

Met up with the rest of the group. We have five Swedes, two Finns two Austrians, a Swiss and one Kiwi.

Around 5 pm we went to the Shrine of the Book. This museum houses the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex. Most people will have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but now the Codex, which is basically the oldest existing bible – around 3,000 years old. It isn’t a bible per se – more the authoritative source for the bible. So you get some idea of its historical value.

This is a photo of a model of old Jerusalem at the Shrine of the Book. The model is huge – only a 50:1 ratio.

Then went to the Mount of Olives and saw some of the 150,000 graves there, plus the superb view of old Jerusalem.

At 8 pm we hit Old Jerusalem. I can’t describe how wonderful the city is – such a sense of history. We visited the Western (or Wailing) Wall, and also had tours through the Generations Centre and best of all though the tunnels underneath the wall.

This is the base of the Western Wall. All day and night many Jews go there to pray.

The original temple here was the Temple of Solomon. After that was destroyed in 586 BC, a second temple was constructed by Herod in around 19 BC. The wall is part of the remains of that temple. Judaism believes a third temple will be constructed there when the Messiah comes.

The original temple was on the Temple Mount, which is the holiest site in Judaism as it is taught as the place where God created Adam. It is also sacred to Islam as the site where Muhammed ascended to heaven.

The tunnels under the Western Wall are incredible. So much history down there. Not one for claustrophobics though. Also a bad place to be if there is an earthquake!

Also did a walk through the alleyways and bazaars of East Jerusalem. This is basically Palestinian/Arab area, and is likely to be officially part of a future Palestine state. While there has been violence in the past, things were generally very relaxed in this area, with people from all religions and races walking about.

The Economist reports:

BARELY two months into its six-month presidency of the European Union, Sweden’s government is entangled in a scrap with Israel. Because it pitches Swedes’ cherished free-speech principles against Middle Eastern sensibilities, it is loaded with a wearying sense of déjà vu—and a potential to escalate.

It started on August 17th when Aftonbladet, a Swedish tabloid, published an incendiary article claiming that Israeli soldiers had harvested the organs of some Palestinians whom they had shot. Within hours, Israel’s deputy foreign minister had denounced the article for racism and demanded that it be condemned by the Swedish government. …

Sweden’s ambassador in Tel Aviv obligingly called the article shocking. But she was countermanded by the Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt. Israel, he wrote in his blog, wanted the Swedish government to distance itself from the article or take steps to prevent a replication, but that was not how the country worked. This robust defence of freedom of expression was endorsed by the prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt.

Matters quickly deteriorated. An internet campaign called for a boycott of Swedish companies, including IKEA and Volvo. A planned official visit by Mr Bildt to Israel may be under threat. Lawsuits have begun. And Sweden stands accused by prominent Israelis, including the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, of blood libel and anti-Semitism.

This has uncomfortable echoes of Denmark’s cartoon wars, started when a Danish newspaper published drawings of the prophet Muhammad in late 2005.

The article in the Swedish tabloid newspaper was racist and gross anti-semitism. It was designed to give credibility to the lies spread in many Middle East countries about Jews and organ harvesting.

The newspaper incidentally is owned by Swedish Trade Union Confederation and has a history of anti-semitic articles.

Now it is debatable about whether the Swedish Government should or should not condemn the article, but there is absolutely no way the Government should be trying to prevent the article, or be held responsible for the actions of the newspaper.

So the campaign against Sweden, and especially Swedish companies, is misguided and wrong. Do not hold a country responsible for the actions of one newspaper.

There are some parallels to the Danish cartoon controversy. The aspect in common is the misguided desire to punish an entire country for the editorial decisions of one newspaper.

But I have not seen any burning down of Swedish embassies or incitements to violence against Sweden.  A boycott campaign is not the same as death threats against journalists.

Sadly it looks like things will get worse in the Middle East:

The anti-Arab politician who emerged as a kingmaker after Israel’s election endorsed Benjamin Netanyahu, virtually ensuring he will once again become prime minister.

The big question is whether the hawkish Netanyahu will be able to build the broad coalition he will likely need to stay in power and avoid clashing with the Obama administration and much of the world.

With his top rival, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, signalling on Thursday that she would enter the opposition, Netanyahu’s prospects do not look good.

He will probably have little choice but to forge a coalition with nationalist and religious parties opposed to peacemaking with the Palestinians and Israel’s other Arab neighbours.

Sad, but possibly inevitable.

The NZ Herald is concerned with the swing to the right in the Israeli election. It may surprise some, that I am also.

Generally I am fairly tribal, and support the centre-right party in most countries. In fact have enjoyed close relations with many in the Australian Libs, US Republicans, UK Conservatives, French UMP, Canadian Conservatives, Taiwanese KMT etc etc.

If I was a voter in Israel though, I would vote for Kadima, not Likud. The Likud policy of actually building more settlements on disputed territory is provocative, and unhelpful in my opinion. And the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu wants to have a loyalty oath, or you lose your citizenship. Yuck.

The result is not totally surprising though. In previous elections Israelis voted for parties that promoted sacrificing land for peace. And when they unilaterally give up land, and it results in not peace, but thousands of rocket attacks from the very land they unilaterally gave up. Well it explains why they have flocked to those promising a harder line. I think it is the wrong call they have made, but I understand why they have made it.

It is not quite certain what sort of Government will be formed, but as the Herald says, it will be a test for President Obama to keep the peace process moving forward.

The Southland Times reports:

Two women were shocked after being kicked out of an Invercargill cafe yesterday because they come from Israel.

Sisters Natalie Bennie and Tamara Shefa were upset after being booted out of the Mevlana Cafe in Esk St by owner Mustafa Tekinkaya.

They chose to eat at Mevlana Cafe because it had a play area for Mrs Bennie’s two children, but they were told to leave before they had ordered any food, Mrs Bennie said.

“He heard us speaking Hebrew and he asked us where we were from. I said Israel and he said `get out, I am not serving you’. It was shocking.”

Mr Tekinkaya, who is Muslim and from Turkey, said he was making his own protest against Israel because it was killing innocent babies and women in the Gaza Strip.

“I have decided as a protest not to serve Israelis until the war stops.”

He said he had nothing against Israeli people but if any more came into his shop they would also be told to leave, and he was not concerned if he lost business.

I wonder if he would refuse to serve Israeli Arabs?

I wonder how he would like it if a shop refused to serve Turks until Turkey apologises for the Armenian genocide (or even accepts ot happened) or if after 9/11 a shop refused to serve Muslims because the 9/11 hijackers were Muslim?

It is absolutely legitimate to protest against the Israeli Government if you disagree with what they do. But it is quite wrong to target individual citizens.

First we have some nice photos from the Auckland protest, equating Israel with Nazi Germany.

Oh a nice professional sign comparing Israel’s response to 10,000 rockets to Nazi death camps where Jews were gassed, and their possessions looted.

While this protester gets marks for his home made sign.

Ironically I suspect that if WWII was occuring today, they would be demanding Churchill be placed on trial, for an unacceptably high civilian death toll in Germany.

Anyway once again I am pleased to quote Chris Trotter. Chris explains why so many on the left support liberation movements:

A fairly substantial chunk of the New Zealand Left would echo Keith’s view. In part this is because a great many leftists see Israel as the primary instrument of “US imperialism” in the Middle East – making the Palestinian cause one of the World’s last great unresolved struggles for national liberation.

For leftists of Keith’s generation, people who came of age in the early-1960s, when the empires of the European powers were being challenged by a multitude of national liberation movements, the anti-colonial struggle was something to be supported wholeheartedly and unequivocally.

Even more exciting for these young leftists was the fact that most liberation movements espoused some variant of the socialist ideology, and many enjoyed the backing (overt or covert) of the Soviet Union and/or the Peoples Republic of China.

National liberation struggles and the socialist revolution seemed inextricably linked.

Hamas is anything but secular and quasi-socialist, and its dedication to the elimination not only of Israel, but of the entire Jewish people, is unequivocal. In the words of its own charter:

“The Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree.”

The last time people talked about the Jews in this way, they were wearing brown shirts and jackboots. And the fate they had planned for the Jewish people gave new meaning to the word “disproportionate”.

Which is why I find it so hard to respond with any degree of positivity to Keith Locke’s call for New Zealand to stand up and be counted among the outspoken opponents of what is happening in Gaza.

Were Hamas a secular and socialist organisation dedicated to the creation of a secular and socialist state of Palestine: a state where all those with an historical and/or religious attachment to the Holy Land; Jews and Arabs, the followers of Judaism, Islam and Christianity – all the people of the Book – could live together in peace and harmony; well, then I might feel differently.

But it isn’t.

There was twit-nit Catholic priest Gerard Burns daubing his blood over a peace monument, bizarro MP Keith Locke accusing Israel of war crimes, and sundry radio commentators giving full voice to anti-Semitic outrage.

All followed a simple maxim, straight out of Animal Farm: Israel wrong, Palestinians right.

Indeed.

Almost without exception, liberals accept that the Israelis are the baddies. They are the ones with the fighter planes, helicopter gunships and tanks tearing through the ghettoes of Gaza. As John Minto opined this past week they are the primary aggressor. Ipso facto, they are morally inferior.

The truth is considerably different. The Gaza Strip is a territory controlled by an Islamic fundamentalist faction that has sworn to wipe Israel from the planet. It has been doing its best by launching rockets at Jewish settlements, arming and directing suicide bombers, and ending the uneasy ceasefire.

Yep, they are delighted that they finally got Israel to respond.

The only problem is that Hamas are not freedom fighters. In fact, they are not even sane. They are religious fanatics. Fundamentalist nutters armed with guns, rocket-propelled grenades and rockets. Their idea of a Palestinian state is one that eradicates Israel. They emerged victors after a bloody civil war with the Fatah party in 2006 killing plenty of innocent civilians themselves and now consider that Hamas is the frontline in the fight against the infidel.

Yet these are the people that Minto, the Greens, the Catholic fringe and Kiwi liberals seek to embrace.

The UN has got it right (this time). They have called for both sides to stop fighting. But the Greens and Minto want Israel to unilaterally stop, and nothing to be done about the rocket attacks from Hamas.

This is not to suggest that Israeli actions over these past 60 years meet any antipodean morality test either. There have been inhumane actions and outrageous abuses. But not this time: not in Gaza in 2009. Israel is responding as any nation would were it under continual military harassment.

This is quite right. Israel bashers can’t tell the difference between the times when their actions have been outrageous, and legitimately responding to Hamas and their rocket attacks.

The death of innocents in Gaza is regrettable it is sad and it is wrong. But all the more so for being orchestrated by Hamas, in pursuit of their despicable ends.

And this could all end is Hamas will agree to cease the rocket attacks.

Fran O’Sullivan writes in today’s Herald, criticising Israel:

The reality is Israeli excesses helped pave the way for Hamas to become a power in the first place. Israel is not alone in facing provocations from “terrorists”. But the extent of its retaliation will simply empower its enemies further as Palestinians react against the loss of life. At the end of the day, the moral arguments used by both sides to promote their excesses will not have much currency.

Israel does often over-react but it is easy to criticise imperfect reactions from the “armchair” so to speak.  But when the Red Cross is concerned, we should be also:

Even the International Committee of the Red Cross says: “The Israeli military [has] failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.”

That is not good.

What will matter is the consequences that result from the Gaza War. If Israel’s onslaught destabilises the Middle East further how much longer will it be able to count on the United States for unwavering support?

In this case though, there has been considerable support for Israel’s right to try and stop the rocket attacks. Russia and China have been muted – not just blaming Israel. The EU and most western states have been careful not to just blame Israel or call on them to stop unless Hamas will agree to stop also.

Even in Canada, the new Liberal (centre-left) party leader is taking a balanced view:

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff says Israel is justified in taking military action to defend itself against attacks by Hamas from the Gaza Strip.

“Canada has to support the right of a democratic country to defend itself,” he told reporters in Halifax on Thursday after speaking to a forum of business leaders on the economy.

“Israel has been attacked from Gaza, not just last year, but for almost 10 years. They evacuated from Gaza so there is no occupation in Gaza.”

And I can only quote approvingly from Chris Trotter:

To the Israelis, however, a more persuasive precedent might well be found in their own history. After all, in ancient Judea, wasn’t it the Jews who found themselves in exactly the same position as present-day Palestinians: under the heel of a brutal army of occupation? Was not the Great Jewish Revolt of 66-73AD, and the second, far more destructive Jewish-Roman War of 132-35, the intifada of their time?

And what was the outcome of those revolts? Massive retaliation: countless deaths, towns destroyed, lands seized, and, in the wake of that final, cataclysmic defeat, the “ethnic cleansing” of Judea – the 1,900-year Jewish Diaspora.

“Impossibel!” you say. “Unthinkable!” Not really. What, after all, was the policy of the Allied Powers regarding the German speakers of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II – if not “ethnic cleansing”? The intractability of the problems caused by ethnic Germans living amongst Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Rumanians led to the wholesale uprooting of entire communities. Families which had lived in the same towns, farmed the same land, for hundreds of years were simply put on trains and “resettled” in the West. Under the auspices of the “Big Three” – the USA, the USSR and the British Empire – Eastern Europe was ruthlessly, and very effectively, “cleansed” of its German-speaking population.

The Germans, of course, had sent six million of Europe’s Jews in the opposite direction, to an altogether more permanent kind of “resettlement”.

And can anyone seriously doubt that, should Hamas “win”, their “final solution” would be any different?

Daniel Finkelstein has a column in The Times (also appeared in Dom Post this morning) that is recommended reading.

It was strictly forbidden to have a notebook in Belsen, but my Aunt Ruth had one anyway. Just a little pocket diary – an appointment book with one of those tiny pencils. And in it, in the autumn of 1944, she noted that Anne Frank and Anne’s sister, Ruth’s schoolfriend Margot, had arrived in the concentration camp.

My mother and my aunt had been watching through the camp wire when the Franks arrived. Mum remembers it well, because they had been excited to spot girls they knew from the old days in Amsterdam. They had played in the same streets, been to the same schools and Ruth and Margot attended Hebrew classes together. The pair had once been pressed into service to act as bridesmaids, when a secretive Jewish wedding had taken place at the synagogue during their lesson time.

But Ruth and Margot did not grow up together. Because while Ruth and my mother lived, Margot and Anne never left Belsen. They died of typhus.

I am telling you this story because I want you to understand Israel. Not to agree with all it does, not to keep quiet when you want to protest against its actions, not to side with it always, merely to understand Israel.

There are two things about the tale that help to provide insight. The first is that all these things, the gas chambers, the concentration camps, the attempt to wipe Jews from the face of the Earth, they aren’t ancient history, and they aren’t fable. They happened to real people and they happened in our lifetime. Anne and Margot Frank were just children to my aunt and my mother; they weren’t icons, or symbols of anything.

The second is that world opinion weeps now for Anne Frank. But world opinion did not save her.

Indeed. Anne Frank is now some sort of mythical heroine, but to Daniel’s aunt, she was just a family friend. The Holocaust is not ancient history, but very very recent.

The origin of the state of Israel is not religion or nationalism, it is the experience of oppression and murder, the fear of total annihilation and the bitter conclusion that world opinion could not be relied upon to protect the Jews.

And as people demand that Israel allow Hamas to keep firing 10,000 rockets at them, without responding, their conclusions seem quite sensible.

So when Israel is urged to respect world opinion and put its faith in the international community the point is rather being missed. The very idea of Israel is a rejection of this option. Israel only exists because Jews do not feel safe as the wards of world opinion. Zionism, that word that is so abused, so reviled, is founded on a determination that, at the end of the day, somehow the Jews will defend themselves and their fellow Jews from destruction. If world opinion was enough, there would be no Israel.

The poverty and the death and the despair among the Palestinians in Gaza moves me to tears. How can it not? Who can see pictures of children in a war zone or a slum street and not be angry and bewildered and driven to protest? And what is so appalling is that it is so unnecessary. For there can be peace and prosperity at the smallest of prices. The Palestinians need only say that they will allow Israel to exist in peace. They need only say this tiny thing, and mean it, and there is pretty much nothing they cannot have.

Yet they will not say it. And they will not mean it. For they do not want the Jews. Again and again – again and again – the Palestinians have been offered a nation state in a divided Palestine. And again and again they have turned the offer down, for it has always been more important to drive out the Jews than to have a Palestinian state. It is difficult sometimes to avoid the feeling that Hamas and Hezbollah don’t want to kill Jews because they hate Israel. They hate Israel because they want to kill Jews.

Many people will deny this, but I suggest you look at the terrible terrible anti-semitism taught to school children in various countries about Jews.

There cannot be peace until this changes. For Israel will not rely on airy guarantees and international gestures to defend it. At its very core, it will not. It will lay down its arms when the Jews are safe, but it will not do it until they are.

And remember Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in the hope this withdrawl – without conditions – would be a sign of good faith and help the peace process. Instead it has just been used to launch rocket attacks closer to Israel.

Israel has made many mistakes. It has acted too aggressively on some occasions, has been too defensive on others. The country hasn’t always respected the human rights of its enemies as it should have done. What nation under such a threat would have avoided all errors?

But you know what? As Iran gets a nuclear weapon and so the potential for another Holocaust against the Jews and world opinion does nothing, I am not so sure that the errors of world opinion are so much to be preferred to the errors of Israel.

I agree that Israel has made mistakes. I’m not convinced that the land invasion into Gaza was a wize move. I defend their right to defend themselves, but what happens when they withdraw from Gaza and if they have not managed to stop the rocket attacks. It may even embolden Hamas.

Again decision making in these circumstances is often a matter of “least worst” rather than good or bad.

An excellent editorial from the Dom Post:

But Hamas’ leaders and those who unquestioningly side with them overlook a simple fact when they deplore Israel’s assault on Gaza, The Dominion Post writes. Hamas, an organisation that is committed to the destruction of Israel, provoked the Israeli attacks and it has it within its power to stop them. All it has to do is stop firing rockets into Israeli territory.

Yes. Ask yourself this. If Israel stops it air strikes, will Hamas stop its rocket attacks? No – it will carry on. But if Hamas stopped rocket attacks, would Israel stop its strikes – absolutely.

In the past eight years 16 Israelis have been killed by rockets launched from within the strip. Israel’s response – air attacks and now a ground assault – is disproportionate. But what is Israel supposed to do? Would its critics prefer it to send a rocket back every time one landed in its territory? No other sovereign nation would tolerate a neighbour indiscriminately targeting its citizens, and anyone who thinks a people who pledged “never again” after the Holocaust would do so, has rocks in their head.

As David Cohen (currently in Israel) points out, there have been more than 9400 documented rocket attacks in the past five years, and in the last year almost 10 a day.

Hopelessly outgunned militarily, Hamas cannot hope to defeat Israel in a conventional war, but it can compete in a public relations battle for hearts and minds. The Israeli attacks are producing images of dead and wounded Palestinians that damage Israel’s international reputation.

They also serve as rallying posters for future Hamas foot soldiers.

That the strategy has cost hundreds of Palestinians their lives and condemned Gaza’s population of 1.5 million to even greater hardship does not appear to concern Hamas’ leaders.

In a column published in yesterday’s Dominion Post, Fania Oz-Salzberger, professor of modern Israel studies at Monash University in Melbourne, likened Hamas’ behaviour to that of a “poor and traumatised” man who sits with his daughter on his lap taking pot shots at a neighbour’s house packed with women and children.

That is a great analogy. And yes it is a deliberate strategy of Hamas to try and maximise civilian casualaties on both sides. Meanwhile as Whale Oil points out, Israel is going so far to minimise civilian deaths it is actually ringing neighbours of targets and giving them time to evacuate. This is why of 600 destroyed targets, there have been less than 100 civilian deaths (and around 400 non civilians). Israel is meant to have made more than 9,000 warning calls.

None of this justifies the wrongs done to Palestinians dispossessed of their ancestral lands, the unconscionable conditions in which millions of Palestinians live, or the excesses of the Israeli military. As Professor Oz-Salzberger writes: “Gazans are worse off than Israelis in every single way.”

Palestinians have reason for being poor and traumatised and bitter and vengeful.

But one simple fact remains. If Hamas’ leaders really want to end the suffering caused by the Israeli attacks they can do so.

All they have to do is stop firing rockets into Israeli territory, acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist and start negotiating.

The problems with Hamas go beyond Israel. They recently voted to bring back crucifixion as a punishment. Now think about how many pages have been devoted to the US water boarding, and how the middle east media have almost totally failed to cover this vote to legalise this most barbaric way to kill someone.

And for those who think all these problems would disappear if Israel was wiped out, reflect on this fromMr Cohen again:

While the military campaign by the Israelis is against the Hamas death-cultists who are sworn to Israel’s destruction, there is no denying it is also aimed at sending a severe message to the Islamist group’s Iranian sponsors, whose to-do list of countries to eliminate after they’re done with the Zionist entity even includes New Zealand.

Yes, follow the link. Ths is not just a war about a border.

The Herald reports that Israeli ground forces have entered Gaza. This is a sad day, after they voluntarily left it some years ago.

Whether Israel will be sucessful with its aims to cripple Hamas remain to be seen.

While I am a defender of Israel’s right to respond to the thousands of rocket attacks Hamas launches at Israel, it doesn’t mean I agree with every aspect of their response.

Will this make things worse in the long run? Sadly it may.  The status quo of “Let Hamas keep firing rockets without a response” seems a pretty bad strategy also. This is the problem in the Middle East – there are no good options, just a series of bad to very bad options.

The Herald has a solution to the Israel problem – to effectively get rid of Israel, by supporting a full Palestinian Right of Return.

I’m all in favour of peace for land, and Israel going back to its 1967 borders. But it would be suicide for Israel to agree to a full right of return – this would turn Israel into an Arab majority state – either initially or over time.

The Herald says:

Change may require something as drastic as reconsideration of Israel’s need of a Jewish majority, the reason for its resistance to a full Palestinian right of return. Israel fears for its religious character if it ever makes that concession but Judaism was freely practised in the Islamic empire that preceded today’s warring states.

I’m not sure if this is stupidity or naiveity of the worst kind. The world has changed, in case the Herald editorial writer has missed it. And after the Holocaust, persuading Jews that they should give up majority control of a country to become a minority again is well near suicidal.

The so called right to return is a play to destroy Israel from within. There may be a case for compensation as part of a peace settlement, but a full right to return (which the Wikipedia article shows is both hypocritical and unheard of in international law) is just nonsense – especially when you consider this would be giving a right of return to thousands of terrorists whose only aim in life is to destroy Israel.

On a similiar issue Fran O’Sullivan notes a different tone from the NZ Government:

Just simply a few bland words by McCully to newswire agencies lamenting the Gaza strip onslaught and endorsing the United Nations’ call for an immediate ceasefire. Notably, his words were devoid of the usual harsh condemnatory judgments against Israel that had become a trademark of the Clark Government.

Good. While Israel is far from without blame, the one sided condemnation of Israel only was tiring. Fran then notes:

National’s fellow travellers have already complained of bigotry after a Herald “letter to the editor” writer made the linkage between Key’s Jewishness and the Government’s new stance.

It is a nonsense to allege bigotry in this instance.

In a multitude of post-election articles in Israeli and Jewish newspapers elsewhere, there had been a clear expectation that the advent of the Key Government would lead to a more “balanced” relationship between Israel and New Zealand.

The Jewish community has publicly singled out several National Cabinet ministers who are “friendly to Israel”: Key himself, McCully, Tim Groser, Jonathan Coleman, Wayne Mapp and Attorney-General Chris Finlayson.

I stand by the bigotry claim. As Fran notes there are many Ministers “friendly to Israel”.Are they all Jews? No, of course not (and neither is Key in terms of religion). Centre-right Governments tend to be less willing to bash Israel than centre-left ones – and that would have been the case I suggest, regardless of if Key was PM or not.

NZ peace groups are now calling for a boycott against Israel and the Palestinian Human Rights campaign has sent an open letter to Key and McCully calling on them to “declare your positions of principle regarding Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian land”.

So far, there has been no official response.

I imagine the response would be that NZ’s position remains that it wants a peace settlement that involves land for peace.

The traditional Christmas/New Year holiday period is an easy excuse. But British PM Gordon Brown is not asleep on this issue, neither is Australian Acting PM Julia Gillard who has pledged an extra A$5 million ($6 million) aid to help Palestinians get access to food and medical supplies.

New Zealand has been urged to follow suit – but so far nothing has eventuated…

This is not a good look – but one which is quickly remedied.

Fran may have a point here, but of course Australia is far more globaly focused with its ad than NZ. We have a Pacific focus. But on the assumption there is an appropriate budget available, it would be good to help with aid. Regardless of who you blame for the conflict, there are a lot of innocent families suffering.

Tzipi Livni (and no I can’t pronounce that) narrowly won the election for leadership of Israel’s Kadima Party, and should become Prime Minister of Israel in the near future.

Livni has a fascinating background having served in the Israeli Defence Force and later for Mossad.

She is currently the Foreign Minister and the chief peace negotiator for Israel. The current negotiations are secret (they only will reveal details once they have an agreement) but leaks have suggested she has agreed in principle to East Jerusalem going into a Palestinian State. Her election boosts the chances of peace, but is no guarantee.

Not PC has this useful little map. I don’t think people realise how tiny Israel is, and how significant giving up land is.

Now before people jump in, I do support giving up land for peace. I just don’t support giving up land for more terror. But it pays to remember how one could over-run Israel if just a few hours if they were not well defended. When people talk of wiping Israel off the map, it isn’t that far fetched (putting aside the Israeli military).

Reading in the NY Times about a blunder Obama made on Israel, reminds me of why I remain unconvinced about his experience. In six months time he may occupy the most powerful job on the planet where every statement has serious consequences.

So what did Obama do wrong. He addressed a pro-Israel lobby and said:

“Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

Now that statement goes beyond the position of George W Bush, hell it even goes beyond the position of Israel itself – it is somewhere to the right of Likud. The status and possible division of Jerusalem is one of the major issues for a peace settlement, and anyone who has done more than Stage One foreign relations would know you can’t rule it out like that.

As one would expect it caused outrage in the Middle East, and the Obama campaign has started to backtrack or clarify his remarks. As he is only a candidate, no harm for now. But if he becomes President he is really really going to need an extremely strong foreign policy team to prevent him saying things like that again, because as President such a statement would have ramifications – it would be read as the US unilaterally deciding the boundaries of Israel.

There is a vibrant industry in the Middle East. It consists of faking photo opportunities to make Israel look bad. I’ve covered some in the past such as the so called bombed ambulance.

One of the biggest hoaxes has just been confirmed in a French court, as detailed by this excellent article by Piers Akerman.

THE death of 12-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Durra by “gunfire from the direction of the Israeli” forces, as reported by French TV reporter Charles Enderlin, was huge world news eight years ago.

But it now seems that what we saw was not what actually happened. The dramatic footage of the youngster crouched beside his father as “Israeli” bullets whizzed by him, the scenes of his death and his father’s wounding were ghastly but compelling viewing.

Invocations of the young al-Durra’s death became a regular ritual on Palestinian television, songs encouraging children to join him in martyrdom were written, streets were named after him, mothers were exhorted to encourage their infants to be like him, his image was even used on stamps.

The al-Durra imagery truly became, in the words of one Canadian journalist, “the farce that launched a thousand suicide bombers”.

Okay so this is not some minor footage. This is an iconic video.

Doubts arose about the footage shot by a Palestinian cameraman for the network France 2 when it was revealed the same person had been responsible for faking other news footage.

People need to know that almost all the international media use Palestinian stringers, with little checking for accuracy. Associated Press has been one of the worst offenders.

The independent investigators led by Philippe Karsenty, a director of the Media-Ratings watchdog, went further and said the scenes had been staged and that report was a “hoax”.

He was sued for defamation and lost in the initial court, but has just won in the Court of Appeal. Now wait to see what was revealed in court:

The inflammatory report was essentially destroyed when he ordered the government-owned broadcaster to produce all the raw footage shot of the incident and instead of a few seconds of film, an 18-minute excerpt, still not the complete sequence, was shown to the court.

It revealed staged battle scenes, rehearsed ambulance evacuations – but nothing to substantiate the toxic television report.

No shots were seen coming from the Israeli position, no bullets were shown striking the boy, no blood was seen on the father’s shirt, though he was said to have cradled his eviscerated son in his arms, and the boy is seen to move, even to look conspiratorially at the television camera, when he is supposed to have been dead.

Yes, he looked at the camera *after( he was shot dead. And French TV had this footage but never showed it – they just showed the hand picked segments which supported the story.

More damning evidence is on the Wall Street Journal.

Over the next 24 hours I and others celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel. David Zwartz writes in the Herald:

It is worth celebrating that the scattered and dispossessed Jewish people, suffering oppression and having emerged from history’s worst genocide, accepted the newly formed United Nations Partition Plan and built a vibrant democracy in part of their ancestral homeland.

To survive as a race and a religion for over 2,000 years without a homeland is an amazing feat. And the Holocaust remains a unique evil.

Had the Arab states accepted the UN’s plan in 1947, we could all be celebrating the 60th birthday of both Israel and Palestine. Sadly, that didn’t happen.

More than sad. It was one of the biggest mistakes in recent history.

Security for Israelis is better now than in the dark days of 1948-9, 1967 and 1973, but still not good enough. There are peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, two of the five Arab countries which invaded the fledgling state in 1948. Most of the rest of the Arab world, and many other Muslim countries, still refuse to recognise Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and Iran’s President has threatened to wipe her off the map.

What is really bad is that Israel has given up territory in Gaza, but instead of that leading to peace in that area, it becomes a venue from which to launch more rocket attacks. There are many people who in principle support Israel returning to 1967 boundaries in exchange for peace, but the fear is they will retreat to 1967 boundaries and then just have even more effective attacks on their civilians.

In spite of security and other major problems (such as trade boycotts) Israel – a country only a 12th the size of New Zealand and with meagre natural resources – has become a world leader in IT, medicine, science and technology, agriculture and water technology.

Must almost be the only place in the Middle East with no oil!

The Jewish National Fund has planted 240 million trees over the last 100 years to make the desert bloom, and reduce greenhouse gases. Israel recycles 70 per cent of its wastewater for re-use. In January this year, the Government announced its support of a plan to install the world’s first electric car network in Israel by 2011, and the country has world-leading solar energy projects.

Will this lead to even a small pause by those who normally condemn Israel?

Of course there are actions from Israel which have been bad. They do sometimes over-react to attacks. But they have created the only truly democratic country in the region.