"For This I Made Aliyah?"

Image: Ha'aretz

Dennis Prager is heading Down Under soon as a guest of the United Israel Appeal campaign. In an interview with the Australian Jewish News's hot-off-the-press issue foreshadowing his visit he makes the following comment, with which I entirely agree:

"If I want to criticise Israel and its poliicies, I just have to fly from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv and the next day I can do that.  But as someone who choose to live outside of Israel, my primary role has to be to defend it."

Sage advice for the NIF Australia types and other lefties, not only here but throughout the Galut, who have the bloody-minded chutzpah to tell Israel how it should be conducting itself and, worse, as in the case of the NIF Australia, to donate funds to undermine the concern of Israeli citizens regarding "infiltrators".

It's the hallmark of Leftism in the Western world as a whole (we are seeing its despicable effects in Europe, and especially in Sweden, that continent's "rape capital," as well as in Merkel's Germany) that when the "rights" of illegal immigrants conflict with the rights and interests of the citizenry as a whole, the former are always championed by the Left.

Thus it is that the "rights" of African infiltrators in south Tel Aviv are prioritised over the negative impact such infiltrators have on the quality of life for local people, perhaps especially women.

See, for example, an article this week Amir Levi (with accompanying video) that begins:

'While the disingenuous campaign to keep the illegal infiltrators in Israel is gaining momentum from various media outlets, the voice of the people whose daily lives are most effected by the situation, has received almost no attention at all.

The residents of the neighborhoods in south Tel Aviv have been those most affected by the phenomenon of illegal infiltration since it started ten years ago. They pay the steepest price for life next to the infiltrators, while all proposed solutions are stuck in a legal quagmire.

One of these women is Sophie Menashe. She made Aliyah from India at the beginning of the fifties and moved to Levinsky Street next to the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station in 1979.

“The neighborhood was a normal neighborhood, many families lived here. I had three young children and they would roam the neighborhood without problem, even at night,” she said in a conversation with Mida about those days, that seem very far away as compared to the neighborhood’s current state.

 According to Menashe, Neve Sha’anan was never an upscale neighborhood and there was always crime and poverty. However, when the large numbers of infiltrators arrived to the area, the character of neighborhood began to change.

“As the years passed, the adults died and the children left, the apartment owners started renting them to the Africans.” In the building where Sophie lives today, there are only two older Israeli women. Infiltrators live in the rest of the apartments, all of which are illegally divided into a number of living spaces.

“They simply split every apartment into a number of rooms with different entrances. In every room, four or five people live. I turned to the municipality and they told me that it is impossible to do anything because the original plans for the building were lost,” she said....

“They simply throw their trash into the courtyard from the balcony, they go to the bathroom everywhere. There are a few infiltrators who live on the roof....

"They play loud music on big speaker systems that shake the walls of my house. I feel like I’m in hell – for this I made Aliyah? To the Jewish country?”

 Read (and reflect on) the entire article here

NIF Oz's False Analogy

In Tel Aviv (image Haaretz)

The latest issue of the Australian Jewish News carries a letter from a Sydney reader expressing outrage at Israel's decision to "deport specifically African refugees".  Inter alia:

"What message does it send to all those people that have been to the Sydney Jewish Museum or the Jewish Holocaust Centre, seen the suffering of the Shoah and then read what Israel is doing to people who could also be sent to their death by an Israeli government's decision?

As Jews we must put pressure on the government by any means we know how, not only because it is humane to do so, but also for a selfish reason to ensure that this action does not lead to increased anti-Semitism."  (Emphasis added)

And in the same newspaper is an article on the same theme by the vice president of New Israel Fund Australia and a board member of the Asylum Seeker Centre of NSW, that also invokes the Shoah, specifically the voyage of the SS St Louis, and observes, inter alia:

"Here in Australia, the country with the highest number per capita of Holocaust survivors except Israel – people are insisting on being heard.

An emergency appeal launched by the New Israel Fund Australia raised $20,000 within just one week to help fund lawyers and case workers in Israel who are assisting asylum seekers facing deportation.

And, in just two days, 200 people signed a letter to PM Netanyahu protesting against his asylum seeker policies.

NIF plans to send the letter to Mark Sofer, Israel’s ambassador to Australia, next week.

... Please join us and call upon the Israeli government to treat its refugees with the compassion that Jewish people, our parents and our ancestors, have sought at times of grave danger for more than 2,000 years."

Never mind that, as reported here,

'When asked whether Israel needs to deport illegal Eritrean and Sudanese infiltrators, 58% of those polled said yes, and 23% said no.

When asked whether the infiltrators from Sudan and Eritrea are seeking political asyum or migrants looking for jobs, 51% of responders said they believe the infiltrators are "job seekers," and only 37% said they are "asylum seekers."

In addition, 63% of Israelis support the decision to remove the infiltrators to a third country in Africa, and 20% opposed the decision. 59% of Israelis do not believe that Israel has a moral obligation towards the infiltrators, while 24% said they believe Israel does have a moral obligation towards them.

Israel's plan offers the nearly 40,000 male, unmarried infiltrators, who entered Israel illegally, the opportunity to leave voluntarily before the end of March and receive $3500 compensation. enough to live on for as long as a year in the countries which agreed to accept them and to which they are to be flown. Anyone still in the country after that date will be arrested and deported without compensation.

Families and bona fide refugees are not included in the plan.

Israeli residents of southern Tel Aviv - where most of the infiltrators live - have long complained of their presence, the increased crime rate endangering Israeli citizens, and the city and Supreme Court's preference for infiltrators over Israeli citizens. The government's current plan has been approved by the Supreme Court, after all its previous objections were complied with by the Justice Department.'

As Liel Leibovitz sensibly states here:

"The Sudanese and Eritrean migrants struggling to stay in Israel aren’t Anne Frank, and the Israeli government isn’t the Gestapo. Thinking in these terms is morally unserious, intellectually dishonest, and politically unwise. And they prevent us from carefully and effectively addressing the real question: Should the migrants be allowed to stay?

Take the sound and the fury out of the picture, and you’ll find good and convincing arguments on both sides. It’s perfectly fine to argue that Israel, a Jewish state founded in the shadow of unprecedented persecution, should be sensitive to all who wish to make a better life for themselves, and therefore loosen its immigration policy to absorb as many newcomers as it can without making spurious arguments and claiming that they’re all in imminent mortal danger. That said, anyone making this argument should be prepared to explain precisely how Israel ought to welcome torrents of newcomers. The last decade was proof that, in the absence of clear guidelines, Israel’s free society and robust economy will attract an exponentially growing number of African migrants. Even if you believe the freedom to pick up and move anywhere you like to be a universal human right—a problematic proposition—you’d still have to explain just how Israel is supposed to take in so many newcomers without jeopardizing its ability to sustain its citizens first, losing its inherently Jewish nature, or both.

This, of course, is a more jagged version of the very same conversation Americans are having when they talk about immigration. Israelis, so frequently the canaries in the global coal mine, would do well to lead the way by rejecting the temptation of empty outrage and engaging instead in a difficult and complicated conversation, the kind adults have when faced with inconvenient truths and imperfect choices."

In Australia, the NIF Hooks a Big 'Un

'Any Jew who endorses the view that Judaism’s most sacred site – formerly occupied by the Jordanians who denied Jews access to worship – is occupied territory is reminiscent of medieval “mosers” (informers), who were ostracized from the religious and social life of the community. Those in J Street, The New Israel Fund and other far left Jewish groups who consider Jewish districts of Jerusalem and Judaism’s holiest site to be “occupied territories” should be regarded as renegades and treated as such.'

So wrote the renowned Isi Leibler, who, with his soaring intelligence (as many readers will know, he graduated from the University of Melbourne with a first-class honors degree in political science, embarked on a doctorate and would have entered the diplomatic service had not fate intervened) and other extraordinary qualities, led the Australian Jewish community for some 25 years before leaving for Jerusalem.  Known for his quick incisive mind, instantaneous grasp of the essence of issues, and his vigorous dedication to the welfare of Israel and world Jewry, he has inveighed several times against the New Israel Fund (NIF), which established a branch in Australia in 2011. 

That organisation's mischief-making has been exposed and ably summarised  by Professor Gerald Steinberg's NGO Monitor here

See also here and here

For NIF Australia see here

There seems little doubt that the leaders of NIF Australia are largely if not exclusively on the political left.  Australian Jewish (JAir radio) broadcaster Michael Burd commented below Shirlee Finn's post here last year:

"Our radio program Nothing Left has been exposing this insidious bunch of anti Israel activists for a long time.

We have had ... experts on our program ...  who have provided facts and figures not just raw opinion . Our Jerusalem based good friend Isi Leibler has on many occasions let our listeners know how NIF are helping our enemies to demonize Israel around the world .

[Fellow broadcaster] Alan Freedman and myself delivered an excellent talk with fantastic feedback at the recent Limmud O . In fact one of NIF supporters also on the board of the far left wing Limmud Oz was in the audience and I think was hugely embarrassed by the overwhelming evidence we supplied. Of course in typical leftist manner all [that] NIF supporters could do was demonize and shoot the messenger...."

NIF Australia now has, it's rumoured, a new cobber in Australia, namely the country's oldest Reform congregation, Temple Beth Israel in Melbourne, established in 1930, and led for decades by two very great men in succession, intellectuals Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger from Berlin, a robust Zionist, and Rabbi Dr John Levi, whose sense of history and love for Eretz Israel and Medinat Israel is palpable.

But now, under its present rabbi and board of management, the Temple is rumoured to on the verge of partnering, so to speak, with NIF Australia and, through the employment of a holder of an NIF Australia Naomi Chazan Fellowship, of acting as a sort of propaganda vehicle for the NIF, at any rate within the congregation itself.

No doubt the Temple, naively, has the best of intentions in pursuing such a path.  But it's disturbing to see it hoodwinked.

To quote Isi Leibler again, interviewed by Michael Burd last year:

"I would urge anybody who has the interest of Israel at heart not to have anything to do with New Israel Fund. It is an organization which is sponsoring enemies of the Jewish people, which is sponsoring groups which are reviling and demonizing the Jewish people. It is sponsoring groups within Israel which are undermining the Zionist vision, and all I can say is you can just look at the list of where their donations go to some of these organizations. It's quite frightening.

I would say to you, any Australians who are committed to the Jewish people, you're not doing the Jewish people or Israel a favor by sponsoring this organization, which, as I say, whatever it may do on the side, you can do it directly.

Give it to the Keren Hayesod or give to any other Jewish organization. You know where it's going to go. But don't give it to an organization a large proportion of whose funds are going to go towards anti-Zionist bodies. In fact, they've even got organizations that they're sponsoring who are calling for a boycott of the territories over the Green Line. To have Jews supporting such a body, it's a great shame. Many of these people are stupid, and some of them are not stupid. Some of them are bad.

... There's no excuse for anybody that is committed to Israel today to be providing money to people that give money to anti-Israeli causes. 

I must tell you, this group is one of the worst of all the groups. You've given only one example, but they send their emissaries all over the world to try and ...demonize Israel, and accuse Israel of war crimes. Everybody has condemned them here. Everybody has condemned them. Even the Israel labor party foreign has condemned these groups... 

All I can say to Australians is please, think twice before you support this group, and don't be conned by the fact that they describe themselves as progressives. There's nothing progressive about supporting elements that are against Israel, and undermine Israel. Believe me, Australia's a pretty good country when it comes to Israel, but you've still got plenty of negative elements in Australia.

You've got the ABC. You've got the Fairfax Media, and you've got quite a few other left-wing media that are doing nothing else except attacking Israel. Why on earth do you have to support an organization which is going to bring people into Israel, into Australia, that are going to help build up the anti-Israeli campaign? What's wrong with people that they can ... It's very hard to visualize and understand how people can behave in this manner. 

Michael: Yes. Finally, on the NIF they bring out a conga line of far left-wing anti-Zionist Jews. One of them they're bringing out recently, or coming, is a very prominent American journalist who happens to be Obama's favorite Jewish journalist. So you can imagine where he's come from. His name is Roger Cohen, and one ... 

Isi: Yes. He writes for the New York Times, and he has written pernicious stuff against Israel, vicious, Vicious, Vicious stuff, and you should also, when he comes out, some people should look up and Google some of the articles he wrote about Iran, because he went to Iran and thought they weren't so bad. Quite nice people, the Iranians. They're bringing this man out to Australia. What for? 

Michael: Yeah, that's right. Cohen wrote that he said that the hospitality he received as a Jew in Iran was a sign that the country was misunderstood. I think that just sums up ... 

Isi: Exactly. Exactly. This sort of a man is being brought to Australia? That's the New Israel Fund ? That is the New Israel Fund. That sums them up."  [Emphasis added]