Jewish Online News from Australia and New Zealand
AICE is an outward focused, inclusive body, advancing the exchange of culture between Australia and Israel as a means of encouraging art and artistic links. We foster a spirit of greater tolerance and understanding of the unique cultures that these two ancient lands have to offer and facilitate artistic co-operation, innovation and exposition.
June 29, 2011 by Agencies
Albert Dadon, the founder of the Australia Israel Leadership Forum, met Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday to hand over a policy paper outlining three key recommendations to strengthen further the bilateral relationship between Australia and Israel.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (l) with Albert Dadon
“The Prime Minister read the proposal with interest and was most interested by the solutions proposed by the Forum,” said Mr Dadon AM, who attended the meeting with the PM along with Ronit Tirosh MK, a member of the AILF.
“While the distances are vast, the friendship is close, and the policy paper is an attempt to buttress this decades-old alliance between such far-flung friends.”
The policy paper by the AILF, which was established in 2009 to improve bilateral relations, calls for a joint research and development fund to leverage the technical achievements of both countries.
It also calls for a feasibility study to eliminate blockages preventing a free trade agreement.
And, in recognition of the two nation’s security interests in the South-East Asia region, the paper urges the establishment of a process for closer cooperation with Indonesia and Malaysia to counter fundamentalist Islamist terrorism.
The policy paper was the outcome of the last Australia Israel Leadership Forum, held in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem last year, which was addressed by Mr Netanyahu.
The meeting with Mr Netanyahu comes one month after Mr Dadon AM handed the policy paper over to Prime Minister Julia Gillard at a function at Parliament House in Canberra, which was also attended by the Opposition leader, Tony Abbott, as well as a host of other MPs and Senators.
The Australia Israel Cultural Exchange (AICE) has appointed Alex Fein as its Director of Communications.
Alex Fein
Fein’s role with AICE will include managing media relations, providing advice for strategic direction, and developing youth involvement in the organisation.
AICE’s initiatives have brought leaders from Australia and Israel together for highly successful events in both countries. These initiatives will be expanded by Fein to involve a youth leadership forum.
Chair and founder of AICE, Albert Dadon, identified Fein as an innovative communicator and someone who shares his vision of pluralism, diversity of opinion, and effective, non-adversarial Israel advocacy.
During 2009 Alex Fein emerged as a commentator on key Jewish communal issues. Her blog, The Sensible Jew, drew thousands of readers and attracted media coverage in both the Jewish and mainstream media. Ms Fein sparked debate throughout the community on the nature of leadership and communal organisation. In her new position, she will continue blogging, and commenting on communal issues.
Fein has degrees in political science (Monash) and communications (RMIT), and ten years’ experience working with youth in the Jewish community. She also counts her personal and professional relationships with people from a wide variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds in Australia, Israel, and France, as key to the formation of her worldview.
June 23, 2009 by admin
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has addressed the inaugural Australia Israel Leadership Forum…J-Wire publishes the full text of her speech….
JULIA GILLARD
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard
Thank you for that warm and generous welcome.
Erev Tov Haverim (Good evening friends)
Shalom, Salaam, G’Day!
I am delighted to be here, among so many people of goodwill, in such magnificent surroundings.
I am thrilled to be joining you for the beginning of a new and exciting shared venture: the Australia Israel Leadership Forum.
Let me acknowledge and thank our hosts, the Australia Israeli Cultural Exchange. In particular, I want to acknowledge my friends Albert and Debbie Dadon and to recognise the vision, entrepreneurship and dedication that has made our gathering possible.
I would like to acknowledge my parliamentary colleagues Peter Costello, Mark Dreyfus, Michael Danby, George Brandis, Guy Barnett and Christopher Pyne and thank them for making the journey to be here.
Our Forum is part of a wider celebration of Israeli and Australian culture.
Both are founded on the strong, deep friendship that runs between our two countries.
When a vote was called in 1947 on United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, to establish separate Jewish and Arab States, the Australian delegate was the first to vote. The first to vote in favour of Israel’s right to full independent nationhood and its right to live securely within defined borders.
Our support has continued as strongly ever since, as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd make clear when he introduced the Parliamentary motion to celebrate the state of Israel’s 60th anniversary. That motion was supported on both sides of the House.
Our friendship has blossomed in so many different ways. It has been enriched by a constant flow of people. Australia is proud to have the highest proportion of Holocaust survivors as part of its population of any nation beyond Israel. The Australian Jewish community enhances and enlivens Australian life in myriad ways. In science, the arts, law, business, philanthropy and education, their contribution is outstanding and ongoing.
That is part of what we are here to do. To embrace the opportunity, across all those fields and more, for our two nations to exchange and share perspectives and experiences that may benefit us all.
Yesterday the delegation visited the Park of the Australian soldier at Beersheva. It is a wonderful reminder of our shared history and one more part of the legacy of the late Richard Pratt. It will serve as a place of pilgrimage for Australians and a reminder that the freedoms we enjoy today were hard-won.
Every nation has its own experience of struggle.
But some peoples have experienced suffering of a kind that does not bear any comparison. Instead, we can only bear witness to it. That is why our delegation, with humility, will visit Yad Vashem to pay our respects and reflect on the horror of the holocaust.
Where there is suffering, there is also courage and empathy. We need those human qualities now, as much as we have ever done.
Because, like our forebears, we also live in difficult and dangerous times.
The events taking place in Iran are a source of worry for us all and a symbol of wider uncertainty about the future of this region.
In recent weeks we have seen important speeches by Prime Minister Netanyahu and by President Obama.
In recent days I have had the opportunity to meet with my counterpart in the United States, Vice President Joe Biden and with Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg. Just today I have met President Peres, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defence Minister Barak.
On Thursday I will travel to Ramallah to meet Prime Minister
and the Palestinian Authority.
We know that nobody has a complete solution to offer. But I know that the possibility of a solution will be strengthened by commitment to fresh engagement and open exploration of the way forward.
Our two nations were founded in the modern world, but both have living links to ancient cultures.
Both have been established and built in difficult, sometimes hostile, physical conditions.
Both have been called upon to fight to ensure the integrity of our borders and the security of our people.
Both have built strategic relationships which ensure influence and representation in the highest councils of the international community.
And both now confront the compelling challenges of global interdependence and risk.
This a world where a bomber can strike instantly at the most innocuous of targets, like a café or nightclub.
Where the flow of workers and migrants, so essential for economic vitality and enterprise, brings with it fear and controversy over security and identity.
A world where carbon pollution threatens our viability as nations.
A world where exclusion and humiliation breed despair and hatred.
Perhaps it is inevitable that there are moments when politics, domestic and international, turn ugly. But the current events in Iran serve as a reminder. A reminder that we count our democratic methods and cultures as a privilege that has not been won by people everywhere. A reminder that we belittle them at our own peril.
I believe that each generation has a chance, indeed a responsibility, to remake the rules that govern how we live together.
As the world changes around us, our opportunity is to pursue that goal with more determination and ingenuity than ever before.
We have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that democracy cannot be imposed by force, however strongly its proponents believe in its ideals.
Instead, the rule of law and the rights of conscience and free participation must emerge, guided and shaped by leadership, by exchange in all its forms and by institutions built to be fit for purpose.
That is why, for me, the true root of democratic freedom is conversation.
Without readiness to exchange our beliefs and experiences freely and fiercely, we cannot build the understanding we need for collaboration and compromise.
And while I have been privileged in recent days to speak with individuals who play a global role, we know that the choices and options available to leaders actually depend on a different kind of conversation.
A conversation that is happening in cafes and at school gates. In churches, mosques and synagogues. Around dinner tables. In front of television screens and behind closed doors. Between teachers and students. And across the internet.
If the root of democracy is conversation, then the true root of friendship is honesty.
We should be honest about the difficulty of achieving a just and lasting settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We should be honest about where we all fail to live up to our ideals. We should be honest about how, despite its importance, politics is only one small part of what shapes our lives and our actions. We should be honest about what each of our nations still has to learn. And we should use honesty to make our exchanges and our differences more valuable and better appreciated.
So let us enjoy, in our Forum, the privilege of honest conversation. Let us use it to face openly those things that are truly difficult. Let us share in the riches of culture. And let us celebrate and learn from all those things that make our lives fulfilling and unique.
My hope is that, if we can combine honesty and conversation in sufficient measure, then from their meeting new and deeper trust will flow.
Thank you very much
June 18, 2009 by Henry Benjamin
A petition protesting her visit to Israel was delivered by email yesterday to Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard shortly before her departure.
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard
Organised by Canberra academic Dr Ned Curthoys, the petition was signed by almost 200 signatories, mostly academics and numbering several Jews among them, notably Antony Lowenstein and actor Miriam Margolyes.
Curthoys told J-Wire: “I went through the list to check there was no-one involved who had a known ant-Semitic bias. Of course, I did not expect the petition to bring any bearing into the decision as to whether or not she would make the trip. We just wanted her to know how we felt about it.”
The petition read:
Dear Julia Gillard,
The following is a petition that I’m presenting to you on behalf of some 180 concerned Australians, many of them eminent names in their chosen fields, who would prefer it if you refrained from leading the Australia-Israel exchange delegation this month. They see this trip as a poorly timed public-relations exercise for the Israeli government that can only reaffirm your internationally anomalous disregard for the Palestinians during the Gaza crisis of December-January, when you refused to call for a cease-fire or acknowledge the disproportionate nature of Israel’s response, its initial breach of the cease-fire with Hamas on November 4 2008, or the devastating nature of Israel’s (with Egypt’s complicity) economic blockade of the Gaza Strip which constitutes collective punishment, continuing to deprive Palestinians of basic medicines, hospital equipment, adequate electricity supplies, food stuff, and gas for cooking.
I note that your latest comments in defence of the trip stress Israel’s diversity, but does Israel’s continual demolition of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, denial of Palestinian building permits in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and zoning of ‘Jewish only’ residential eras in East Jerusalem, speak well of this diversity and inclusivity? How inclusive can a nation be, that, unlike Australia, restricts its right of return to Jews and their spouses while ignoring the plight of Palestinian refugees expelled from their homes in 1948 and 1967? What is the relevance of this diversity if the grand narrative of Israel since 1948 is the uninterrupted theft of Palestinian land, a process that actually intensified during the Oslo Peace process of the 1990s and has been guaranteed by the present government? Will you be talking to Israel Jewish anthropologist Jeff Halper of the Committee against House Demolitions about the true purpose of the almost daily demolition of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank? Will you visit Hebron where some 180. 000 Palestinians face constant violence and disruptive military curfews because of the presence of hundreds of Jewish religious settlers protected by the Israeli Defence Force? Are you thinking of visiting the Gaza Strip to see how Palestinians are rebuilding their lives or to listen to their traumatic testimony?
If you speak with Netanyahu and government officials will you solemnly nod and sympathize with the generosity of an offer for a ‘Palestinian state’ that is demilitarized and cannot control its own airspace or external trading relationships, that cannot have East Jerusalem as its capital, and that must recognize and affirm the Jewish character of Israel despite some 20 percent of the population being Palestinian and Bedouin and despite the Jewish character of Israel being the very rationale for refusing Palestinians the right to return to their ancestral lands? Will you be asking discerning questions of Netanyahu’s offer? Please keep me informed of your travels and transform it into something worthwhile, a fact-finding mission, a conversation with Israelis and Palestinians of all political persuasions as conducted by brave journalists such as Antony Loewenstein, a tour of the some 500 military checkpoints that disrupt and degrade the lives of West Bank Palestinians, perhaps then you’ll have your mind opened to the devastating nature of the apartheid system governing the lives of Palestinians like Desmond Tutu, and Jimmy Carter before you. It’s still my hope that you will be mentioned in the same breath as statespeople like these.
On behalf of supporters of Palestinian human-rights everywhere,
Yours sincerely,
Ned Curthoys
Deputy Prime Minister Gillard will meet with Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in Washington before heading to Israel where she will meet with President Shimon Peres and Defence Minister Ehud Barak. Organised by the Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange, the visit will also include meetings with the Palestinians in Ramallah.
May 26, 2009 by J-Wire Staff
Julia Gillard will visit Israel next month along with politicians from both major parties, journalists and representatives from the worlds of business and technology.Highlight of the visit will be a forum to be held in Jerusalem on June 25-26 at which the Australians will be joined by their Israeli political counterparts amongst whom it is hoped will be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is expected that all three Israeli major parties, Labour, Likud and Kadimah will attend.
The visit has been arranged by the Melbourne-based Australia Israel Cultural Exchange headed by Albert Dadon in a bid to strengthen political and cultural relations between the two countries with an eye on also increasing trade.
It has been reported that Australian Palestinian leader Moamar Mashni had been invited but declined.
Political identities joinging the 40-plus delegation will include, Peter Costello, Christopher Pyne and Jewish Labour MP Mark Dreyfus.
