During a visit to the northern town of Kiryat Shmona to inaugurate a new emergency room in October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized as “boring” a woman who interrupted his speech to protest the closure of a local medical center. “Look,” he told resident Orna Peretz, a local social activist who also suffers from cancer,…
ACCORDING to his biographer Blanche d’Alpuget, who subsequently became his wife, for Bob Hawke: “Israel – sung about, spoken of, yearned for – glowed as a portentous presence at the heart of spiritual life.” As many have recorded, having visited Israel for the first time in 1971, he then immediately developed an uncanny affinity with…
We would like to extend you an invitation to join the AILD Labor Innovation Mission to Israel And Palestine 4-8 December 2016. Israel is second only to Silicon Valley in the number of startups and successful listings of startup companies. Our Mission is designed to find answers to how this is so and bring these…
STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO THE AUSTRALIAN16 MARCH 2016 In a story published in The Australian today, John Lyons makes a tenuous suggestion that the Australia Israel Labor Dialogue is funded by Israeli arms manufacturer, Elbit. The AILD is not now, or has ever sought to be funded by Elbit or any other defence company, whether…
Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie says the Labor Party risks becoming politically irrelevant over its “Stalinist” approach to Israel, which he argues has become an obsession. Mr Beattie described a proposed ban on politicians travelling to Israel on trips funded by Jewish organisations as an “extreme view” that would not help achieve a two-state solution,…
The UK Jewish Community has had an historically out-sized influence on many aspects of British life. Their influence has been felt in Philanthropy, Science, Medicine, the Arts, Economic life, Social Welfare and Politics. The experience of this community of around 260,000 people mirrors the experiences of many other Western Jewish communities, and nonetheless in voting…
On the 20th of April 2015, Secretary General MK Hilik Bar and Chairperson of Israel’s Labor Party MK Isaac Herzog sent the following letter the the members of the AILD delegation during the election. You can download and see the letter in full by clicking Thank You to Australian Delegation
It certainly surprised many in Israel and the global commentariat that current Israeli Prime Minister and leader of the right-wing Likud party, Bibi Netenyahu, won the recent Israeli Election, and with the 6-seat margin over the Labor-dominated Opposition Zionist Camp unity group. The significance of the win resonates strongly within a number of overlapping circles…
Peter Baldwin was the ALP member for the House of Representatives seat of Sydney between 1983 and 1998. Following a dinner hosted by the Blackheath Philosophy Forum on 26 July 2014, the chair Peter Baldwin and speaker Peter Slezak disagreed about the recent conflict between Hamas and Israel. Peter Baldwin’s take on it can be…
At the NSW Labor Conference I spoke in opposition to a motion moved by Bob Carr concerning the Israel-Palestinian Peace Process. The motion lacked balance, was loosely and inappropriately worded, and seemed to equate Israel with Hamas. In 1977 as a university student, under the tutelage of Bob Carr, I joined Labor Friends of Israel…