It is a pleasure and an honour to be invited to address The Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research. This Centre is a very distinguished enterprise, which has as one of its core missions, to stimulate discussion about the strategic signposts of our world today. To be asked to help do that is deeply…
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…
The academic Left, influenced by the Boycott, Divestment and Sections (BDS) movement, is abandoning core academic standards when it comes to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. In September 2018, the respected journal Critical and Radical Social Work (Policy Press, University of Bristol) published a remarkably simplistic and arguably non-scholarly paper by an academic from Scotland about the…
Today, 29 January 2019, marks the 70th anniversary of an obscure and long-forgotten event in the history of Australia’s international relations: the day Australia recognised the State of Israel. The issue generated intense behind-the-scenes controversy, and ultimately open disagreement, between the then Labor government, led by Prime Minister Ben Chifley and Foreign Minister, “Doc” Evatt,…
“Social democratic parties have a problem selling opportunity and hope, while conservatives easily sell fear and trepidation.” I am paraphrasing two comments delivered at a recent Australian Labor International dinner hosted by Australian Labor’s Opposition Minister for Foreign Affairs, the remarkable Penny Wong, and current leader of the Israel Labor Party, and soon to be…
Last month I went on a mission to Australia to develop and deepen the ongoing dialogue between the Israeli Labor Party and its sister Social Democratic Party, the Australian Labor Party. I travelled for a week between Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, and during the trip I met Labor and other lawmakers, party officials and trade…
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,…