Love of the Land: The ADL Is Wrong: Boycotts Can Be Kosher

The ADL Is Wrong: Boycotts Can Be Kosher

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
19 February '10

A long simmering dispute about the level of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement going on at the University of California at Irvine has prompted a debate between Jewish groups about the propriety of academic boycotts. After the latest incident in which heckler disrupted a speech being given by Michael Oren — Israel’s ambassador to the United States — at the school’s campus, the Zionist Organization of America has called for donors to cease making contributions to the institution and for students to stop applying to the school. But the Anti-Defamation League says this is a mistake, since such boycotts are a “double-edged sword that legitimizes a tactic so often used against Jews and Israel.”

The problem with UC Irvine goes deeper than just the bunch of loudmouths who interrupted Oren. For a number of years, the Irvine campus’s Muslim Student Union and its leftist allies have made the school a haven of Israel-and-Jew bashing without the university’s administration doing much or anything about it. The result has apparently been the creation of a hostile atmosphere for Jewish students. Repeated attempts to get the university to address the grievances of the Jewish community have failed. After years of talking about the problem, the ZOA has apparently concluded that the only thing the school will understand is a boycott that will bring home to them that their indulgence of radical anti-Israel and anti-Jewish elements has consequences. The ADL prefers to keep the lines of communications open with the university and, in its usual manner, spends as much time complimenting the administration for the little it has done as it does criticizing them for their obvious failures.

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Love of the Land: The ADL Is Wrong: Boycotts Can Be Kosher

Love of the Land: A new Palestinian city takes root - with JNF trees

A new Palestinian city takes root - with JNF trees

Eli Ashkenazi
Haaretz
29 November 09

(See ZOA response below)

Hirui Amara excitedly held a bunch of pine seedlings and was quick to dip their soft roots in a bucket of water. Several seconds later he was next to an elderly man, and helped him plant one of the seedlings.

This was the end of an exciting day for Amara, who heads a Jewish National Fund greenhouse at Golani Junction.

Amara and five other JNF employees took part, 10 days ago, in an extraordinary project that involves the JNF assisting in planting trees in the area where a new Palestinian city, Ruwabi, is scheduled to be built north of Ramallah. The name means "City of Hills."

As a first step, the JNF contributed 3,000 tree seedlings for planting in what is meant to be a forested area on the edges of the new city. At the same time, the forestry experts of the JNF have been advising the city planners on the matter.

Suhil Zaydan, one of the JNF's forestry managers, is serving as liaison between the organization and the city planers.

"There have been a number of meetings, both at the location where the city will be built and also at the JNF greenhouses," he says. "We have contributed with our know-how, by advising on how to prepare the ground for the planting and how public gardens should be planned, as well as the best times for planting, and what kinds of trees it is preferable to plant. We did not talk about politics and we shall not talk about it - we deal with trees and understand forestry, botany and greenhouses."

The ambitious project of building a city from scratch has drawn an estimated investment of $800 million, mostly from Palestinian and Qatari sources.

The plan is for 6,000 housing units over a 6,300 dunam area that is supposed to provide housing for nearly 40,000 people and employ some 10,000 Palestinian workers. The project is aimed at the Palestinian middle class. (Full article)

Click here "ZOA Criticizes J.N.F. For Donating 3,000 Trees To Palestinian Authority"

Gary N. was kind enough to send me JNF's reply to his query.

"Shalom Yosef,
This is JNF's (Jewish National Fund (Hebrew: קרן קימת לישראל, Keren Kayemet LeYisrael) reply to my query about their tree donation: "I hope this well help clarify. None of the trees bought by JNF-KKL donors were used for this purpose. KKL grows approximately three million saplings a year; less than one million are bought by donors worldwide. These saplings came from a stock that KKL utilizes for international forestry and related projects. KKL was appointed national foresters by the Israeli government. As such, we work with many countries together with the U.S. Forest Service in their international forestry department, the Canadian Forest Service, the Australian Forest Service, and many others, and we a proud member of the International Arid Lands Consortium. We have worked with Rwanda, Indonesia, E. Timor, Jordan, just to name a few countries, sharing our expertise with them and teaching them how to cultivate and care for the land. We hope to always be able to share our knowledge with the world for positive uses.Beyond tree planting, our priorities are focused on building new lives for Gaza evacuees, building the Negev for tomorrow’s generations, and finding answers to the drought in Israel. For these and many other reasons, JNF is the central address for connecting to Israel."

Regards, Jenn Lonschein,

Assistant Marketing Manager,
Jewish National Fund.

Sorry, This does not satisfy me, at all.

Love of the Land: A new Palestinian city takes root - with JNF trees

Love of the Land: the Goldstone UN Gaza Report

the Goldstone UN Gaza Report

From the ZOA press release response to the shocking UN Report:

"The very title of the Report - ‘Human Rights in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories: Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ – contains a falsehood – namely, that Gaza is “occupied” by Israel when, under Article 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, a foreign power is only considered an occupier “to the extent that such Power exercises the functions of government in such territory” – something Israel has not done since 2005."

And also:

"the Report claims that “The data provided by non-governmental sources with regard to the percentage of civilians among those killed are generally consistent and raise very serious concerns with regard to the way Israel conducted the military operations in Gaza.’ Yet, as British journalist Melanie Philips points out, Israel provided a detailed breakdown of the Palestinians killed in Gaza and stated that the vast majority of these were Hamas or other terror operatives. Even the UN eventually acknowledged that some 75% of the dead in Gaza were Hamas terrorists."

And:

"ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “The ZOA condemns this atrocious, new installment in the international effort to delegitimize Israel, using perverted and spurious norms of international law in order to invalidate Israel’s elementary, fundamental right and obligation to defend its territory and its citizens. It is nothing less than an anti-Semitic, Israel-bashing, immoral piece of trash. We are appalled that Justice Goldstone was willing to ruin his legal reputation by participating in this dishonestly-conceived and fraudulent investigation. Most serious, perhaps, is the fact that Richard Goldstone was willing to bend and pervert legal norms – such as the definition of occupation and of combatants – in order to pin non-existent legal responsibility on Israel for acts were both justified and indeed necessary in self-defense."

To read the complete Press Release from ZOA (America's oldest Zionist Organization) in response to this latest example of Jewish Defamation and UN anti-Israel bias, click on ZOA Press Release.

Love of the Land: the Goldstone UN Gaza Report