Responding to Obama’s malicious betrayal of Israel

From Isi Leibler, 29 December 2016:

As predicted, on the eve of his retirement President Barack Obama betrayed Israel. The former long-standing congregant of the paranoid anti-Semitic pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright who has a penchant for supporting to the Moslem Brotherhood, broke with forty years of U.S. bipartisan policy of protecting the Jewish state from the wolves at the United Nations.

His action as a lame duck president was a last ditch effort aimed at undermining his successor’s intended policies, realizing that it is virtually impossible to rescind a Security Council resolution. At the end of his eight years in office he exhibited an unprecedented abuse of power knowing that in his last month he would be unaccountable, despite the fact that his vindictive initiative was totally opposed by Congress, the American people and even by many members of his own party.

European countries represented on the Security Council voted in favor of this abominable resolution 2334 which was essentially drafted and orchestrated by the US and ultimately initiated by New Zealand, a Western country whose foreign policy is largely determined by the extent that it promotes export of lamb. Its co-sponsors were the rogue state of Venezuela, as well as Malaysia and Senegal.

The resolution, passed during the week that Aleppo was conquered by President Assad in the midst of brutal torture and massacres of thousands of innocent civilians, highlights the duplicity and hypocrisy of the United Nations, a body dominated by anti-Israeli and rogue states with democracies groveling in an effort to appease the dominant Muslim nations.

It will serve as an instrument for Israel’s adversaries to further promote boycott, divestment and sanctions and the International Criminal Court will be encouraged to define Israel as a criminal state.

It officially nullifies the disastrous Oslo Accords, negates UN Resolution 242 and repudiates the concept of defensible borders. It paves the way for criminalizing all settlers, including those in the major blocs that will always remain part of Israel and even Jews resident in Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem. It actually defines the Old City of Jerusalem and the Kotel (Western Wall) as occupied Palestinian territory.

In this context the Palestinians will demand that any future negotiations accept these bizarre territorial definitions as opening benchmarks – a status that no Israeli government would ever contemplate accepting. The UN Resolution has effectively negated the concept of direct negotiations, thus ensuring that a peaceful solution to the conflict is more remote than ever.

In this poisonous anti-Israeli international climate, we should not be influenced by the pessimistic prophets of doom in our midst.

We are more powerful today than ever before and in the course of our history we have successfully overcome far greater threats to our existence than the United Nations. Now is a time for us to display unity and strength.

Despite the many initial concerns, we should thank the Almighty that the American people elected Donald Trump as president. Were we now faced with a Clinton Democratic Administration, which in all likelihood would retain Obama’s policies, we would be confronting a real nightmare.

In this context, if the proclaimed decision to move the U.S Embassy to Jerusalem is implemented it will send the world a powerful message. To his credit, Trump used all his weight as an incoming president in efforts to ward off the UN resolution, albeit unsuccessfully. He described the UN “just as a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time” and stressed that after January 20^th “things at the UN will be different”. In the wake of his selection of pro-Israeli David Friedman as ambassador to Israel he appointed another pro-Israeli from his team, Jason Greenblatt as his point man for Middle East negotiations. He also demonstratively refused to grant an audience to retiring UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon.

In light of these developments most of the mainstream Jewish leadership who were in denial for over eight years should share a deep sense of guilt and shame.

They remained silent as Obama treated Israel diplomatically as a rogue state whilst he groveled to the Ayatollah. They continued voting for him and we now see how he repaid them. The only consistent critic was indefatigable Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America who has now been more than vindicated.

Individual American Jews are free to express their personal political opinions in any manner they deem fit, but mainstream Jewish organizations are obliged to avoid activity which reflects political bias. The disgusting behavior of liberal mainstream leaders exploiting their positions to promote a partisan bias against Trump, including accusations of anti-Semitism against him and his co-workers before and during the elections, now stands out as being utterly unethical and outrageous.

After the elections the Anti-Defamation League, the religious Conservative and Reform leaders all issued statements conveying their anguish and even mourning the results. Some of these publicly supported the election to the Democratic Party leadership of the Muslim extreme left-wing anti-Israeli congressman Keith Ellison whilst bitterly protesting Trump’s appointment of a pro-Israeli ambassador. Others even protested that moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem would harm the peace process.

The climax was the almost comic but bizarre boycott by major liberal mainstream Jewish organizations of a Hanukah celebration hosted by the Presidents’ Conference at the Azerbaijani Embassy in Washington because it was being held in a Trump-owned hotel.

But now is the time for us to look forward and unite. This U.N. resolution was not just about settlements. It was to undermine the security of the state and pave the way for anti-Semitic boycotts and sanctions by those seeking Israel’s demise.

The resolution employing Obama’s malevolent views made no distinction between isolated outposts and settlements in outlying regions and Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem including the Western Wall.

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.

The immediate challenge is to encourage the incoming Trump administration to salvage what it can from Obama’s betrayal of Israel.

There are grounds for hoping that when the extremism of this resolution is fully comprehended some countries will have a change of heart. Besides, if current trends prevail, many European countries will follow the pattern of America and elect governments which will be far more pro-Israel than those appeasing the Muslims.

But above all, we must be optimistic that if President Trump will stand by his recent statements, Israel may enjoy the closest relationship it has ever had with the United States – which could more than compensate for the UN whose rogue actions have encouraged Trump to display open contempt. This is relevant when taking into account that the US funds 25% of the UN budget.

Most important to note is that the moderate Sunni countries of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states will be desperate to ally themselves with Trump and are hardly likely to do more than express formal protests if and when the US treats Israel as a genuine ally.

But for this to be effective, Israel must tread cautiously and not provoke the incoming administration by seeking to impose arrangements without prior consultation.

Naftali Bennett and other right-wing elements should be silenced and Prime Minister Netanyahu must be enabled to determine the attitude of the new administration. They should also realize that whilst there is close to a consensus for ultimately annexing the settlement blocs and creating defensible borders, most Israelis do not seek to incorporate Judea and Samaria in their entirety because this would effectively lead to the demise of a Jewish state and its substitution by a binational state which would be swallowed up by the Arab world.

The recent statements and settlement policies certainly provided Obama with additional ammunition to justify his perfidious initiative. But it is almost certain that he would have acted no differently had the government not been engaged in any public discussion because his prime intent, since the day of his inauguration, has consistently been to impose such a settlement on Israel.

The reality is that all political parties – other than the Joint Arab list and Meretz – are no less opposed to this resolution than the government. This is surely a time for all political parties to set aside parochial squabbles and act in the national interest by displaying strength and unity.

This will not be the first time that we overcame major challenges and subsequently emerged stronger than ever.

Despite this despicable UN resolution, the new Trump Administration could lead to major changes in the global arena which may have dramatic positive repercussions for Israel and so gives us cause to be confident and optimistic.

Israel-basher and fake journalist may be forced to leave Israel

From JPost, 19 Dec 2016, by GIL HOFFMAN:

Antony Loewenstein: 

dyed-in-the-wool Australian Israel-basher and BDS supporter, who pretends to be a journalist 

A journalist who has allegedly engaged in activity supportive of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement may not be able to remain in Israel, the Government Press Office told The Jerusalem Post exclusively on Sunday.

GPO director Nitzan Chen said he was leaning against renewing the press card of Antony Loewenstein... If the card is not renewed when it expires in March, the Interior Ministry will not allow him to remain in Israel.

“We are leaning toward recommending that his work permit not be renewed due to suspected BDS activity,” Chen said. “We are checking the incident because unfortunately, the journalist did not give enough information to our staff. We will learn to check better so there won’t be such incidents in the future.

...Loewenstein noticeably directed what was seen as a hostile question toward Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid at an FPA event last Monday.

“Is there not a deluded idea here that many Israeli politicians, including yourself, continue to believe that one can talk to the world about democracy, freedom and human rights while denying that to millions of Palestinians, and will there not come a time soon, in a year, five years, 10 years, when you and other politicians will be treated like South African politicians during Apartheid?” he asked.

After the Post wrote about the event, Honest Reporting managing editor Simon Plosker investigated Loewenstein.

“He is a prominent anti-Israel activist in his native Australia and a public supporter of the BDS movement,” Plosker wrote. “His own blog includes a post titled Personally supporting BDS against Israel where he published a statement that he made at a BDS event in Sydney in 2014.”

...The Guardian distanced itself from Loewenstein. Its Jerusalem correspondent, Peter Beaumont, said he knew nothing about him. The Guardian’s head of international news, Jamie Wilson, said Loewenstein was contracted to write comment pieces for Guardian Australia and remains an occasional comment contributor but he “is not a news correspondent for the Guardian in Israel.”

According to Honest Reporting, Loewenstein was told by the Guardian not to reference the publication at future press conferences unless he is working on a direct commission.

Lapid praised the GPO’s move. 

“Freedom of speech and freedom of the media are key in a democracy likes ours, but that doesn’t extend to BDS activists pretending to be journalists,” he said. “It harms Israel and it harms the media. This is another example of the lies of the BDS movement. We have a duty to protect ourselves from people who seek to demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel.”

The TRUCK did it!!

From "Steyn on the World", December 19, 2016, by Mark Steyn:

The following column appears in Australia's Herald Sun:

On Saturday morning, I recalled a conversation over the summer with a German lady who had "found herself on the receiving end of some vibrant multicultural outreach from one of Mutti Merkel's boy charmers":

As a result, she no longer goes out after dark. She had also decided - with reluctance, because she enjoyed it - to cancel her participation in a local Christmas market, where she'd sung carols every year - in broad daylight.

"Why would you do that?" I asked.

"Because it's Christmas," she said, "and I'm worried Christmas will be a target."

And I concluded:

Christmas markets are a grand German tradition, but probably not for much longer.

Forty-eight hours later, twelve people are dead and 48 are injured (at the time of writing) because they attended a Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin. This BBC headline effortlessly conveys the madness of our times:

Lorry kills 12 at Christmas market

Ah, so the truck did it. So it's nothing that can't be fixed by some basic truck-control measures - like, say, licensing and registration of trucks.

Within moments, the familiar rituals of this latest vehicular misfortune emerged: "It was definitely deliberate," said one intended victim. And as CNN reported:

Witnesses told police the attacker had shouted out...

Go on, take a wild guess!

...'Allahu akbar' and 'Infidels must die' as he carried out the attacks.

The less obviously evasive responses were almost as dispiriting. An English tourist visiting from Birmingham complained that in his native city ugly bollards line the sidewalks to obstruct any similarly homicidal lorries in the vicinity. The Christkindlmarkt is a German tradition dating back to the Middle Ages: Munich's is over 700 years old. A society that can only hold three-quarters-of-a-millennium-old traditions behind an impenetrable security perimeter is a society that will soon lose those traditions. 

My own preference, as I've stated, is that, if free countries have to have unsightly security controls, why don't they have them around the national borders rather than around every single thing inside those borders?

"I think this is insane when I listen to people say 'oh, we're now going to have to have metal detectors in night clubs, security in nightclubs. Ok, so what happens next? They blow up a bakery, they blow up a little pastry shop, so then you're gonna have to have metal detectors to get into the pastry shop?" 

"Instead of having all these individual perimeters around every Dunkin Donuts franchise or every gas station, or ever J.C. Penny, why not have just one big perimeter around the country?" Steyn concluded. "We could call it a border! And we could have, like, border security!"

But that's just crazy talk. On Fox News' top-rated Kelly File, Martha MacCallum asked two experts about the market slaughter and both of them instantly pivoted to military strikes against ISIS, the need to form an Arab version of NATO, and other grand schemes. 

I'm all in favor of destroying ISIS, but ISIS is a mere symptom, not a cause. After ISIS is destroyed, it'll be something else. In many parts of the world, it's already something else: al-Qa'eda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Abu Sayyaf, al-Shabaab, al-Nusra, al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, al-this, al-that, al-the other...

Neither of Martha's guests so much as raised the question of why people who want to murder you for attending a Christmas market are in your country in the first place.

But relax! As Australia's Malcolm Turnbull assured us a couple of atrocities back, it is "a very, very small percentage" of the Muslim community who are "violent extremists". Like other western leaders, he never actually tells us what percentage it is - one per cent, point-one, point-oh-oh-oh-one - but I'm sure he knows, or he wouldn't say it so breezily, would he?

And at least our leaders are agreed that it is a percentage. A percentage is a very simple concept: If it's 0.001 per cent of the Muslim community that are "violent extremists" and you have 100,000 Muslims, then, yes, it's "a very, very small percentage". If you then admit another 100,000 Muslims, then you've just doubled the number of "violent extremists". And, whether you keep on doing that year in year out or just cut to the chase and import (as Angela Merkel did) a million and a half in one fell swoop, then, regardless of whether the percentage is stable, you are importing more and more people who want to kill your own citizens.

Why? What's the benefit? And why do people like that Birmingham tourist think the answer to more and more Muslims is more and more bollards? I spent most of the last year in France and other parts of Western Europe and there are soldiers everywhere - outside churches, post offices, railway stations, shopping malls, Jewish schools initially and now non-Jewish schools, topless beaches and Christmas markets... And it's not enough, and it can never be enough. And, even if it was, who wants to live like that?

Just a few hours before twelve German families had a big bloody hole blown through them a week before Christmas, my old friend and sometime warm-up act Jonathan Kay, with his usual impeccable timing, decided to have another sneer at those simpletons who fret about where all this is heading:

Great @CBC180 discussion. Due to Mark Steyn-esque hysteria, Canadians think Canada is 17% Muslim. It's actually 3%.

Ha! What rubes, eh? You hick Aussies are no better: According to the same poll, you reckon Australia's 12 per cent Muslim; it's actually 2.4 per cent. So what's the big deal?

As flattering as it is to be blamed for an entire nation's Islamophobia, I'd say the reason Canadians and Australians - like the French and Germans and Belgians and almost everybody else - think there are more Muslims than there are is fairly obvious: Islam punches above its weight. Even on days when they're not mowing down Christmas shoppers and assassinating Russian ambassadors - or stabbing French priests, or blowing up Belgian airports, or sexually assaulting German New Year revelers, or storming Sydney coffee shops - the less incendiary news of Islam in the west nevertheless conveys an assertiveness and confidence that would still be impressive even if it were 17 per cent. By the time it actually is 17 per cent, you'll think it's 48.

Since we seem to have wound up obsessing on percentages, I suppose twelve dead Germans is likewise an insignificant percentage, and far too trivial to sophisticates to warrant "Mark Steyn-esque hysteria". But it is December 20th, and for the victims' families in five days' time that will be 100 per cent of their children or parents or boyfriends or girlfriends missing at the Christmas table. Say a prayer for them: They died because of the recklessness of a western political class that has doubled down on a mad long-shot sociopolitical experiment that can only end catastrophically.

~from The Herald Sun of Melbourne

An open letter to Australian Labor "Friends of Palestine"

From Luke Walladge, a (very) active and leading member of the Australian Labor Party:

Dear Labor Friends of Palestine, 

As a long-time supporter of Israel, inside and outside the ALP, I received your recent pamphlet with some disquiet. But having read it closely I must admit to having been wrong, entirely wrong, and I feel I must now make amends for my errors. 

You see, I had always assumed the supporters of the Palestinian cause to be well-intentioned (if misguided) social democrats and left-wingers who confused poverty and disadvantage with moral righteousness. A bit like those trade unionists at United Voice who preface every policy speech with "we represent the lowest paid workers in Australia" as if that were cause for pride instead of shame. I assumed most pro-Palestinian people bought a simplistic and error-riddled narrative about Israeli oppression and heroic resistance and just wanted to Do The Right Thing. 

But I was wrong. And I will make amends. 

Your recent tract "So You're Going To Israeli" is such a vile, fraudulent, racist, biased piece of propaganda that it can only be indicative of something much darker, much older, much more sinister. To be so knowingly and repetitively wrong, to blatantly misrepresent the truth so often, to use such anti-Jewish tropes so cavalierly can only result from a deep well of our civilisation oldest prejudice. 

You are a pack of anti-Semites. And you should be ashamed, and I was wrong about you, and I'm going to make amends. 

You are not Friends of Palestine. You are enemies of Israel and and you are enemies of Israel because you have given in to anti-Semitism. 

If you were Friends of Palestine you would ask why, despite receiving more international aid per head than any other people group on earth, Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza are destitute while their leadership flies Lear jets and live in Paris mansions. You would ask Egypt why they have built a wall between that country and Gaza, through nothing passes - instead of asking why Israel has checkpoints and naval searches of cargo through which all legitimate goods may pass. You would ask why the Palestinian leadership holds no elections for its people, why they place rocket launchers in their houses and their schools and their hospitals to create human shields for civilian-killing weaponry, why they inculcate innocent children into philosophies of hate and death that produce suicide bombers and knife attackers. 

But you are not Friends of Palestine. You are, instead, friends of those who enslave and oppress and misguide and exploit the Palestinian people. You are Friends of terrorists. You are Friends of those who's goal is not the liberation of Palestinians but the extinction of Jews. And you are enemies of Israel and blame all the ills of the region on the only Jewish state in the world. 

You use the Israeli Prime Minister's Hebrew name, Binjamin, in an attempt to make him seem less normal, and, well, Jewish. 

You say that Jewish organisations will not fund trips to places like Hebron and Bethlehem when in fact they do, they really do, I have been there and you are lying. 

You misquote people and torture data in your booklet to distort the situation in the Middle East and hold the Jewish state responsible. 

You use anti-Semitic tropes of rich Jews and shadowy Jewish organisations to create an image of deception around visiting Israel. 

You lie, lie and lie again, so often and so cunningly and so blatantly that it cannot be an accident, it can only be your intent. 

So from now on I will not be misled about your organisation and its goals any longer. I will make amends for my previous errors by resisting you to the absolute fullest extent of my capacities. 

This is an open letter; unlike your organisation I hide neither my motives, nor my methods, nor my associations. I sign my letters while you publish your blogs and your pamphlets and your propaganda anonymously. 

I am ashamed to share membership of the same Party as you. 

But I will not allow you to poison the wells of the last, best hope of social democracy in this nation with your racist, anti-Semitic stench. 

I was wrong. But I'm not wrong any more. 

You are. 

Luke Walladge 

[Luke Walladge is a former Senate staffer, and currently runs his own political consultancy.]

Time to scrutinise foreign aid

From The Australian, 29 Nov 2016:

If the Israelis are right, the Australian taxpayer has been one of the biggest (unwitting) funders of the terror group Hamas in Gaza. The claim is that money given to World Vision for farms and other economic projects has been diverted to build a military base, tunnels and weapons for Hamas. The head of World Vision Gaza, Mohammad El Halabi, stands accused of funnelling $US43 million ($57.4m) to Hamas since infiltrating the charity in 2010. These are serious allegations. Australia gives aid money to the Palestinian Authority to encourage the economic development without which a two-state solution cannot be viable. It is a destructive fraud if those funds are used to bankroll terror.

There is much at stake. Through AusAID and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian government has been the world’s single biggest donor to World Vision in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, as we reported yesterday.

Tim Costello, chief executive of World Vision in August when charges were brought against Mr Halabi, stressed the agency’s work in Gaza was subject to “regular internal and independent audits”. This week, a spokeswoman for World Vision said it had “yet to see any substantive evidence to support the charges made by the Israeli authorities”. There is no suggestion that the World Vision hierarchy was aware of the alleged fraud. Even so, it was the correct step to suspend World Vision’s operations in Gaza and to put a freeze on funding from DFAT. The Israelis can answer for the integrity of their justice system but Australia must ensure that the DFAT review of Gaza funding is thorough and its results open to public scrutiny. The Australian allegations have a larger context. In June this year, a former British cabinet minister, Eric Pickles, complained that British financial assistance to the PA was being used to free up money to pay prisoners convicted of violent crime in the conflict with Israel. Last month, Britain suspended millions of pounds in financial aid to the PA pending an investigation into claims that money was ending up in the hands of terrorists.

The PA has received an estimated $US25 billion in financial aid from the US and other countries during the past two decades, according to Khaled Abu Toameh, a journalist writing for the Gatestone Institute. He argues that the failure of the US and Europe to hold Yasser Arafat accountable for this money encouraged the corruption that pushed Palestinians into the arms of Hamas. “Unless Western donors bang on the table and demand that the Palestinian Authority use their money to bring democracy to its people and prepare them for peace, the prospects of reviving any peace process in the Middle East will remain zero,” Abu Toameh says.

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely cites a 2015 report to the effect that per capita the PA receives the highest amount of foreign aid in the world. She says the PA budget for giving monthly stipends to terrorists and their families is roughly $US75m, representing 16 per cent of the annual foreign aid received. Rather than dedicate financial assistance to peaceful economic development, the PA prefers to spend it on terrorists, cross-border tunnels, and missiles to fire on Israel.

All this suggests that Australia should seize the opportunity provided by the World Vision affair to revisit the rationale of our payments to the PA, and be prepared to stop them altogether if the Palestinians cannot satisfy the most stringent conditions.

Trump takes stock of the world

From The Australian Editorial, November 14, 2016:

... Donald Trump ....is so far showing a level of finesse that seemed unlikely during the election campaign. His early prioritising of Israel and the Middle East — woefully neglected by Barack Obama for so long — is a case in point. 

The protracted civil war in Syria, with its dire consequences for the growth of jihad terrorism and the opportunity it has handed Russia to gain regional strategic ascendancy, owes much to Mr Obama’s lackadaisical attitude and his unwillingness to assert US power.

His first nine calls to world leaders after his victory made his priorities clear. As well as Malcolm Turnbull, those called included key Middle East figures who have long been at loggerheads with Mr Obama — Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi King Salman.

On the negative side, the last rites of the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership have been announced. Asian leaders saw the pact as a vital sign of Washington’s commitment to the region. Its collapse, unfortunately, opens up new opportunities for China to expand its influence. Beijing, along with Australia, is a member of the alternative, 16-nation Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

At least Mr Trump has moved quickly to reassure regional nations, including South Korea, of continued backing. The first foreign leader he will meet will be Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. It is also good that two Trump advisers have set out the president-elect’s “Peace Through Strength Vision for the Asia-Pacific”, borrowed from Ronald Reagan’s Cold War mantra.

The world will be watching his moves in Europe closely, after he cast protocol aside to welcome Britain’s UKIP Brexit leader Nigel Farage to Trump Towers....

Launching a new chapter in Australia–Israel relations

From The Strategist (ADPI), 31 Oct 2016, by Anthony Bergin:

Photo by James Francis (Frank) Hurley. Australian War Memorial B01619.

In conjunction with the Begin-Sadat Center of Strategic Studies [BESA], the Australian Strategic Policy Institute [ASPI] has released a new report, 

The Wattle and the Olive: A new chapter in Australia and Israel working together. 

The cover photo of the report (and above) by official Australian war photographer in both world wars, Frank Hurley, was carefully chosen: it’s an iconic picture of an Australian Light Horse regiment marching up to the old city of Jerusalem, in the wake of the surrender of the Ottoman forces in December 1917.

The Australian Light Horse’s battlefield prowess in Palestine during WW1 helped lay the groundwork for the eventual creation of the modern Jewish state. Jerusalem symbolises the modern Jewish state. The cover picture brings both together.

The study looks at what strategic interests Australia and Israel have in common and what each side can bring to the relationship across traditional and non-traditional security realms. It examines the strategic rationale for a stronger working relationship, rather than just relying on the common values both states share.

There’s really no country in Middle East whose interests are more closely aligned to Australia than Israel. In particular it’s a bulwark against violent extremism in the region. Unfortunately in Australia there’s a tendency to see Israel purely through the lens of Palestinian issue and the peace process. The ASPI-BESA study wanted to get away from that prism.

The report highlights areas cooperation where interests are aligned, like countering terrorism and counter proliferation. Cyber security is another obvious area. Israel is very advanced in cyber deterrence. It’s probably subject to more cyberattacks than any other country.

The report’s key message is that Australia and Israel can cooperate in strategic affairs to the benefit of both countries. Israel should be seen as strong middle income country: it qualified to join the OECD, the top industrial countries group, six years ago, so the idea of ‘tiny’ Israel is rather out of date.

Let me just pick three areas to highlight for bilateral cooperation—one in hard, traditional security and two in the soft, non-traditional security space.

In traditional security, there’s been almost no high-level military exchanges between the two countries. Israel doesn’t have a uniformed military attaché in Canberra (although it’s posted a Ministry of Defense civilian). The Australian military attaché to Israel is based in Ankara, Turkey.

Both the ADF and the Israel Defense Forces would benefit from enhanced cooperation: both operate American equipment and both states’ militaries have invested heavily in world-class technology.

Israel has proven to be a prime source of effective counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactics, techniques and procedures. On Australia’s side, there’s been unprecedented growth in its special forces’ capability. Israel, whose military doctrine is based on self-reliance, can learn from Australia’s experience in operating as part of military coalitions.

Israel has experience in urban warfare and the development of unmanned aerial systems for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and combat. It has expertise in countering improvised explosive devices, an area where Australia also has considerable expertise, and is a global pacesetter in active measures for armoured vehicle protection, defence against short-range rocket threats, and the techniques and procedures of robotics. Israel has also developed a range of capabilities for battlefield intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and advanced munitions.

Both countries’ militaries are focused on how to incorporate cyber capabilities into their military operations. Both countries are near to major choke-points along maritime oil and trade routes, making naval affairs an important component in their national strategies. In air power, both countries intend to acquire the F-35A variant of the Joint Strike Fighter. As two operators of the same variant, there might be potential for collaboration: in the technical domain, that’s most likely to occur in the broader community of international operators of the F-35A.

The RAAF is developing its expertise in the use of unmanned aerial systems. There’s much Australia can learn from Israel’s pioneering extensive development and operational deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles. Starting in 2017, Israel and Australia should look to develop a strategic dialogue involving senior uniformed and civilian defence personnel. The dialogue should look at strategic thinking, military-to-military cooperation, US alliance issues, cybersecurity and defence industry cooperation.

In the area of soft security, societal resilience is an obvious area for information sharing: Israel has been hit with terror and rockets while still preserving social capital. As a country that’s endured decades of conflict and terror, yet still managed to build a flourishing economy and vibrant democracy, Israel offers insights into individual and societal resilience.

Water management is another area where we can share expertise. Israel is a world leader in dryland farming, drip irrigation and waste water recycling. This is an obvious area for cooperation in international development programs in the Asia–Pacific and Africa, one that will support Australian foreign policy objectives.

Right now the relationship between the two states is underachieving. The Wattle and the Olive suggests that both countries use next year’s centenary of the battle of Be’er Sheva, and the centenary of the Balfour Declaration that led to the creation of the modern state of Israel, to revitalise the relationship.

We can transform our longstanding friendship by opening a new chapter in our relations through deepening existing areas of cooperation and catalysing new ones, such as defence cooperation.
Our two countries will need to be as bold as the 4th Light Horse Brigade at Be’er Sheva if we’re to succeed in forging a new strategic partnership.