TRANSCRIPT:

This coming Friday Dec 13th Australia will vote on the renewal of UNRWA’s mandate in the United Nations General Assembly. There is an opportunity for those of us who are concerned about the continuation of UNRWA in its present form to take action. We can petition Australia's UN ambassador to ask for conditions to be stipulated in relation to how UNRWA operates. Listen to what David Bedein, the director of the Israel Resource News Agency and Center for Near East Policy Research had to say about this in the podcast from last week’s show and take note of what he recommends that each and every one of us can do.

Sadly Jeremy Leibler, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia doesn’t like what I am doing in my efforts to drum up grassroots Israel advocacy on the issue of UNRWA. He sees that I have been trying to get our Israel friendly Liberal politicians, the likes of Dave Sharma and Senator Paterson to speak publicly out on the issue of UNRWA and they have both declined to do so. Perhaps their hands are tied because they cannot come out readily to criticise what our Department of Foreign Affairs is doing since DFAT sits under governmental control.

Jeremy Leibler wrote to me when I asked him what the Zionist Federation of Australia is doing about the UNRWA issue right now and he responded, “The ZFA has said much publicly and continues to be active in engaging with Government and DFAT in relation to this issue. While there is a time and place for public advocacy, the most effective form of advocacy is not public and sending e-mails like the ones below to our friends in Parliament who are already extremely supportive asking them to do more and more is completely counterproductive.”

I have replied to Jeremy Leibler as follows, “Your response is rather negative and disdainful of my efforts to get our politician friends to speak out about UNRWA. These guys are perfectly able to take care of themselves - I was only trying to solicit their public support for this issue by inviting them to be interviewed.

But more to the point you may have written back in September for 'The Australian' about the sorry state of UNRWA but what you proposed then - "The Australian government should call on the UN to hand responsibility for Palestinian refugees to the UNHCR" - is not realistic and I have not read any public statement from you or the ZFA since that says what can be done practically to deal with the UNRWA situation going forward.

You treat public (grassroots) advocacy as though it an option of last resort. Never to my knowledge have you ever backed a public advocacy initiative which is most unfortunate.”

I haven’t heard back from Jeremy following my last set of remarks to him.

In my latest correspondence with David Bedein he remarks that the worst suggestion has made by Jeremy Leibler when he proposed Australia should suspend or cut off funds to UNRWA. As David Bedein states, "Whatever we have learned from the disaster of the Trump cut-off to UNRWA is that every penny was replaced by pro-Arab nations."

No clips