The Hebrew University is a bastion of peace-loving/anti-occupation, a thorn in Israel's government's side.

Stuart Rees, you made Netanyahu a very happy man today!

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Dear Julian,

ANY ___cracy is evil, being wrong for people to control others, with nobody happy to be at the receiving end.
What makes ethnocracy particularly worse than the others?

If all "ethnocracy" is evil, Emperor Julian, then the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Arab Republic of Syria, and all the ethnic nations of Europe and Asia are evil. Unlike immigrant nations like Australia, Canada, the US and NZ, all the States of Europe are ethnically based. They are all political expressions of the ethnic language, culture and identity of their majority populations. There is nothing evil about this. The test of how evil they are (if at all) is how they treat their ethnic minorities. Every country in the world discriminates against their minority communities to some degree. Although Israel's record on this score is certainly open to criticism in terms of political and legal equality, standard of living, life expectancy, health, education and overall happiness, Israel's Arab minority fares much better than, say, the African Muslims of France or the Turkish "guest workers" of Germany.

In your position as Chair of the Sydney Peace Foundation, I applaud your efforts in working towards a peaceful solution for world conflicts. Supporting boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel does not, however, promote peaceful negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA).
By attempting to apply pressure to one side of the conflict, the BDS approach fails to acknowledge the intransigent position of the PA leadership, which refuses to recognise the legitimate right of the State of Israel to exist.
A more effective approach towards peace is to promote co-operation between Israelis and Palestinians, an approach adopted by the International Trade Union Confederation.
Refusing to host Prof. Don Avnon was counterproductive: he, like many Israeli academics, encourages debate within Israel regarding their government’s policies. Israeli universities have a significant Arab student population and are important forums for developing understanding and co-operation between Jews and Arabs.

Look, let's cut all the B.S. The Israelis will never give the Palestinians their land back.

They will eventually push the Palestinians out of the road or into the desert and create a Jew-only enclave. That achieved, they will begin to build Greater Israel with help from the U.S. which wants a powerful proxy in the middle of all that oil and always has done!

All the rest is political window dressing and has been since the first batch of fanatical Jews arrived in Palestine. The Palestinians have one choice: fight for their land using any means just as Arafat was doing.

If they won't fight, then history will pass them by.

Perhaps it already has.

___cracies don’t faze me - democracy is a splendid basis for rule of a country and would provide the main foundation for a just solution for Palestine (all of it). Ethnocracy (polite for racism) is recognised worldwide as an evil.

An ethnocratic state is one that is constructed for a global ethnic group (real or invented). Its laws distinguish rights including immigration, citizenship, and residency and legal rights on the sole basis of ancestry. Not birth, not culture, not family connection to the country, but ethnicity. There is only one such state in the world. Compounding its racism, it occupies land seized from the original inhabitants, whom it has driven into exile. Hostility to it is growing in direct proportion to its arrogance and its menace to world peace.

It is important to realize that the BDS campaign is indifferent to, and omits any protests about the treatment of Palestinian "refugees" in Lebanon, Syria (where they are fleeing persecution), etc., or even within the Palestinian Authority territories -- e.g., they are not allowed to work nor do they have many other basic civil rights, but instead in the PA they are used as milch cows to draw international aid into Fatah Swiss bank accounts, while unemployment remains rampant in the PA.

But the grossly hypocritical BDS campaign has very few successes anywhere in the Western world. It is rightly marginalized (also here in Australia) as the antisemitic and far leftist group it is.