Wilf, Prasquier top UIA bill
FORMER Knesset member Einat Wilf was one of the international speakers featured at the United Israel Appeal (UIA) Women’s Division annual campaign events in Sydney last week.
FORMER Knesset member Einat Wilf was one of the international speakers featured at the United Israel Appeal (UIA) Women’s Division annual campaign events in Sydney last week.
Wilf spoke to audiences initially about her view of movements for democracy within the Middle East such as the Arab Spring.
“What we are seeing is a lot of the ancient identities that were kept under this pressure cooker of the modern Middle East,” Shimon Peres’ former foreign policy adviser explained.
“The lid is now off the pressure cooker and now all the old identities are bubbling to the surface and are being splattered across the surface.”
She described these identities as “tribal, religious, sectarian and ethnic” and emphasised that the world needs to let the people of the Middle East resolve and manage these political crises and tribal tensions themselves.
“It will be bloody, there will be butchery and there is no way to somehow accelerate the process to the other side of it,” Wilf told audiences.
“There is no choice but to let the people of the region do it for themselves. No-one else can do it for them.”
Turning to what Israel should do amid this regional turmoil, Wilf prescribed that Israel must be a “neutral bunker”.
“We should not be for any or against any side in this ongoing battle,” she explained. “It is not our battle.”
In order to be a “bunker”, Wilf explained that Israeli leadership, technology and military must work to keep “all this insanity” out of Israel, “to ensure that Israelis can go on with their lives”.
However, Wilf did note that there is an opportunity for Israel to seize as the region “reverts to tribes with flags”.
“It is the Arab belief that we are foreigners, that we are foreigners who have come to a foreign land to which we have no connection,” she said.
Wilf explained that Israel now has the “opportunity to remind the region that we too are a tribe with a flag, that we too are the tribe of Judea, that we are of the region and have returned to our home”.
She concluded that peace “will come at the moment when the Arab world does recognise that the Jewish people are at home”.
Also speaking at the UIA event was Richard Prasquier, a leader of the French Jewish community and vice-president of the European Jewish Congress.
Prasquier acknowledged the problems that have recently faced the Jewish community in France in the wake of last January’s Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, and the coordinated attacks in November, which left 130 people dead.
However, he cautioned against labelling France as anti-Semitic: “It’s not a question that France is an anti-Semitic country – France is not an anti-Semitic country.”
Prasquier also emphasised the importance of Israel as part of any Jew’s identity, and recognised rising rates of aliyah by French Jews to Israel especially recently.
“I’m a French Jew, I’m a proud French Jew, but I’m also a member of the Jewish people and the nucleus – the centre – of this Jewish people is the State of Israel.”
ELENORE LEVI
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