On Sunday, 8th September, the Policy Committee hosted a briefing at Liberal Party HQ with Mr Eylon Levy, former Israeli government spokesperson.
Mr Levy, a former international media advisor to President Isaac Herzog, has a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford and an MPhil in International Relations from Cambridge. After making Aliyah from the UK and serving in the IDF, he now leads the Israeli Citizen Spokespersons’ Office and hosts the State of a Nation podcast and YouTube show.
Key Points from the Briefing:
Israel was attacked by Hamas on 7th October. Calls for a ceasefire are unreasonable while Hamas continues to hold over 100 hostages.
The use of Israeli hostages as bargaining chips to release Palestinian prisoners has proven problematic in the past with the 2011 swap of IDF captive Gilad Shalit in exchange for militant mastermind Yahya Sinwar who, after being released form prison, went on to becoming the mastermind of the 7th October attacks in 2023.
Hamas must be removed and its sympathisers must be deradicalised before any prospects of lasting peace.
Israel’s peace agreements with Bahrain, the UAE, and Morocco do suggest that peace with Palestinian Arabs should also be possible, except the two sides are a long way off from reaching that point while the war is still on-going and Hamas refuses to surrender and release the hostages.
Many Gazans descend from those 700,000 Palestinians displaced in 1948 and are perpetually kept in UNRWA funded refugee camps.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 but the propsects of Gaza becoming economically and politically stable and coexisting alongside the State of Israel were hampered by the election of Hamas and continuous firing of rockets into Israel and perpetual demands for a 'right of return' to resettle Palestinians from Gaza inside the borders of the State of Israel. Such a demand is unreasonable.
It is inaccurate to view Israel as a European settler colony as its critics continually do. There is a 3000 year long Jewish connection to the land of which 2000 years were spent in galut (exile) as Jewish people were expelled from the land by their Roman occupiers in 135 CE.
While Israel was established mostly through the efforts of Ashkenazi (European) Jewish communities in 1948, over time it has become a refuge for the resettlement of 850,000 Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews displaced from Muslim countries.
Most modern Israelis trace their ancestries to countries like Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco and Tunisia. Mr Levy's own family traces its origins to the Jewish communities of Iraq.
The Iranian regime seeks to disrupt the balance of power in the Middle East by sponsoring its various proxies Hezbollah (Lebanon), Houthis (Yemen) and Hamas (Gaza).
Australia continues to stand with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in their on-going regional conflict with the Iranian regime and its proxies.
The rise in attacks on members of the Jewish community in the diaspora across the Anglosphere are unreasonable and do not help build the good will and mutual trust otherwise needed in order to achieve a just and lasting solution.
Special thanks to Jeremy Buxton and Scott Stirling for organising the event and in particular Mr Gavin Kotkis President of the Jewish National Fund (WA) for helping facilitate Mr Levy's participation.
