Professor David SG Goodman, according to the University of Sydney is Professor of Chinese Politics. He was educated at the University of Manchester (Politics and Modern History) Peking University (Economics) and the London School of Oriental and African Studies (Chinese language and Chinese Politics.)David Goodman’s research is concerned primarily with social and political change in China, particularly at the provincial and local level. In recent years he has written on the history of the Chinese Communist Party; China’s social history in the Twentieth Century; and local social and political change in China. David Goodman is currently working on two major research projects. The first is a social history project, looking at German colonial adventurers in China, 1870-1937. The second is concerned with contemporary social and political change - The New Rich and the State in China: The social basis of local power. Recent publications include China’s Campaign to ‘Open Up the West’: National, provincial and local perspectives (2004); The New Rich in China: Future rulers, present lives (2008); and Twentieth Century Colonialism in China (2010). Prof Goodman is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia (see: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/government_international_relations/staff/academic_staff/david_goodman.shtml ).
Professor David SG Goodman as a signatory on the "Petition Against the Right of Return to Israel on Behalf of Australian Jews” (March 2010): “We are Jews from Australia, who, like Jewish people throughout the world, have an automatic right to Israeli citizenship under Israel’s “law of return.” While this law may seem intended to enable a Jewish homeland, we submit that it is in fact a form of racist privilege that abets the colonial oppression of the Palestinians.
Today there are more than seven million Palestinian refugees around the world. Israel denies their right to return to their homes and land—a right recognized and undisputed by UN Resolution 194, the Geneva Convention, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Meanwhile, we are invited to live on that same land simply because we are Jewish, thereby potentially taking the place of Palestinians who would dearly love to return to their ancestral lands.
We renounce this “right” to “return” offered to us by Israeli law. It is not right that we may “return” to a state that is not ours while Palestinians are excluded and continuously dispossessed.’ [1].
[1]. Antony Loewenstein, "Prominent Australian Jews reject the Israeli "right of return", Media release, 3 March 2010: