Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001 (see: http://www.countercurrents.org/vlazna090413.htm ).
Dr. Vacy Vlazna on the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians (2013): “With regard to Israel's occupation of Palestine, decent people scratch their heads and ask, “Why do the Israelis behave like Nazis to the Palestinians?' or ‘Why, having suffered the Holocaust, do Israelis make Palestinian's suffer?” They are important questions, and the answer is shocking and distressing. Speaking personally, this puzzled me. My parents lived under Nazi occupation in then-Czechoslovakia and were Jewish sympathisers so I was enlightened on the evils of Nazism including the Lidice atrocity. When I was 16, I read the The Belsen Trial detailing the horrors of the holocaust in one concentration camp and in my twenties fell under the propaganda spell Uris' Exodus. Then as an activist for Palestinian human and political rights, I was bewildered by the Israeli record of Nazi-like persecution of Palestinians until... until I attended a talk by Avigail Abarbanel, former Israeli soldier and now activist for Palestinian rights, who shared with us the state-induced compulsory trauma and victimhood, which is, sadly, Israeli childhood. The world is outraged, as it must be, about the shocking incidence of child abuse and child soldiers, illegal under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet there isn't a murmur of condemnation of the Israeli practice, shades of Huxley, of artificially altering with Zionist conditioning from birth, the minds of its children (with some lucky exceptions) who hatch at 18 years of age into mindless, cruel soldiers and soulless citizens. Individuals who do not conform, who miraculously hold onto an independence of mind and compassion, are made into pariahs and branded with the pejorative, ‘Self-Hating Jew' and ‘traitor'… With a boost from the Hebrew Bible, Israeli children are made immune to the immorality of contemporary ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians through the heroic justification of the same methods in Joshua's conquest of Canaan. Shlomo Sand says ‘ under no circumstances is it permissible to skip over the book of Joshua. Moreover, even though the teaching of this “past” has been proven ethically and pedagogically destructive, the Israeli education system refuses to exclude from the curriculum these shameful accounts of extermination.” [1].
Dr. Vacy Vlazna on the ongoing Palestinian Genocide (2014): “At the black heart of Israel’s 65 year rape of Palestine, is the Jewish National Fund ( JNF) which once went by the more germane, Jewish COLONIAL Trust; an opportunistic real-estate jackal that has aggressively deposited its Zionist stink throughout the ancestral land of Palestine.
From its inception in 1901, JNF’s mission of the theft of Palestinian land for the Jews-only Greater (Eretz) Israel is racist, colonial, criminal (colonial expansion is a warcrime under Article 8.2(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute) and bloody.
Max Blumenthal writes “JNF director Yosef Weitz was instrumental in hatching Plan Dalet, the campaign to ethnically cleanse at least 400 Palestinian villages and expel their residents in 1947 and 1948. After the war of 1948, Weitz orchestrated the planting of hundreds of thousands of non-native trees west of Jerusalem to cover up the scores of villages that had just been ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias.”
These days, to cover up its criminal activities, JNF has reinvented itself as ‘the caretaker of the land of Israel on behalf of its owners--Jewish people everywhere’. To promote this benign image of the normalisation of ethnic cleansing, JNF offers tours and missions of Israel that are “intensely emotional, educational and spiritual experiences” of Orwellian Newspeak and war crime whitewash.” [2].
Dr Vacy Vlazna (Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters, editor of a volume of Palestinian poetry, “I remember my name”, and was convenor of Australia East Timor Association) on the boycott of Apartheid Israel from the 2019 World Para Swimming Championships by Malaysia, one of the international hosts of the games) (2019): “Malaysia’s principled boycott was not directed against the athletes but against the Jewish state of Israel in protest of decades of Israel’s brutal illegal occupation, its 12 year illegal siege of Gaza and its months of recent sustained atrocities against Gaza’s unarmed protestors at the non-violent Great March of Return… “According to the latest report issued by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the total number of wounded is 24,516 since the Gaza Return March started. The injuries in the lower limbs were 49.6% and 8.2% is the head and neck” [about 200 were killed]… The disabilities caused by the Israeli attacks since the beginning of Gaza March of Return reached 94, including 82 amputations in lower bodies, 12 amputations in upper body parts.” The Great March of Return is now in its 48th week. and despite the horror and carnage, young healthy as well as newly maimed Palestinians, children and grandchildren of the refugee survivors of the 1947-8 Nakba (Palestine’s holocaust) continue to protest for their legal Right of Return … Israel, according to international law, is not equitable, it is a belligerent apartheid coloniser which daily perpetrates crimes against humanity and war crimes against the indigenous Palestinian people and therefore the IPC should place sanctions against Israel until its ends its military occupation of Palestine” Vacy Vlazna, “Paralympic body shields”, Countercurrents, 2 March 2019: https://countercurrents.org/2019/03/02/paralympic-body-shields-israeli-systematic-mutilation-machine/ ).
[Editor note: According to the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) IPC (2019): “The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) on Sunday (27 January) stripped Malaysia of the right to host the 2019 World Para Swimming Championships, which were due to be held in Kuching between 29 July and 4 August… ” ( “IPC strip Malaysia of 2019 World Para Swimming Championships”, Paralympics Australia, January 20189: https://www.paralympic.org.au/ipc-strip-malaysia-of-2019-world-para-swimming-championships/ )].
[1]. Dr. Vacy Vlazna, “Zionist Herods and the Massacre of the Innocents”, Countercurrents, 13 April 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/vlazna090413.htm .
[2]. Vacy Vlazna, “Jewish National Fund’s War Crimes Mission”, Countercurrents, 30 January 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/vlazna300114A.htm .