Sweet Charity

"Heloise Waislitz was only 13 years old when her parents, Richard and Jeanne Pratt, took her to South Africa on a family holiday... I was completely traumatised... I thought 'How can you separate people by the colour of their skin?' And that's why I got into philanthropy,' she tells The Australian in the first wide-ranging interview." (The heiress who keeps on giving, Damon Kitney, The Australian, 8/6/15)

Yes, Heloise, it's dreadful what they got up to in apartheid South Africa back then. Of course, separating people by religion so that you and yours can go and live in Israel but Ahmed Bloggs in Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp just across the border in Lebanon can't, that's perfectly OK, right? But I digress:

"In 1995 Richard Pratt made Heloise... the chairman of the Pratt Foundation. He implored her to give and give, declaring he had never heard of an unworthy charity... Few know Waislitz as one of the nation's leading philanthropists, for which she is today [8/6] being awarded a Member of the Order of Australia. The Pratt Foundation... run by distinguished [Zionist] journalist Sam Lipski for the past 17 years... donates to causes in Australia, the US and Israel, giving away $15-$17 million a year."

Tax deductible of course.

The Pratt Foundation's best known project in Israel is probably Beersheva's Park of the Australian Soldier, where rambammed Australian politicians go to learn that Australian troops, by ejecting the Turks from the southern Palestinian town of Beersheba (as it was then known) in World War I, were not engaged in paving the way for the implementation of the proclaimed Allied war aim of a post-war settlement based on the principles of the 'right of self-determination' and the 'consent of the governed' for Palestine's then 90% Arab population, but rather paving the way for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

This deliberate linking of the military exploits of Australian troops in Palestine in World War I with the lobbying exploits of the Zionist movement in London at the same time has, as I have shown in previous posts on the subject, become a staple of Zionist propaganda directed at uninformed Australians.

Pratt Foundation CEO Sam Lipski, for example, put it this way in a recent issue of the Spectator magazine:

"On the same afternoon that the 4th and 12th Light Horse regiments... raced towards Beersheba... Lloyd George's war cabinet met in London. It agreed to support 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people...' A few days later, on 2 November, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to lord Rothschild advising him of the British government's decision... More than any other political event... the [Balfour] Declaration... greatly invigorated the Zionist movement [and] paved the way for Israel's emergence 31 years later... If the Turks had held the line at Beersheba... and if the first world war had ended with the decaying Ottoman empire still ruling Palestine, then the Balfour Declaration would have been meaningless. The Light horse victory ensured that didn't happen." (Beersheba Diary, 31/5/15)

What Lipski doesn't tell us, of course, is that, instead of making illegitimate promises to the Zionists in London in 1917, the British had a clear moral and legal obligation to honour their earlier 1915 pledge to the Arabs, given by the British High Commissioner in Cairo to the Arab nationalist Sharif of Mecca, to support Arab independence in the Middle East, including in Palestine, if the Arab forces agreed to join with the British in driving the Turks out of the Middle East.

That Anglo-Arab pact of 1915 was scrupulously observed by the Arab forces who fought and died (alongside the British and the Australians) all the way from Mecca to Damascus for an independent and unified Arab state in the region. Unfortunately, the Arabs were betrayed by Anglo-Zionist collusion and deal-making far from the scene of battle.

The sad truth is that if the Australian troops who'd captured Beersheba had had any inkling of what was afoot in the smoke-filled backrooms of Whitehall, they may well have had second thoughts about the entire Palestine campaign, let alone Beersheba. 

Lipski concluded his piece thus:

"Legendary the Beersheba victory may be for many. But for most Australians it's not as legendary as the Gallipoli defeat. For most Israelis, and many Australian Jews, the Light Horse's contribution to Israel's eventual establishment is virtually unknown."

Not if Lipski or the mayor of Beersheva have anything to do with it, however:

"Come the centenary in 2017, Mayor Ruvik... wants thousands of Australians and Israelis to come to Be'er-Sheva, not just to mark the the 100th anniversary, but to honour and celebrate his city's permanent Anzac legacy. I am booking early."

So too, I imagine, will Heloise Waislitz.