WITTON, Ron. Dr Ron Witton, Law Faculty, University of Wollongong, renounces and denounces Israeli "law of return" that oppresses Indigenous Palestinians

Dr Ron Witton is an Honorary Principal Fellow in the Faculty of Law at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia (see: http://www.uow.edu.au/law/honoraryfellows/index.html ).

Dr Ron Witton 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:

http://antonyloewenstein.com/2010/03/03/prominent-australian-jews-including-peter-singer-reject-the-israeli-right-of-return/.