Australia's Shame
Thousands of Lebanese citizens, injured or murdered by apparent
Israeli planted explosives in pagers and other communications devices,
are referred to as Hezbollah operatives, even though victims have
included small children.
A macabre picture does not end there. The public is given the usual
either or account of slaughter in a war depicted as between Israel and
its enemies, hence invitations to politicians to take sides. This binary
convenience ignores the sadism inherent in Israel’s claims about
defence, let alone questions about international law or values
concerning a common humanity.
Pager slaughter in Lebanon, humanity of no consequence
Saddened but the need to be human
It is not because of my own history that I have declared myself to be an ally of the struggle of Palestinian people, it is because as human beings injustice and inequality demand that we all care.
The lesson of October 7 is that you cannot normalise and live peacefully in the context of a profound, ongoing injustice. Peace and justice will only come to the region when Palestinians are recognised as a people with the right to self-determination, sovereignty and their own state.
I arrived at the end of 1972. I imagined that I was landing in a socialist utopia. Instead, the reality of the Zionist project made itself explicit at the airport: European Jews stamped my passport, Middle Eastern Jews manned the luggage carousels while Palestinians swept the floors and cleaned the toilets. So much for the socialist dream.
Israel has long been hailed as the only democracy in the Middle East, which belies the fundamental contradiction: a Jewish state is by definition exclusionary and therefore anti-democratic for everyone who is not Jewish.
Why should Palestinians (or anyone) respect a distinction between Jewishness and Zionism when the Israeli state is founded on – and its continued existence justified by – precisely this conflation? When the Star of David is emblazoned on the uniforms of the IDF soldiers who humiliate, torture and murder Palestinians? When, as an Australian Jew, I can settle on a kibbutz in southern Israel that was once home to the family of a Palestinian – now confined in Gaza mere kilometres away, who have to break through a barbed wire fence to “return” – simply because I am a Jew, and he is a Palestinian?
To compare the conduct of the IDF in prosecuting the occupation to the Nazi regime’s segregation, dispossession and persecution of the Jews in World War II is forbidden.
In this small corner of the world, there are 120,000 Jews. I have learnt that it is not acceptable to ask what is our relationship to the modern state of Israel. What is our response to the occupation of Palestine and the plight of the Palestinians?
And my response is to ask why empathy, an acknowledgement of our shared humanity, is such a risk?
the establishment of a Jewish state didn’t arise as a response to the Holocaust; it was a nationalist project of the 19th century, and its advocates set aside the fact that a Jewish state would entail the denial of an indigenous population.
The tragic lesson Israel failed to learn yet again on October 7 is that peace cannot be premised on the subjugation of a people. Violence invariably returns. Indeed, every attempt to cover it up – be it with the increasingly fascistic policies of the Israeli government, the ever-increasing restrictive conditions of the occupation, or the hysteria of the Zionist lobby in the diaspora in response to the mildest expression of solidarity with Palestinians – only reveals the terrible and inevitable persistence of violence.
The lesson of October 7 is that you cannot normalise and live peacefully in the context of a profound, ongoing injustice. Peace and justice will only come to the region when Palestinians are recognised as a people with the right to self-determination, sovereignty and their own state.
These are the things I’ve learnt you can’t ask about Israel
" TRUMP: If I don’t win this election, and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because at 40%, that means 60% of the people are voting for the enemy."
Donald Trump’s ‘Pitch’ To Jews: If I Don’t Win, It’ll Be Your Fault
Australian film-maker David Bradbury has been refused entry into India, after flying into Chennai from Bangkok on 10 September with his two children, aiming to take a holiday.
Bradbury, an Oscar-nominated film-maker who is an anti-nuclear campaigner, said all three members of his family had valid visas issued by the Indian consulate in Canberra before they left Australia on 7 September.
Australian film-maker refused entry into India
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