I don’t think I got it right about what is happening in Australia; I’m going to take another crack at it. And I thank the commenters who corrected me.
Last Wednesday, a group called Al-Nakba ran a large newspaper ad in The Australian, attacking a Parliamentary motion to celebrate Israel’s birth 60 years ago. The ad insisted that 1948 must more properly be remembered for the Nakba, or catastrophe of the Palestinian people. The language was unstinting:
Such a
motion, which honours a foreign country’s independence while it is violating
the rights of the indigenous people, occupying their land and breaching
international law, is unprecedented in our Parliament’s history. It
completely ignores the now well-documented historical record of Israel’s ethnic
cleansing that began with the 1948 al-Nakba – the Palestinian catastrophe
of dispossession and displacement – and which is continuing to this day. For
sixty years, the Palestinians have been denied their rights, their freedom and
their nationality…
The progressive group Independent Australian Jewish Voices called the ad a "Palestinian statement" and circulated it to its members in advance of publication. Sol Salbe has commented below that the ad got about 10 percent of the progressive Jewish group’s 400+ members as signatories. Not a "huge" amount of support, as I suggested. Apparently, many were disturbed by the ad’s strong language.
The ad deeply upset the established Jewish community. Here is a letter reportedly sent out by the leading organization of Sydney Jewry, the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, in advance of the ad’s publication:
We
believe that a letter harshly critical of Israel will be published in
The Australian as a paid advertisement on Wednesday. Please encourage
your friends – from the wider community, even more importantly than
from within the Jewish community – to write letters to the editor of
The Australian before 12 noon the day this letter appears (Wednesday),
rebutting some of the outrageous statements. The address is…
The ongoing furor in Australia involves the fact that the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies reportedly suggested that the entire progressive group of Independent Australian Jewish Voices was behind the ad, when it was not.
I think my earlier headline, saying that Anti-Zionism has been rehabilitated in Australia, is an overstatement.
Richard Witty asks sternly whether I am now an Anti-Zionist, as opposed to a Post-Zionist. It is a very good question, and one I admit I’m confused on. A few months back the playwright David Zellnik said he was a Post-Zionist because being anti-Zionist meant you were denying the achievement/existence of the Israeli people. Zellnik is intelligent and kind; and I thought his an emulable position. I am not very knowledgeable in this area (Israeli history) and my mood tends to harden depending on what I’ve read. The last couple of days I have been reading The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe, and am shocked by the extent to which the founders of Israel planned to create a "cradle" for Jewish nationalism in Palestine by expelling Palestinian Arabs, and then went about doing so. At that time, 1947, Arabs composed 2/3 of the population and U.N. Partition granted the Jewish settlers about half of Mandatory Palestine for a state. But this half was not enough in the eyes of the founders of Israel.
Pappe reproduces a New York Times article from April 1948 covering the Deir Yassin massacre, in a village outside Jerusalem, where more than 100 Palestinians were killed, mostly women and children and elderly. Deir Yassin was not part of the portion of the land granted by the U.N. to the Jews. But the town’s destruction was necessary for security, and for the possession of Jerusalem. The Times quotes a spokesman for the Irgun/Stern Gang forces saying that the village had become a concentration point for Iraqi and Syrian Arabs planning to attack Jews in west Jerusalem; "he regretted the casualties among the women and children at Deir Yasin but asserted that they were inevitable because almost every house had to be reduced by force…" [emphasis mine]
I find this article chilling because we see the very same rationalizations for violence, on both sides, today. My chief response is that the U.S. should not be taking taking sides in this horrific cycle of violence but should take a strong, evenhanded and international approach to seeking peace. It must be remembered that Even the U.N. Partition plan called for an open international city in Jerusalem. Israel, the more powerful side in this struggle, has not permitted this; and so violence will go on forever.
I apologize for my swings in tone/program. The one thing I do feel sure of is: Zionism is not the answer to peace in the Holy Land, and neither is Palestinian terror.
