"Sixty years ago next Wednesday, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was born. Australia voted for it and an Australian, H.V. Evatt, was president of the United Nations General Assembly." This is how the Sydney Morning Herald kicked off its editorial on PM Rudd's proposal to canvass an Australian bill of rights (The right bill of rights, 4/12/08).
Rudd loves to invoke the memory of Evatt whenever he's sucking up to the Israel lobby. The last time (that I'm aware of) was when he moved his infamous 12 March 2008 parliamentary motion "celebrating and commending the achievements of the State of Israel in the 60 years since its inception" (see my 14/3/08 post The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 3). Rudd said at the time: "Australia is proud to have played a significant part in the international process that led to the foundation of the state of Israel. Australia's then Minister for External Affairs, Dr Evatt, was part of the UN Special Committee on Palestine which recommended in August 1947 the termination of the Mandate for Palestine. And he was chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee meeting on the Palestine Question that proposed the partition of Palestine." IOW, Evatt was instrumental in laying the legal groundwork for the later creation of the Jewish state. IOW, Australia owes the Palestinian people big time. How can it discharge this debt? Simple - by basing its foreign policy squarely on the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
Article 13 of the UDHR reads: "(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." That article applies to all refugees, including the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their descendants.
Australia thus has a clear legal (through its vote for the UDHR) and moral ( through expiation for its historic role in the dismemberment of Palestine) duty to work in all international legal fora for the return of Palestinian refugees to the homeland from which they were ethnically cleansed by Zionist terrorists in 1948.
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Couldn't agree more. We need to begin by acknowldging that Evatt's (& Australia's) position was fundamentally racist - there is no way they would have given away the land of anyone of European descent. Once we acknowledge the wrong, we can start talking about compensation.
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