Richard Di Natale: The Fool Who Rushed In

You can read the full story, New Greens boss Richard Di Natale forced to clarify Israel stance (Max Chalmers, 28/5/15) on the New Matilda website.

Briefly, Di Natale's office has been prompted, obviously by some kind of backlash from rank-and-file Greens, to issue the following clarification of his recent interview with the Australian Jewish News, the subject of my 23/5/15 post Richard Di Natale Reclassified: "He had no intention for his comments to be interpreted as support for establishment of a 'Jewish state'. It's not a phrase that he used."

"According to his office," writes Chalmers, "Di Natale simply agreed to a question put to him by [AJN] journalist Gareth Narunsky, apparently missing the distinction being made."

The "distinction" referred to is that between Israel as is, on the one hand, and the Zionist dogma of Israel as the State of Jews wherever they live, on the other.

IOW, the likes of Josh Frydenberg (Lib) and Mark Dreyfus (Lab), simply by demonstrating that their mothers are Jewish, can, if they so choose, take up Israeli citizenship, while millions of Palestinian Arabs, both Christian and Muslim, driven from their homeland in 1948 and 1967 by Zionist terror gangs, are not allowed to return.

The fact that Di Natale was unaware of this elementary distinction between Israel, the state of its citizens, and Israel, the state of its citizens plus every other Jew on the planet, including Frydenberg and Dreyfus, but  rushed in regardless with his de facto endorsement of Zionist holy writ, to the delight of the AJN and its ultra-Zionist readers, speaks volumes about his ignorance on the subject of Palestine/Israel.

There is no excuse here. The issue's been on the boil since the late 19th century, yet the man who would be king of a viable third force in Australian politics, cannot pass Israel 101?

The Australian Jewish News, BTW, is standing by its story and has released a tape of this part of its interview with Di Natale. You can listen to it on Chalmers' NM report, but here's the transcript:

Gareth Narunsky: One of the sticking points that the Palestinian Authority... the leadership [is] their refusal to accept Israel's existence as a Jewish state. Do you have a view on whether they should or shouldn't?

Di Natale (rushing in, scoffing): Well, of course. I mean if you have a two-state solution, refusing to acknowledge the right of one state to exist is patently nonsense... it's self-evident that you can't, we're not going to achieve progress until we accept that both Israelis and Palestinians have a right to exist, determine their own futures and that's what a two-state solution means.

Sure, fools rush in. All the time. Especially into Australian parliaments. But if the Greens are ever to break LibLab's stifling monopoly on Australian politics and introduce a genuinely fresh approach to people and planet, they have to be up to speed on this particular issue. That means, in a nutshell, rejecting Zionism and its modus operandi, calling for the right of return of Palestinian refugees, embracing the pro-Palestine campaign of boycotting, divesting from, and sanctioning Israeli apartheid, and supporting the creation of a secular democratic state for all of its citizens, both Jewish and non-Jewish, in historical Palestine.