Thursday, February 23, 2017

Rudd & Netanyahu Cross Swords

The public airing of friction between a foreign head of state, while he is visiting a country, and one of that country's former leaders must surely be unique in the annals of international affairs.

Former Australian PM Kevin Rudd was moved to post the following unprecedented statement on his FB page yesterday:

"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today challenged former Prime Minister Hawke and myself on what sort of Palestinian state we would recommend Israel recognise.

"I have a simple reply to Mr Netanyahu: The boundaries, internal security, external security, public finance and governance of a Palestinian state have been elaborated in detail in multiple negotiations with the US under the Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations, most recently in the Kerry Plan. Mr Netanyahu knows these formulations like the back of his hand. Mr Netanyahu also knows he has torpedoed each of them, often at five minutes to midnight, often by changing the goalposts, to the enduring frustration of both Republican and Democrat Administrations.

"I have been a supporter of Israel all my life. And a public campaigner against any form of anti-Semitism. But to support the state of Israel does not mandate automatic support for each and every policy of Mr Netanyahu. The state of Israel and Mr Netanyahu are not co-definitional. That is why I beg to differ on this and other aspects of Mr Netanyahu's policies.

"For example, I also have a simple question for Mr Netanyahu. Will he use this visit to Australia to apologise to the Australian people for his government using forged Australian passports to facilitate an Israeli assassination of a member of Hamas in Dubai?

"No apology has ever been received for that action which had the consequence of putting the integrity of Australian passports and the security of Australian passport holders travelling to the Middle East at risk."

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good on you Kevin!

Anonymous said...

Thank you Kevin for saying what the rest of us dare not whisper!

Mannie De Saxe said...

Oh, we not only dare whisper, we actually shout it out loud on our blogs and on our web pages and wherever we can, but nobody hears what we are saying - not the government, not the opposition, not our politicians, not most people who believe "we support Israel because it is the "only democracy" in the middle east".

An apartheid state which learnt from apartheid South Africa and also learnt to magnify and divide in a way that the South African apartheid government could only have dreamt about.

When is the world going to wake up to the Israeli government and the lying Netanyahu and help the Palestinians establish their own independent state?

My only explanation for it all is that they are all anti-semitic christians who are working hard to ensure that the Jews in all countries around the world are moved in all senses of the world to go to Israel and to rid all these countries of their Jewish populations - at last. Then and only then will anti-semitism presumably come to an end.

But I have no intention of moving and will continue to support BDS in every way I can.

Israel will be a democratic state when it becomes a bi-national state of Israelis and Palestinians with equal rights in every way possible. Human rights and freedom.

MERC said...

Mannie, your explanation has more than a ring of truth about it, except to say that there is a push/pull factor at work here.

The push came (and still comes to a greater or lesser degree) from Western politicians such as Balfour, who, instead of seeing Jews as merely one element in the religious mix of their nations, viewed them as essentially a foreign, 'national' element who didn't really belong in the country of their birth.

The pull came (and still comes) from the Zionist movement which has always advocated the idea that Jews are a 'national', rather than a religious, entity requiring a "national home" (to cite the words of the Balfour Declaration) somewhere outside the country of their birth. And so, in an age of nationalism, the Zionists were able to exploit the non-inclusive/anti-Semitic mindset of Western politicians such as Balfour to advance their aim of channeling as many Western Jews as possible out of Europe and into what they decided would make the optimal Jewish "national home", Palestine.

As an anti-Zionist, my view is that Jews (whether religious or merely cultural) are, or should be seen as, an integral and valued part of the open, multi-sectarian, multi-cultural, inclusive society into which they are born and raised.

Zionists, on the other hand, would have them fixating on Israel and, if possible, emigrating there.