The Hyping of Hawke

Just prior to election day, former ACTU boss and Labor prime minister Bob Hawke (1929-2019) passed away. The msm, including,  the Murdoch press, rang with his praise, as in the passing of a saint.

Bill Shorten, for example, emailed as follows:

"An Australian at home in Asia, a voice heard and respected in the councils of the world. A country that steps up and plays its part, keeping peace in the Middle East, keeping Antarctica safe for science... As president of the ACTU, Bob was the champion of unpopular causes: *The right of unions to organise and bargain * Opposing French nuclear testing in the Pacific * Opposing the war in Vietnam * Opposing Apartheid and defending Nelson Mandela, when conservatives were branding him a terrorist." (From Bill Shorten's email Remembering Bob Hawke, 17/5/19)

Murdoch's Australian had this to say:

"He was magnificent on Israel. On apartheid. On Antarctica. On French nuclear testing. in the Pacific." (From larrikin to legend, Caroline Overington, 17/5/19)

And, in a feature article by its editor at large, Paul Kelly, this:

"Tensions [between the Whitlam government and the ACTU] were exacerbated by a new development in Hawke's life - his passionate embrace of the cause of Israel. He formed close bonds with many Jewish leaders and campaigned fiercely for the Soviet Union to allow the immigration of Jews to Israel, to end a situation he saw as a grave injustice." (Lover, fighter & peacemaker, 17/5/19)

It's those references to Israel that belie all the warm and fuzzy pre-election media effusions about St Bob, and, whatever his other accomplishments, reveal a dark side wholly forgotten, it seems by a historically illiterate mainstream and social media. We need to go back then to the 70s to see what I mean, and, in particular, the following shocker:

"Relations between Hawke and the Arab community had often been strained. Since Hawke's first visit to Israel in 1971, he had made his pro-Israeli sympathies very public. 'The problem', wrote Blanche d'Alpuget, Hawke's biographer, 'is that in his speeches on the Middle East, Hawke has devoted only a small percentage, if any... to the plight of the Palestinians, while highlighting the violent physical and verbal assaults upon Israel by her neighbours. He thus projected the impression that, for him, the Palestinians were irrelevant'. reports such as the one in the Daily Telegraph in 1974 that 'I'd A-Bomb Arabs, says Hawke' did not endear him to the community. His personal identification with Israel was so strong that he had once declared: 'If I were to have my life again, I would want to be born a Jew', and 'I'm an Israeli'." (Christine Asmar, The Arab-Australian Experience, in Australia's Gulf War, Edited by Murray Goot & Rodney Tiffen, 1992, p 72)

There's no getting around this indecent colonial obsession of Hawke's, and what it led to in the 80s and early 90s, a subject I'll return to in my next post.