The confected outrage of Zionist propagandists at Mike Carlton and Glen LeLievre, following their forthright condemnation of Israel's current wilding in Gaza in Saturday's Herald, was as inevitable as night following day.
Five of the 9 letters on the subject in yesterday's Herald were in this category. Here's my deconstruction of one of them - that by Zionist barrister Irving Wallach of Alexandria:
"Journalistic and cartoon comment in coverage of the tragic and extremely disturbing deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza..."
Note the feigned concern for Palestinian civilians. It's there merely to lend the requisite air of humanity to the letter. (Rule Number 1 in the Zionist propaganda handbook.)
Readers are not, of course, expected to notice that the term "tragic deaths" is really nothing more than a euphemism for bloody murder, or reflect that if the writer was in fact "extremely disturbed" by them, he'd be condemning them as the war crimes that they are.
"... and of Israeli civilians was always going to need caution."
Although there is, in fact, no balance whatever in Israel's genocidal rampage in Gaza, you'll note here an attempt to suggest otherwise.
"Which makes one wonder how on earth LeLievre's cartoon was approved for publication."
The reader is not, of course, expected to wonder how on earth genuine obscenities such as 'Operation Protective Edge' can be perpetrated by those who spin themselves as the very acme of civilization and modernity.
"His image of a fat hook-nosed Jew..."
Hm... reminiscent of a geriatric Menachem Begin, Israeli terrorist par excellence and Likud founder, of whom Netanyahu has said, "He is a great role model for me... Israel and the Likud are inspired by the spirit of Menachem Begin." (Israel remembers Prime Minister Menachem Begin, israelhayom, 28/2/12)
Seems like LeLievre's captured the 'spirit' of today's Likudnik murderers perfectly. And that reminds me: wasn't Wallach once a leader of the Zionist youth movement Betar, founded by the ideological godfather of the Likud, Vladimir Jabotinsky?
"... complete with religious head covering..."
Such as Netanyahu wears from time to time, to shore up the kippah-wearing settler vote.
"... and labelled with a large Star of David is disgraceful. It should be the stuff of a bygone era."
Apparently the appropriation of the Star of David as the national symbol of the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime is neither here nor there.
"It should not have appeared in the pages of any Australian newspaper, let alone a quality publication such as the Herald. Shame on you, LeLievre, and the Herald."
Bollocks!
Showing posts with label Irving Wallach. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irving Wallach. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
The Taming of Tanya
Hope springs eternal, as the saying goes.
Some people out there apparently see Labor's new deputy/shadow foreign minister, Tanya Plibersek, as the Great White Hope of the ALP, partly on the strength of her description of Israel as a "rogue state" back in 2002.
Well, she's come a long way since then. But not, mind you, without a bit of - ahem - 'guidance' from 'friends' in the party:
"A year or so after Tanya Plibersek's widely reported anti-Israel comments, several Jewish friends who were openly Zionist and active in the Labor party told me they had since spent many hours talking to her about Israel, Zionism and the Palestinians. They said she had been quite open to discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict [and] her attitudes had shifted. Plibersek now understood why there was a Jewish State and recognised a two-state approach was the only practical solution. I was sceptical. I want to a book launch at Gleebooks where Plibersek was to be the guest speaker. The book was about Israel, the Palestinians and the Middle East, and Gleebooks was a well known gathering place for pro-Palestinian sentiment. I knew the audience would be hostile to Israel and it would be easy to score points by kicking the Israeli can. But Plibersek spoke with insight and genuine conviction. I was intrigued and pleasantly surprised to hear her say injustices suffered by the Palestinians could not be ended and a Palestinian state could not be achieved without ensuring there was a Jewish state and Israel was entitled to security as much as the Palestinians."
(Letter from Irving Wallach, Bronte NSW, The Australian Jewish News, 25/10/13)
Still, one can never be sure she's quite got the message, so:
"Asked whether she would be open to travelling to Israel to further her understanding of the conflict on the ground, she said: 'I have had the pleasure of visiting Israel before, and I would welcome the opportunity to visit again'," (Plibersek 'would welcome' chance to visit Israel, The Australian Jewish News, 25/10/13)
Some people out there apparently see Labor's new deputy/shadow foreign minister, Tanya Plibersek, as the Great White Hope of the ALP, partly on the strength of her description of Israel as a "rogue state" back in 2002.
Well, she's come a long way since then. But not, mind you, without a bit of - ahem - 'guidance' from 'friends' in the party:
"A year or so after Tanya Plibersek's widely reported anti-Israel comments, several Jewish friends who were openly Zionist and active in the Labor party told me they had since spent many hours talking to her about Israel, Zionism and the Palestinians. They said she had been quite open to discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict [and] her attitudes had shifted. Plibersek now understood why there was a Jewish State and recognised a two-state approach was the only practical solution. I was sceptical. I want to a book launch at Gleebooks where Plibersek was to be the guest speaker. The book was about Israel, the Palestinians and the Middle East, and Gleebooks was a well known gathering place for pro-Palestinian sentiment. I knew the audience would be hostile to Israel and it would be easy to score points by kicking the Israeli can. But Plibersek spoke with insight and genuine conviction. I was intrigued and pleasantly surprised to hear her say injustices suffered by the Palestinians could not be ended and a Palestinian state could not be achieved without ensuring there was a Jewish state and Israel was entitled to security as much as the Palestinians."
(Letter from Irving Wallach, Bronte NSW, The Australian Jewish News, 25/10/13)
Still, one can never be sure she's quite got the message, so:
"Asked whether she would be open to travelling to Israel to further her understanding of the conflict on the ground, she said: 'I have had the pleasure of visiting Israel before, and I would welcome the opportunity to visit again'," (Plibersek 'would welcome' chance to visit Israel, The Australian Jewish News, 25/10/13)
Saturday, September 22, 2012
The Nakba Comes to Q & A
Getting Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on Q&A on Monday night was quite a coup. In fact, I can't even remember any program ever on ABC television devoted, even if not in its entirety, to the issue of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Q&A, September 17 2012, was memorable for many things.
First, there was an uncharacteristic silence from the ms media's most vociferous Zionist, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian. As he himself remarked at one point, "Haven't I been magnificently silent through all that debate? It is the longest debate on Israel ever held in Australia in which I haven't spoken, you know."
And better for him to have remained magnificently silent than to flaunt his abysmal ignorance thus:
"I comprehensively reject Ilan's narrative of Israel. I think it's wrong in every respect. I haven't had time to read all of Ilan's books but I read this week devastating critiques of them by historians, who are very critical of Israel, for their factual inaccuracy. Benny Morris and others who are very critical of Israel, not servants of the Israeli Government."
Who is he trying to fool? For one, Sheridan wouldn't know a book by Pappe if it hit him in the face. For another, portraying Morris as a trenchant critic of Israel simply means he hasn't read Morris either. Happily, apart from the above, this pompous windbag had little else to say other than to moan irrelevantly about Israel's so-called legitimacy coming under attack, crack this little funny - "There is no country in the Middle East which better observes the human rights of all its citizens than Israel" - and draw a false analogy between Arab Jewish immigrants to Israel and ethnically-cleansed Palestinians.
The only real attempt to land a few blows on Pappe came from Zionist barrister Irving Wallach. Of course, we'd heard Wallach's line a thousand times before: the Palestinians were the authors of their own misfortune. If only they'd accepted the 1947 UN partition plan! Then, presumably, Israeli forces would have advanced no further than a line on a map drawn by a UN committee and the Palestinians would now be partying in at least 44% of their ancestral homeland. One (just one!) of the problems with this little fantasy can be summed up by the rhetorical question: Since when have lines on a map ever been an obstacle to Zionist expansionism? Wallach then followed this with: If only the Palestinians hadn't been led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini*, a man who'd spent the war years in Nazi Germany schmoozing with Adolf Hitler!
Despite Pappe's categorical dismissal of Wallach's 'if onlys' as "Israeli propaganda," credulous ringmaster Tony Jones was mightily impressed by the second at least:
Jones: OK. All right. Let's settle this issue of the Mufti of Jerusalem because I have seen those pictures. I have seen the history. He was connected to Hitler. [What exactly have you been reading, Tony?]
Wallach: Yeah, definitely. Absolutely.
Jones: There isn't any doubt about that.
They hadn't, however, reckoned on Pappe's succinct presentation of the bleeding obvious:
"Stupid behaviour by a Palestinian leader does not justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. A Palestinian refusal to accept the partition may or may not be justified. What is not justified is punishing the Palestinians by depopulating half of [Palestine]. We have to understand what happened in 1948. Imagine half the population of a country [being] forcibly expelled. Half the villages destroyed. Half the towns demolished. Is this the right kind of punishment for for a leader who made a stupid mistake in World War 2? This was not a tragedy. This was a crime against humanity."
The insularity and self-absorption of one elderly Zionist questioner (on video) was breathtaking. He wanted to know why Q&A "coincided with the holiest days of the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hashanah," thus "preventing observant Jews from being able to attend as members of the audience or even to watch the broadcast."
This provided an opening for another jab by Wallach, for whom defending Israel from a prominent critic obviously took precedence over Rosh Hashana: "Look, can I say this about Ilan's whole point of view, and that is: it is designed and intended to perpetuate a conflict model and narrative." There was, said Wallach, a war, but both sides have been moving towards a two-state solution. He went on portentously, "if you want to carry on in Ilan's fashion and throw around cliches and accusations then a couple of things follow. Firstly, you have to seriously consider surrendering your claim to be an objective historian. Secondly, you have to accept that what you want to do is encourage ongoing conflict and battles and death and destruction between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. If you want to go along the conflict road, then forget about peace. If you want to promote Israel as a pariah state for your own political and ideological agenda, go ahead. History will not thank you for it."
Wallach's little homily, which smeared Pappe as a promoter of violence while ignoring the fact that the root of all violence in Palestine/Israel stems solely from the Zionist movement's goal of imposing a sectarian 'Jewish' state on the indigenous non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, led to the following revealing exchange:
Pappe: Can I...?
Jones: Ilan, yes, you have to respond to that.
Pappe: Can I respond? First of all, I don't think Israel's seeking legitimacy [as such]. Israel is seeking legitimacy as a racist state within the community of civilised states.
Wallach (interrupting): Look, pardon me, can we stick to the facts?
Pappe (as if bone-weary of Zionist claptrap): No. No. Please no.
Wallach: Please stick to the facts.
Pappe: I didn't interrupt you. You taught me a lesson about being polite so try to apply it to yourself. Now, Israel wants to remain both a racist and a democratic state. This is an oxymoron... Secondly, the documentation for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine [and] for Israel's criminal policies since is there and most Israeli historians recognise that. So the debate in Israel is not over facts but morals. Whether it was right, as Benny Morris says, in self-defence, to ethnically cleanse another people, or whether it was immoral. I say it was immoral, not Jewish, inhuman and finally...
Jones: What's being challenged is the documentation.
Pappe: No. No.
Jones: Which, as a historian, you are relying on. [Jones, like Doogue, who knows little or nothing about the Palestinian Nakba is challenging Ilan Pappe? Is this chutzpah or what?]
Pappe: The documentation is not challenged. Nobody challenges it.
Wallach (taking advantage of Jones insufferable chutzpah): And Tony, if I might say so, what's also challenged...
Pappe (trying to close the door on this peddler of Zionist snake oil): No, let me finish.
Wallach (channelling Benny Morris):... is the slur of an ethnic cleansing as opposed to war followed by refugees. That's what's under challenge.
Pappe: Yes. Now...
Wallach: And in that regard Ilan is on his own...
Pappe: In that regard, you could look...
Wallach: Ilan is on his own as regards the historians. He's on his own.
Pappe: I am totally alone - with 5-6 million Palestinians and another 10 billion people in the world. Now, the point I'm making...
Sheridan (ever the smartarse heckler from Greg & Tony Do Monash): There are only 6 billion people in the world. [Actually its over 7 billion.]
Pappe: Six billion. That's right. I extended it to the universe. I'm sure even aliens understand that the Zionist version is wrong. Now, the...
Sheridan: I'm sure the aliens watch the ABC.
MULTIPLE SPEAKERS TALK AT ONCE
Jones (having allowed Wallach and Sheridan to interrupt Pappe repeatedly, now proceeds to cut him short in favour of the two panellists, Moore and Davidson, who know nothing about the issue): I'm going to get you to sum up because we haven't heard from at least two of our panellists for quite a while.
Pappe: I know but let me make a final, very important point. By the time the so-called war started on May 15, 1948, when the Arab armies entered Palestine, half of the Palestinians had already become refugees. This was [before] the war. And this was the plan, the unpleasant reality that Israelis have to come to terms with if Jews and Arabs are ever to have peace and reconciliation.
The idiocy of the decision to include Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore on the panel became apparent when she rambled vacuously: "Well, I just think that history's fine and I acknowledge that there have been terrible experiences of the Jewish people during particularly the Hitler era and for Palestinians as well but, you know,, I think we really should be talking about solutions here. I think of the families of the two communities and, you know, the bloodshed that continues, and I really think we should all be working very hard to try and find solutions."
You're kidding me! Pappe had to be cut short for that? History's fine, like, but hey, it's behind us. Now let's all shake hands and move on. Jeesus! Is it too much to expect people like Moore to say simply: Hey, I'm a whizz on the Sydney CBD but this Jew/Palestinian thingy? Forget it! And if Tony Jones asked her if she'd learnt anything from Ilan Pappe, all she had to do was ask, Alan who? But no, she not only blaahed the above but went on to rhubarb the following:
"You know, Europeans came to this country 200 years ago. The Aboriginal community had been here for 60,000 years. Now the Europeans dispossessed the Aboriginal people of their land and we're now working very hard on reconciliation and making amends and so I really think reconciliation and coexistence and solutions for the Palestinian and Israeli communities should be the goal of everyone involved in this issue."
Such is the 'quality' of Australia's political class (not sure if class is quite the right word here, know what I mean?).
Tony Jones asked if her if she was equating Aboriginal dispossession with Palestinian dispossession. It's "comparable," she replied, apparently in blissful ignorance (after all these years) of the fact that millions of Aboriginal people are not living in refugee camps in PNG and New Zealand.
For Wallach, however, any suggestion of comparability between indigenous Palestinians and indigenous Australians was to venture into dangerous territory. This mere inkling of a truth - that in fact both peoples were steamrolled by a belligerent, relentless, and unforgiving settler-colonial project - simply had to be scotched. Hence the following:
"[C]an I say this about this question of Aboriginal people: my first job as a solicitor was with the South Coast Aboriginal Legal Service... One of the things that surprised me was the number of my Koori clients coming up to me and saying, Mate, we appreciate what you're doing. We feel just like you and your people, the Jews. We went through exactly what you're going through." (There are two ways of looking at this. The less charitable is simply to dismiss it as poppycock. After all, unless Wallach wore a neon sign on his head saying Wandering, Suffering Jew, his Aboriginal clients would likely have perceived in him little more than another, albeit sympathetic and helpful, white man. The more charitable interpretation is to assume that Wallach did indeed talk to his clients about the fate of his relatives in Nazi-occupied Poland, in which case the word may well have got around, incurring the reaction he describes. What is certain, however, is that if his Aboriginal clients had heard the real story of the Palestinian Nakba, they'd have identified with the Palestinians, not the Zionist terror gangs of the Haganah, Irgun and Stern.)
I particularly enjoyed this delicious exchange between a member of the studio audience and Pappe:
Marrianne Fraser: After all the pogroms throughout the centuries, with Jews never being able to own land in any country they lived in [???] and being forced from their homes time and again as portrayed so well in my favourite musical Fiddler on the Roof, and after the Holocaust, isn't it just for Jews to have been given a place to call their own?
Pappe: You know, this kind of question always reminds me of people setting off in search of a refuge for battered women and abused children. They find a home where another family lives, throw them off the balcony, and their home becomes the refuge. Of course Jews are entitled to a safe place, and in many ways the Palestinians were willing to give them a safe haven. What they were not willing to give them was the right to take over their homeland. I think there's a difference between giving people a refuge (which, for some reason, you Australians refuse to give these poor boat people) [and a group who come to take over your country]. Imagine if these boat people today were knocking on your door saying, Dear Australians, 2,000 years ago Australia used to be my homeland. You must give us half now and the rest later on. This would never be accepted by anyone in Australia and rightly so.
Finally, who could forget this wonderful contribution from someone known only as 'audience member'?:
"We keep speaking about the history, 1948 and all that. I was privileged to have worked in Israel and Palestine for the last 18 months, and was even able to attend a meeting with the current mayor of Jerusalem. At the time he had just announced 5,000 more Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, but when we questioned him about that he just laughed and said, 'I've only announced 5,000 but there are 90,000 planned,' so the ethnic cleansing is still going on as far as I'm concerned."
[*Re Haj Amin, I'll be doing a post in the near future.]
Q&A, September 17 2012, was memorable for many things.
First, there was an uncharacteristic silence from the ms media's most vociferous Zionist, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian. As he himself remarked at one point, "Haven't I been magnificently silent through all that debate? It is the longest debate on Israel ever held in Australia in which I haven't spoken, you know."
And better for him to have remained magnificently silent than to flaunt his abysmal ignorance thus:
"I comprehensively reject Ilan's narrative of Israel. I think it's wrong in every respect. I haven't had time to read all of Ilan's books but I read this week devastating critiques of them by historians, who are very critical of Israel, for their factual inaccuracy. Benny Morris and others who are very critical of Israel, not servants of the Israeli Government."
Who is he trying to fool? For one, Sheridan wouldn't know a book by Pappe if it hit him in the face. For another, portraying Morris as a trenchant critic of Israel simply means he hasn't read Morris either. Happily, apart from the above, this pompous windbag had little else to say other than to moan irrelevantly about Israel's so-called legitimacy coming under attack, crack this little funny - "There is no country in the Middle East which better observes the human rights of all its citizens than Israel" - and draw a false analogy between Arab Jewish immigrants to Israel and ethnically-cleansed Palestinians.
The only real attempt to land a few blows on Pappe came from Zionist barrister Irving Wallach. Of course, we'd heard Wallach's line a thousand times before: the Palestinians were the authors of their own misfortune. If only they'd accepted the 1947 UN partition plan! Then, presumably, Israeli forces would have advanced no further than a line on a map drawn by a UN committee and the Palestinians would now be partying in at least 44% of their ancestral homeland. One (just one!) of the problems with this little fantasy can be summed up by the rhetorical question: Since when have lines on a map ever been an obstacle to Zionist expansionism? Wallach then followed this with: If only the Palestinians hadn't been led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini*, a man who'd spent the war years in Nazi Germany schmoozing with Adolf Hitler!
Despite Pappe's categorical dismissal of Wallach's 'if onlys' as "Israeli propaganda," credulous ringmaster Tony Jones was mightily impressed by the second at least:
Jones: OK. All right. Let's settle this issue of the Mufti of Jerusalem because I have seen those pictures. I have seen the history. He was connected to Hitler. [What exactly have you been reading, Tony?]
Wallach: Yeah, definitely. Absolutely.
Jones: There isn't any doubt about that.
They hadn't, however, reckoned on Pappe's succinct presentation of the bleeding obvious:
"Stupid behaviour by a Palestinian leader does not justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. A Palestinian refusal to accept the partition may or may not be justified. What is not justified is punishing the Palestinians by depopulating half of [Palestine]. We have to understand what happened in 1948. Imagine half the population of a country [being] forcibly expelled. Half the villages destroyed. Half the towns demolished. Is this the right kind of punishment for for a leader who made a stupid mistake in World War 2? This was not a tragedy. This was a crime against humanity."
The insularity and self-absorption of one elderly Zionist questioner (on video) was breathtaking. He wanted to know why Q&A "coincided with the holiest days of the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hashanah," thus "preventing observant Jews from being able to attend as members of the audience or even to watch the broadcast."
This provided an opening for another jab by Wallach, for whom defending Israel from a prominent critic obviously took precedence over Rosh Hashana: "Look, can I say this about Ilan's whole point of view, and that is: it is designed and intended to perpetuate a conflict model and narrative." There was, said Wallach, a war, but both sides have been moving towards a two-state solution. He went on portentously, "if you want to carry on in Ilan's fashion and throw around cliches and accusations then a couple of things follow. Firstly, you have to seriously consider surrendering your claim to be an objective historian. Secondly, you have to accept that what you want to do is encourage ongoing conflict and battles and death and destruction between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. If you want to go along the conflict road, then forget about peace. If you want to promote Israel as a pariah state for your own political and ideological agenda, go ahead. History will not thank you for it."
Wallach's little homily, which smeared Pappe as a promoter of violence while ignoring the fact that the root of all violence in Palestine/Israel stems solely from the Zionist movement's goal of imposing a sectarian 'Jewish' state on the indigenous non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, led to the following revealing exchange:
Pappe: Can I...?
Jones: Ilan, yes, you have to respond to that.
Pappe: Can I respond? First of all, I don't think Israel's seeking legitimacy [as such]. Israel is seeking legitimacy as a racist state within the community of civilised states.
Wallach (interrupting): Look, pardon me, can we stick to the facts?
Pappe (as if bone-weary of Zionist claptrap): No. No. Please no.
Wallach: Please stick to the facts.
Pappe: I didn't interrupt you. You taught me a lesson about being polite so try to apply it to yourself. Now, Israel wants to remain both a racist and a democratic state. This is an oxymoron... Secondly, the documentation for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine [and] for Israel's criminal policies since is there and most Israeli historians recognise that. So the debate in Israel is not over facts but morals. Whether it was right, as Benny Morris says, in self-defence, to ethnically cleanse another people, or whether it was immoral. I say it was immoral, not Jewish, inhuman and finally...
Jones: What's being challenged is the documentation.
Pappe: No. No.
Jones: Which, as a historian, you are relying on. [Jones, like Doogue, who knows little or nothing about the Palestinian Nakba is challenging Ilan Pappe? Is this chutzpah or what?]
Pappe: The documentation is not challenged. Nobody challenges it.
Wallach (taking advantage of Jones insufferable chutzpah): And Tony, if I might say so, what's also challenged...
Pappe (trying to close the door on this peddler of Zionist snake oil): No, let me finish.
Wallach (channelling Benny Morris):... is the slur of an ethnic cleansing as opposed to war followed by refugees. That's what's under challenge.
Pappe: Yes. Now...
Wallach: And in that regard Ilan is on his own...
Pappe: In that regard, you could look...
Wallach: Ilan is on his own as regards the historians. He's on his own.
Pappe: I am totally alone - with 5-6 million Palestinians and another 10 billion people in the world. Now, the point I'm making...
Sheridan (ever the smartarse heckler from Greg & Tony Do Monash): There are only 6 billion people in the world. [Actually its over 7 billion.]
Pappe: Six billion. That's right. I extended it to the universe. I'm sure even aliens understand that the Zionist version is wrong. Now, the...
Sheridan: I'm sure the aliens watch the ABC.
MULTIPLE SPEAKERS TALK AT ONCE
Jones (having allowed Wallach and Sheridan to interrupt Pappe repeatedly, now proceeds to cut him short in favour of the two panellists, Moore and Davidson, who know nothing about the issue): I'm going to get you to sum up because we haven't heard from at least two of our panellists for quite a while.
Pappe: I know but let me make a final, very important point. By the time the so-called war started on May 15, 1948, when the Arab armies entered Palestine, half of the Palestinians had already become refugees. This was [before] the war. And this was the plan, the unpleasant reality that Israelis have to come to terms with if Jews and Arabs are ever to have peace and reconciliation.
The idiocy of the decision to include Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore on the panel became apparent when she rambled vacuously: "Well, I just think that history's fine and I acknowledge that there have been terrible experiences of the Jewish people during particularly the Hitler era and for Palestinians as well but, you know,, I think we really should be talking about solutions here. I think of the families of the two communities and, you know, the bloodshed that continues, and I really think we should all be working very hard to try and find solutions."
You're kidding me! Pappe had to be cut short for that? History's fine, like, but hey, it's behind us. Now let's all shake hands and move on. Jeesus! Is it too much to expect people like Moore to say simply: Hey, I'm a whizz on the Sydney CBD but this Jew/Palestinian thingy? Forget it! And if Tony Jones asked her if she'd learnt anything from Ilan Pappe, all she had to do was ask, Alan who? But no, she not only blaahed the above but went on to rhubarb the following:
"You know, Europeans came to this country 200 years ago. The Aboriginal community had been here for 60,000 years. Now the Europeans dispossessed the Aboriginal people of their land and we're now working very hard on reconciliation and making amends and so I really think reconciliation and coexistence and solutions for the Palestinian and Israeli communities should be the goal of everyone involved in this issue."
Such is the 'quality' of Australia's political class (not sure if class is quite the right word here, know what I mean?).
Tony Jones asked if her if she was equating Aboriginal dispossession with Palestinian dispossession. It's "comparable," she replied, apparently in blissful ignorance (after all these years) of the fact that millions of Aboriginal people are not living in refugee camps in PNG and New Zealand.
For Wallach, however, any suggestion of comparability between indigenous Palestinians and indigenous Australians was to venture into dangerous territory. This mere inkling of a truth - that in fact both peoples were steamrolled by a belligerent, relentless, and unforgiving settler-colonial project - simply had to be scotched. Hence the following:
"[C]an I say this about this question of Aboriginal people: my first job as a solicitor was with the South Coast Aboriginal Legal Service... One of the things that surprised me was the number of my Koori clients coming up to me and saying, Mate, we appreciate what you're doing. We feel just like you and your people, the Jews. We went through exactly what you're going through." (There are two ways of looking at this. The less charitable is simply to dismiss it as poppycock. After all, unless Wallach wore a neon sign on his head saying Wandering, Suffering Jew, his Aboriginal clients would likely have perceived in him little more than another, albeit sympathetic and helpful, white man. The more charitable interpretation is to assume that Wallach did indeed talk to his clients about the fate of his relatives in Nazi-occupied Poland, in which case the word may well have got around, incurring the reaction he describes. What is certain, however, is that if his Aboriginal clients had heard the real story of the Palestinian Nakba, they'd have identified with the Palestinians, not the Zionist terror gangs of the Haganah, Irgun and Stern.)
I particularly enjoyed this delicious exchange between a member of the studio audience and Pappe:
Marrianne Fraser: After all the pogroms throughout the centuries, with Jews never being able to own land in any country they lived in [???] and being forced from their homes time and again as portrayed so well in my favourite musical Fiddler on the Roof, and after the Holocaust, isn't it just for Jews to have been given a place to call their own?
Pappe: You know, this kind of question always reminds me of people setting off in search of a refuge for battered women and abused children. They find a home where another family lives, throw them off the balcony, and their home becomes the refuge. Of course Jews are entitled to a safe place, and in many ways the Palestinians were willing to give them a safe haven. What they were not willing to give them was the right to take over their homeland. I think there's a difference between giving people a refuge (which, for some reason, you Australians refuse to give these poor boat people) [and a group who come to take over your country]. Imagine if these boat people today were knocking on your door saying, Dear Australians, 2,000 years ago Australia used to be my homeland. You must give us half now and the rest later on. This would never be accepted by anyone in Australia and rightly so.
Finally, who could forget this wonderful contribution from someone known only as 'audience member'?:
"We keep speaking about the history, 1948 and all that. I was privileged to have worked in Israel and Palestine for the last 18 months, and was even able to attend a meeting with the current mayor of Jerusalem. At the time he had just announced 5,000 more Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, but when we questioned him about that he just laughed and said, 'I've only announced 5,000 but there are 90,000 planned,' so the ethnic cleansing is still going on as far as I'm concerned."
[*Re Haj Amin, I'll be doing a post in the near future.]
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Q&A, September 17
Q&A next Monday, the 17th is a must-view.
The advertised line up includes Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian and author of must-read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006); barrister Irving Wallach, a former head of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar and the Zionist Youth Council of Australia; Greg Sheridan, The Australian's foreign editor and no stranger to MERC readers; Clover Moore, Lord Mayor of Sydney; and Robyn Davidson, an Australian author.
Considering that the first 3 speakers at least have an interest in the Middle East conflict in common, I can't really understand the inclusion of Moore and Davidson, neither of whom have an interest in the issue that I'm aware of. More relevant would have been at least one Palestinian Arab speaker and maybe anti-Zionist blogger and journalist, Antony Loewenstein, who has never appeared on Q&A, for reasons best known to its producers.
Noting Pappe's expertise on the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, I recall a May 2009 Q&A stoush between Guy Rundle and Sheridan. Rundle had cited another Palestinian Nakba scholar, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, and referred to "dozens of massacres of Palestinians in 1948." Sheridan, who probably wouldn't know Benny Morris from Betty Boop, responded: "all rubbish... just rubbish." (See my 9/5/09 post Sheridan: Nakba Denier)
Sheridan has also ludicrously averred in an opinion piece that there has been only "one authentic Jewish Israeli terrorist, Baruch Goldstein." (See my 30/7/11 post Leave Our Islamophobes Alone, OK?)
Someone out there might like to put questions directly to Sheridan about these utterly bizarre assertions. With Pappe at hand to set the historical record straight, I'm expecting Sheridan to emerge groggy and bloodied at best, if not KOed outright.
Just to give you a flavour of Pappe, here are two extracts from his autobiographical Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (2010):
1) The Palestinian Nakba of 1948 in a nutshell:
"In February 1948, within a year of the British decision to leave Palestine, the Zionist leadership began ethnically cleansing it. Three months later, when the British left, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were already refugees, pressuring the Arab world to take action, which it did on 15 May 1948. But the limited number of troops it sent to Palestine were no match for the efficient Jewish forces and they were defeated. The ethnic cleansing continued and at the end of it almost a million Palestinians became refugees (half of Palestine's population) and with them disappeared half of the country's villages and towns, erased from the face of the earth by the Jewish forces." (p 187)
2) Pappe's journey out of the Zionist cult:
"The year 1982 was also when I began the journey described in this book during and after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that summer. The first turning point was an invitation by the Israeli Embassy in London to speak at a pro-Israel rally in the north of Britain. The spokesperson explained that the ambassador, Shlomo Argov, was critically ill from an assassination attempt and it would be too dangerous to send his deputy. It was not only the willingness to sacrifice me, should there be another terrorist attack, but the presumption I had no reservations about or objections to the invasion that served as a wake-up call. From then on, I embarked on a journey of no return. Powerful as the Zionist grip is on one's thoughts and life, as an Israeli Jew, once you have extracted yourself from its hold, you cannot understand how you could ever have been captivated by its lure, logic or vision. This book is a modest attempt to try to decipher the riddle of an ideology that was once seen by this author as the ultimate expression of pristine humanity, but when abandoned, as a racist and quite evil philosophy of morality and life. Yet the 'divorce' from Zionism is in no way a desire to sever links with what is a vital and vibrant society, in which I still have family and dear friends and about which I cherish many fond memories. But in order to preserve the positive side of Jewish life in Israel, I believe that not only would Palestinians fare better under almost any non-zionist regime, so would most Israeli Jews." (p x)
The advertised line up includes Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian and author of must-read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006); barrister Irving Wallach, a former head of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar and the Zionist Youth Council of Australia; Greg Sheridan, The Australian's foreign editor and no stranger to MERC readers; Clover Moore, Lord Mayor of Sydney; and Robyn Davidson, an Australian author.
Considering that the first 3 speakers at least have an interest in the Middle East conflict in common, I can't really understand the inclusion of Moore and Davidson, neither of whom have an interest in the issue that I'm aware of. More relevant would have been at least one Palestinian Arab speaker and maybe anti-Zionist blogger and journalist, Antony Loewenstein, who has never appeared on Q&A, for reasons best known to its producers.
Noting Pappe's expertise on the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, I recall a May 2009 Q&A stoush between Guy Rundle and Sheridan. Rundle had cited another Palestinian Nakba scholar, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, and referred to "dozens of massacres of Palestinians in 1948." Sheridan, who probably wouldn't know Benny Morris from Betty Boop, responded: "all rubbish... just rubbish." (See my 9/5/09 post Sheridan: Nakba Denier)
Sheridan has also ludicrously averred in an opinion piece that there has been only "one authentic Jewish Israeli terrorist, Baruch Goldstein." (See my 30/7/11 post Leave Our Islamophobes Alone, OK?)
Someone out there might like to put questions directly to Sheridan about these utterly bizarre assertions. With Pappe at hand to set the historical record straight, I'm expecting Sheridan to emerge groggy and bloodied at best, if not KOed outright.
Just to give you a flavour of Pappe, here are two extracts from his autobiographical Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (2010):
1) The Palestinian Nakba of 1948 in a nutshell:
"In February 1948, within a year of the British decision to leave Palestine, the Zionist leadership began ethnically cleansing it. Three months later, when the British left, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were already refugees, pressuring the Arab world to take action, which it did on 15 May 1948. But the limited number of troops it sent to Palestine were no match for the efficient Jewish forces and they were defeated. The ethnic cleansing continued and at the end of it almost a million Palestinians became refugees (half of Palestine's population) and with them disappeared half of the country's villages and towns, erased from the face of the earth by the Jewish forces." (p 187)
2) Pappe's journey out of the Zionist cult:
"The year 1982 was also when I began the journey described in this book during and after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that summer. The first turning point was an invitation by the Israeli Embassy in London to speak at a pro-Israel rally in the north of Britain. The spokesperson explained that the ambassador, Shlomo Argov, was critically ill from an assassination attempt and it would be too dangerous to send his deputy. It was not only the willingness to sacrifice me, should there be another terrorist attack, but the presumption I had no reservations about or objections to the invasion that served as a wake-up call. From then on, I embarked on a journey of no return. Powerful as the Zionist grip is on one's thoughts and life, as an Israeli Jew, once you have extracted yourself from its hold, you cannot understand how you could ever have been captivated by its lure, logic or vision. This book is a modest attempt to try to decipher the riddle of an ideology that was once seen by this author as the ultimate expression of pristine humanity, but when abandoned, as a racist and quite evil philosophy of morality and life. Yet the 'divorce' from Zionism is in no way a desire to sever links with what is a vital and vibrant society, in which I still have family and dear friends and about which I cherish many fond memories. But in order to preserve the positive side of Jewish life in Israel, I believe that not only would Palestinians fare better under almost any non-zionist regime, so would most Israeli Jews." (p x)
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