The Other Bob Hawke

The figure of the recently deceased (16/5/19) former Australian Labor Party PM Bob Hawke, has, of course, been weaponised by the new neoliberal Liberal Party government led by Evangelical/Christian Zionist PM Scott Morrison for use against the Labor Party opposition led by Anthony Albanese.

But the former PLO ambassador to Australia, Ali Kazak, portrays a very different former Labor PM.

Written for the Pearls & Irritations website (johnmenadue.com), Kazak introduces himself as "an expert on Australian-Arab relations and affairs, and author of Australia and the Arabs (in Arabic), and editor of the book Jerusalem Reader: From Occupation to City of Peace (2019) (in English).

Hawke's prime ministership lasted from 1983-1991, and Kazak describes a very different Bob Hawke to the one appropriated by the present government and its supporters, one who'd transcended his blind support for Israel while president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) from 1969-1980:

"Bob Hawke was long known as a great friend of Israel, but in his years after retiring from Parliament, I came to know him as a person increasingly concerned about Palestinian rights and getting a fair peace deal for Palestinians and Israelis. Then, as Palestinian ambassador and head of delegation, we developed over the last 25 years a decent friendship; we would share a cigar on the balcony of his Northbridge house overlooking the harbour, where most of our meetings took place, discussing and working on specific issues of concern. Bob used to express immense frustration and disappointment not only with the Israeli government's persistent human rights violations but of Palestinians but also with the United States' blind eye and lack of commitment to a just peace.

"Building on Gough Whitlam's implementation of an even-handed policy towards the Israeli-Arab conflict in 1972, Bob Hawke's government reviewed Australia's Middle East policy. The review announced by Foreign Minister Bill Hayden on 30 September 1983 recognised the central importance of the Palestinian issue for any settlement, a role for the Palestine Liberation Organisation in any peace process and acknowledged the the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. It also called on Israel to freeze its settlement program in the 1967-occupied territories, because the settlements are 'contrary to international law and a significant and a significant obstacle to peace efforts'. At the time this was a more advanced position than many European countries.

"Following the Palestinian uprising (Intifada) in 1987 and the PLO initiative in November 1988, Hawke's government recognised the PLO in March 1989.

"In a speech celebrating former Soviet refuseniks in Melbourne on 17 May 1988, Bob compared the struggle of the Palestinian people with the Jews in the Soviet Union and the blacks in South Africa, saying 'The Palestinian in the occupied territories, as the Jew in the Soviet Union and the black in South Africa has his aspirations to be fully free.' A point he stressed again, decades later, in an article he wrote for the Australian Financial Review, titled Time to recognise the state of Palestine, on 14 February 2017.

"From the early days of Benjamin Netanyahu's prime ministership of Israel, Bob realised that Netanyahu was not part of the solution, telling me in 1996 that 'This f...ing Netanyahu does not want peace'.

"The Guardian reported Hawke as saying, 'I think that President Obama has been inadequate in terms of using his influence and that of the United States in trying to bring together the Israelis and Palestinians'.

"When all Arab governments agreed to a peace initiative at the Beirut Summit of the Arab League in March 2002, Israel not only responded by refusing the Arab peace initiative, but its prime minister General Ariel Sharon's response to the Arabs' outstretched hand for peace was to order his army to reoccupy Palestinian cities and surround and bombard President Arafat's headquarters.

"Bob was furious; he expressed to me his wish to break the siege and go and meet with Arafat and asked me to arrange that; and despite the wrath and rejection of of the Israeli government he met with Arafat on 24 September 2003.

"From then onwards, Bob worked hard and travelled around the world to gain Australian, American, European and Asian support for an economic plan to help build the palestinian economy, similar to the Marshall Plan. He spoke with John Howard, Alexander Downer, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schrodor of Germany, and many others.

"He also tried to build a technical school in Gaza as a gift from the Australian people to the Palestinians to help them rebuild their economy, in which the ACTU would organise volunteer technicians and teachers. The project was supported by the Palestinian Authority which allocated land that was inspected by deputy prime minister Tim Fischer during a visit to Palestine in March 1997, but the Howard government would not provide the $5m needed for the school.

"Ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu's 2017 visit to Australia, Bob called on the Australian government to recognise the state of Palestine in an article published in the Australian Financial Review. He wrote: 'Australia was there at the very beginning. The least we can do now, in these most challenging of times, is to do what 137 other nations have already done - grant diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine'."

Some Massacres are More Equal than Others

Like Orwell's well-known adage that 'some animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,' it would appear that some massacres, at least in the eyes of the Murdoch's Australian, are also more equal than others.

This could be said of Beijing's 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre as featured in Saturday's Australian. Forgive me for being cynical, and without, of course, detracting in any way from the gravity of the Tiananmen massacre itself, but I think it is safe to conclude that its commemoration in The Australian arises not from any real, heartfelt sorrow at the fate of its victims, but stems rather from the paper's enthusiastic embrace of Trump's anti-Chinese demonisation, rhetoric, and sabre-rattling:

"The first contingent of troops entered the square at about 1am on June 4. Live rounds were shot at civilians there and at other areas of central Beijing. No official death toll has been released but estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. Following the military engagement, up to 10,000 people were arrested - including most of the leaders of the protests who had refused to or were unable to flee China. Several dozen were later executed.

"The most famous, and poignant, incident to reach world attention featured 'tank man' - a lone, bespectacled figure carrying a shopping bag who walked in front of a contingent of 13 tanks that were driving west from the square on June 5. He moved sideways to try and speak to the soldiers inside before being pulled away by young men who emerged from the watching crowd - whether to rescue him or arrest him after emerging from the nearby Public Security Ministry remains unknown, as is his fate.

"Six days after the army cleared Tiananmen, Australian prime minister Bob Hawke shook with uncontrollable emotion, weeping as he addressed the huge crowd, including hundreds of Chinese students, gathered in Parliament House for a memorial service."(The ghost of Tiananmen still haunts, Rowan Callick, The Australian, 1/6/19)

But note this also:

"Renowned Sinologist John Fitzgerald... tells The Weekend Australian that while the students had an immediate impact on Australia's cities, their long-term contributions were probably more important: 'They brought Shanghai and Beijing dialects on to city streets, swelled the congregations in Pentacostal churches... " (ibid)

So why am I drawing attention to the Australian's coverage of Tiananmen?

In a word, Gaza.

The WHO estimates the still ongoing Israeli killings of Palestinians along the border fence from 30/3/18-30/3/19 at 277.

Before that came:

Operation Cast Lead (2008-09) saw the massacre of 14,000 Palestinians.
Operation Pillar of Defence (2012) saw the massacre of 100 Palestinians.
Operation Protective Edge (2014) saw the massacre of 2,200 Palestinians.

And before those came:

Operation Rainbow (2004) (with 59 Palestinian deaths accord. to HRW).
Operation Days of Penitence (2004) (with 133 Palestinian deaths accord. to B'Tselem).
Operation Summer Rains (2006) (with 416 Palestinian deaths accord. to B'Tselem).
Operation Autumn Clouds (2006) (with 53 Palestinian deaths (?)).
Operation Hot Winter (2008) (with 54 Palestinian deaths accord. to B'Tselem).

And before those came:

Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank (2002) (with 497 Palestinian deaths accord. to the UN Secretary General).

All of the above within this century.

No need, even to cite the casualties of the First Intifada (1987-1993) estimated, for the record, at between 1,162 -1,204 Palestinian deaths.

And so I wonder, rhetorically, has any Australian politician ever cried publicly for these Palestinian victims of Israeli guns, rockets, tanks, planes and warships? Have any ever wept in private?

Is there not a rank stench of hypocrisy in all of this?

The Hyping of Hawke 4

Finally, in my series, The Hyping of Hawke, it is sobering to reflect on the fact that what is often referred to today as fake news played a crucial role in the erosion of Labor Party opposition to Hawke's obscene rush to join in the US-led war in the Gulf. It is equally sobering to note just how few questioning journalists there were back then - just like today!

Thankfully, there was one back then, the Reporters without Borders representative in Australia, Max Watts:

"In January 1991, the Australian parliament took a vote on whether to join the United States and go to war with Iraq. A journalist, Max Watts, asked one of the Australian [Labor] senators, the late Olive Zakharov, which way she intended to vote. Through her assistant, Max was informed she planned to vote for going to war. Max asked, Why? He was told that Iraqi soldiers had gone into a hospital in Kuwait, taken 306 babies out of their incubators and left them to die. Max, with his decades of experience in identifying inconsistencies in suspect stories, thought it rather odd that the number should be so precise. Who has time to count to 306 in a war zone?

"Max asked a friend, Dr Rosie Kubb... how many incubators are there in Melbourne? The population of Melbourne is about four million people. Dr Kubb checked it out. There were about 80 incubators for the city of Melbourne, which has a population three times that of the whole of Kuwait.

"The life of a lie may be short, but this lie was believed by enough people for long enough to enable George Bush Sr. to execute Gulf War I. The truth about the Kuwaiti Babies story was not exposed until eleven months later, after the war was over and thousands of innocent people had been killed. The story had been fabricated by a United States public relations company, Hill and Knowlton, to 'sell' the war. The company had dressed the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States as a nurse, and had her filmed telling the story. She was presented on television as a Kuwaiti nurse who had counted the babies, even though she was in the United States at the time the incident was alleged to have taken place." (Invasion of Iraq: An Eyewitness Account, Waratah Rose Gillespie, 2004, p 13)

The Hyping of Hawke 3

By now, after reading my previous two posts questioning his virtual canonisation, it should be apparent that the late, former Australian prime minister, Bob Hawke, was, with his fatal decision to involve Australia in the brutal US-led Gulf War of 1991, very much the war hawk.

Of course, the impacts of war today are seldom confined to the immediate area of conflict, but consideration of their wider impact is of scant concern to those who, like Hawke, are hell-bent on waging them. One of those areas of impact is inevitably the home front.

The following three extracts, detailing the dark forces unleashed by St Bob here in Australia, come from academic Christine Asmar's invaluable essay The Arab-Australian Experience, in Australia's Gulf War (1992). Although the 'experience' she describes took place almost ten years before 9/11, it is chilling to note the sheer depth of Arabophobia and Islamophobia of the time, a phenomenon that Hawke cannot evade responsibility for unleashing, and one that continues to haunt us today with a vengeance:

"For Arabs born and brought up in Australia the experience of the Gulf War was shattering: 'I'd never thought of myself as anything but Australian', said Mary Rebehy, 'and suddenly I realised that some people had never accepted us as Australians at all'. Similarly, John Brennan of the Ethnic Affairs Commission told an audience at the University of Sydney of his shock at having to confront in Australia the 'reservoir of pathological loathing' towards both Arabs and Muslims. A writer to the Age expostulated: 'Australians be damned! They are an alien fifth column and should be interned'. Arab children were abused from passing cars as they walked to school and intimidated by fellow-students while at school, sometimes without teachers intervening. Muslim Arab women were spat at, abused, and had their headscarfs ripped off their heads... Islamic institutions such as the mosque and Islamic Centre at Lakemba in Sydney; the mosques at Preston and Coburg in Victoria; and a Muslim primary school in Perth were all subject to abusive calls, bomb threats and break-ins as were the premises of Arab organisations such as the Lebanese Women's Association and the Australian Arabic Welfare Council, both in Sydney. Many Muslim Australian women became afraid to leave home, even to go shopping." (p 65)

"A particular source of contention arose from the belief that ASIO (the Australian Security and Intelligence Organization) had carried out surveillance, and possibly even harassment of members of the Arab community. An article in the Bulletin in January 1991 claimed that ASIO had mounted 'an operation which has seen the surveillance of scores of Moslems living here, phone tapping, [and] a recommendation to intern certain people'. ASIO was reported to have claimed that 'NSW could be a target of Arab terrorist attacks or sabotage', and that six terrorist plots had been foiled in Australia during the Gulf War. Such reports encouraged the tendency to equate 'terrorist' with 'Arab'. Since no Australian of Arab origin has ever been charged with any crime involving political violence, the reports added to the Arabs' sense of being victimized. Responding to a claim that Muslims were behind attacks on Jewish institutions, the President of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board made it clear that 'there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that any Muslim community is behind these attacks'. A large number of individuals in the Arab community, mostly political activists, reported that they had been visited by security personnel and questioned, although there was no suggestion of any physical harassment taking place. Some, however, alleged other forms of harassment and surreptitious surveillance. Whether true or not, those who believed such actions were taking place felt intimidated." (p 73)

"The widespread stereotyping of Arabs left a legacy of vulnerability and alienation. The experience of an unprecedented level of hostility has traumatized many Arabs in Australia, leading some to question the the Australian model of multiculturalism. In the words of Hassan Moussa, a prominent member of the community: 'The war has had a terrible effect on the community's sense of identity. Even today a lot of people are reluctant to say they are of Arab origin. It is very possible that the community may have become isolated and marginalized as a result of this crisis'. Ramsey Jebeile of the Australian Arabic Welfare Council has noticed that, after the Gulf War, Arab schoolchildren and their parents were showing an increased alienation, and a willingness to attribute any unwelcome developments at school to racist discrimination. Even more disturbing is the potentially self-fulfilling sense of hopelessness among school leavers about discrimination ruining their job prospects." (p 79)

To be continued...

The Hyping of Hawke 2

Here's Paul Kelly's version of the late former PM Hawke's contribution to the Gulf War (August 1990 - February 1991), otherwise known as Operation Desert Shield:

"In early 1991 after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and his defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions, Hawke authorised Australia's most important military commitment since Vietnam. For Hawke, the argument was irrefutable - it was a repelling [of] aggression, it involved support for the alliance since US President George H W Bush was spearheading the action; but, more decisively, it meant support for the UN authorised position. In November 1990 the Security Council passed its 'war resolution' approving 'all necessary means' to reverse the invasion. Australia's contribution was a modest three ships. Hawke had considered five but, worried about casualties, opted for caution. For the Labor Party and the Left - still shaped by the Vietnam experience - this was a turning point. Many feared a disaster but the war was short and successful. While Australia's contribution was small, the significance of the decision was great - the nation had moved beyond the psychology of Vietnam." (Lover, fighter & peacemaker, The Australian, 17/5/19)

Needless to say, Kelly's is a caricature of the reality, designed solely to burnish the image of St Bob. The following data has been culled from The Case Against Australian Participation by Janet Powell & Richard Bolt, in Australia's Gulf War (1992). (Powell was the parliamentary leader of the Australian Democrats, 1990-91.) I set it out here by way of rebutting each of Kelly's propaganda points in the order in which they are raised:

Saddam's alleged "defiance of UNSC resolutions":

"In fact Iraq had in several statements demonstrated sufficient realism to comprehend that it would have to withdraw for the crisis to end. Its recent history shows reversals of apparently intractable positions as the pressure of circumstances demanded; for example, in handing back territory won from Iran during their recent war... This was clear from a leaked UN transcript of Secretary-General [Peres] de Cuellar's 13 January meeting with President Saddam Hussein, in a last minute bid to avert war. Despite public claims that the Iraqi leader had refused to even discuss withdrawing the transcript reveals that President Hussein 'produced a map of Kuwait and asked... 'Where should Iraq withdraw to?' But he also said that open discussion of withdrawal 'as war was looming' would be damaging to him. Contrary to the rhetoric of war advocates, a negotiated settlement backed by sanctions would not have required that Iraq be appeased with unprincipled enticements to withdraw. Assurances could have been given that withdrawal, payment of compensation, and the dismantling of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction would be followed by increased efforts to convene a Middle East peace conference, and agreement that the World Court should adjudicate on Iraq's claims over the disputed Rumaila oilfield on its border with Kuwait... Such assurances were ruled out simply to reduce the prospects of success in the contrived eleventh hour-hour negotiations initiated by the United States." (p 32-3)

"It was a repelling of aggression":

"The Australian Government justified its commitment of naval forces as a contribution to the enforcement of sanctions, which it claimed could not be effective without policing. However, other successful sanctions regimes, such as that against South Africa, were not enforced. And the multi-national naval task force in the Gulf was far larger than needed for enforcement... In fact, the predominantly US naval force was structured from the outset to give the Bush Administration the option of launching war against Iraq. It was based on Operation Plan 90-1002', an existing contingency plan for an oil war in the Middle East... Sanctions enforcement was thus a convenient pretext for deploying warships in anticipation of war." (pp 29-30)

"It meant support for the UN authorised position":

"The US-led blockade usurped the Security Council, which has the power to authorize a blockade where sanctions 'have proved to be inadequate'. The UN Charter requires that the military forces contributed to a blockade by member countries be subject to the 'strategic direction' of the Council's Military Staff Committee. Because sanctions had not proved to be inadequate, with diplomatic pressure serving an effective means of sanctions enforcement, and to avoid the shackles of the Military Staff Committee's control, the Bush Administration bypassed the United Nations by citing Section 51 of the UN Charter, which upholds nations' right of collective self-defence. President Bush obtained an invitation from the Emir of Kuwait to impose a blockade in defence of his country. Prime Minister Hawke fully supported the United States by announcing on 10 August that Australia's deployment of two warships and a supply vessel was primarily to 'enforce the blockade on Iraq and Kuwait'. But no request for Australian help had been received from the Emir of Kuwait (it arrived some time later) and no blockade had been approved by the Security Council. This was such a blatant breach of the UN Charter that it was later disowned by Senator [Gareth] Evans. After weeks of wrangling, the Security Council finally gave its retrospective blessing for the sanctions to be enforced by those countries that were already doing so. However, its Military Staff Committee was not placed in overall command; this was a US, not a UN blockade." (p 30)

"The advocates of war cited Security Council Resolution 678 as evidence that this was a UN war, consistent with its Charter's provisions for military action. But 678 was worded to leave all decisions on the war... to the US. The Security council had simply rubber-stamped a decision of the Bush Administration. As UN Secretary-General Peres de Cuellar said as his alarm at the loss of life grew, 'This is not a United Nations war'." (pp 36-37)

"The war was short and successful":

"The pre-war suffering of Iraqi civilians was magnified economically by the war, as the [US-led] coalition systematically bombed Iraq's civil infrastructure: power stations, water purification plants, communications facilities, roads and bridges. Thousands died from the direct effect of the blasts - homes, hospitals, markets, mosques... were incidentally destroyed - and many more from the resultant collapse of health and transport services, the loss of clean water, and food shortages. The most authoritative estimate so far is that 9,000 to 21,000 Iraqi civilians died from the effects of the war. The resultant civil uprising crushed by the Iraqi leadership left 20,000 Iraqis dead, with another 15,000 to 30,000 refugees dying on the road or in camps. The war 'resulted in the largest movement of people in the shortest amount of time in any modern war', as millions fled their homes. The civilian death toll is mounting as normally treatable diseases - diarrhoea (causing infant death from dehydration), typhoid, gastroenteritis, hepatitis, meningitis, polio and cholera - sweep the country. A Harvard University team estimates that 170,000 Iraqi children will die from the after-effects of the war.... Finally, the slaughter of Iraq's armed forces raises serious humanitarian questions. Some 100,000 to 120,000 perished with half dying in the last few days, many while retreating to Iraq. They were mostly a dictator's conscripts who faced execution for deserting, and whose lives could have been spared by reliance on sanctions." (pp 34-36)

Then there's this uncritical, almost casual assertion of Kelly's that deserves attention: "The nation had moved beyond the psychology of Vietnam." The nation had moved, or Hawke had moved? Was this necessarily a good, or a bad thing? Should not the lessons to e learnt from of our uncritical and overzealous involvement in Vietnam have been uppermost in the mind of any prime minister worth his salt, let alone in that of a Labor prime minister? All of these matters are, of course, bypassed in Kelly's hagiographical account. More broadly, could it not be said of Hawke that, by involving Australia in America's first assault on Iraq, he helped pave the way for Liberal prime minister John Howard to involve Australia in America's war on Iraq in 2003?

Finally, just to highlight Hawke's (and Bush senior's) hypocrisy on this matter, consider these pertinent words of Powell's:

"This was not a war which saw the United Nations at last fulfill its Charter, free of Cold War shackles, but one in which the United Nations was hijacked by the United States in pursuit of largely national interests and in violation of the spirit of the UN Charter. Contrary to Mr Hawke's claim, this was not a war which carried a message that big nations cannot invade small ones and get away with it. Syria is still in Lebanon, Israel is tightening its grip over the Occupied Territories, the United States has not renounced its unlawful invasion of Panama, Indonesia's annexation of East Timor remains appeased by the United States and Australia, Turkey still occupies Cyprus, China is in Tibet, and so on. None of these countries are under threat of sanctions, let alone war, despite numerous UN resolutions which have not been complied with. The Gulf War was an oil-based exception to this pattern of appeasement." (p 38)

To be continued...

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.

Bob Carr's 'Run for Your Life' 1

In my post, Kevin Rudd's 'The PM Years' (3/1/19), I mentioned several recent Australian memoirs that shed light on the tactics used by the Israel lobby to keep our politicians and journalists in line. One of these, Run for Your Life (2018), by former Labor Party foreign minister Bob Carr, has its own chapter on the subject - Me and 'The Lobby'.

These days, Carr is known for his efforts to push Labor in a pro-Palestinian state direction. This position, however, developed relatively late in his political career.

A mindset of blind support for Israel seems to have characterised most of the Labor Party since the creation of Israel in 1948, through to at least the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000. (It should be noted that NSW state MP George Petersen (1921-2000), and Bill Hartley (1930-2006), state secretary of the Victorian ALP from 1965 to 1970, were honourable exceptions to this tendency.) In fact, during this period, dogmatic support for Israel could almost be said to have become one of Labor's much-trumpeted 'values'.

I will examine the process of Carr's move from received to actual wisdom on the subject of Palestine/Israel, and the Israel lobby's response to same, in follow up posts. For now, here are excerpts from Carr's account of his early days, shilling for Israel:

"I had been a long-term supporter of Israel. In 1977, as a young trade union official, I had rented a room in the Trades Hall, bought some cask wine and invited Bob Hawke to come along and launch Labor Friends of Israel. I had remained its token president ever since and was always on hand to greet delegations and troop along to the [Israel] Independence Day celebrations... In 1983 I had visited Israel with a delegation of NSW Labor people... and had found it congenial enough, if not a revelation, admirable for its strong labour institutions. We met no Palestinians and were not driven around the occupied West Bank. At that time no Israeli historians had explored what had really happened in 1948. That would occur only when Benny Morris and others uncovered the story of massacres and expulsions that had forced the Arab population to flee. We just accepted the prevailing wisdom. It had been 'a land without a people for a people without a land': this was the Exodus narrative." (pp 174-5)

If Begin and Sharon's bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982 registered with Carr, he doesn't mention it.

"I and my Labor crowd were in the Zionist camp. I remember joking with John Wheeldon, a former Labor senator and a minister in the Whitlam government, about our special closeness to Israel - with its craggy old Labour Party in permanent power, its collectivised agriculture, kibbutzniks who were Holocaust survivors... I entertained the notion that in retirement I might sign up as a volunteer to talk about the Holocaust to counter Holocaust denial. It seemed to me self-evident that the Jews were in fact an exceptional people who - and I said this in many speeches at their community events - had made a contribution to civilisation well above their numbers. I didn't dream that in feeding this self-image I might be encouraging a strand of thinking that, among other things, had Jews enjoying a view of themselves as the 'Chosen People' and therefore entitled to uncontestable rights to the land God gave them. (ibid)

As an example of collective delusion, the ALP's historical love affair with Israel is reminiscent of many Western leftists' unquestioning support for Stalinist Russia. To be sure, at the time, the lobby will have lapped up the kind of adulation of Israel expressed by Carr and others in the party - to the point of taking Labor's support for its cause for granted. But, as the old adage goes, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. My next post will look at Carr's gradual awakening to the reality of Palestine/Israel.

To be continued...

Reflections on Barry Cohen (1935-2017)

Barry Cohen was a cabinet minister in the Labor government of Bob Hawke. Here are my thoughts on certain lines from his obituary in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald:

"Cohen recalled that at his first day at boarding school, he had three fights with classmates who called him 'a dirty bloody Jew'. He developed defence mechanisms: humour, and pride in the Holocaust survivors recreating a Jewish nation." (Labor hero fought for the Barrier Reef and Kakadu, AAP, Sydney Morning Herald, 19/12/17)

It's not that hard, is it? Anti-Semitic bullying has propelled many a young, unthinking Jew into waiting Zionist arms. Thus anti-Semites, in effect, act as recruiters for Zionism.

Unfortunately, Barry Cohen never seems to have developed any real insight into the nature and history of the Zionist movement, namely that it is a particularly toxic form of settler-colonialism; that it had come into existence long before the Holocaust; that it was in fundamental agreement with the Nazis that Germany's Jews should be transferred to Palestine; and that it was and still is bent on the wholesale dispossession of Palestine's indigenous Arab population. A little research or reflection, at least in retirement? Sadly, not for Barry Cohen.

"As he's told it, he was an armchair critic of discrimination in all its forms, mouthing endlessly against anti-Semitism, apartheid and the appalling treatment of Aborigines. Then a friend asked him what he was doing about it. His answer was to join the ALP."

What to make of those who can see discrimination and injustice everywhere - except in one tiny corner of the world? The word 'phony' springs to mind.

"Cohen had been close to Hawke. They shared an emotional attachment to Israel and a love of golf."

At least Hawke's emotional attachment to Israel eventually gave way to a more critical understanding that Israel was not quite what it had been cracked up to be. Less time wasted on golf might have helped in both cases. Life really is too short.

"Occasionally his serious side surfaced, as in a 2004 denunciation of Labor's growing Palestinian lobby."

Sadly, it never seems to have occurred to Cohen that the anti-Semitic bullies of his youth, the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide, and the ruthlessly dispossessed Palestinian people are not all cut from the same cloth. Truly, Zionism rots the brain.

Reading Between the Lines on Bob Carr & Israel

I've always been intrigued by the question of why it is that so many people allow themselves to fall under the influence of clearly nonsensical, even downright nasty, ideas. Ideas such as Zionism, for example.

Certainly, Jewish Zionists are easy to read and can be assumed to have been indoctrinated from their earliest days. Those classic lines of the English poet, Philip Larkin, spring to mind here: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do." Ditto for Christian Zionists. (So that I am clear here let me acknowledge that in the past most Jews were anti-Zionists, and that growing numbers of today's Zionised Jews are coming to see through, and to reject, their early Zionist indoctrination. May that welcome trend continue.)

That said, it's gentile Zionists of the political and scribbling classes who interest me the most, simply because, given their positions of influence within the prevailing political power structure, it is they who have the greatest potential for aiding and abetting, covertly and overtly, the Zionist cause.

Both Bob Carr and Bob Hawke fall into this category, and if they are both at last, thankfully, evolving into critics of Israel, if not yet of its underlying Zionist rationale, they must surely acknowledge their part (albeit, in the scheme of things, minor) in aiding and abetting the monster they now find themselves grappling with.

The rusted-on Zionist Murdoch press cynically attributes all such deviations from its own party-line on Israel to pressure on Labor MPs representing electorates with high numbers of voters of Arab origin, and will even feature lists of seats where Jews and Arabs make up one percentage point or more of the electorate, as though these were the sole determinant of the matter.* This is because it is ideologically incapable of conceding that such deviations have anything to do with intellectual/moral growth, let alone, particularly in the cases of Carr and Hawke, as regret for something which may once have seemed to them like the proverbial 'good idea at the time', but which, they have subsequently discovered, has been anything but. Yet there is much to support this thesis, especially if one reads between the lines, in Brad Norington's feature in yesterday's Australian, Carr alarms pro-Israelis:

"As a young union education officer and aspiring politician, Carr was so passionate in his support of Israel that he set up a Labor Friends of Israel group in 1977. His inspiration was reading a pamphlet written by then ACTU president Bob Hawke that put the case for Israel. Carr was a member of the dominant NSW right faction and a 'Cold War warrior'. He was wooed to a cause opposed by the party left, which had thrown its support behind the Palestinians. In her biography of Hawke, Blanche D'Alpuget writes that he was of the generation that, in its youth, was stunned by the news of the Holocaust and then exhilerated by the founding of the Israeli state.... While Hawke's first visit to Israel fired his passion, he was also influenced by a mentor, Clyde Holding, who showed 'uncanny foresight' about changing ALP attitudes to Israel in the 1970s by encouraging prominent Labor people to speak out in its defence. Holding told D'Alpuget that young radicals were a bit lost for a cause when the Vietnam War wound down: 'They were on the lookout for the next wretched depressed victims of American capitalism - and there were these benighted Palestinians'."

Notice in both cases the role of party mentors. For Labor politicians back in the 70s a large - how large? - part of their 'decision' to back Palestine or Israel simply came down to whether they were on the right or the left of the party. The actual merits or otherwise of the political cause were seemingly irrelevant. Clyde Holding (Danby's predecessor in the seat of Melbourne Ports btw), for example, hated the party's left faction, led by George Crawford and Bill Hartley, both of whom were anti-colonialists, and therefore, pro-Palestine. Hence Holding's pro-Israel stance. My point here is that, for those on the right of the ALP, little, if any, real thought or investigation went into their choice.

"Carr recalls Hawke turning up to a 'seedy' Trades Hall office he had rented for Labor Friends of Israel. 'He was affected by grog but spoke eloquently, almost coming to tears when he spoke of Golda Meir,' Carr said... Carr says he maintained his loyal support of Israel. When Israel continued its expansion of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank, criticism from the ALP's left grew louder. Carr asked one Jewish contact about the settlement increase: he claims he was told not to worry because they would be 'withdrawn' when peace was eventually reached with Palestinians. 'The next time I looked there were more,' Carr recalls. 'I asked, why, if they are going to withdraw, do they keep planting them so deep into the territories?'"

This focus on settlements and settlement expansion is, of course, Carr's most oft-quoted reason for his turn away from Israel. While Israel's West Bank settlements are a good start to a good hard look at the Zionist project in Palestine, a little investigation would have told him that Jews-only settlements/colonies have been the central feature of that project since it began in earnest after World War I. Before 1948 they were called kibbutzes and sold to gullible Westerners as socialism's greatest achievement. Since Israel's conquest of the West Bank in 1967, of course, the utopian socialist facade of the pioneering kibbutz has been discarded, and we have been left merely with settlements, generally inhabited by Israel's version of the Taliban, and no-one, except the usual suspects, sees these as anything other than illegal facts-on-the-ground, a prelude to Israel's outright annexation of the West Bank and the final step in its realisation of the Zionist wet-dream of a Greater Israel. I imagine that for most of his early career in the party Carr was spending what little time he had outside the Labor bubble reading up on the American Civil War, and so that little investigation, unfortunately, never really proceeded and the proverbial penny was left hanging. And of course, the party needed to fund its election campaigns, didn't it? But, frankly, what politician will admit such things in public?

"As NSW premier from 1995 to 2005, Carr claims he remained neutral on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He attended functions of both communities in an official capacity. While harbouring doubts about the settlements, the closest to a turning point came in 2003 when he agreed to welcome Palestinian scholar and activist Hanan Ashrawi, who was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize by the University of Sydney. According to Carr, he had already angered the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network by refusing to condemn Israel's building of a dividing wall with Palestinians. He told them that if bombs were 'going off in central Sydney' while he was premier, he would have built a dividing wall too."

Norrington has stuffed up the timing here with "he had already angered...," which seems to refer to Ashrawi's 2003 visit, while APAN was not, in fact, born until 2011. Carr's idiot remark about the wall, however, was made to APAN, as he relates in his 2014 Diary of a Foreign Minister at pps 95-96. Did no one there at the time pointedly remind him that bombs only went off because Palestine was, hello, under occupation, and that said wall was actually just another a West Bank land grab and will be enclosing around 100 Israeli settlements, including settlers and settlements in occupied Arab East Jerusalem? I ask that question because Bob mentions no such rejoinder in his diary.

"At Ashrawi's welcome, Carr said he had told Sydney's Jewish community that a two-state solution would become more difficult with more settlement activity, and Israel risked insurgency and international isolation if its burgeoning Arab population was denied civil rights. But he stresses he also said, 'Israel will not be bombed into a peace agreement'. Carr says the negative, even vitriolic reaction to his welcoming of Ashrawi, whom he considered a Palestinian moderate, left him puzzled. He still spoke at Holocaust memorials and Jewish museum events - but his 'old fondness' for Israel faded [...] Carr says he has immersed himself more in the history and culture of the Palestinian people, but argues the Israeli settlements issue is his primary motivator."

Of course, immersing oneself in the history of the Palestinian people, can only lead, ineluctably, to one conclusion, and, if what I reported in my last post, Age Shall Not Weary Him, is correct, Carr appears to be getting there, but will certainly not admit it, for now, on the record, to a Newscorpse journalist. One hopes too that Simon Sebag Montefiore's tosh tome on Jerusalem, Jerusalem: The Biography that we see on Carr's bookshelf in the photo of him by John Feder is not what he means by immersing himself in Palestinian history.

[*The Australian, The Electoral Israeli-Arab divide, 5/7/17. There is more of the same in Norington's feature story on Carr.]

Auntie Poppy Syndrome

If you were an aging baby boomer and, while still young and tender, had the misfortune to have in the family a dotty old aunt who had one too many bees in her bonnet for her own or your good, and who repeated, mantra-fashion, in year ear, the injunction to never forget that the Jews are God's chosen people, you may - perish the thought - contingent on the onset of some kind of developmental delay, have ended up as the foreign editor of Murdoch's Australian, projectile-vomiting such dark green prose as the following:

"What a caterwauling coven of craven zeitgeist whisperers they are - Bob Hawke, Kevin Rudd and Gareth Evans - calling for Australia to formally recognise a Palestinian state, the three of them like the witches of Macbeth intoning sterile incantations; in this case not with the purpose of affecting reality but rather to signal once again their sublime and ineffable virtue." (ALP's three amigos only invite ridicule by maligning Israel, Greg Sheridan, 25/2/17)

I, therefore, nominate what I call 'Auntie Poppy Syndrome' (after Sheridan's Auntie Poppy, as described on page 22 of his 2015 memoir When We Were Young & Foolish: A Memoir of My Misguided Youth with Tony Abbott, Bob Carr, Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd & Other Reprobates) for inclusion in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Danby to Hawke: How Very Dare You...

Born and bred in Melbourne, portly, pudding-faced Labor MP for Melbourne Ports, Michael Danby, looks just like any other comfortable, well-upholstered, whitebread pollywaffle with a princely retirement package lying in wait.

But appearances, as always, are deceiving.

Beneath that puffy, humdrum visage lurks a fierce Semitic Son of Israel with an unbroken DNA connection going all the way back to the warriors of Moses' Israeli Labor Party who once stood on the desert verge, gazing wide-eyed at the land flowing with milk and honey which lay before them, and which that mysterious entity G-D had conveniently promised them for their exclusive use.

With this antique connection surging through his veins, grinding all the while a photo of Bob Hawke underfoot, and the aforesaid mysterious entity guiding a hand trembling with righteous indignation at the silver bodgie's blasphemous use of the words 'Palestinians', 'indigenous', and 'Holy Land' in the same sentence, he furiously penned the following words, which, lo and behold, appeared in yesterday's Australian:

"Hawke's analysis of the conflict included a surprising throwaway that the Palestinians are the 'indigenous' people of the Holy Land. How could anyone, let alone a former prime minister, ignore the plethora of historical documents and archaeological artefacts that attest to the unbroken chain of Hebrew, Israelite and Jewish language, culture, religion and civilisation in the Holy Land over the past 3250 years?"" (Labor troika fails to see the roadblocks in Palestine)

But wait. What's this?

"And I have said I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt into the land of the Canaanites..." (Exodus 3:17)

Once again: "... the land of the Canaanites..."

Just in case you missed it: "... THE LAND OF THE CANAANITES..."

Bob Hawke's Crazy Love

In an Australian Financial Review op-ed published yesterday, former Labor PM and die-hard "friend of Israel," Bob Hawke, confesses to being worried about "the danger of Israel being blinded to the threat to its very soul and the vision of its future."

In Time to recognise the state of Palestine, he describes a meeting he had with former Israeli PM Golda Meir, at the end of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973:

"I listened with admiration and in total agreement as this wonderful woman, still traumatised with grief, looked into my eyes and said there could be no peace for Israel until there was an honourable settlement of the aspirations of the Palestinian people."

"Soul"? "Vision"? We're dealing here with a-worse-than-apartheid-state for God's sake, with no other "vision" than to cram in as many Jews as possible, and knock off as many Palestinians as circumstances allow. As for that "wonderful woman," Golda Meir, wasn't she the one who said, "There is no such thing as Palestinians"? (See my 17/8/08 post The Zionist La Passionara.)

Unfortunately, despite all his free time and a taxpayer-funded retirement package an aged pensioner could only dream of, he still hasn't taken the time or trouble to revisit, research, revise and apologise for his youthful infatuation and where it led him.

Clearly, the old codger's still not over it.

The only thing, it seems, which perturbs his rosy vision of an imagined Israeli golden age, is the current "sentiment of Israeli political leadership" as exemplified in "the inexorable expansion of Jewish settlement in the West Bank," where "some 580,000 Israelis live in 123 government-authorised settlements and about 100 unauthorised outposts on the West Bank and 12 major neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem." Not to mention those recently announced.

"The least we can do," he concludes, "in these most challenging of times, is to do what 137 other nations have already done - grant diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine."

The appalling thought arises: Will this be it? Will Hawke's be the one and only opinion piece in the lead-up to Netanyahu's visit in the Australian press that deviates from the usual, bipartisan kowtowing to Israel?

Perish the the thought.

But there's more to Hawke's piece than meets the eye. Something quite astonishing in fact. This:

"It was our great foreign minister Dr H.V. Evatt who chaired the UN Special Committee on Palestine and it was the resolution of that committee that authorised the partition of Palestine into two states. It was on the basis of this resolution that the state of Israel was established in 1948. The resolution gave the already settled and the newly arriving European Jewish settlers - who by then constituted a third of the population and owned less than 6% of the land - exactly 56.47% of the Palestinians' best cultivated land and cities. The two-thirds population of indigenous Palestinians who owned more than 94% of the land were given 47% of their own country."

Think about it...

If:

a) Evatt had a hand in proposing that the indigenous Palestinians be divested of 56.47% of their patrimony, to be handed over, lock, stock, and barrel, to a minority of recently-arrived European settlers who had purchased only 6% of it (and he did);

b) and if the partition proposal enshrined in the UNGA's resolution of 29 November, 1947, was as draconian as has been described (and it was);

c) and if said partition resolution was, at least in part, Evatt's legacy in Palestine (and it was), then how the hell can Hawke describe Evatt as "our great foreign minister"?

In fact, it was the partition resolution of 1947 that gave Zionist fanatics such as David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir all the excuse they needed to embark on the military offensive they'd been preparing for for decades, drive out the indigenous Palestinian population, occupy 78% of their ancestral homeland, destroy hundreds of their villages, steal their land, and strew it with settlements (called at the time kibbutzes).

If Hawke really wanted to make a statement at this time, the very least he could have done would be to repudiate Evatt's legacy in Palestine, demand Israel withdraw to its 1947 partition borders, and call on it to implement all relevant UN resolutions, particularly UNGA resolution 194, enshrining the right of Palestinians ethnically cleansed in 1948 to return home.

'An Audible Drawing In of Collective Breath'

I'm sure that Sam Lipski (then & now) actually thinks that the incident he describes below reveals more about Bob Hawke than it does about the 3,000 blinkered individuals listening to him:

"For the Jews of Australia, it was a night to remember. On May 17, 1988, some 3000 of them came to the Concert Hall at Melbourne's Arts Centre to celebrate, to pay tribute and to give thanks. On stage were 15 former Soviet refuseniks. Just months earlier... Mikhail Gorbachev had let them leave for Israel. Just days earlier they had landed at Melbourne Airport to a heroes' welcome from the Jewish community... But later in the evening, prime minister Bob Hawke punctured the mood of celebration. In an otherwise powerful and uplifting speech, Hawke included just one unsettling sentence. In it he drew comparisons between Soviet Jews and the Palestinians and black Africans under apartheid. There was an audible drawing in of collective breath. Then a turning of heads in disbelief. The remarks distressed the refuseniks, disappointed many of Hawke's admirers, and marked a turning point in Hawke's public views on Israel. With a few words, his public persona changed from the Jewish state's most passionate admirer in Australia to its sorely troubled critic." (On a night for refuseniks, Hawke brought Palestinian conflict to the party, Sam Lipski & Suzanne Rutland, The Australian, 28/3/15)

Bob Carr: Nagging Questions Remain

Whilst I welcome politicians finally seeing the light on the subject of Jewish State, and going public with it, their enlightenment is invariably less than 100 watt.

Former foreign minister Bob Carr is a classic example of the phenomenon, as his address to the Australian Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA) on Friday night, reprinted in part in The Weekend Australian, reveals.

Some excerpts, annotated:

"Pennant Hills Golf Club in Sydney is an unusual place for an epiphany on the changes in Israel. Still, it was there I met a Christian volunteer who went to the occupied territories to escort Palestinian children to school, to protect them from verbal and physical violence by Israeli settlers. Violence against Arab kids? Christian volunteers to protect them? From Jewish settlers? None of this was around in 1977 when I rented a room in Sydney Trades Hall and called on Bob Hawke, ACTU president, to help me launch Labor Friends of Israel. In 1977 the Israeli occupation was 10 years old. There were 25,000 settlers. It was easy to believe the Israelis were holding the West Bank only as a bargaining chip. Arabs were terrorists." (Why I'm now a friend of Palestine)

Easy to believe? Who was easy to believe, Bob? Someone must have been in your ear at the time, spruiking the cause. After all, a party operative (Carr was not an MP until 1983) doesn't simply up and start a fan club for a foreign state apropos nothing. (Carr reveals neither why he set up - or helped set up? - LFOI in the first place nor whether he now regrets having done so. That late, great, always staunchly pro-Palestine NSW MP George Petersen describes Carr in the 80s as "an unabashed admirer of United States capitalism" with "a total commitment to the ideology of economic rationalism." (George Petersen Remembers, 1998, p 356) For the WikiLeaked details of Carr's and Hawke's links with US diplomats back in the 70s, see my 11/4/13 post Rats in the Ranks.)

And those Arab terrorists? You honestly couldn't see them for what they were, a national resistance movement with genuine grievances? As a voracious reader, did it not occur to you to read a book on the subject, one not pushed on you by those whispering in your ear at the time? And are you now prepared to concede, after all these years, that George Petersen (and Bill Hartley) got it right on Palestine? Just asking.

"Israel has gone from secular to religious... from cosmopolitan to chauvinist... 'The symbol of Israel used to be the kibbutz,' says a friend in the British Labor Party. 'It's now the settlement.' They have doubled in the past 54 months alone."

So when Israel, to use your terms, was secular and cosmopolitan, it was OK? You really had no idea that exploiting religion for political ends has been a central feature of Zionism from its inception? What part of Jewish State did you not understand? And don't tell me you still can't see that the kibbutz was just the settlement of its day? Is it really that hard, Bob?

"He (UK MP Richard Ottaway) and others in centrist politics, have been sickened by settler fanatics standing on seized Palestinian land declaring God gave them Judea and Samaria, and the Arabs are inferior anyway."

What about the kibbutz fanatics who perpetrated the Palestinian Nakba, Bob? Those who, by fire and sword, drove out the indigenous Palestinian population in their hundreds of thousands in 1948, stole its land, and refused its return?

But wait, what's this? 1948 finally gets a look-in:

"In 1977 when we launched Labor Friends of Israel we knew none of [the Palestinians'] narrative. Now Israeli historians... have gone to the archives of their army to tell the full story of how massacres were used during the foundation of Israel in 1948 to drive out 700,000 Palestinians."

You really needed Israeli historians to explain why all those Palestinian refugees were twiddling their thumbs in refugee camps throughout the Middle East? Seriously?

And who are you to preach to those you once dismissed as mere terrorists? 

"Palestinians must commit to non-violent resistance, not a third intifada. They must build international support. They must engage with the righteous Jews who condemn the takeover of Zionism by the fanatics."

The takeover of Zionism by the fanatics? Blimey! You still haven't twigged to the fact that Zionism, from Herzl to Netanyahu, is fanaticism incarnate? 

Still, it's a measure of how just how much Israel has alienated so many in the Western political establishment (the recent House of Commons vote, dealt with in my 17/10/14 post Britain's Moral Responsibility for Palestine, is another case in point) that Carr can conclude his speech thus:

"Forty years ago I signed up to be president of Labor Friends of Israel. I still count myself a friend of the liberals in that country but it serves the cause of a just peace better by me this week becoming patron of Labor Friends of Palestine."

The Saturday Paper

Is Melbourne publisher (The Monthly, Quarterly Essay) Morry Schwartz's TSP a brave new venture in fearless, investigative journalism? Or just another exercise in Zionist gatekeeping?

"[Peter] Craven [editor of Quarterly Essay 2001-04] is on friendly terms with Schwartz but acknowledges the publisher's heart 'will always belong to Robert [Manne*, La Trobe University academic, author and member of QE's editorial board]. He says Schwartz was always keen for robust editorial debates, becoming noticeably 'toey' on discussions of Israel. Everyone says Schwartz responds viscerally to this question. 'Loyalty to the idea of a Jewish homeland is very important to him,' argues Manne. Says Craven: 'He's very one-eyed on these sort of things. I once said to [his wife] Anna I was going to see [the opera] Tristan und Isolde and she said, 'Peter, I won't even buy German goods.' In 1982, Schwartz published Blanche D'Alpuget's biography of Bob Hawke after Penquin and Melbourne University Press turned it down. 'Morry was very influenced by the fact that Bob was a huge supporter of Israel,' D'Alpuget tells me. 'It was really Bob's connection to Israel that he leapt at.' (Schwartz disputes this; he says he sensed the public was hungry for political biography...) Critics wonder how TSP will cover the Middle East. Schwartz says: 'I think Israel is over-tackled. The media are too obsessed with it; but a balanced view, sure.' He imposed upon Craven his preference for Australian-centric content but concedes a newspaper can't ignore world crises..." (Paper tiger: Morry Schwartz's gamble, Kate Legge, The Australian, 14/12/13)

[*For Robert Manne and QE, see my three posts: Who Speaks for Palestine? (2/9/11); The Silence of the Intellectual 1 (6/9/11) and 2 (7/9/11).]

Geraldine Doogue: Still Clueless After All These Years

I don't know about you but I find the ABC's Geraldine Doogue profoundly irritating. This is primarily because, on those occasions - alas too frequent - when she discusses the Palestine/Israel conflict, little more than Israeli talking points emerge.

The latest example came on last Sunday night's Compass program - Why I'm still... Jewish - when she talked with 4 members of Australia's Jewish community:

"Can I raise the issue," she chirped at one point, "and it's amazing that I am raising this, but what about the rockets, what about Hezbollah, what about Hamas?"

So Doogue was amazed that none of her interlocutors had thus far started banging on about Palestinian fireworks - these, of course, being the be-all and end-all of the conflict in her view. (Hers was no mean feat actually: not only did she reduce the conflict to the level of a Zionist cliche but managed to stereotype her guests as knee-jerk Zionist propagandists at the same time.)

Doogue's unblushing invocation of this particular propaganda trope came like the proverbial shot-in-the-arm for the show's beleaguered (because terminally smug) Zionist ultra, Timmy Rubin. "Thank you. Thank you, Geraldine," she gushed, as Doogue babbled on: "In other words if you are going to give it [the West Bank] back..."

Until, that is, she was interrupted by the sharpest of the four, Ronni Kahn, who labelled her nonsense "scare-mongering."

To which an incredulous Doogue could only retort: "Is it?"

The thing is, Doogue of all people has no excuse whatever for such ignorance.

In January 1991, at the time of the First Gulf War, she presented a current affairs slot on ABC television called The Gulf Report. For expert opinion on events as they unfolded, the program turned to Macquarie University Arabist Dr Robert Springborg, a move which angered reigning Prime Minister (and uber-Zionist) Bob Hawke and catapulted Doogue and her colleagues, particularly Peter Manning, head of ABC News & Current Affairs, into the centre of a political storm. As a result, Doogue underwent something of a learning curve which she described in the Spring 2003 issue of The Griffith Review. Here are the relevant paragraphs:

"It was on! Day after day, new criticism turned up. We learned there was a 'war room' in Parliament House where the prime minister, with his widely acknowledged emotional attachment to Israel at full throttle, and several Cabinet colleagues, including future opposition leader Kim Beazley, pored over every detail. I became aware for the first time of the Israel/Jewish lobby and its power. Naive little me had never experienced organised opposition in my previous reporting life. In an odd way, it was enthralling to watch in practice what I had read and heard about. I just wish I hadn't been at the centre of it. This campaign was conducted in public and private. Letters arrived by the dozen, plus phone calls to the program (including utterly sexist diatribes directed at me; I was after all, one of the first Australian women to be allowed to report a war on television)."

Unfortunately, while Peter Manning, whose courage under fire Doogue acknowledged in her essay - "Peter Manning, I salute you," is her concluding sentence - has since gone on to study the Middle East conflict in some depth, even writing a book on the subject, Us & Them: A Journalist's Investigation of Media, Muslims & the Middle East (2006), Doogue, it seems, has not only failed to build on her initial awareness of the power of the Israel lobby by developing a real understanding of the Palestinian case, but has actually moved in the other direction, and now simply recycles Zionist talking points and cliches as the occasion demands.

Laziness? Self-protection? The price of retaining a perch at the ABC? Who knows? Perhaps it's time for her to pen another piece for The Griffith Review.

Rats in the Ranks

No surprises here:

"Bob Carr may have been Foreign Minister for only 12 months, but he started talking to American diplomats about internal Labor politics nearly 40 years ago. Previously secret US embassy and consulate reports incorporated into a new searchable database unveiled by WikiLeaks on Monday reveal that Senator Carr was a source for US diplomats seeking information on the Whitlam government and the broader Labor movement in the mid-1970s... A former Australian Young Labor president and then education officer with the NSW Labor Council, Senator Carr later 'expressed deep concern to [the US] consul-general over [the] impact of Labor disputes on the prospects of [the] Labor government'. The once confidential cables also suggest US envoys turned to him as a source of background information on Labor figures. For example, Senator Carr explained that a speaker at a pro-Palestinian protest in 1975 - left-wing Labor parliamentarian George Petersen - was 'a NSW equivalent of Victoria's [Bill] Hartley', another prominent Labor Left figure who developed close ties with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.* Senator Carr has long been a strong supporter of Australia's alliance with the US. He was a prominent participant in the Australian American Leadership Dialogue while serving as NSW premier." (Hawke & Carr were US sources on Whitlam turmoil, Philip Dorling, Sydney Morning Herald, 9/4/13)

The late, great George Petersen had Carr figured out decades ago:

"Paul Landa was succeeded as [NSW] Attorney-General by Terry Sheahan. The Cabinet vacancy was filled by Bob Carr, who is an unabashed admirer of United States capitalism, and who became Minister for Environment & Planning. He has been Premier since 1995. Together with the Treasurer, Michael Egan, he represents a total commitment to the ideology of economic rationalism." (George Petersen Remembers: The Contradictions, Problems & Betrayals of Labor in Government in New South Wales, 1998, p 356)

No surprises here either:

"Then ACTU president Bob Hawke was the US embassy's most valued Labor contact, conferring regularly with embassy officers and the consulate in Melbourne... Mr Hawke was especially critical of what he called Mr Whitlam's 'immoral, unethical and ungrateful attitude' towards Israel. He told the US consulate he felt unable to approach the Jewish community for campaign funds because of 'Whitlam's 'unprintable' even-handed 'unprintable' Arab policy'." (ibid)

George Petersen also had Hawke's number, describing him as a "reliable servant of the Australian capitalist class and United States imperialism." (George Petersen Remembers, p 185)

[*This is misleading. Saddam Hussein did not become Secretary of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party until 1979.]

Bob Carr & His Imaginary Friend

"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."
Bertrand Russell

Welcome though the leadership and common sense shown by Foreign Minister Bob Carr in saving the Prime Minister from herself and heading off a foreign policy disaster in the UN General Assembly is,  it should in no way blind us to the frankly risible simple-mindedness of his position on the Middle East conflict:

"'No, it doesn't change things,' an insouciant Foreign Minister Bob Carr told the Weekend Financial Review after he led a successful revolt against Prime Minister Julia Gillard's insistence that Australia vote against upgrading the status of Palestinians at the UN. 'Australia is, and always will be, a friend of Israel. They have their own democracy. They have a system that enables them to throw out prime ministers and ruling parties. They have the rule of law and their Supreme Court can overrule the government of the day on difficult issues.' However, 'good friends speak the truth to one another and, as a friend of Israel, we have a duty to highlight our concern about the settlement activity which is illegal under international law.'" (A loss for the Jewish lobby, Andrew Clark, 1/12/12)

Where to begin with this pollyanna-ish guff?

Israel is not a democracy. Only when the 5 million Palestinian refugees, who were disenfranchised (and so much more) in 1948, return to their homeland and get to vote in Palestine's first post-apartheid election will 'Israel' be a genuine democracy.

Now apart from that little caveat, the other slight problem I have with Carr's position is that, while he's now speaking out about Israeli settlements, he's never once mentioned, so far as I'm aware, the occupation itself - the trigger-happy troops, the land-grabbing Wall, the checkpoints and roadblocks, the closures and curfews, the arrests, imprisonments and torture, and the home invasions and demolitions; or Israel's Gaza blockade or killing sprees; or its apartheid laws; or its history of ethnic cleansing, wholesale theft and dispossession; or its serial aggressions and invasions of neighbouring lands (annexation optional). Presumably, all that's just water under the bridge for Carr.

As for Carr's delusional nonsense about Australia being a 'good friend' of Israel, don't even get me started.

The origin of his Israel fantasy - and this probably applies to many others in the Labor party - is of interest here. In establishing his credentials as a long-time Israel luvvie during an interview with Richard Glover on the latter's Drive program yesterday afternoon, Carr mentioned he'd read some pro-Israel pamphlet or other written by former Prime Minister and Labor elder Bob Hawke back in the 70s, and that, as they say, was that. Sort of, 'If it was good enough for Hawkie, it was good enough for me.'

Talk about the blind leading the blind. Here's where the credulous Hawke was coming from back then:

"[Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir] showed [Hawke, soon after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973] photographs of 18-year-old Israeli kids whose hands had been tied behind their backs and who had been shot in the back of the head. Mrs Meir wept with Hawke over the pictures. 'She said she felt guilty about it because if she had taken a pre-emptive strike [presumably on Damascus] those kids would not have been dead.' Hawke took the pictures back to Australia and showed them on television. He told the story about Golda Meir's agony again and again, and every time he did it, he wept. 'I came away from that,' he said four years later, his voice breaking, 'in an intellectual position which was incapable of change.'" (Bob Hawke: A Portrait, Robert Pullan, 1980, p 158)

If Carr has read a serious book on the subject of Palestine/Israel since then, I'd like to know about it.

While You Weren't Looking

A 29 November report by the Australian's Troy Bramston, The day Carr won Mid-East conflict, tells the incredible story of how Australia's sitting prime minister came close to becoming a political casualty of the world's longest-running colonial saga, the Middle East conflict.

While the pundits and the public have been lately diverted by allegations stemming from Julia Gillard's past associations and dealings with the Australian Workers Union, something more subterranean, maybe even seismic, was taking place inside her party.

Bramston's report tells a number of stories.

There's the story of how an Australian prime minister's blind devotion to the state of Israel almost cost her the prime ministership.

There's the story of how her party, hitherto seemingly just as blindly devoted as their leader to the apartheid state, seems (apart from the diehards listed in my previous post) to have finally lost patience with it and revolted at the acutely embarrassing prospect of being seen on the international stage in the company of Israel and its gang of eight - the United States, Stephen Harper's seriously weird Canada, a collection of coconut palms, a clapped-out phosphate mine-cum prison camp for refugees, and two insignificant others.* Or, as ex-Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans put it pithily and persuasively, being seen 'on the wrong side of history'.

There's the story of how Foreign Minister Bob Carr, aided by party elders Evans and Hawke (a story in itself), managed at long last to loosen the Israel lobby's grip on the party's balls and, in doing so, wipe the smug grin off its face.**

And there's the story of how, just maybe, second generation Arab constituents are at last making their views known to the politicians who ostensibly represent them at a time when no Australian politician dares risk taking his constituents for granted.

Given that all the data is not yet in, one hesitates to draw too long a bow here. However, one thing seems certain, namely that something rather unusual has just occurred in the ranks of the ruling Labor government: a recognition, albeit hesitant, that Australia's and USrael's interests are not one and the same, the relentless propaganda of the Israel lobby to the contrary notwithstanding.

Given its importance, I've decided to reproduce Bramston's report in full. The highlights are, of course, my own:

"Julia Gillard's prime ministership must have flashed before her eyes in the early hours of Tuesday morning. In a night of high drama, she came dangerously close to precipitating a full-blown crisis that could have brought her leadership to a premature end.

"The Gillard government was pushed to the brink over the Prime Minister's insistence that Australia vote against Palestine's bid to upgrade its status at the UN. Just minutes before the caucus meeting, Foreign Minister Bob Carr stood in Gillard's office and told her, eyeball to eyeball, to change her mind or she faced a humiliating defeat. He pleaded with her to back an abstention on the UNGA motion to recognise Palestine as a non-member state observer. In the end, Gillard relented and a crisis was averted, but only narrowly. 

"It came after a series of dramatic meetings that tested loyalties and long-standing fealty to Gillard's embattled leadership. At one point, sources suggest, Gillard considered the unprecedented step of calling a meeting of the full ministry and parliamentary secretaries - 42 MPs and Senators - to bind them to her position in a full meeting of 102 caucus members. Even the attempt to coral [sic] the executive into supporting a view an overwhelming number of the cabinet and caucus opposed would have finished Gillard's prime ministership.

"Several ministers and backbenchers had been warning Gillard for weeks that the position on the UN vote, slated for Friday, needed to be finalised in order to instruct the ambassador to the UN, Gary Quinlan, on what to do. They were seized by the dramatic change in the caucus on the Israel-Palestine issue, with several factors that had been slowly building within Labor - Israel's settlement policy, increasing violence by settlers against Palestinians, and a right-wing Israeli prime minister who backed Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. There is concern both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are stalling on a two-state solution and that the outcome of the UN vote could positively energise those discussions. And, critically, there is the growing Muslim and Christian make-up of several key Western Sydney seats which have exposed MPs to different points of view on the Middle East. Some sections of the party suggest Victorian Labor is too close to the Israel lobby and does not fully understand the underlying changes in Sydney's outer suburbs. However, one Victorian minister said: 'How are we going to solve Labor's challenges in western Sydney by the way we vote at the UN?'

"Before the cabinet meeting late on Monday, Gillard met with senior ministers for two hours to discuss the UN vote. Carr sketched out the foreign policy argument for not opposing the Palestinian motion that he believed was in Australia's interests. Environment Minister Tony Burke, holding a seat in southwest Sydney, explained the shift in the community he had been feeling on this issue for a long time. Wayne Swan, Defence Minister Stephen Smith, Communications Minister Steven Conroy and Transport Minister Anthony Albanese also attended.

"Before this meeting, Gillard made an extraordinary request to the NSW Right faction convener and chief government whip, Joel Fitzgibbon. She wanted him to bind the Right behind her position. Fitzgibbon refused.

"Meanwhile, former prime minister Bob Hawke, a long-time ardent supporter of Israel, was arguing behind the scenes for Australia not to oppose the motion on Palestine. So had his foreign minister, Gareth Evans, who warned Labor MPs and senators not to be 'on the wrong side of history'.

"In cabinet, Gillard introduced the topic and stated her position. Albanese, Burke, Trade Minister Craig Emerson, Arts Minister Simon Crean, Resources Minister Martin Ferguson, Industry Minister Greg Combet, School Eduction Minister Peter Garrett and Immigration Minister Chris Bowen all spoke against it. Conroy and Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten, both of the Victorian Right, indicated support for Gillard's position. Carr also spoke, and made the case for not opposing the UN motion. Some ministers regard this as breaking his word to Gillard not to speak. Others say he had no choice but to offer his view, given the spirited debate.

"At the end of the meeting, Gillard summed up the debate and cabinet agreed to back her judgement, given she is Prime Minister. After what one minister described as 'a barrage of opposition', the meeting broke up in stunned amazement. Gillard remained steadfast. Few can understand why she so trenchantly held the view that it must be a no vote. Even her closest supporters were telling her it was a lost cause in caucus.

"After cabinet finished, a cabal of ministers met to discuss strategy and started contacting caucus members. The details of the cabinet meeting quickly reverberated around Parliament House. A motion to support the Palestinian bid was on the agenda for caucus the next morning and was likely to be supported. Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change Mark Dreyfus, from the Victorian Right, urged Fitzgibbon to have the national Right bind its MPs and senators in support of Gillard's position. Fitzgibbon rebuffed Dreyfus several times on Monday and again on Tuesday.

"Gillard met with key members of the left and right separately before the caucus meeting on Tuesday morning. She also met again with several ministers. The Treasurer alerted her to the dangers that lay ahead. Sources say it was not until then that Gillard was fully cognisant of the weight of numbers against her. Until then, one observer says, 'Gillard was all at sea'.

"Backbench MP Andrew Leigh had before parliament a motion urging a yes vote, to recognise Palestine as a non-member state observer at the UN. Leigh was reluctant to back away from it. Part of the deal reached with Gillard to support an abstention vote required Leigh to withdraw the motion, which he did. This was not a secret back-door attempt to white-ant a prime minister, it was conducted in full view to get Gillard to make what MPs believe is the right policy decision in Australia's interests. Carr worked as craftily as he had ever done as NSW premier to see his view prevail. Some say the vigour with which he pursued this has put him offside with some in the party. Others say it marks his arrival as a serious political player in Canberra. Carr will not be critical of Gillard's leadership. He believes she made the right call in the end. Moreover, along with eight other ministers, he saved Gillard's neck. As one familiar with the discussion said yesterday: 'If the caucus resolution on abstention didn't go under her feet, she would have gone under the ice'."

Watch this space!

[*Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Nauru, Czech Republic, Panama; **The front page of this week's Australian Jewish News, for example, features a photo of Carr and Defence Minister Stephen Smith with the header You've let us down and the following text: "Bob Carr and Stephen Smith were among the senior ministers who this week forced Australia to abstain on a crucial UN vote that helps hand the Palestinians a state via the backdoor rather than through negotiations with Israel."]

Labor Isn't a Brand, It's a Zionist Cause

"Delegates, sometimes when reforming our great Party is talked about, people say there is a problem with the Labor brand. But delegates, Labor isn't a brand, it's a cause." (Prime Minister Julia Gillard, NSW ALP State Conference, 15/7/12)

But what kind of cause? Alas, a deeply Zionist one.

Just follow the thread:

"A story of plot and counter plot, of frustration and ultimate success was told by The Right Honourable Dr HV Evatt to over 400 people at the Maccabean Hall when the Jewish National Fund opened its Jubilee Year last Monday night. Dr Evatt was President of UN committee on Palestine in 1947, and in 1949 was chairman of the Paris Assembly which debated the Trusteeship of Palestine. Later as Australia's delegate to UN he exercised his chairman's casting vote and was instrumental in having Israel admitted to UN membership. 'Australia stood for justice and had a knowledge of what justice demanded,' said Dr Evatt. 'When the debate was taking place on the establishment of Israel as a State, Australia did not avoid its responsibilities - it voted 'yes' and also voted for full recognition instead of de facto recognition.' Dr Evatt said Israel would stand side by side with Australia in the name of democracy and law and will do all it can to avert war. Mr A Landa, MLA, declared that if it were not for Dr Evatt in the years of 1947-49, Israel - who knows - may not have been in existence today... Mr Landa described Israel as a bastion of democracy in the Middle East. Mr HB Newman presented Dr Evatt with a parchment which was a certificate showing that a forest of 10,000 trees had been contributed by the Australian Jewish community and planted in Israel in Dr Evatt's name." (Dr Evatt at JNF Jubilee, Sydney Jewish News, 24/3/52)

"The ACTU president, Mr [Bob] Hawke, said yesterday that if he were the Israeli prime minister he would drop an atomic bomb on invading Arabs." (Hawke: I'd A-bomb Arabs, Chris Forsyth, The Daily Telegraph, 16/2/74)*

"UNION CHIEF WHO SAID: 'I'm proud our nation helped to kill Hamas terrorist in Dubai'... come hear outspoken Paul Howes." (JNF ad for its 2010 AGM, The Australian Jewish News, 7/5/10)**

"... ALP officials, Eric Roozendaal and Mark Arbib have spoken to me and requested that I should have my speeches vetted, visit the Holocaust Memorial, visit Israel and meet with members of various Jewish organisations..." (Julia Irwin, former Labor member for Fowler, August 2010)***

[*See my 13/7/10 post The Heart that Throbs for Bomber Bob; **See my 8/5/10 post Zionism Red in Tooth & Claw; ***See my 11/8/10 post Julia Irwin Spills the Beans.]