Why I’m now a friend of Palestine rather than Israel
Bob Carr
The Australian: November 08, 2014 12:00AM
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.
Now the occupation has lasted 47 years. There are 500,000 settlers. Up to 60 per cent of the
Israeli cabinet is on record as opposing a two-state solution. Palestinians have been part of a
peace process for 25 years.
Israel has gone from secular to religious. The ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionists hold 30 of the
120 seats in the Knesset. It has gone from cosmopolitan to chauvinist, with some ministers espousing a brand of radical nationalism like that of France’s Le Pen or Austria’s Jorg Haider.
“The symbol of Israel used to be the kibbutz,” says a friend in the British Labour Party. “It’s now
the settlement.” They have doubled in the past 54 months alone. The Atlantic reported the
Obama administration is deeply offended at how the Israelis use settlements to wreck any peace
deal. Settlers won’t move. The Israeli government won’t force them. So an indefinite occupation
morphs into the extremists’ goal of a Greater Israel.
With one catch. It will have two classes of citizen.
“A term used about another country on another continent”, Ehud Barak told me when I as foreign
minister discussed this very dilemma. The word is apartheid, of course, used by another former
prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and the only word that can be applied if, within one nation, there is
one set of laws for one race and an inferior set for the other — the other being the majority.
Barack Obama says that if settlement expansion keeps growing he can’t manage the fallout for
Israel. That fallout has begun, with Sweden joining 138 nations that have already recognised
Palestine and Britain’s House of Commons endorsing recognition. In the British debate, Richard
Ottaway, a Conservative and long-term supporter of Israel, declared, “If they are losing people
like me, they will be losing a lot of people.”
He and others in centrist politics have been sickened by religious fanatics standing on seized
Palestinian land declaring that God gave them Judea and Samaria, and the Arabs are inferior
anyway. Sickened by the routine violence of the settlers, serious enough to warrant front-page
treatment in that voice of the US foreign policy establishment, Foreign Affairs: settlers smashing
the windows of Palestinian flats to drive families out, uprooting the date and olive trees on
Palestinian farms, spraying graffiti on churches and mosques.
In 1977 the Palestine Liberation Organisation was blowing up planes. Now for 25 years
Palestinians have been committed to a negotiated solution, most recently to a demilitarised state
with the presence of a US-led NATO force on the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In 1977 when we launched Labor Friends of Israel we knew, to our disgrace, none of their
narrative. Now Israeli historians — this is a measure of Israel’s openness — 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. The credibility of historian Benny Morris is
confirmed when he declares he agreed with the policy and thinks David Ben-Gurion should have
gone further until there were no Palestinians left.
Where do Palestinians stand now? Gideon Levy wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that it
leaves them living with mass arrests (760 in a recent sweep, 260 of them children) expulsions,
demolitions. A former head of Shin Bet (Israel’s ASIO) said in the 2012 documentary The
Gatekeepers that his paratrooper son invaded Nablus two or three times. He asked, “Did this
bring us victory? I don’t think so.”
This week 100 ex-generals, senior police and a former head of Mossad issued a letter urging
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to negotiate with “moderate Arab states and with the
Palestinians (in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as one)”. They know a two-state solution will not
be perfect but preferable.
Permanent occupation means Israelis get cast as Afrikaners and the world will recognise
Palestine and isolate Israel.
After all, the alternative would be unthinkable: to accept colonial rule with one religious and racial
group enjoying the vote, the majority denied it.
From the writers of The West Wing came this. Discussing Gaza and the West Bank, a White
House adviser says to another, “Revolutionaries will outlast and out-die occupiers every time.”
No other colonial rule has survived, let alone with rich settlers on fortified hilltops with Los
Angeles lawns, the wretched huddled in the gullies, their 12-year-old kids subject to military
arrest and detention.
We have politely pitched the case for Palestinian statehood as creating security for Israel. But in
view of the settlements and settler violence, I now pitch the case in terms of the rights of the
Palestinian people, recognised in international law and every draft peace statement supported by
the world for a quarter of a century.
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.
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.
Bob Carr is a former NSW premier and foreign minister. This is part of an address he gave to the
Australian Friends of Palestine Association in Adelaide last night
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/why-im-now-a-friend-of-palestine-rather-thanisrael/story-e6frg6zo-1227116367617