In a speech to an Australian Friends of Palestine Association dinner in Adelaide on 7 November, former foreign minister Bob Carr said that he has had an “epiphany on the changes in Israel”. Carr, who along with Bob Hawke founded Labor Friends of Israel in 1977, announced that he is now patron of Labor Friends of Palestine.
Declaring his support for Palestinian statehood, Carr said Israel had “gone from secular to religious” and compared Israel’s racist laws with South African apartheid. “A majority of the Israeli cabinet is now on record opposing a two-state solution”, he said.
Carr’s epiphany came two weeks after Labor MP for Fremantle Melissa Parke tabled a petition in federal parliament calling for support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign. While condemning Israel’s settlement construction and recent attack on Gaza, Parke was cautious in her defence of BDS, telling parliament on 27 October, “I am not seeking to validate all of the actions that have occurred in the name of BDS, because it can mean different things to different people.”
Unsurprisingly, Zionists went ballistic.
An 11 November editorial in the Australian attacked Carr for his “disservice” to Israel. “Israel … does not discriminate against Palestinians; its laws are ethnically blind”, its editorial asserted, in blind disservice to the truth.
Never mind Israel’s laws that allow the confiscation of Palestinian land, discriminate based on “nationality”, demand loyalty to a Jewish Israeli state or allow for the jailing of Palestinians (including those with Israeli citizenship) without trial or access to a lawyer.
Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) spokespeople Mark Leibler and Colin Rubenstein told the Australian Jewish News: “[Carr] displays at best superficial knowledge of Israel’s egalitarian society.” They said that his claims regarding the Israeli cabinet’s hostility to a two-state solution were “intellectually dishonest and morally offensive”.
In a tirade published on J-Wire on 12 November, Labor MP and arch-Zionist Michael Danby sought to deride Carr’s criticisms of Israel, invoking the cause of oppressed Tibetans, North Koreans and “Christians and other minorities facing death across the Middle East”.
Danby was not the only Labor MP to lash out against Carr. Flinching at the apartheid label, Labor’s deputy leader and foreign affairs spokesperson, Tanya Plibersek, told Sky News’s Viewpoint, “I don’t think we should diminish the seriousness of the apartheid struggle in South Africa.” Cautioning against recognition of Palestinian statehood, she asserted that recognition must occur “in the context of a negotiated peace process” (i.e. under terms of surrender negotiated by the Palestinian Authority).
Yet Carr’s campaign within Labor ranks for recognition of a Palestinian “state” is hardly radical. Former Australian PM Malcolm Fraser, also a former friend of Israel, adopted this position three years ago. Two weeks ago, Sweden joined 134 other nations in officially recognising a Palestinian state. And last month a large majority of the British parliament passed a motion stating that “the government should recognise the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel, as a contribution to securing a negotiated two-state solution”.
These diplomatic gestures don’t change the fact that Britain and Sweden both continue to sell arms to the Israeli state. Nor do they change the fact that the Palestinian Authority, more than two decades after the Oslo Accords, exercises no control over its land, sea or air borders and, in the West Bank, acts as an appendage to the occupation.
Nonetheless, fissures within Labor’s leadership on the question of Palestine, after years of uncritical support for Israel, are an indication that international solidarity with Palestine’s struggle for national liberation is growing.
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Nick Everett is the convener of Friends of Palestine WA.