It was Julia Gillard who began
the retrogression in Australian politics on the question of Israeli breaches of
international law. Only under pressure from her cabinet did Prime Minister
Gillard in 2012 reconsider her intention to oppose a UN resolution to upgrade
Palestine’s status in the General Assembly. Gillard’s preferred position would
have seen Australia marginalised within a US-led, stridently pro-Tel Aviv
minority of the international community. (Gillard apparently had no qualms
about the Vatican’s holding of the same ‘non-member observer status’ that
Palestine were seeking, and eventually won. Perhaps she needed reminding that
the ‘non-observer status’ was created specially for the Vatican – a single-religion
enclave that was unilaterally dreamed into existence by fascist Italy in 1929
and undoubtedly has far less of a claim to increased UN recognition than
Palestine.)
There is no need to rehearse here
Bob Carr’s condemnation of the influence Melbourne’s ‘pro-Israel lobby’ allegedly
had on Gillard while she was PM. She was a politician of strong, if often
seemingly contradictory, personal convictions; an atheist in an unconventional
relationship who did not support gay marriage, a woman vocally proud of her
British heritage but at the same time a fierce supporter of the Australia-US
alliance. It is, I suspect, the latter that had the most to do with Gillard’s favoured
position on the Palestinian vote than any undue (and unproven) influence of
Jewish-Australian lobbyists.
Which brings us to the present
government, led by the even more determined and altogether more paradoxically US-enamoured
anglophile Tony Abbott. Last week, the Abbott government quietly announced it
would no longer be using the word ‘occupied’ when referring to Israeli
settlements in East Jerusalem. George Brandis told a Senate estimates hearing
that to characterise the settlements in this way was ‘judgmental’, ‘pejorative’
and ‘unhelpful’. Why is this shift in language significant? Because, as George
Orwell knew almost 70 years ago, it is, like all political language, designed
to ‘make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance
of solidity to pure wind’.
The UN, the International Court
of Justice and the International Committee of the Red Cross are all in
agreement: the establishment of settlements in territories that have been
occupied – what other word is there for it? – by Israel since the Six-Day War
is illegal under international law. It is no more pejorative or judgmental to
say this than it is to say that Ronnie Biggs was a thief. On the other hand, we
know that the Coalition has form in the area of pointedly dissembling language.
It has routinely used incorrect and prejudicial language to paint asylum
seekers as criminals. This is a government that understands all too well
Orwell’s belief in the power of language to shape our perceptions of reality.
Our leaders insist upon these tiny revolutions in the language when they
suddenly glimpse a reality that holds no further political mileage for them.
The pure wind that blew through
the Senate hearing last Thursday had the goal of making murder respectable. The
military occupation of the Palestinian territories has resulted in the deaths
of thousands of Palestinians. The notorious saturation bombing of Gaza that
began in December 2008 claimed the lives of over a thousand civilians alone.
Daily, the occupation guarantees the humiliation, oppression and bullying of
countless Palestinian men, women and children. Israel’s night-time terror raids
go on, as does the detention of children who may, or may not, have thrown
stones at heavily armed and armoured Israeli soldiers. Not only does Brandis’
announcement fly in the face of reality – it flies in the face humanity.
Moreover, it should not be seen
as an aberration, only an isolated case of overzealous pro-Americanism, but rather
as part of the Abbott Government’s wider project to soft-peddle gross human
rights violations when it is politically expedient to do so. The combined
commentary of Abbott and Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop on the Sri
Lankan civil war and its aftermath has been consistently mendacious. In
November last year at Colombo’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (which
was boycotted by countries including India and Canada), Abbott dismissed Sri
Lanka’s complicity in war crimes with a Rumsfeldian ‘sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen’. Bishop,
meanwhile, wanted us to see the Sri Lankan situation ‘in context’, and to
forget that the country’s sitting president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, is accused of
the massacres of Tamil civilians and captured Tamil Tiger militants. None of
this, of course, has anything to do with the necessity of having Rajapaksa on
side in order for the Abbott Government’s refugee policy to remain intact.
The UN has already rebuked us over our breaches of
refugee convention. We are now, I think, at serious risk of becoming an
international pariah, not only far out of step with global political consensuses
on any number of critical human rights issues, but with reality itself. Is
there anything we won’t deny, downplay or rechristen in the name of a
short-term political fix?
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