On behalf of Byron Friends of Palestine we utterly condemn your message of congratulation to Israel on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the apartheid Israeli state. You say, “The flame of our friendship remains undimmed by time or distance. At Yom Ha’atzmaut, Australia affirms its unwavering support for Israel and the Israeli people, but as you very well know, Israel perpetrated a reign of terror against the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and the British. They massacred Palestinians at Deir Yassin, bombed the King David hotel killing British citizens, razed 400 villages and forced 750,000 Palestinians out of their ancestral lands at gunpoint. Palestinians remember this tragedy as the Catastrophe or Nakba which continues to this day, but Australia deliberately ignores their agony just as it ignores the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People held each November.
Many experts in international law, like Professors Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley and august human rights organisations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli, B’Tselem, have judged Israel to be an apartheid state. Australia’s “unwavering support” for Israel therefore, puts it at odds with the International Convention for the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid which it signed in 1973. Your government’s support for apartheid Israel means we are in violation of international law!
Your congratulatory message to apartheid Israel coincided with its blitzkrieg on the civilians of Gaza using the most modern US supplied weapons. Given that Gazan’s have no bomb shelters and live in the most densely packed prison on earth, this was tantamount to “shooting fish in a barrel”. Our most charitable interpretation of your unqualified support for Israel is that you and your ministers are ignorant, which is surprising when you have access to ASIS intelligence reports. Please consult the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (https://www.ochaopt.org) and learn all about apartheid Israel’s daily terrorism against the Palestinian people.
Please reply to this letter but please, no more platitudes about a “two-state solution”. Zionist Israel is totally committed to fulfilling what it believes is God’s command to enlarge its territories by military force if necessary, so that it ultimately achieves Holy Land or Eretz Israel status (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Israel).
—
Gareth W R Smith & Maxine Caron
Palestine Liberation Centre
Byron Bay
Australia
Tel: (61)2-56058404
MOB: 0491107279
“Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire
George Orwell, ‘Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’
“The sleep of reason produces monsters.” Goya
Lines composed in solidarity with the Palestinians’ struggle for justice and freedom on the 75th anniversary of Al-Nakba, May 2023.
We ate no citrus when I was a lad.
You could buy fascist oranges from Spain,
But the flavour would come with bitter taint.
Racist ones, from South Africa, the same.
We eschewed those, despite the TV ads
(“The man from Del Monte –
He say Whites Only!”)
Which just left Jaffas, labelled ‘from Israel’.
The one remaining case where justice failed.
Three quarters of a century now gone,
Of unimaginable loss and pain,
At least to us, with our privileged lives.
So let Mahmoud Darwish take the baton
To elevate our discourse, and explain
How the people feel and think, as they strive
For freedom, and to spend their days at home –
Not consigned to exile or forced to roam.
Not so fast. “I don’t choose to represent
Anything except myself”, he once wrote;
“But that self is full of collective memory”.
Which brings us neatly to another quote:
“The metaphor of Palestine is stronger than
The Palestine of reality”.
It’s up to us to work out what he meant.
He learned and broke all words to make “homeland”.
But how come we’re involved, this far away?
The honest answers strain to scan or rhyme.
Impunity, extended over time;
Ignoring calls to use whatever sway
We have to force accountability.
Feigning to believe in a unicorn
‘Peace process’, as if birthright is forsworn,
Which makes us guilty of complicity.
Then it depends on who is meant by ‘we’.
Sydney’s last eyewitness of ‘48
Said the real Australian folk story
And his own were as one. This on The Date,
To a crowd outside Town Hall, with elders,
Present and emerging. A red and green
Striped Rabbitohs scarf warmed a dog they’d brought
In a shopping trolley. Two right colours
Out of three: not bad, they probably thought.
So, for al-Nakba Day, this was the scene.
Ideal weather, said a woman (quite glam):
Cool, but not too cold, with just enough breeze
To stir the flags. The tiger of Eelam,
Gold on blood; Left shades, different by degrees,
And iconic billowing tricolour
Of Mahmoud’s enigmatic metaphor.
Later, café coffee, with madeleines
To stir remembrance of times past. So when
Did we win, and how? Apartheid, now dead
In Azania, lives in Palestine.
Therefore, look back in time, to look ahead:
We stickered tins of segregated fruit
In shops, and pressured banks to disinvest.
It was “not the destitute; prostitute,
But the man in the three-piece suit” that best
Explained support for a system of crime.
Humans cannot bear much reality,
Eliot wrote, as the Great Uprising
Against British Mandate rule reached full swing.
(News unlikely to have strongly impinged
On literary walks chez Harrowby).
Surely he was on to something cuter,
Though, when he added: “Time past and future
Point to one end”. That’s when freedom will win.
Let our own history be our tutor,
And we can all find Palestine within.
Jake Lynch
20 May 2023