******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
In a move that surprised many ― and symbolises Israel's growing isolation and global opposition to its crimes ― former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr has publicly declared his opposition to Israeli policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Carr's change in position was announced in a November 8 *Australian* opinion piece <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/why-im-now-a-friend-of-palestine-rather-than-israel/story-e6frg6zo-1227116367617> titled “Why I am now a friend of Palestine rather than Israel”. The shift is especially symbolic given that Carr, a member of Labor Right, was key to setting up Labor Friends of Israel in 1977. Now, Carr is a patron of Labor Friends of Palestine. In his piece, Carr ponts out that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip “has lasted 47 years”. “There are 500,000 settlers,” he says. “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.” Carr points out the logic of the situation, saying: “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.” As Carr points out, the word for such a situation is “apartheid”. “In 1977 when we launched Labor Friends of Israel we knew, to our disgrace, none of their narrative,” Carr says. “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.” The former “friend of Israel” asks: “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.” Carr notes the inevitability of Palestinian resistance, writing: “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.” Sincerity is a difficult thing to judge. It is not possible to measure how much Carr's about-face represents a true change of heart as opposed to a tactical shift recognising the need for a negotiated settlement in the face of Palestinians' refusal to accept defeat. It is also undoubtedly much easier to speak the truth when out of power and retired. But none of that makes what Carr says any less true. And is not just high-profile former politicans like Carr who are discovering the truth about Israeli apartheid and history of ethnic cleansing. Many Israelis are not taught the history of genocide and dispossession through which the Israeli state was created. Like many people who grow up in colonial-settler societies ― such as Australia ― learning the truth can be a shock. This is why Israeli filmmaker *Lia Tarachansky* sets out in her new film *On The Side Of The Road*, to address the uncomfortable truth about the *Nakba*, or “Catastrophe” ― as the Palestinians call the 1948 ethnic cleansing that drive Palestinians off their land to allow the State of Israel to be founded. Speaking to Electronic Intifada, Tarachansky explained that making a film on this topic ― which remains taboo in Israel ― was the result of a long and ongoing process of rejecting Zionism. When she was six, Tarachansky was brought from Ukraine to the occupied West Bank by her mother. She grew up in the settlement of Ariel on land stolen from the Palestinians, yet inculcated with the idea that the Palestinians were an enemy of Jewish people. Tarachansky now lives in Canada and is a reported on Palestine for The Real News Network. She spoke with Electronic Intiafada's *Sarah Levy*. https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/57875 -- “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism “The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
