Eyeless in Gaza? No, clueless in Australia

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

It is something of an event when a longstanding friend of Israel chooses to publicly criticise it and recommend recognising Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (but not Hamas-controlled Gaza) as a sovereign Palestine.

In the case of former prime minister Bob Hawke, writing recently in The Australian Financial Review, this was always going to be newsworthy, given his long role in passionately standing up for Israel in the Labor movement amid the radical furies of the 1970s.

Accordingly, Hawke’s views command attention and their provenance can have an impact on an ALP seeking to define its stance.

In fact, it probably has: since his piece appeared, former Labor foreign ministers Gareth Evans and Bob Carr have renewed their own calls for recognising Palestine and they have been joined by former prime minister and foreign minister Kevin Rudd.

Hawke was once an eloquent proponent of the view that Israel could not relinquish territories to forces inimical to its existence. Yet his views began to alter, perhaps as early as the late 70s, but certainly by the mid-80s. It is not unreasonable to suppose that his Israeli Labor counterparts, who increasingly adopted the view that a Palestinian state might defuse the conflict, exerted an influence on his thinking.

Witnessing a seemingly unending sequence of bloodshed and uneasy respites over decades inclines people of goodwill to suppose that a bold initiative might break the tragic logjam. And indeed, the Israeli Labor Party did eventually embrace this point of view, chartering in 1993 the Oslo peace process with Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organisation, upon whose probity its ultimate success depended.

It did not work out as intended, at least on the Israeli side. The PA regime established in Gaza and Jericho in 1994, later progressively extended to other major population centres in the West Bank, proved a corrupt and violent entity that, far from fostering a renovation of Palestinian society away from terrorism and conquest towards peace and accommodation, incubated the jihadist terror organisations of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Children within the PA became hostage to an educational system replete with incitement to hatred and murder. One need only view a few video clips of Palestinian classrooms, with their ­pupils interviewed openly and proudly extolling the religious and national duty of murdering Israelis, to see it works.

None of this was altered or ameliorated by Israel’s transfer of territory, funds and, tragically, even arms, to Arafat’s forces, to say nothing of the vast inflow of foreign capital: in the Oslo era, Palestinians became the largest per capita recipients of internat­ional aid while, for example, tragically destitute Niger, with one doctor per 33,000 people, got peanuts.

Ambitious peace plans, going beyond what most Israelis before, then and since regarded as prudent, the first brokered by US president Bill Clinton in 2000-01, the second proposed by then-­Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in 2008, were rebutted without counter-offer by the Palestinian Authority.

Indeed, Arafat’s response in 2000 was to launch a terror wave of suicide bombers against Israel that lasted four years and claimed the lives of more than 1100 Israelis. In the years since Oslo, more Israeli lives have been snuffed out by terrorists than had been in all 45 years of Israel’s national existence that preceded Oslo.

The wonder, then, is not that Hawke changed his view on dealing with the PLO. Rather, the wonder is that many including Hawke continue to subscribe to this viewpoint, long after the Oslo process had been tested to destruction and ruination. It is peculiar to read Hawke today, thinking and arguing as though Oslo never happened, as if dealing with Arafat’s lieutenants and loyalists had never been tried.

Thus, he now writes, “I and the friends of Israel around the world are fearful that in a real sense we may be witnessing again after thousands of years a giant Eyeless in Gaza. Is there not emerging the danger of Israel being blinded to the threat to its very soul and the vision of its future?”

Other than one small change of phrase, Hawke has lifted verbatim a passage from a speech in May 1988 where he first voiced the view that Palestinian statelessness was the key issue.

No one who has spoken to Hawke about Israel, as I have several times in the past, including on that night in May 1988, could doubt that he viewed negotiations with the PLO as the acme of far-sighted Israeli statesmanship.

Far from being disabused of what he thought then by the carnage and tragedy that followed from Israel acting on such advice, and, ironically, 11 years since Israel evacuated every Jew, living and dead, from Gaza in return for exponentially increased rocket assaults, he seems entrenched in the view he has been right all along.

Hawke used to propound the view that, should Israel ever be assaulted from territories it had ceded for peace, it should re­occupy them in perpetuity, without any further “argy-bargy”. Today, however, in the absence of argy-bargy — the PA has persistently refused all but one week of talks with Israeli counterparts in the past eight years — he thinks Australia should recognise as a sovereign state the PA that has served as the base for these assaults. Accordingly, he joins the ranks of those who urged Israel to take risks for peace and continue to do so, long after it has blown up in its face.

Why has he done so? With those who were always hostile to Israel, there is little mystery, but in the case of Hawke it is difficult to diagnose the cause.

A warm friend of former Israeli Labor prime minister Golda Meir, Hawke, in his recent piece, recalls her telling him in the immediate aftermath of the October 1973 Yom Kippur War that “there could be no peace for Israel until there was an honourable settlement of the aspirations of the Palestinian people”.

But it is worth noting that Meir also said in 1976 the “startling effrontery” of the PLO in seeking a Palestinian state the better to assault Israel at a later date made it ineligible for talks until it changed its eliminationist program.

The PLO has certainly since changed some of its statements (at least in English), but it only takes a moment’s checking of today’s scene to see that the change Meir hoped to see has yet to emerge.

In the last month alone, the PA has upbraided UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for the “sin” of correctly stating that the Jewish biblical temples stood on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

An al-Quds University academic, professing that Jews have no historical connection to the city, was just broadcast on Palestinian television. Indeed, the PA, which Hawke wishes to recognise as a state, has called for such a state to be Jew-free.

Hawke’s cri de cœur shows no flicker of recognition of the state of Palestinian society today and its majority support for terrorism against Israel. Of the PA-encouraged and applauded wave of ongoing stabbing attacks on Jews walking Israeli streets, or the call to preserve the mosques atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount from wholly imaginary assault from what the PA’s Abbas called the Jews’ “filthy feet”, not a word.

Indeed, Hawke doesn’t seem to have noticed that the PA recently led a successful effort at the UN with the backing of the so-called “non-aligned” bloc to have ­UNESCO authorise a flat-earth resolution rewriting history by declaring Jerusalem’s Temple Mount to be an exclusively Muslim site.

Hawke used to oppose mightily the cynical manipulation and fostering of Jew-hatred. Today, however, he believes that Israel can obtain peace from those who deny Jews ever lived there.

Instead of conceding ­Israel did as he urged and was rewarded with bloodshed, opprobrium and boycott, he lends his hand today to applauding December’s UN Security Council resolution 2334, which has condemned as illegal all Jewish residences in the West Bank and the eastern half of Jerusalem, something enshrined in international law since the 1920 San Remo settlement and never subsequently extinguished by any binding agreement.

Hawke now urges Australia to recognise Palestine, an internat­ional fabrication designed to circumvent the negotiations that he believed he had been ahead of his time in urging upon the Israelis.

He shows no sign of having thought whether Australian recognition of Palestine might aid postponing indefinitely any prospect of a settled peace, as indeed it does: Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have less chance of convening, much less succeeding, if only because 2334 tells Palestinians that everything is theirs and that there is nothing to negotiate.

Indeed, even Hawke seems to be thinking this way. Why else recycle, as he did in his piece, the old chestnut that the 1947 UN General Assembly partition resolution recommending two states, which, as he reminds us, emerged in good part due to the efforts of Australia’s external affairs minister, HV Evatt, gave 56.47 per cent of “the Palestinians’ best cultivated land and cities” in the British Mandate of Palestine to its Jewish third, who owned merely 6 per cent of the country, while giving a mere 47 per cent “of their own country” to the Palestinian two-thirds who owned the remaining 94 per cent?

The mathematics is shoddy, the statistics absurd: in the territory that became Israel in 1948, Jews owned 8.6 per cent of the land, Arabs owned 20.2 per cent, and the remainder — 71.2 per cent — was crown land.

The greater part of the territory awarded to the Jews by the UN, far from being “the Palestinians’ best cultivated land and cities”, was the almost uninhabited Negev desert. Major Arab cities and towns such as Jaffa, Ramleh, Lydda, Ramallah, Nazareth and Gaza were all awarded by the UN to the intended Arab state and would be part of one today, had the Palestinian and wider Arab leadership accepted the award.

How swallowing whole a cynical fabrication routinely disseminated by Israel’s enemies honours Golda Meir, a plucky defender of her country, and her aspirations for peace is anyone’s guess. She would have been profoundly dismayed at this turn of argument from her pro-Israel Australian friend. Hawke’s preoccupation with establishing a Palestinian state via international pressure on Israel suffers from the undemocratic tendency of seeking to compel Israel, against the judgment of its government and electorate, to make self-defeating concessions to an unreconstructed Palestinian regime.

It also assumes such a state will produce peace. Yet no perusal of Palestinian sermons, statements or publications suggests that Palestinians want peace.

If a Palestinian state won’t bring peace, why create it or urge its creation upon others? Surely, a policy that devises carrots and sticks to induce Palestinians to relinquish their war on Israel is the best basis for negotiations.

In the meantime, Palestinians live under Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank. Scarcely a happy outcome for Palestinians, who must contend with the despotism, brutality, corruption and capriciousness of their own regimes, even while sharing their political goals.

But we can discard the cant about their being occupied by an Israel that stands to lose its soul.

As it stands, the PA lacks vital attributes of sovereignty required under international law, such as effective control of territory and undivided authority.

Does Australia really wish to endorse a mischievous fiction by recognising Palestine, which additionally circumvents a negotiated settlement? Hawke never asked this question, but those reading him should.

Daniel Mandel is director of the Zionist Organisation’s Centre for Middle East Policy, a former fellow in history at the University of Melbourne and author of HV Evatt and the Establishment of Israel (Routledge, London, 2004).