Bob Carr’s Israel stance an ‘over-roasted chestnut’

JEWISH leaders at home and abroad have lashed out at Bob Carr over his claims about the Israeli body politic.

JEWISH leaders at home and overseas have lashed out at Bob Carr over his claim the Israeli body politic is leaning towards imposing a permanent “apartheid” between Israelis and Palestinians rather than a peace deal for a two-state solution.

Mr Carr sparked a storm of debate after he agreed to be the patron of Labor Friends for Palestine and delivered a speech claiming the pace of new Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and statements by some Israeli politicians that they did not support a Palestinian state, showed in reality Israel was against a peace deal.

Instead, he said, “an indefinite occupation morphs into the extremists’ goal of a Greater Israel, with one catch: it will have two classes of citizen, a term used about another country on another continent”.

The executive director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Peter Wertheim, said the former Labor foreign minister’s comments ignored repeated opinion polls showing Israelis overwhelmingly supported a negotiated two-state agreement, though they had doubts Palestinian leaders will allow it.

“If Carr’s problem is with what he sees as Israel’s lurch to the political Right then one would expect him to use his authority as a veteran social democrat to bolster, not undermine, the moderate political forces in Israel whose work he professes to support,” he said. “What if Israel were to dismantle the settlements and evacuate Israelis from all or most of the West Bank and the end result was yet another attempt by the Palestinians and others to wipe Israel off the map and, even worse, bloodletting?”

Mr Wertheim was joined by American “celebrity rabbi” Shmuley Boteach, who wrote on Facebook that “Carr is wholly unoriginal”. “If you’re going to savage the Jewish state surely you can do so by saying something new,” the national US television personality said.

“But is this all we get, the overroasted chestnut of Israel as pre-Mandela South Africa?”

Mr Carr yesterday breezed over criticism, saying the tide of history in the Middle East itself was leading to political parties and governments around the world granting recognition to a Palestinian state. “The trend is very clear outside Australia,” Mr Carr said, saying a Labor government in Sweden, the British Commons, Irish politicians, French socialists and others had passed resolutions to this effect.

He implied that, with ALP state conferences in NSW and Queensland passing pro-Palestinian resolutions, next year’s national conference was likely to follow suit.