Bob Carr alarms pro-Israelis

Labor elder Bob Carr’s rhetoric has become increasingly shrill.

Bob Carr, who set up Labor Friends of Israel 40 years ago, has in recent years been arguing that Israeli policies are a barrier to peace with Palestinians. Picture: John Feder

The words tumbling forth from Bob Carr to describe Israel’s resistance to statehood for the Palestinian people were strident, even shrill. Addressing a mainstream ALP event jointly hosted by frontbench MPs Anthony Albanese and Tony Burke in Sydney last week, Carr let fly.

He described Israel’s behaviour as “foul”, “cruel”, “getting crueller”, “poisonous”, “hateful”, “illegal”, “aggressive” and “chau­vinist”. He referenced internal Israeli critics, from Labor opposition leader Isaac Herzog to historian Benny Morris, agreeing with them in succession.

There were “massacres” of Palestinians by Israeli militiamen when Israel was created as a Jewish state in 1948, Carr said.

A new Israeli law was a “looting bill” and condoned “war crimes” because it permitted seizures of privately owned Palestinian land in addition to territories under occupation.

As evidence of “apartheid” he recounted a reported anecdote about the removal of Palestinian children from a West Bank swimming pool for a busload of touring Israeli settlers.

Carr’s purpose was to argue his case in blunt terms to the party faithful why the NSW ALP should end 40 years of unqualified support for Israel. He wants a resolution passed at the state party conference later this month that “urges the next Labor government to recognise Palestine”.

In recent years Carr has enraged sections of the Australian Jewish community with his apparent shift away from wholehearted Israeli support to views sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

If he was a left-wing radical of minor significance, he would be ignored. But Carr has a platform that he is using to the hilt as a Labor elder — NSW Labor premier for a decade and then Australia’s top diplomat as Julia Gillard’s foreign affairs minister.

Carr’s strategy in pushing for NSW ALP recognition of Palestine “now” is to force it on to the agenda of Labor’s federal conference next year with a further resolution that binds Bill Shorten and his Labor team to a policy shift at the next election, due in 2019.

Despite emerging as an irritant to the pro-Israel camp, Carr was kept in the harness to some extent as Gillard’s foreign minister when her political adviser Bruce Wolpe “banned” him from what Carr regarded as “routine” speaking out about an escalation of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories.

Carr did have one big victory, though, for which he takes credit in his tell-all book, Diary of a Foreign Minister, when he successfully stood against Gillard in November 2012 as she pressured the Labor cabinet into accepting a “no” vote by Australia on a UN resolution proposing observer status for Palestine. Australia abstained.

On one level, Carr’s position is no surprise. But his confronting language and tone have shocked the pro-Israel camp to the core. This is no longer a polite debate.

Vic Alhadeff, the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive, is disturbed about the “dangerous” encouragement that an ALP policy shift, backed by Carr and some other influential party figures, could give to Palestinians in pursuit of their cause.

The big risk, for Alhadeff and others, is emboldening Palestinian demands for sovereignty — without a renunciation of violence against Israel.

Jewish dismay at Carr — in pushing for recognition of Palestine with a two-state solution now rather than at some later, unspecified time when outstanding differences with Israel are resolved — is compounded by how he is perceived to have made such a dramatic U-turn.

As a young union education officer and aspiring politician, Carr was so passionate in his support of Israel that he set up a Labor Friends of Israel group in 1977. His inspiration was reading a pamphlet written by then ACTU president Bob Hawke that put the case for Israel. Carr was a member of the dominant NSW right faction and a “Cold War warrior”. He was wooed to a cause opposed by the party left, which had thrown its support behind the Palestinians.

In her biography of Hawke, Blanche D’Alpuget writes that he was of the generation that, in its youth, was stunned by news of the Holocaust and then exhilarated by the founding of the Israeli state.

HV Evatt, Australia’s minister for external affairs, early chairman of the UN General Assembly and later federal Labor leader, played a leading role in Israel’s creation.

While Hawke’s first visit to Israel fired his passion, he was also influenced by a mentor, Clyde Holding, who showed “uncanny foresight” about changing ALP attitudes to Israel in the 1970s by encouraging prominent Labor people to speak out in its defence.

Holding told D’Alpuget that young radicals were a bit lost for a cause when the Vietnam War wound down: “They were on the lookout for the next wretched depressed victims of American capitalism — and there were those benighted Palestinians.”

Carr recalls Hawke turning up to a “seedy” Trades Hall office he had rented for Labor Friends of Israel. “He was affected by grog but spoke eloquently, almost coming to tears when he spoke of Golda Meir,” Carr said.

As Hawke later told D’Alpuget of his first meeting with Israel’s then prime minister: “I think that was the most emotional meeting I’ve ever had with anyone in my life.” For Hawke, it was the power of the moment, meeting this old woman who had endured the “unbelievably traumatic experience” of leading her country during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when its survival was under threat from Egyptian and Syrian advances.

Carr says he maintained his loyal support of Israel. When Israel continued its expansion of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank, criticism from the ALP’s left grew louder. Carr asked one Jewish contact about the settlement increase: he claims he was told not to worry because they would be “withdrawn” when peace was eventually reached with Palestinians. “The next time I looked there were more,” Carr recalls. “I asked, why, if they are going to withdraw, do they keep planting them so deep into the territories?”

As NSW premier from 1995 to 2005, Carr claims he remained neutral on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He attended functions of both communities in an official capacity. While harbouring doubts about the settlements, the closest to a turning point came in 2003 when he agreed to welcome Palestinian scholar and activist Hanan Ashrawi, who was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize by the University of Sydney.

According to Carr, he had already angered the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network by refusing to condemn Israel’s building of a dividing wall with Palestinians. He told them that if bombs were “going off in central Sydney” while he was premier, he would have built a dividing wall too.

At Ashrawi’s welcome, Carr said he had told Sydney’s Jewish community that a two-state solution would become more difficult with more settlement activity, and Israel risked insurgency and international isolation if its burgeoning Arab population was denied civil rights. But he stresses he also said, “Israel will not be bombed into a peace agreement”. Carr says the negative, even vitriolic reaction to his welcoming of Ashrawi, whom he considered a Palestinian moderate, left him puzzled. He still spoke at Holocaust memorials and Jewish museum events — but his “old fondness” for Israel faded.

When Carr retired as premier, his political career seemed over. He joined Macquarie Bank. The dream of his youth to be a foreign minister in a federal Labor government would not be realised. But six years later fortune knocked at his door in the shape of NSW ALP head office secretary Sam Dast­yari and his deputy Chris Minns. “We have an idea,” Dastyari said.

By agreeing to be drafted to the Senate and become foreign minister, Carr helped diffuse an uncomfortable political situation for Gillard, after Kevin Rudd abruptly resigned from the job and made a failed first tilt at reclaiming the Labor leadership.

Carr’s elevation was a brainwave — but he soon became a headache for Gillard. His role in spearheading the cabinet revolt over UN status for Palestine, supported behind the scenes by Palestine sympathiser Dastyari, gave him a cause celebre. It gave him the standing to be regarded as a leader for Palestinian recognition.

Carr says he has immersed himself more in the history and culture of the Palestinian people, but argues the Israeli settlements issue is his prime motivator.

The shift of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government further to the right, with 65 per cent of his cabinet opposed to Palestinian statehood, and a new law allowing seizure of property in the territories, has persuaded him that Israel is not serious about a two-state solution. He believes the alternative of a “greater Israel” with more settlements in occupied territories is a “ruinous path” that will lead to more Palestinian suffering.

The ALP’s current policy on Israel and Palestine, endorsed this week by Bill Shorten’s deputy Tanya Plibersek, despite her past criticism of Israel as a “rogue state”, supports a two-state solution. But it commits Labor in government only to “discussing” joining like-minded nations in recognising a Palestinian state if there is no progress in peace talks.

The last thing Shorten needs in the lead-up to an election he is confident of winning is a heated internal debate on the Israel-Palestine question. He does not want disunity. He wants to focus on a Turnbull Coalition government battered by sniping from Tony Abbott and still struggling to find its way after a narrow win a year ago.

On the current state of numbers, however, it is likely in the absence of a compromise that an unwanted shift in Labor policy will be foisted on Shorten next year. ALP state conferences in Tasmania, South Australia and Queensland have already made their decisions. In NSW, the largest party branch, the left is united and has support from a majority of the NSW right. Shorten’s reluctance to take a stand — despite his closeness to Melbourne’s Jewish community and preference for the status quo — suggests he knows he is in the minority and he lacks the numbers to prevent a change.

Even Hawke has joined criticism of settlements and called for recognition of Palestine. So have Rudd and Gareth Evans. Carr dismisses suggestions he is seeking to make life difficult for Shorten: “It is simply common sense. You can’t suspend the updating of your policy.” He claims the Israeli government has not helped its position with “aggression and rudeness” and some MPs calling Palestinians “subhuman”.

The fact Carr was invited by Albanese and Burke to speak at their event last week in full knowledge that his criticism of Israel would be savage is instructive. They back Carr. Also instructive is census data released this week showing key NSW Labor seats in western Sydney such as Watson, held by Burke, and McMahon, held by Labor treasury spokesman Chris Bowen, have large numbers of voters with Arab ancestry.

Eighteen per cent in Burke’s seat have an Arab background. For Bowen, the figure is 13.2 per cent. The largest with Arab ancestry is Blaxland, also held by a NSW right frontbencher, Jason Clare, with 19.5 per cent. Albanese has his fair share of constituents with Arab ancestry too. All these ambitious Labor MPs — Albanese on the left and Bowen, Burke and Clare on the right — have been mentioned as possible leadership contenders if Shorten’s stocks fall. All are hardheads when it comes to numbers: they want to appeal to the growing Arab-based demographic in their electorates.

The largest Jewish population lives in Turnbull’s seat of Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs — 12.5 per cent. The second highest concentration is in Melbourne Ports, held by Michael Danby, an ally of Shorten who is Jewish and a bitter opponent of Carr’s.

Danby, currently overseas, expressed optimism during a Sky News interview on Monday that a policy shift for the federal ALP was not inevitable. He said the matter was not a fait accompli in NSW either, and state party votes did not determine national outcomes.

According to Danby, Carr is pushing Palestinian recognition to “fuel his obsession” and put pressure on the Labor leadership.

Michael Easson, an old Carr friend but now on the opposing side, took up the issue in a recent article by arguing that no “responsible” former foreign minister should allow personal emotion and pent-up rage against what Carr has called “the Melbourne Jewish lobby” to cause him to miss the big picture. Easson was drawing on the frustrations Carr expressed in his book.

The most cynical of Carr’s critics claim he is driven by wanting a legacy after not much to show for a decade as NSW premier. “He wants to win the Sydney Peace Prize,” says one.

Carr disagrees. He claims he is not prescriptive about the shape of a Palestinian state, which could be worked out in detail later. The West Bank could be recognised first, and Gaza could join later if its militant Hamas leaders were unwilling to moderate their more hardline stance. According to Carr, Israeli concerns about a Palestinian state posing an existential threat could be allayed by requiring that Palestine be demilitarised. “The Israelis could always come in and take over again if the Palestinians didn’t stick to it,” he says.

Danby questions whether the Palestinians are capable of ruling themselves. “This has got nothing to do with reality,” he says. “You’ve got the Palestinian Authority (cutting) off the electricity to Hamas’s sewage works in Gaza. I mean, how could you hand over a government to two fighting organisations like that?”