Middle East debate sparks Labor warfare

The Labor Party has broken into open warfare over Israel-Palestine

The Labor Party has broken into open warfare over Israel-Palestine, with Bob Carr accusing former federal cabinet colleague Mark Dreyfus of holding a secret meeting to try to “silence” him.

Mr Carr, a former foreign minister, has discovered Mr Dreyfus and his Labor colleague Michael Danby met Chinese businessman Huang Xiangmo last year.

Mr Carr is outraged that, in the early weeks of last year’s election campaign, Mr Dreyfus and Mr Danby went to see Mr Huang, who provided $1.8 million to start the Australia-China Relations Instit­ute, which Mr Carr runs.

While Mr Huang was the instit­ute’s founding financier, it is now fully funded by the University of Technology Sydney.

The accusation is contained in Balcony Over Jerusalem, a new book looking at how the media, lobby groups and political parties in Australia deal with the Israel-Palestine issue. “The purpose of the visit by the two Labor figures was to protest that I had the audacity to ­occasionally criticise Israel for spreading settlements on the West Bank,’’ Mr Carr said.

“As it happened, I simply re­stated­ the policy of the Labor government that Dreyfus and I had been a part of and I used language­ little different from that used by the Obama administration.

“The implication of the Dreyfus­-Danby meeting with Huang was that he should use his position as financial supporter of the think tank that employed me to press me to cease expressing my opinion about Israel. It was, without any doubt, an attempt to pull levers to silence me from making points I’d made, on behalf of the last Labor government of which Dreyfus and I were part.”

When told of Mr Carr’s claim that the meeting was an attempt to silence Carr, Mr Dreyfus said: “Bob Carr is not speaking on ­behalf of the former Labor government, and should not pretend to do so. The meeting to which Mr Carr refers was private.”

Before that meeting, Mr Carr and Mr Dreyfus were close, and in 2013 Mr Carr had raised with colleagues­ the idea of Mr Dreyfus being a possible leader of the party. But the two men no longer talk.

Mr Carr has driven a campaign to pressure Israel to agree to a two-state solution under which Palestinians would have their own state, as recommended in the original 1947 UN resolution. Mr Carr has argued that after 50 years of occupation, Israel will not agree to a Palestinian state ­unless pressured.

He argued yesterday at the NSW Labor conference that two-thirds of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet members were opposed to a two-state solution, and they needed to know that countries such as Australia wish to protest about this.

Due largely to the efforts of leader Bill Shorten, Mr Dreyfus and Mr Danby, Victoria is now the only branch that has not called for the recognition of Palestine.

John Lyons is the author of Balcony Over Jerusalem