Caveats To Today's Discussion, Lest I Be Tarred
Before I get on with this today, I just want to make clear that:
- I am not a Zionist
- I am not Jewish
- I do not support Binyamin Netanyahu, or his government
- I think what is happening in Gaza, free of context, is a terrible thing;
- ...and I think that the IDF response is disproportionate.
That said...
Exile On Federation Mall
This business of West Australian senator Fatima Payman who crossed the floor to vote with the Greens in support of Palestinian statehood, is eating up a lot of airtime. On Sunday she was interviewed and said she'd do it again if the issue came up again. In response the Prime Minister summoned her to The Lodge and told her she's now excluded from Caucus until further notice. Albo can't outright expel her from the party because damnit, they need that vote in the Senate. So exiled out of Caucus it is, and Albo ends up looking weak. The ALP strategists must be having some heaving indigestion over this one.
The ALP is in a bit of a pickle. The offical line is that the ALP supports a two-state solution so Senator Hayman voting to support a Palestinian statehood is not against the policy. It's just that she's flying in the face of ALP rule where everybody takes collective action. You can't go it alone with policy positions. Them's the rules. So the ALP finds itself admonishing the person standing up for what they allegedly hold as their offical position.
The reason why the ALP doesn't commit to this position is because Hamas holds power in the Gaza strip, and as far as anybody can tell Hamas is a terrorist organ more than a credible government. The ALP would like to support a normal state for Palestine but they don't want to be supporting Hamas, or for that matter lend any legitimacy. The gap, as it were between the ideal of a Palestinian state that behaves like a state and Hamas is so large nobody is willing to stick to their ideals. If anything the events of 7 October 2023 have put a big fat underline under this problem.
If Senator Payman doesn't want to roll with the realpolitik that's her business but she shouldn't be surprised she's the one that's out on her own.
The Business of Voting With Your Conscience
Penny Wong sort of admonished her colleague by pointing out that she had to vote with the party against her own wishes during the debate for gay marriage. Fatima Payman retorted that process took 10 years and the Gazans did not have 10 years. I beg to differ - they have had 70 years to come to some peace agreement over there, but they have not- and it's not incumbent upon the Australian Parliament to make that happen. But that is by the by.
I guess the best way to interpret this is that if you draw false equivalences, you can expect to be shot down. Senator Payman also cited 40,000 casualties in that quip to underline how dire the situation is in Gaza - and let us all properly state it and leave no ambiguity, what the government of Israel is doing in the Gaza strip is terrible. However, what exactly we call that kind of loose acceptance of civilian casualties by the Israeli military, is highly contestable. Is it genocide? It certainly seems like War Crimes; but I'll come back to that one too.
If we are indeed playing the conscience game, I would like to hear something about those killed on 7th October 2023, which prompted this mess. What troubles me about Senator Payman and those who support her defiance is that on the face of it, we have no accounting of what the Hamas-led Palestinian militants did to buy the violent response from Israel. If the argument is that there should be a two state solution, and therefore there should be recognition of a Palestinian state, then surely that Palestinian state should be held to account for its violent actions. I don't really detect there to be that kind of consideration coming from that camp.
So Much For Having Labor Values
It's disingenuous at best to claim having core Labor values when you cross the floor. It's more contradictory and self-defeating.
Speaking afterwards, Payman said she crossed the floor to represent the core values of the Australian Labor Party — equality, justice, fairness and advocacy for the voiceless and the oppressed.
"I walked with my Muslim brothers and sisters who told me they have felt unheard for far too long," she said.
"And I walked with the people of Palestine, for the 40,000 killed, for the hungry and scared boys and girls who now walk alone without their parents and for the brave men and women who have to walk alone without their children.
"I walked for humanity. I am proud of what I did today and am bitterly disappointed that my colleagues do not feel the same way."
Ah yes. So if that's enough for her to cross the floor, then it begs the question just how much she understands these so-called Labor values, given that the Labor party by definition has always been the collective action party. I mean, hello. Has she not read much Marx and Engels? The moment she chose to walk with her Muslim brothers and sisters across that floor, she abandoned her ALP bothers and sisters. She put her Muslim identity above that of the political party that delivered her to Federal Parliament. She can't spin this as being faithful to true Labor Party values when she clearly states she put something else that's not the Labor Party above the party line.
Frankly that line of reasoning is a Liberal thing to be arguing - as in Capital 'L' The Liberal Party. If she can't toe the collective line come hell or high water, she's no Labor Party faithful. Please let's not delude ourselves into thinking otherwise. As for this threat of muslim votes being organised to oust Labor from safe seats, you have to say, maybe they're just conservatives who can't get a look in because they're also not white people.
Honestly, she should quit the ALP. She hasn't got the right stuff, and she even has the wrong stuff.
Does 40,000 Amount To A Genocide?
If you read history, you get inured to the suffering of other people. People suffer in history, wherever it took place. Worse still, nobody cries for Carthage in 2024. Cities got razed. they got bombed, and flattened, a couple even got nuked. Cities like Dresden, Osaka and Tokyo lost hundreds of thousands in a night. Nobody calls those moments a genocide because World War II served up 6 million Jews as the number that delineates what genocide looks like. Like it or lump it, 6 million is the benchmark. Nobody looks at Dresden and the 120,000 that perished that night and calls it a genocide of Germans. Nobody looks at the 120,000 lost in a flash at Nagasaki and calls that a genocide. So by this historic scale, if 120,000 Palestinians perished at the hands of the Israelis, it might not be a genocide yet.
So much for the 40,000 casualties forming an argument that says there is a genocide going on, but that's if you're a reader of history. It turns out that for lawyers, the bar for proving genocide is actually pretty high.
The bar for proving that a genocide has occurred is “so high,” said Cohen, the law professor. The ICJ has previously said that crimes that may be abhorrent, such as those constituting ethnic cleansing, do not automatically fall under the definition of genocide, he added.
A. Dirk Moses, an expert on genocide at the City College of New York, said the legal definition of genocide “is extremely stringent and narrow” and added that he is “skeptical” it can be “a tool for recourse for those that are suffering mass violence.”
The definition was set “not by the victims but by states, to ensure that the law cannot be used against them in meeting or confronting security threats,” he said.
We really should stop bandying around that word genocide like it has any relevance to what is going in Gaza. And that very situation out there, brings us back to the need for a proper state, and not a terrorist organisation to be ruling Gaza. I do feel sorry for the people of Gaza getting bombed. I feel sorry for those being used as human shields - Hamas is so ruthless and spinelessness at the same time, it would hide behind their own women and children to force larger collateral damage, and then use that collateral damage as evidence of genocide. The Gazan Palestinians would have been better served had they had a proper state instead of Hamas as their reps - but alas they voted them in and they never left.
In And Out Of Oslo
Once upon a time the Palestinians and the Israelis came to an agreement about a 'two state solution'. They went to Oslo and signed an accord on it. To get there, the Palestinians had to stop being terrorists and become more state-like. That was the long road for Yasser Arafat and the PLO who became the Palestinian Authority. They had to give up on being terrorists. The Israelis had to come to the table and agree that the Palestinians could not be all chased off and made into refugees. For those of us looking on, it was a watershed moment when we thought maybe the Arab-Israeli conflict could finally come to a close.
Boy were we wrong.
Less than six months after the signing of the DOP, an Israeli extremist killed 29 Palestinians in the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.[5] In response Hamas conducted its first lethal suicide bombingkilling eight Israelis and injuring 34.[41][42] An additional five Israelis were killed and 30 injured as a Palestinian detonated himself on a bus in Hadera a week later.[43] Hamas claimed responsibility for both attacks.[43] The attacks may have been timed to disrupt negotiations between Israel and PLO on the implementation of the Oslo I Accord.[41] In 1994, Hamas killed around 55 Israelis and injured over 150 in an effort to derail the peace process, stating that these attacks were a part of jihad against Israel's occupation and in retaliation for the Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre.[6]
Following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the labor party's recently selected prime minister Shimon Peres' would give the green light for the assassination of Yahya Ayyash, which Avi Shlaim describes as "the greatest mistake of Peres's political career" due to the subsequent rise of suicide attacks. Shortly after this increase in violence and Israeli security concerns, polls would show Likud's Binyamin Netenyahu ahead of Peres for the first time since Rabin's murder. Shlaim describes the role played by the Israeli right during and after the Oslo years, highlighting prime minister Binyamin Netenyahu's "largely successful" attempts to undermine the accords after his election in 1996.[44]
Despite the Oslo Accords stipulating that "neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations", Israeli settlement expansion continued during the Oslo period. The Jewish population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (excluding East Jerusalem) grew from 115,700 to 203,000 between 1993 and 2000.[45]
Binyamin Netanyahu came to power in Israel with the intent of killing the Oslo Accords. Similarly, Hamas broke free from the old PLO, specifically to keep fighting and by definition, kill the Oslo Accords. All these years later, It's still Bibi for the Israelis and Hamas for the Gazans. The shit show we're seeing has been very well planned, rehearsed and orchestrated. Neither side wants a sensible peace if they can keep fighting their ideological war.
It's one of life's tragedy that they make you think so much about their problems that they opted to make more complex and more violent for their own purposes. I have to say, after the Oslo Accords fell apart, I stopped being invested. There is no process. There is no peace deal that will hold.
"From The River To The Sea"
It's no joke that the phrase refers to wiping out the Israelis and reclaiming land. It sounds so romantic like something from a David Lean movie but what the phrase means is pretty uncompromising.
I've asked some Arabic women about all this, the conflict and prospect of peace and what I was told is that the way they learn it in their religion, when the fighting stops, it is the end of time. As long as the fight goes on, it means the Apocalypse is not yet here and the rest of the Arabs can live on knowing the end of the world is not here. If peace should ever break out, this would be a terrifying development because the end would be near. Even if the present day parties could or would agree to terms, from the Arab point of view it would be only a temporary respite before the fight continues once more. The whole point of it, is that there is no peace in their framework. Therefore, there is no peace process.
From the Arab perspective, the Oslo Accords was only ever going to be a mere ceasefire that punctuates the eternal struggle. Whatever peace that can be arrived at after this ordeal, will also be temporary.
There is no ever-lasting peace. The Arabs do not want it. The Israelis know this too about their Arab opponents. And so they will not stay their hand because there isn't a good enough reason to hold back if there isn't going to be a peace. What is killing 40,000 people, is the very notion of 'From The River To The Sea".
Here's the thing - and it's probably very unpopular to say it but it goes like this: You can't go and kill 1200 people and then complain the other side killed 40,000 of your people in retaliation. There isn't a moral scale for this kind of thing. If you go and cut up somebody's mother or sister and the other person comes and shoots your daughter in the face with a .50 Desert Eagle, you can't really claim victimhood. It doesn't make any sense - no matter how much you hated the guy and he hates you. Once you start the violence, you better own up to what ever results from the violence unleashed.
The Palestinian cause and the people who throw themselves behind them are shocked the world is rather tardy in helping them out. They underestimate just how fatigued the world is from the commitment to keep fighting. The rest of the world just wants real peace, people.
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