Come on, Irene

COMMENT

Last week’s City News featured a story about visiting Palestinian journalist Sameh Habeeb, which quoted Greens Councillor Irene Doutney giving her views on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

I have a lot of respect for the work Cr Doutney does in the community. As a City Councillor she plays a major role in campaigning for the environment, as well as supporting the disadvantaged and the City’s youth. Her tireless efforts are to be applauded.

Her views on the Middle East’s only true democracy are not.

She accuses Israel of “huge” human rights abuses, compares it to apartheid-era South Africa and calls to boycott it.

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies CEO Vic Alhadeff, who served as chief sub-editor of The Cape Times during apartheid-era South Africa, says “Comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa not only has no basis in reality, but is an insult to those who suffered under apartheid.”

He continues, “Every citizen of Israel, Arab and Jewish, has the vote, while Arabs serve on the Supreme Court, as Israeli diplomats and in the Israeli Parliament as MPs. To equate that to apartheid South Africa, where blacks had separate park benches, separate swimming pools and separate entrances to the post office, is absurd.”

Israel has no desire to rule over the Palestinians. The 1993 Oslo Accords, which gave the Palestinians self-rule in the disputed territories, were meant to pave the way for peace. Ehud Barak’s offer to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000 was meant to cement it.

Barak offered withdrawal from all of Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank, an Israeli land swap to compensate for territory that Israel would keep, a land link between Gaza and the West Bank and a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. He also offered $30 billion in compensation to Palestinian refugees. Arafat rejected the offer and started the second intifada in which many more innocent civilians on both sides died. (In 2008, Ehud Olmert expanded on Barak’s offer. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas did not even bother to respond.)

The difference is that the Arab deaths – and any civilian loss of life is tragic no matter which side one supports – were the unfortunate casualties of a war their own leaders had started, while the Israelis killed, like the 21 teenagers murdered at the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv, were deliberately targeted by Palestinian terrorists.

A swathe of terrorist attacks like this is what led to the construction of Israel’s security barrier, dubbed by its opponents (including Cr Doutney) as a “wall” despite only four percent of it being so. Terrorism is also why there are checkpoints throughout the disputed territories. Checkpoints aren’t an oppression mechanism – they’re there to protect the citizens of a sovereign, U.N. member nation from being murdered by terrorists.

And chief among the Palestinian terrorist organisations is Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel. Hamas controls Gaza with a tight fist, having seized the territory from the more moderate Fatah using violence. If Gaza is like a prison as Cr Doutney says, then it is they who have made it so.

Opponents of Hamas are brutalised and murdered. A totalitarian organisation, Hamas indoctrinates children from a young age and teaches them to hate the Jews. They are told the Jews are pigs who feast on the blood of Arab children. Their kindergartens and schools are used as weapons factories and missile launching sites.

In December 2008, Israel wanted to renew a six-month truce that had just expired. Hamas refused and resumed firing rockets into Israel. This is how the Gaza conflict that Mr Habeeb reported from began. After withdrawing in 2005 – prompting a barrage of 8,000 Hamas rockets – Israel had no desire to return to Gaza. Hamas forced its hand.

Cr Doutney calls the behaviour of the Israeli Defence Forces appalling. This is in stark contrast with UK army Colonel Richard Kemp, a man more than qualified to comment on the reality and horrors of war, who at the height of the Gaza conflict told the BBC, “I don’t think that there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.”

U.S. academic Alan Dershowitz says, “Faced with comparable dangers … no nation in history has ever tried so hard to require its military to operate within the rule of law”. The New York Times in May 2003 reported that “One of the most unusual aspects of Israeli law is the rapid access that petitioners, including Palestinians, can gain to Israel’s [Supreme] Court”. Adds Dershowitz, “It has protected the rights of Palestinians, non-combatants, prisoners of war and others, often at considerable risk to Israeli civilians and soldiers”. Hardly the actions of a serial human rights abuser.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza is indeed tragic, as is the number of Palestinian civilians who perished during the January 2009 conflict. But it was Hamas that brought war to these people.

Says Alhadeff, “Israel has delivered one million tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza since its military operation concluded … an average of 500 truckloads enter the area from Israel every week … and about 10,000 patients and their escorts were transferred from Gaza to Israel and the West Bank to receive medical treatment during 2009.”

Cr Doutney speaks of boycotting Israel but it was there that the technology for her mobile phone and much of the operating system her computer uses was developed.

In the democratic nation of Israel, where all people are free to practice any religion, where Arab citizens contribute to society, the economy and sit in Parliament, scientists and doctors are busy every day making technological and medicinal breakthroughs. Israel is also busy working on new methods of conservation to save the natural environment that Cr Doutney is so passionate about. Israel is simply too busy doing all these things to want to occupy and oppress another people.

But if attacked by terrorists it will defend the safety and security of its citizens. I’m sure Cr Doutney would expect Australia’s Government to do the same.