Questions about union support for Palestine a smokescreen

It is interesting how the other three relevant Australian NGOs (CARE, World Vision and Actionaid) did not get questioned and odd also how their Palestinian partner NGOs (like just about every Palestinian NGO, according to an aid insider who spoke to me) have equally signed up to the 2005 BDS call, yet it is the APHEDA partner that gets singled out.

The Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO Network) is signed up to the BDS and all the Australian NGOs have at least one Palestinian NGO partner who is a member of the PNGO Network. If the Australian government (or AIJAC) were really serious about severing connection with any Palestinian group that backs BDS, then the Palestinian Authority would also have to be shunned because it has implemented partial BDS against settlement goods.

The Australian union movement is increasingly backing BDS against a recalcitrant Zionist state. There are a handful of prominent unionists, such as ACTU Assistant Secretary, Michael Borowick, an Orthodox Jew, who opposes BDS and organises Zionist lobby trips to Israel and Palestine but they are a dwindling minority.

An aid insider tells me that a number of key unionists continue to bully APHEDA behind the scenes in an attempt to stop its work in Palestine, including the successful study tours led by APHEDA. The pressure has singularly failed.

These trips are seen as a threat because they refuse to follow the path set by AIJAC, Albert Dadon and other Zionist lobbyists who take politicians and journalists on propaganda tours around Israel (with five minutes in Ramallah). The Greens recently obtained a long list of media and political elite figures that took the Dadon trip last year and this proved that both major political parties and corporate press are ideologically compromised by such visits.

For those who know the reality in the region, advocating for Palestinian rights under occupation has become unavoidably and necessarily linked to some form of BDS endorsement.

It is ironic that the right-wing Israeli Knesset is making it illegal for Israeli’s to support BDS and yet this is the “democratic” state that Zionists argue we must uncritically support.

Even in Australia, it's apparently illegal to simply protest outside a shop, Max Brenner, which supports the Israeli army. It is not, as claimed by blind defenders of Zionism, an attack on Jewish businesses but rather a non-violent and legitimate form of protest, like what occurred against companies and individuals who supported apartheid in South Africa.

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd is always quoting the fact that Australia has “greatly” increased aid to the Palestinians to $56m in 2011-12 and the important activities the aid is doing. However, he uses this “fact” to erroneously answer questions about Australia’s support of Palestinian aspirations (statehood, refugee right of return, end the occupation, human rights etc) for peace. In a political conflict such as this, providing aid is only half the answer: it must also be coupled with the insistence that Israel comply with relevant international, humanitarian law. The Australian government is silent on law enforcement against its great friend and ally.

Following the ripple effect of the Marrickville BDS campaign and rising public support for the Palestinians, there is growing scrutiny in Parliament on AusAID’s Palestine program. It’s tragic that Palestine, with the least resources available to it and under siege, has to answer for the world’s ills and people’s petty prejudices.

APHEDA’s Middle East project officer Lisa Arnold tells me: “Gaza is a man-made disaster of more than five times the scale of the Indian Ocean tsunami; it’s just that the deaths and destruction occur over the course of decades, not minutes.”

The reality remains that APHEDA operates vitally important programs across Palestine – a few years ago I visited one of its programs at Gaza’s only rehabilitation hospital – and the Zionist lobby with its corporate and media mates should not be allowed to threaten this life-line to a people under occupation.

It is not the right of the Australian Senate to pry into what APHEDA or their Palestinian partners do with their own monies or other donor funds. What AIJAC and its lobby friends desperately want to avoid is any examination of what Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza and why hysteria against any critics of Zionist policies is now par for the course by its Israeli government masters.