A celebration that ignores the plight of Palestine

Last time such an arrangement was tried was in 1980s South Africa, where the government endeavoured to conceal the ugly reality of apartheid by creating the fiction of "Bantustans" or "Black Homelands" for its black population, while maintaining total control over the country's natural resources and road network.

Israel's strategy for dealing with criticism of its colonisation of the occupied territories has been to keep the issue out of sight and off the agenda. The core issue, its advocates claim, is that Arafat/Hamas/the Palestinians refuse to renounce violence and recognise Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

Leaving aside the proposition that an occupied population must renounce violence while they are being violently dispossessed by an occupying power, the argument raises some interesting issues for a state that claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East.

According to the American Declaration of Independence, governments are instituted among men to secure the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to abolish it.

This contradiction, however, is unlikely to intrude upon the festivities of those gathering in Jerusalem to celebrate Israel's 60th birthday. In March Kevin Rudd invoked the memory of the Holocaust when he moved a motion in Parliament commending Israel for its "commitment to democracy, the Rule of Law and pluralism" and pledging Australia's friendship, commitment and enduring support.

Following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the British historian Arnold Toynbee described the Western powers' insistence that a non-Western people should be made to compensate European Jewry for a crime of which they were completely innocent as a "declaration of the inequality of the Western and non-Western sections of the human race".

Sixty years later the Palestinians are still paying for the Nazis' crimes.