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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2008-05-07 Daily Xml
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PALESTINIAN STATE

The Hon. SANDRA KANCK (20:02): I move:

That this council—

1. Recognises the event known to the Palestinian people as Al-Nakba—the Catastrophe;

2. Affirms the special connection of Australia to the land of Palestine and the Palestinians;

3. Regrets the failure of both sides, over the last 60 years, to reach an agreement which guarantees justice and lasting peace for both Israelis and Palestinians; and

4. Calls for the rapid establishment of the State of Palestine within the 1967 borders in accordance with UN Resolution 242.

On 14 May 1948, the British mandate in Palestine expired and, at midnight, the Zionist movement, consistent with UN recommendations, declared large swathes of that land to be the State of Israel. In this coming week, on 15 May, Israel will celebrate 60 years of statehood and, for the Palestinians whose land was stolen, it will be a day of mourning for what they know as Al-Nakba (or, to translate it, 'the catastrophe').

That catastrophe did not happen overnight on 14 May 1948: it was more like an active volcano erupting violently from time to time. Zionist forces had commenced an ethnic cleansing program well before 14 May 1948, with 250,000 Palestinians having already been uprooted, displaced or killed by April 1948; so that is two weeks ahead of the Declaration of Independence.

However, things came to a head in 1948, and in that year more than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed, with the residents either moved on or killed. Three-quarters of a million Palestinians were forced to flee their homes during 1948, and 10 per cent of the total male population was murdered. It is not surprising that the Palestinians refer to this as a catastrophe. This was ethnic cleansing on a large scale, not dissimilar to what we saw in the early 1990s with the fracturing of Yugoslavia. The people of Bosnia, at that time, were very lucky: the world saw what was happening and intervened. However, the world turned its head and looked the other way in 1948.

Palestinians were dispossessed of their land, internally displaced or exiled to surrounding nations, 720,000 of them fleeing to Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and 60 years later they still have no right to return to their land. I point out that 96 per cent of the land now known as Israel and the Occupied Territories was owned by Palestinians in 1946. The UN decision in 1947 to carve up the land clearly envisaged that the Palestinians would have only 55 per cent of their land left after partition. Al-Nakba ensured that it was significantly less than that. Huge tent encampments sprung up, and 60 years on those camps, swelled by the events of 1967, have become the permanent residences of tens of thousands of internally displaced Palestinians, who are now refugees in their own land.

That the World Food Program is active in the occupied territories says much about the disadvantage of the Palestinian people. There is good reason for that international intervention. Subsequent to the Six-Day War, Israel annexed further land with the construction of illegal settlements. From 2002 onwards a further 15 per cent of agricultural land belonging to Palestinians has been annexed as a consequence of building what the Israelis call the 'separation wall', and which others, such as former US president Jimmy Carter, call the 'apartheid wall'.

Land dispossession by this method will only increase as the wall continues to be built. With a population of 3.5 million in the occupied territories, but without the land to grow their own food, coupled with the problem of denial of access to water, Palestinians are not able to produce enough food for themselves. This problem has been exacerbated by Israeli control of road transport routes, the banning of any sea trade through Gaza, and the restriction of food supplies into Gaza.

More than 80 per cent of the population in Gaza is now dependent on UN food aid. According to recent data from the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, over 40 per cent of Palestinian five year olds are anaemic, and nearly 76 per cent of children aged one to six years show signs of becoming vitamin A deficient. Using, I suppose, bureaucratese, 35 per cent of all Palestinian families are 'food insecure' and another 20 per cent are vulnerable to insecurity.

Despite the fact that the combined population of Israel and Palestine makes up 0.15 per cent of the world's population, in the history of the United Nations 5 per cent of the Security Council resolutions have been about Palestine; that is 33 times what ought to be expected for the population size. There have been related resolutions about Israel's attacks on Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, but I have not included them in these figures. In addition to the Security Council resolutions, there have been resolutions and decisions of the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and UNESCO.

That 1948 was a disaster for the Palestinian people is well illustrated by the 16 resolutions passed by the UN Security Council in 1948 alone. This represents a supreme irony, because much of the impetus to establish the United Nations and for the adoption of a convention on human rights sprang from the appalling treatment of Jewish people in World War II.

The decision was made by world powers in the 1940s to provide a homeland for the Jewish people, but it surprises me that the world imposed Israel on Palestinian land in the way that it did without thought to the consequences. After all, the world had seen the impact of colonisation for a couple of centuries.

It is interesting to compare the statistics for the two sides. There have been 1,648 Israelis killed in clashes since 1948; that is about 27 Israelis killed each year in these clashes. By contrast, around 400 Israelis are killed per annum on their roads. Meanwhile, compared to the 1,648 deaths over 60 years, in 1948 alone 13,000 Palestinians were killed. There have been 4,719 Palestinians killed in clashes with the Israelis since 2000. Since that time, Israeli forces have killed more than 29,300 Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon; 15,000 Palestinians and other Arab combatants and civilians during the 1967 war; and, in the Palestinian uprisings from 1988 through to 1996 and from 2003 to 2006, Israeli forces killed 2,939 Palestinians. Human rights groups have estimated that 80 per cent of those killed were civilians.

Up until a week ago (I checked this last night) 340 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military this year. The ratio of deaths of Palestinians compared to Israelis in 40 years of fighting is something like 300:1. However, having statistics does not help when might is right, not morality.

I sometimes feel quite despairing when I hear or read what is going on—and for me that raises the question of what is going on now. What is going on now is systematic provocation. Last week the Left Bank was closed down for three days by Israel, because Israel was commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day. For what the Israelis say were security purposes, all travel between West Bank towns was stopped, there was forced closure of all Palestinian public services, a ban on hospital procedures involving travel, and the prevention of visits to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Having got that out of the way only three days ago, it is happening again, this time in anticipation, in a couple of days' time, of Israel's day to commemorate the 1,648 Israelis killed since 1948.

It would not be possible, despite all the history and even if it were desirable, to return the 5 million Jews who have emigrated from Europe and the US to what was Palestine, and so there is nothing to be gained by seeing this in black and white terms. In order to stop the bloodshed we have to find a solution that allows these two groups of people to live in peace. Former US Secretary of State, James Baker, in his foreword to Father Elias Chacour's book Blood Brothers (which I will lend to anyone who would like to read it), states:

To the fiercest partisans, all questions are answered in cold absolutes. There can be no forbearance, no balancing of costs and benefits, no tolerance, no respect for the other side, no mercy.

Yet forbearance, tolerance and respect will be required if the massive tensions in this tiny area in the world that have fuelled some of the world's major terrorist acts are to be resolved. While I condemn many of the Zionist actions of the past 60 years, I know, from my visit to Palestine last year, that there are some wonderful Israeli people who also recognise the injustices that have been perpetrated in that time. There are so many good people, such as those in the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, the residents and supporters of the Oasis of Peace, Machsom Watch, Christian Action for Israel, Jews for Justice for Palestine—the list goes on and on, and I suspect that when eventually a decent peace can be brokered with Palestine as an independent state, we will hear many Israelis saying, 'Yes, I supported this all along but I wasn't brave enough to speak out.' Both Israeli and Palestinian communities have the right to exist within secure borders. As part of that, a separate and viable state of Palestine needs to be created, with equal sovereignty and equivalent inalienable freedoms and human rights.

In November 1967 the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 242 (and that, of course, means Australia was involved) stating the principles for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. There were two principles. The first was the withdrawal of Israeli troops from territories they had occupied six months earlier. That still has not happened, and that was in 1967—and it is, by the way, why the West Bank and Gaza are called the Occupied Territories. The second principle was:

Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries free from threats or acts of force.

That has not happened either. The resolution then went on to affirm the necessity for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem. However, 41 years after passage of the resolution, none of this has been achieved for the Palestinian people.

In 2002, at a meeting of the Arab League in Beirut, a proposal called the Arab Peace Initiative was developed. Although it was about normalisation of relations between all the Arab states and Israel, it was quite specific about Palestine. The initiative:

offered peace in exchange for the return of land, specifically that land captured during the war in 1967;

invoked UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338;

called for the establishment of an independent Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital; and

called for a just settlement to the Palestinian refugee problem in terms of UN General Assembly Resolution 194.

I will address those points now that are part of the Arab Peace Initiative.

Peace for land seems to me a very sensible solution. The ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine has occurred because land was taken from the Palestinian people. When any of us have our property stolen, we usually try to get it back. So much is dependent upon land, because it is what we build our homes on, it is where we grow our crops, it is how we feed ourselves, it is our refuge and, when it is stolen, most people fight back, as have the Palestinians.

Handing back the land to the Palestinians based on the pre-1967 borders might seem tough for Israel but it was not their land for the taking, nor has been the land on which the Israeli settlements have encroached since 1967, nor has been the land appropriated by building the separation wall inside the Green Line—that is, the pre-1967 borders which have been agreed to in numerous UN motions.

UN Security Council Resolution 338 was passed in October 1973 in the context of the Yom Kippur War, calling for a ceasefire and, again, the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 224, which I have already discussed. It decided that negotiations would start immediately to establish a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. That, I remind members, was 1973.

The issue of East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestine is one that has been hotly contested over the years. The original UN Partition Plan envisaged that Jerusalem would be part of a UN protectorate to resolve the disputes about ownership. But to me, it seems that if Palestine gets the east section, then Israel gets the north, south and west, and that seems to be a reasonably fair division of land.

Solving the refugee problem, as it is called, is the final basis of the Arab Peace Initiative. Once again, the UN (which I remind you is responsible for the creation of Israel in the first place) is invoked. This time it is in terms of General Assembly Resolution 194, passed in November 1948, with particular reference to clause 11. Clause 11 reads:

The General Assembly, having considered further the situation in Palestine...

11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or inequity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;

Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation, and to maintain close relations with the Director of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees and, through him, with the appropriate organs and agencies of the United Nations;

It is a point of great contention to the Palestinians that their exiled countrymen are not allowed to return to their own lands. At the same time as this return is prevented by Israel, anyone of the Jewish faith or culture is granted permanent residency and/or citizenship if they so desire. Not only is it permitted; it is encouraged. This increasing population—from people in places like Russia and the Sudan who have no emotional connection to this particular piece of land—is, in turn, creating more illegal settlements on Palestinian land.

Australia has a unique historical connection to Palestine that should give all of us reason to support this motion. Australian soldiers fought and died to liberate the Arabs from the yoke of the Ottoman empire during World War I, and their names are etched on thousands of stones in Palestine and numerous war memorials here in Australia—35 Australians were killed in the battle of Beersheba. I quote Sonja Karkar from Women for Palestine, about that special relationship:

During World War II, Palestine was under a British mandate and Australian and New Zealand soldiers were back helping the British army to stop the Germans from reaching Jerusalem. They fought alongside several Palestinian brigades enlisted into the British army under the Palestine regiment. That decisive offensive took place in 1942 at El Alamein, Egypt, the first allied land victory of the war.

Tragically, more than 2,000 ANZACs from both campaigns would never see Australia or New Zealand again. Over 600 lie in unknown graves with Muslim and Christian Arabs who also died trying to defeat the German Army. Other ANZACs are buried in war cemeteries throughout Palestine, two of which can be found in Gaza—one beautifully cared for in the Palestinian town of Deir El-Balah, and the other in Gaza City. The Beersheba Commonwealth War Cemetery has graves of some 175 Australian soldiers and lies on the edge of today's sprawling commercial city that Israel has renamed Be'er Sheva. Our soldiers knew it as Beersheba with a largely Palestinian population.

One of the reasons that I have moved this motion is that on 12 March of this year the federal government moved a motion in both the House of Representatives and the Senate congratulating Israel on this impending anniversary, but it did not acknowledge the impact that this has had on the people of Palestine.

A short time ago, on a website called the American Friends Service Committee, I discovered what I thought was a wonderful quote about the continuing tensions between Israel and Palestine. It states:

We recognise that behind rhetoric, posturing and blame lies mortal fear on both sides that the essentials to living in dignity and fullness will be denied.

We have to acknowledge and address that fear because it is real, and until it is addressed I fear that tensions in the Middle East will go on simmering, with an occasional eruption. The toll over the last 60 years has been immense, and it is time that all those peace plans and resolutions were actually implemented rather than merely talked about.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. I.K. Hunter.

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