The hypocrisy of Australia: Condemning Israeli ‘settlers’ while settling Aboriginal land
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-812412
Australia, an entire country founded on settler violence, is imposing sanctions on a handful of Israelis whom it accuses of “settler violence.” Talk about hypocrisy!
The Australian government has announced that it is penalizing seven Israeli “settlers” and a youth group that it suspects of clashing with Palestinian Arab rock-throwers.
Folks who live in the “land down under’ know something about “settler violence.” The first foreigner to “discover” Australia was a violent settler named Cap. James Cook. Kids around the world today are taught that he was a famous explorer. And that he was. But the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific remember him a little differently.
In 1770, Cook and his settler gang landed in New Zealand, where they murdered at least eight members of the indigenous Maori tribe. Then they headed west to Australia, landing there on April 29 and shooting a member of the Dharawal/Eora nation who opposed them. It would not be the last act of violence by the Cook settlers.
Eight years later, violent British settlers established a penal colony in Australia. European criminals were not the only dangerous import. The settlers also introduced tuberculosis, smallpox, and measles.
Australia is almost three million square miles in size. That’s 350 times the size of Israel. You’d think the violent British settlers who took over Australia could have left at least part of the country to the indigenous tribes, known as the Aboriginals. But no, the settlers had to have the entire thing. So they expanded, and they expelled, and they murdered. Within a century, the Aboriginals, who had numbered 750,000, were down to less than 100,000.
What was it like for victims of British settler violence in Australia? Hannah McGlade, a member of one of the Aboriginal tribes, the Kurin Minang Noongar, spoke about it at a United Nations forum last year.
“My people, the Noongar, were violently dispossessed from their lands by the British, and were basically enslaved,” she said. “My great-grandmother was an indentured child laborer. People who resisted the very cruel laws of the time were incarcerated and taken from their countries by chains to an island prison, where many died. Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families, en masse, as part of a policy called assimilation.”
Israeli “settlers” are not like Australian settlers
ISRAELI “SETTLERS” do not enslave Palestinian Arabs, force Arab children to become indentured child laborers, take them away in chains, or forcibly remove Arab children from their families. But the descendants of the Australian settlers who did that to the Noongar now have the chutzpah to impose sanctions on the Israelis.
Has the mistreatment of the Aboriginals ended?
According to Hannah McGlade, the Noongar to this day face “the removal of children from their mothers,” “high incarceration rates,” “very inhumane prison conditions,” and, as a result, “more Aboriginal suicides.” McGlade said the Noongar suffer from “the shocking, ongoing impacts of colonization, and we know that systemic and institutional racism and discrimination is a key driver of these issues.”
She pointed out that the Australian government is still refusing to embrace the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which the United Nations issued over 10 years ago. “Australia cannot claim leadership internationally, without respecting its international commitments in respect to indigenous peoples,” McGlad said.
To which I would add: Australia cannot claim to be concerned about “settler violence” in other places of the world, when it has still not addressed its own history and its modern-day consequences.
There’s another important aspect to this week’s hypocritical Australian action against Israelis.
One of the victims of the Hamas attack on October 7 was an Australian. If you didn’t know that, it’s because Australian officials hardly ever mention her.
A grandmother named Galit Carbone, who was born and raised in Sydney, was among those who were murdered on Kibbutz Be’eri. Her brother Danny, who lives nearby, later recalled the phone call he received from Galit, who was huddled in fear in her home as she heard the Hamas terrorists approaching. “And that was the end,” he said. “I didn’t hear anything from her afterward.”
“You were always full of love, of helping, of nonchalance, and of giving,” Galit’s daughter, Maya, said at her funeral. “You taught us to look at the world with wonder and you taught us values. You pushed us to be independent and reminded us to be ourselves.”
So where are the Australian sanctions against the Palestinian Arabs who took part in the mass murder on October 7?
Why doesn’t Australia impose sanctions on Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, which has boasted that it participated in the October 7 attack?
Why is Australia giving $20 million to UNRWA this year, even after it was revealed that many UNRWA staff members are Hamas terrorists and even involved in holding Israelis hostage?
Last week, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong issued a statement about the sanctions on Israelis, saying: “We call on Israel to hold perpetrators of settler violence to account and to cease its ongoing settlement activity, which only inflames tensions and further undermines stability and prospects for a two-state solution.”
Well, I call on Australia to hold the perpetrators of the October 7 terrorist attacks to account and to cease settling Australians in Aboriginal territory, which only inflames tensions between Australian settlers and native Aboriginals and further undermines stability and prospects for a peaceful solution to their 200-year-old conflict.
The writer is a past board member of the American Zionist Movement and served as a delegate to the 38th World Zionist Congress.
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