As I travel around the country talking about My Israel Question, Middle East politics and Zionism, my latest stop last weekend was Adelaide. The Sunday Mail reports:
A heckler who ranted that the holocaust never happened failed to disrupt a lecture by journalist and author Antony Loewenstein in Adelaide yesterday.
Mr Loewenstein, in town to talk about his controversial book My Israel Question – which tackles Israel’s occupation of Palestine – was harangued by a man who said the gassing of Jews during World War II never happened.
The 50-strong audience [editor: for the record, the crowd was at least 120 people] at the Rendevous Allegra Hotel shouted the man down.
In his speech Mr Loewenstein told the audience that Israel would cease to exist unless it develop stronger ties to the Arab world.
He was also critical of the media in Australia for not providing an Arab voice.
It was a wonderful event – and this was after giving many interviews to South Australian media and lecturing at the University of Adelaide – despite the lone, ranting individual in the corner. I was humbled by the hundreds of individuals, from a diverse range of backgrounds, who wanted to hear and discuss the Middle East conflict.
It was a strange feeling, as an Australian Jew, for many members of the Lebanese, Muslim community in Adelaide (including some Druze) to say I gave them a voice in the current, toxic, media environment where discussing Arabs, Palestine and Israeli policies is almost taboo. I was very happy to receive the praise, but also wondered about the young, articulate Lebanese people sadly absent from our media landscape.
What strikes me as I travel around the nation is the ability of the Israel/Palestine issue to cross all religious, ethnic, environmental and political lines. This affects the young and old, devout and atheist, Australian and overseas-born. The status-quo no longer works and the political and media elite ignores this at its peril.
Fascinating, that book launch!
Am not an intellectual and this was the first occasion of this sort I can remember attending, although I recall hearing a bitter attack by exiled journalist Margo Kingston on the mess that is mass-media in this country; sentiments reiterated by Loewenstein.
So, a small gathering of people open-minded enough to meet our later-day Niemoller and each other, and anticipate and hear an informed “take” on mid eastern affairs, had turned up.
I felt a bit sorry for Tony, who I met for the first time, in his efforts at consciousness-raising, when a city of a million and a quarter people could only provide a hundred people or so for a virtual discussion concerning this most pivotal of issues.
After observing and meeting some of the vivacious, dignified Levantine people who had organised much of the thing and who turned up often replete with anecdotes of life in the modern Middle-East, I feel we can start thinking of not only the vast and needless loss of life of Middle-Easterners of various types, but the jeopardising of the soul- the very soul- of the West and Westerners.
I went a way with the distinct impression that the people I was privileged to meet are the modern day inheritors of the quiet, strong spirit once possessed by the pitiful, heroic Auschwitz victims or, say, British endurers of the Blitz of 1941.
So, where has the ignorant spirit of fascism also migrated? Sad and disturbing, isn’t it, if you have reached my conclusions.
There were, of course, two issues at stake as far as the launch itself was concerned. First and formost a gathering of willing free-spirits were confronted with a metaphorical elephant in the room – the stupefying realisation of the scope of the shameful realities of the prolonged middle-eastern disaster.
The issue travelling parallel was the sense of embarrassment and shame felt by Anglo-Irish and Jewish Australian citizens living in this privileged little oasis of ours, inexperienced as to the grim realities of a lonely, agony ridden and turbulent world beyond our safe, sandy shores, but uneasily complicit in our comfort.
What worries me is; that once upon a time, Jews, free-thinkers and so many otherinnocent people in pre-Hitlerite/Stalinist Europe felt this comfortable. Two hundred years ago free Australians indigenes felt, no doubt, a timeless comfort (compared to today). And more recently Israelis and even more so; Lebanese, Iraqis and Palestinians, remember the lost, lazy glow of an Australian sort of sunshine.
What can this augur for those sunbaking or playing a leisurely round of deck-tennis (with beer and pretzels!) aboard a modern-day “Ship of Fools”?
Back again!
Just had an epiphany of sorts catching up on some reading elsewhere; in this case a tale of educative value offered in the weekend “Age” from the pen of Terry Lane. Encompasses every thing the book launch was about, good and bad; positive and negative.
Told of the friendship between the seminal thinker Edward Said and Israeli virtuoso and maestro Daniel Barenboim and their attempt to build bridges, in the form of a youth orchestra including all nationalities from the region.
Naturally, both received (understandable)criticism from Arabs as well as some abuse from more chauvinist Israelis, but the project continues.
So it should. Nurturing peaceful coexistance is the aim. That is not what “The Ant” and his patronising patrons do.