…Polls now show that while Hawke might have reflected Australian attitudes in the 1980s, in the 21st century Rudd and Gillard certainly don’t.

Individual polls can be misleading. It’s the trend of polls that matters. Occasional polls on Israel-Palestine were conducted by a small number of companies between 1946 and 1990. Over that 40-plus-year period, they tell us that: Australians were evenly divided on whether Palestine should be partitioned at all in the late 1940s; Australians supported Israel by a large majority in 1967 when it defeated Egypt and invaded and occupied the Palestinian territories; and Australians were pro-Israel in 1974, again by a large majority, following the 1973 war with Syria, Egypt and Jordan.

This support continued into the 1980s. A McNair Ingenuity poll in 1981 asked, “Are your sympathies … mainly with the Jewish people? OR mainly with the Arabic people? OR are they more or less equal?” (Results: Jewish people 28 per cent; Arab people 4 per cent; Equal 55 per cent; Don’t know 13 per cent.)

At least seven reputable polls have been conducted in the past decade touching on the question of Australian attitudes to Israel-Palestine.

In 2003, 35 per cent agreed ”with American policy on Israel and Palestine”, while 39 per cent disagreed.

In two polls in 2006, sympathy was almost evenly divided between the two sides, with two-thirds in one poll saying their sympathies were ”equal”.

But in 2007, after the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, 68 per cent had a negative view of Israel and, in 2009, after the war in Gaza, 24 per cent sympathised with Israel, 28 per cent with the Palestinians and 26 per cent with neither.

In 2010, 55 per cent described the conflict as ”Palestinians trying to end Israel’s occupation and form their [own] state”, while 32 per cent preferred ”Israelis fighting for security against Palestinian terrorism”.

And last year, while sympathies were almost evenly divided, 63 per cent were against settlers building on occupied land and 51 per cent thought Australia should vote ”Yes” for Palestinian statehood at the UN, compared to 15 per cent ”No” and 20 per cent ”Abstain”.

I am listing here only polls from private polling companies with established reputations in the specialist field.

The overwhelming trend shows a sharp swing since the 1980s against Israel’s image and actions among ordinary Australians.

The fact of the current disjunction between government policy and public attitudes on the Israel-Palestine issue receives almost no publicity, unlike polls on Afghanistan. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to hide.

More here on the increasingly embarrassing attempts by American Zionists to defend Israel by not talking about occupation. At all. Ever.

In a warm café in central Baku, Shimon sips his Persian tea and grimaces at the unusually large snowdrifts outside. Nearby is the building that houses the Israeli Embassy — and Shimon’s unofficial place of work. In all the years he has worked in Azerbaijan, he has only been to the building once.

Shimon is one of dozens of Israeli Mossad agents who work in Azerbaijan at any given time. His familiarity and comfort in the country are obvious as he speaks about various towns and cities that he has come to know.

“This is ground zero for intelligence work,” he said, having agreed to talk on condition of anonymity. “Our presence here is quiet, but substantial. We have increased our presence in the past year, and it gets us very close to Iran. This is a wonderfully porous country.”

 

Nestled between Iran and Russia, Azerbaijan has long been a listening post. But the recent tensions over Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions have brought the small country to the forefront and established it as a pivotal hub for the spy wars being conducted between Iran and the West.

According to Arastun Orujlu, a former Azeri counter-intelligence officer and director of the East-West Research Centre, the capital, Baku, is like Norway during the First World War. “Or like Casablanca was during the Second World War. Yes, exactly like this — it is at the centre of the spying.”

…

“There is anger over perceived Iranian arrogance, and the fact that Iran continues to support and grow ties with Armenia, with which Azerbaijan has a territorial dispute,” said Mehman Aliyev, director of the independent news agency Turan.

Israel has capitalised on such discontent and an open market in Azerbaijan, forging business and military links over the past two decades. Israel buys 30 per cent of its oil from Azerbaijan, and recently awarded a lucrative gas-drilling contract off the coast of southern Israel to an Azerbaijani company. Israel has also recently set up a factory outside Baku, which makes approximately one third of the parts for its drones. The unmanned aerial vehicles, which are used to gather intelligence, are also being sold to Azerbaijan amid speculation that a base is being constructed for a permanent mission over Iran.

“The Azerbaijani military force is already completed in sync with the Israeli and American systems,” Dr Orujlu said. “Largely because the Americans have been using Azerbaijan for medevacs from Afghanistan for years.” Shimon confirmed that the Israeli and Azerbaijani militaries were “well acquainted” with one another.

But for residents of Azerbaijan who maintain ties to Iran, the newfound closeness with Israel is a subject of distress.

A recent plot to attack the Israeli Embassy in Baku is being attributed to two young Azeris with ties to Iran. Their families said that their sons’ cases were being blown out of proportion to set an example.

Hacking group Anonymous are now threatening Israel for “crimes against humanity” against the Palestinians:

Through the use of media deception and political bribery, you have amassed the sympathies of many. You claim to be democratic, yet in reality this is far from the truth. In fact, your only goal is to better the lives of a select few while carelessly trampling the liberties of the masses.

Amongst it all sits the Israeli people themselves who according to a new study aren’t too fond of democracy at all (via the Forward)

In late January, the Israel Democracy Institute’s Guttman Center for Surveys, along with the Avi Chai Foundation, released the results of a comprehensive survey on the religious beliefs of Israeli Jews. Among other interesting findings, it showed that some 80% of the Jewish population in Israel believes in God — which, perhaps, is good news. What is not so good is that only 44% of those questioned replied that if there is a contradiction between democratic values and Halacha (Jewish law), the former should be upheld. This implies that when push comes to shove, a majority of Israelis would prefer Jewish law to democratic values.

The Zionist future, if it has one, will increasingly revolve against Jewish supremacy.

Nice legacy.

The movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel — long painted as a fringe group by the Israel advocacy community — is seeking to wrap itself in the mantle of the mainstream American left. At the movement’s first-ever national conference, presenters and attendees compared BDS to the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, the Cesar Chavez grape boycott and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, from which it draws inspiration.

They also worried about how to brand themselves in easily accessible sound bites.

“Palestine has to become part of the American vocabulary in the way Americans learn about and digest information, like in the kinds of magazines you read in the laundromat,” said Sarah Schulman, a professor of English at the City University of New York who spoke at the conference, held at the University of Pennsylvania the first weekend in February. “We have to brand BDS as something alive, progressive, increasingly available, with a human face, something Americans can relate to.”

But Penn’s Israel advocacy community greeted all this with a cold shoulder. Rather than protest the event, Rabbi Mike Uram, director of Penn Hillel, urged the group’s pro-Israel member organizations to steer clear of the program, lest they legitimize the BDS movement by drawing attention to it.

“On Penn’s campus, people don’t know what BDS is,” Uram said. “To engage in a conversation is to raise them to a level that they are not at.”

“Spending our time and resources and efforts standing outside, protesting the event, says that this is mainstream political discourse,” added Noah Feit, a sophomore who is president of Penn Friends of Israel. “We decided not to stage a protest, because we prefer not to legitimize radical political discourse. We think there are better and more effective forums to express our opinions.”

This contrast — a nascent pro-Palestinian movement craving legitimacy, with the Jewish establishment ignoring it — was a surprising outcome of what some had expected to be a volatile few days on an Ivy League campus with a large percentage of Jewish students and graduates. Area Jewish leaders had signed on to advertisements decrying the conference; some criticized the university for even allowing it to occur.

…

At the conference, which was organized by the 15-member Penn BDS group, there was talk of positioning the initiative as a democracy movement. A student activist media handbook circulating at the conference admonished BDS proponents to “infuse our language with values like freedom, equal rights, democracy, etc. This allows you to speak to Americans in terms they understand. Most can’t define Zionism, but freedom and equality are easy terms for most people to conceptualize. Emphasizing shared values also allows you to connect with Americans on both an emotional and intellectual level.”

That message was echoed by Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian rights activist and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada website. “We are fighting for rights people have fought for all over the world,” Abunimah said in his well-attended keynote speech. “We have to link this struggle to so many other struggles in this country and around the world.”

A senior lawmaker says Iran’s Majlis is considering a plan to cut off the country’s economic transactions with South Korea’s Samsung in reaction to the company’s anti-Iran teaser.

News came this week of three individual battles against Israel’s discriminatory regime that have scored gains. Bedouin from the Jahalin tribe will not be expelled to a community next to the Abu Dis dump, and their school will not be demolished. A tender for a luxury development in Lifta, a Palestinian village on the western outskirts of Jerusalem, destroyed in 1948, was withdrawn by court order. And Munther Fahmi, the Jerusalem-born owner of the bookstore in East Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel, will be allowed to remain in the city of his birth. Millions of hours of work and immeasurable amounts of endurance on the part of Palestinians has paid off.

Perhaps it was the Jahalin ecological school made of used tires, in the Khan al-Ahmar community, that pierced the thick Israeli hide and drew enough international attention to make the Israeli destruction authorities think twice. For the refugees of Lifta (who now live in Jerusalem ), it was presumably their uncommon access to their ruined homes that prompted them to appeal against the damage to their heritage and its beauty. Their appeal, filed jointly with Israeli activists and organizations, led to the exposure of problems with the development tender. And the signatures of authors Amos Oz and David Grossman, as well as those of other public figures, surely sent the Interior Ministry the message that it would be misguided to deport Fahmi from his birthplace.

How tempting it is to think that these three examples contain some magic formula that could be copied to ensure the success of thousands of other battles.

But they don’t. The awareness that these are exceptions to the rule tempers the already low-key celebrations. It is not yet clear whether all the Jahalin living in tent compounds on the eastern outskirts of Jerusalem will be saved from a forced move to near the dump, a plan cooked up over the past year. But the occupation authorities remain determined to commit more violations of international law and to concentrate this protected population in a single, permanent location. The affected community will be allowed to review and comment at the end of the planning process but will not be consulted during it.

Despite protests, including from Europe, the enormous expanse of Area C of the West Bank, which is under Israeli control, continues to be an Israeli laboratory for implementing sophisticated methods for the hidden deportation of Palestinians.

…

Rabbis for Human Rights? This organization is not involved only in the battles of Lifta and the Jahalin. It takes part in dozens of other campaigns, most of them Sisyphean, to rescue people from the evil jaws of the regime of Jewish privilege. They are, unintentionally, bold and painful attempts to save “Jewish” from being a synonym in Israel for racist, lordly, hard-hearted, hypocritical, shortsighted.

The South African government might consider supporting sanctions against Israel as it explores a variety of peaceful methods to step up support for the Palestinians’ fight for freedom and independence.

“We want to step up our support of the Palestinians and are investigating a number of peaceful ways to upgrade this support. We have no problem with supporting the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aganist Israel,” Minister of Arts and Culture Paul Mashatile told The New Age.

Mashatile was addressing a press conference in Pretoria yesterday at the Department of Arts and Culture, during the signing of a cultural agreement between South Africa and Palestine.

During the signing Palestnian Arts and Culture Minister Siham Barghouti and Palestinian Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture Musa Abu Ghreibeh, exchanged gifts with their South African counterparts, Minister Mashatile and deputy minister Joe Pehle. 

Later on in the year the Palestinians will host South Africa’s Arts and Culture Week, where South African artists and cultural entrepreneurs will present cultural exhibitions from their country.

Mashatile’s statement presents a considerable upping of the ante in South Africa’s long-standing support for the Palestinians and the cementing of a relationship that goes back decades, to when the ANC was struggling against the former apartheid government.

“Your Excellency, we count the people of Palestine among those patriots who stood by us in our struggle for national liberation,” Mashatile told the Palestinian delegation as he recalled former President Nelson Mandela’s 1997 speech to honor the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

“Having achieved our freedom we can fall into the trap of washing our hands of difficulties that others face. Yet we would be less human if we do so,” said Mandela in 1997.

BDS supporters argue that Israel’s continued illegal occupation of the Palestinians territories and expropriation of Palestinians land, water and other resources can only be stopped when sanctions against Israel begin to bite economically

“We are grateful for South Africa’s support for our efforts to become members of the international community and look towards you for guidance in our continued struggle,” said Barghouti.

The two delegations agreed that future cooperation would include language development, heritage preservation, literature exchanges and exhibitions.

This week, the BBC issued its final ruling on a controversy which has been raging for nearly a year after the words “Free Palestine” were censored from a freestyle rap played on Radio 1Xtra.

Appearing on the popular Charlie Sloth Hip Hop M1X last February, the artist Mic Righteous performed a rap which included the lyrics: “I can scream Free Palestine for my pride/still pray for peace.”

BBC producers replaced the word ‘Palestine’ with the sound of breaking glass and this is the version that was aired and which can be seen on a video on the BBC website(the censorship occurs at 2:59).

The edited performance was repeated in April on the same show.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has spent the last eight months trying to find out why the decision to censor an artist who raised the issue of Palestine was made.

During the course of a long correspondence, the BBC’s head of editorial standards for audio and music, Paul Smith, wrote that the show’s producer “did not edit out the word ‘Palestine’ because it was offensive — referencing Palestine is fine, but implying that it is not free is the contentious issue.”

In that single sentence, a senior BBC executive revealed the BBC’s complete disdain for the Palestinians and their suffering, and its shameful disregard for international law when it is being broken by Israel.