The following advertisement, sponsored by Australians for Palestine, appeared in newspapers across Australia today, including the Sydney Morning Herald and Australian. I added my signature to endorse the proposal for the Australian parliament to recognise the Palestinian people and their dispossession since 1948.
Showing all posts tagged Australia
Blaming the victims
Talking honestly about Palestine in Australia is clearly too challenging for some: The decision by a Sydney library to dump an exhibition about Palestinian refugees after a visit by counter-terrorism police the night before it opened has been criticised as an act of censorship. Leichhardt municipal library was to launch the Al-Nakba pictorial exhibition last…
Finally, a place to call home
Back in 2004, I interviewed a stateless refugee housed on Manus Island by the former Australian government. Aladdin Sisalem was a kind, quietly-spoken man who simply craved a better life for himself, but John Howard’s system wanted him to suffer for this desire. I met with Aladdin a few times in Melbourne after his release.…
A celebration that ignores the plight of Palestine
My following piece in the Melbourne Age, co-written with Michael Shaik, reflects on Israel’s 60th anniversary: “If you will it,” wrote Theodore Herzl, the founding father of the Zionist movement, in 1902, “it is no dream.” The dream to which he referred was the establishment of a Jewish state in the Arab country of Palestine.…
Israel’s 60th birthday – what the media left out
My following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey: Antony Loewenstein, author of My Israel Question and the co-founder of Independent Australian Jewish Voices, writes: “I am not a Jew”, said an Arab radio journalist in Jerusalem to the New York Times. “How can I belong to a Jewish state? If they define this as…
Iraq, the Kurds and where to from here
I was recently interviewed by Peshawa Muhammed of the Kurdistani Nwe Newspaper, the publication of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Iraqi Kurdistan (Noam Chomsky was also interviewed recently.) The article ran on May 4: Peshawa Muhammed: Five years on, how do you assess the current US policy in Iraq? Which option do you think…
The lobby gets a refit
The recent launch of new Israel lobby in the US, J Street, is an encouraging sign. Its message is fairly conventional – two states for two peoples – but it’s far more moderate than the current loudest voices in the room, the hardline Zionist extremists (the situation in Australia is little different, hence the success…
Time to talk about Palestine
Peter Manning, Sydney Morning Herald, April 29: Australia’s a remarkable country. Cambodian, Yugoslav and Vietnamese Australians who once shot at each other now live in the same city, sometimes the same suburb. The same goes for Arab and Jewish Australians. There are Jewish fighters from 1948 who successfully established the state of Israel and there…
The Jew of reason
The following letter appears in this week’s Australian Jewish News: Just like the constant advances in computer technology, political events and attitudes are changing with great rapidity. A few years ago it was considered a serious sacrilege to offer even the mildest criticism of the Israeli Government. Today, the situation has changed. The publication of…
Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq
My following book review appeared in the Melbourne Age on April 19: On the fifth anniversary the Iraq War, The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn, the finest Western reporter in Iraq, wrote that the conflict “has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain. It has been small but we achieved nothing . .…