Just as Israel’s Independence Day and the Palestinian Nakba Day, in remembrance of deportation and deadly dispossession, have a bloody symbiosis, Australia Day/Invasion Day is celebrated or mourned according to the victors or the vanquished.
The tragic past and near narratives of the suffering of unspeakable colonial atrocities against Indigenous Palestinians and Indigenous Australians bear a close resemblance and are written in blood and great injustice.
Do you also see a thread of colonial superiority and racism binding Australia to Israel?
Terra Nullius
Both Israeli and British colonists took the terra nullius doctrine i.e. ‘empty land’ approach, to justify their brutal occupations and wholesale land theft of Palestine and Australia.
The Jewish settlers claimed they had a god-given right to Palestine, “a land without a people” and boasted that they made the empty desert bloom. However, for centuries, Palestine traded in olives, oil, quinces, pine nuts, figs, carob, cotton, dates, indigo, artichokes, citrus fruit, almonds, mint, sumac and abundantly more.
The island named Australia by British invaders and colonists was home to almost a million peoples of at least 200 nations that traced their ancestry back 120,000 years along spiritual songlines of the land to the Dreaming – to Creation and guardianship of country was/is a sacred trust. Indigenous Australians maintained their food supply with a sophisticated management of the land with fire. This genius was belatedly understood after the mega-bushfires of 2019-20 caused by non-Aboriginal ignorance.
Resistance
The British imperial genocidal wars and massacres (guns vs spears) such as those at Hawkesbury, Nepean, Richmond Hill, Risdon Cove, Appin, Bathurst, Port Phillip, Swan River (Battle of Pinjarra), Gravesend, Vinegar Hill, Myall Creek, Kinroy, Rufus R, Long lagoon, Dawson River, Kalkadoon, Cape Grim, The Black war, McKinley River, West Kimberly, Tasmania – resisted by Aboriginal warriors like Pemulwuy, Winradyne, Woureddy, Multuggerah, Yagan, Jandamarra – as well as starvation and Western diseases destroyed the dispossessed Aboriginal population to about 70,000 by 1920.
As for the Jewish State of Israel, beginning with the Nakba – the destruction of 675 Palestinian villages and towns that generated the forced exile of two-thirds of Palestinians into foreign and internal camps – Palestinians have bravely maintained both armed and non-violent resistance as is their right guaranteed under United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/33/24 of 29 November 1978:
“2. Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle;”
Occupation and apartheid
In Australia, violent genocide was replaced by the more covert cultural genocide i.e. the genocide of indigeneity through the government policy of assimilation intended to eradicate Indigenous identity by cruelly and systematically destroying connections to family, the tribe and ancestral lands.
Australia’s apartheid policies marginalised the First Nation peoples on to reservations and missions, restricted entry into white towns, exploited unpaid slave labour, their indigenous languages and sacred rituals forbidden, and mixed-blood children (The Stolen Generations) were forcibly kidnapped from their parents for re-socialisation – i.e. to be made ‘white’.
Assimilation is where Australia differs from Israel. For Israel, the assimilation of Palestinians is an anathema. The Zionist goal is racist; a pure Aryan-like Jewish state, rid of all Palestinians from the river to the sea.
Until the 1967 Referendum, Aborigines were government property: “The right to choose a marriage partner, to be legally responsible for one’s own children, to move about the state and to socialise with non-Aboriginal Australians, were just some of the rights which Aboriginal people did not have.”
Sound familiar? Israel’s apartheid policies similarly affect Palestinians. Israel has passed racist laws that impose severe movement restrictions dividing families, preventing family reunification and obstructing the marriage of couples who come from different zones. At least a third of Gazans have relatives in Israel and the West Bank.
The personal pain of such enforced separations that deny Palestinians the shared and cherished moments we enjoy freely is immeasurable. Grandparents have never seen their grandchildren who may live just five kilometres away, adult children are denied the right to be with a dying parent; births, weddings, funerals are overshadowed by painful absences.
Racist policies
Australia’s Native Title Act, 1993, finally acknowledged that some Indigenous Australians ‘have rights and interests to their land that come from their traditional laws and customs’. But, as mining boomed on resource-rich Indigenous lands, corporate colonialism reared its rapacious head to undermine this landmark act through the Northern Territory Intervention.
It was initiated by the Howard government in 2007 and maintained by successive governments including that of Kevin Rudd, who made the historic apology to the Stolen Generations while Indigenous communities were suffering the humiliation of apartheid welfare payments, now the Cashless Card, and struggle to survive in developing world conditions.
Meanwhile, the Prawer Plan was debated in the Israeli Knesset over the power to evict, from their ancestral lands, 40,000 Bedouins hindering Israel’s land expansion. Then there is the power to simply bulldoze Palestinian villages and orchards to build settlements for Zionist colonists.
I hope Australians who have fled the Australian-backed US military imperialism from their homelands in Philippines, Bosnia, Vietnam Somalia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria have empathy for colonised Australians on Invasion Day, which is saturated with flags boasting the British Union Jack that mocks truth, freedom and the fair-go of oneness.
Colonial terrorism, disguised as civilised democracy, is not only perpetrated by the hollow men and women in authority. They are the the ones for whom you and I vote and without us they are powerless. Until our moral conscience, intelligence and compassion determine how we vote, we, too, are their accomplices.
Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She is the author of East Timor: Reveille for Courage, editor of a volume of Palestinian poetry, I remember my name and writes political commentary for a number of independent online magazines. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was convenor of Australia East Timor Association and coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.
Comments
6 responses to “Victors of colonial terrorism, disguised as civilised democracy, get to write the story”
Colonial settlement ventures necessarily seek to displace the indigenous with settlers and to appropriate land and resources with scarce regard for the pre-existing claims or the well-being of the indigenous. Clearly Australia and Israel share a common history in this regard. Yes, the British and Zionists both had their ’empty land’ narrative in ‘terrus nullius’ and the ‘land without people’. The Americans didn’t fuss too much about these niceties and just proclaimed their Manifest Destiny.
But there are significant differences between Australia and Israel.
British colonizers never sought to see their settlers as the ‘real’ indigenous of Australia. But Zionism is premised on the notion of Jews, whether of European or Arabic ancestry, being not only indigenous to Palestine but being the only indigenous of Palestine. The others are mere interlopers, frauds or, at the most whackiest, the ‘colonizers’ of the Jews who were forcibly exiled some 2ooo years ago. Of course, this toggles as needs must with the safe haven and/or compensatory justice narrative as posted earlier by Brendel.
This matters. Australia is in the process of coming to terms with its past. Maybe this is imperfect and slow but we do have Mabo, the apology and the 67 referendum. There is recognition of need to close the gap, to keep language alive and to learn from Indigenous history. In return there is Welcome to Country.
There is a very different trajectory within Israel/Palestine. The Palestinian people either live as second class citizens within Israel Proper or remain under belligerent occupation and/or stateless in refugee camps. Rather than seeking to redress the injustices Zionism has inflicted on the Palestinian people, Israel is doubling down. It continues to appropriate land/resources and keep an unfranchised people under military occupation.
Don’t want to set up a league table of suffering but at least the indigenous of Australia have citizenship rights and grounds for hope and healing. The Naqba is not just a past event but is on-going and whilst Israel remains financed and protected by the USA, there is little hope for relief or a measure of justice for the Palestinian people.
Brilliant, comprehensive and timely appraisal on Invasion Day. Totally apt and accurate to identify 1788 ( Invasion of Indigenous Australia) with 1948, ( the Naqba destruction of Palestinian homes, the slaughter of people and the creation of a massive refugee exodus). That any fortunate Australians could remain blind to the cruelties endured by Indigenous peoples of Palestine and Australia is disappointing when the world desperately needs acknowledgement of past violence which for too long has been labelled civilization. Thank you Vacy for the courage, skills @nd wisdom to pen this.
I suggest that it is inappropriate to equate the founding of the state of Israel to the many incidents of European colonialism. Firstly, there is the historical precedent of Jews living in the area for centuries before they were dispersed. But more importantly, the founding of Israel is widely understood as an act of restitution, a gesture by Humanity to acknowledge the collective harm and violent persecution committed by many cultures over many centuries against Jews in many places. Founding Israel was an act of restorative justice. The Palestinians had the misfortune of bearing the brunt of the sacrifice – somebody had to, as the world was fully settled even then – but it was humanity as a whole who recognised a monumental wrong done to a people and who did something towards righting it.
My view – Alexander Lautensach.
Zionist pressure, bribery and blackmail founded Israel, not some mythical sense of collective guilt toward the Jew, though that may be the fairy tale told to the gullible. Israel is now an apartheid State, a squalid little nuclear-armed theocracy, a menace to all its neighbours and a haven for Jewish criminals of every stripe seeking to avoid justice.
I dare you to read Tom Suarez’ State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel- all based on information from British Mandate Archives.
Let me get your logic, so Palestinians are just unfortunate… that they have had to bear the brunt of the sacrifice (like having their lands stolen, getting murdered, their communities smashed) for the wrongs did by Europeans to the Jews?
I assume you are Jewish. Why is the state of Israel committing such criminal acts? If any race should be sensitive NOT to commit such barbaric acts, it should be the Jews.
Israel may have a few hundred nuclear bombs at its disposal, but this is no guarantee that the hatred that they have created among the Palestinians will not result in a massive successful revenge at some future date. Many people in the world will not be unhappy when that happens.