“I am tired of the relentless propaganda to misname any criticism of Netanyahu and his supporters as ‘antisemitic’ or ‘anti-Zionism’. I am tired, too, by the publicity around Randa Abdel-Fattah, who is much quoted for her vitriolic statements attacking the Israeli State,” writes columnist HUGH SELBY.

I am tired of writing rebuttals to pieces in a national broadsheet which seek to capitalise on the tragic deaths at Bondi – deaths that should never have happened – to divert attention from the Netanyahu carnage in Gaza.

Are they “turning catastrophe into opportunity”?

The Bondi death list, thanks to the acts of some heroes, is less than the weekly carnage in Gaza, caused by Israelis pushing buttons to deliver death en masse to civilians, including many women and children. The launchers go home to their families.

I am tired of the relentless propaganda to misname any criticism of Netanyahu and his supporters as “anti-semitic” or “anti-Zionism”.

I am tired, too, by the publicity around Randa Abdel-Fattah who, for the moment, is much quoted for her vitriolic statements attacking the Israeli State.

Henry Ergas, a highly regarded writer for The Australian newspaper, has described her approach as: “Turning catastrophe (the October Hamas attacks and the Israeli government response) into opportunity, she vaulted into public visibility by adopting a style of political performance in which provocation displaced argument and outrage replaced judgment”.

I don’t like Abdel-Fattah’s reported language. I don’t like the ideas reflected in that language. Ergas includes examples of her language that feed on and encourage hate, apply offensive labels across the board with no respect for the many shades of grey, and avoid any interest in forming common cause with others to work towards a long term peace. 

If I was a Palestinian living in Australia and wanting Albo’s government to have some positive influence on keeping my relatives alive, housed and fed, I’d wonder about whether her utterances were the best way to get that government action. (I note the recent Australian recognition of the Palestinian State, but can’t tie it to any change for the better in Gaza.)

What’s more, she has, like us, a capacity for hypocrisy. She was all too keen to see that a US commentator with whose views she disagreed was kept away from a writers’ festival. She was then just as keen to claim that keeping her away from a writers’ festival was a gross infringement of the right to present ideas.

Stark choices as death awaits

But then I turned and looked around at my world. I have never faced being bombed, shot, bayoneted or tortured. Nor did I face the fate of many of my father’s family and communities of being pulled out of their homes and shot, or taken to concentration camps to be gassed, shot or starved.

Palestinians who are living in Australia are faced with the recurrent nightmares of who in their Gaza families will be next to die, next to be maimed, next to be denied medical treatment, adequate shelter, clothing and food.

Are they supposed to be silent about what is going on? Are they supposed to accept that those among them who resist are “terrorists”, while those who launch the missiles against them are heroes?

For those still there in Gaza I wonder who is thinking: “Do I wait for the missile to kill me, or do I join the resistance in the hope of taking out one or more of our exterminators before I die?” 

Born post World War II, I realise that had I been a teenage Jew in eastern Europe in the early ’40s I would have had a simple choice: wait to be killed or join the resistance and kill before being killed.

After all, as a European Jew in World War II or as a Palestinian in Gaza or in Australia, to look to anyone else for help is futile.

Obscenity begets obscenity

Hamas murdered and kidnapped 1200 plus. I can grasp the rage and futility that contributed to taking that appalling action. That does not mean that I accept or excuse it. I do not.

But Netanyahu, much better armed, much better supported, has killed more than 70,000 with 200,000 injured (so says Amnesty International). Where’s the calculus for revenge? Where is there any possible justification for his crude genocide? There is none.

The aim is annihilation, the permanent removal of those who call themselves Palestinians from that remaining land they call home.

He is not being stopped, so he continues, day after day.

I can, I do support the notion of a Jewish State. The holocaust was the tipping point: united as one nation we can survive, divided and separated we and our culture will be destroyed.

That said, the creation of this new state was far from perfect. It was done in disregard for those who lived there. It was a colonising exercise and, whether one likes it or not, it treated those who lived there before the new immigrants as being lesser humans.

That’s not a novel policy. It was done here at the expense of the indigenous.

Ergas has laboured long and hard to write his article. It is well researched both as to Abdel-Fattah’s utterances and the likely historical sources of the ugly belief system that she seems to draw upon. It is polished. It contains a lot of criticism of Abdel-Fattah that seems at first blush to be quite reasonable, because in a background of “Netanyahu right, all else wrong”, that’s what follows.

Change the background picture, put in more detail, and his analysis, for all its erudition, rather misses the point.

He makes this assertion: “Nor is there any doubt, in her mind, as to who those opponents really are. The ‘demons’ who are ‘committing a Holocaust’, as she tweeted in an unguarded moment, are ‘the people of the Holocaust’: that is, the Jews”.

Mr Ergas, it was not “unguarded”. She may speak vilely, she may be obsessed, she may be hypocritical, but she represents the innocents on the receiving end of bombs delivered by the descendants of the survivors of the Holocaust.

She is expressing the pain of her people because, Mr Ergas, people living in comfort and safety have neither stopped the terror nor called Netanyahu to account.

Pain and terror are not described with the polite words, cups clinking and chewing of sticky buns at an academic morning tea.

The obscenity of her language pales before the obscenity of the death of innocents.

Hugh Selby, a former barrister, is the CityNews legal affairs columnist.