Julia Irwin and the scriptwriter

G'day. Webdiarist Sol Salbe was born in Israel, where he did most of his schooling. These days he spends most of his day in Melbourne in front of the computer trawling through the extensive Israeli media and other web sites. Sol contributed to the Webdiary Ashrawi debate in 2003 and runs a small Middle East news service relying predominately on Israeli sources which he often translates himself from the Hebrew. Sol's last piece for Webdiary was Danby MP vs Melbourne University Press. Sol is a member of the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, the Greens, Hamerkaz HaIsraeli and even a few cooking groups however the views expressed are his personal views and are not necessarily those of any these organisations. Info: ssalbe@westnet.com.au

by Sol Salbe

Many years ago when the writer lived in Israel the local equivalent of the Transport Accident Commission had a clever slogan. It was (translated from memory) "On the road it is more important to be wise than to be right." That truism holds for politics.

Labor MP Julia Irwin has now earned herself the title of a serial offender, being lambasted by some of the leading lights of the Jewish community for her recent comments in the adjournment debate. True to form, her own party Leader, Kim Beazley, joined her critics. If the question is: can I find anything which is not right with her comments - then skip the next two paragraphs and read on. However that might not be the only relevant question.

The most logical and sensible critique of Irwin that I have heard came from a personal friend. He simply said that Irwin's comments were not balanced. Maybe I do not share his entire notion of "balance" when it comes to this issue, but I thought he had a valid point. Of course, when we corresponded, I at least (and presumably him) was not aware that Irwin had followed Malcolm Turnbull's contribution which very much fell into the Israeli narrative (and which Palestinians and their supporters would found just as objectionable.) Irwin Supporters could claim that in fact she was restoring the balance. Nevertheless even under those circumstances it was unwise to say the least to mention dead Palestinian children without mentioning dead Israeli ones. Both sides pain is the same on that count.

But there is an even more fundamental point here. Let's agree for the time being that Irwin had every right to use the terms she used. But was it necessarily wise? Instead of debating the merits of her points a lot of valuable time has been taken up with a debate on semantics. Wouldn't it have been better and much more difficult for the other side to refute had she read into Hansard some of the Israeli criticism of the Disengagement mentioned below? Spending more time on the script as to how she says it as well is what she says may have paid handsome dividends. But we digress.

Beazley chimes in

So why did Beazley blast his own backbencher? Most Australian who do not read the Australian Jewish News and are not on the relevant e-mail lists would have first found out about the controversy by reading Glen Milne's article in the 26 September Australian. Irwin and unnamed others were alleged to be "Nazifying" Israel, no less.

Here is the way Milne put it:

Following the Gaza pull-out, Irwin told Parliament in part: "Gaza is now a Palestinian ghetto; a prison for its one million people. All flows of people and goods must pass through Israeli border controls, which has resulted in the World Bank's reporting that unemployment and poverty will rise in Gaza. Now Israel will rule Gaza like a walled ghetto, a giant penal colony, a concentration camp.

"We are witnessing the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, the heart and soul of the Palestinian nation. The world must not allow this to happen."

Milne then sticks in the boot: "This is deliberately insidious stuff. Note the use of the words 'ghetto', 'concentration camp' and 'ethnic cleansing', all terms associated with the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany."

None of Irwin's numerous critics, including Liberals Phillip Ruddock, Tony Smith ; Labor reps Michael Danby, Leo Price and Kim Beazley, Jewish community Leaders Grahame Leonard (Australia) and Michael Lipshutz (Victoria) or anybody else had put out a case why Irwin was wrong. They preferred to tackle her on her language. But it is important to note that she made some important points in her adjournment speech. Again here are some of these:

"Gaza is now a Palestinian ghetto-a prison for its 1½ million people…"

"While 8,000 illegal Israeli settlers will be compensated by as much as $A500,000 each, there was no compensation-not one cent-for the 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza whose homes were bulldozed by the Israeli army."

"Illegal settlements to the east of Jerusalem will be expanded by up to 15,000 people, in defiance of President George Bush's road map for peace. The ever expanding wall now cuts the occupied West Bank…Palestinians have been cut off from their work, their fields and families without any compensation."

"If the 1½ million Palestinians in Gaza have anything to celebrate, it will be the return of the 25 per cent of their land that a mere 8,000 settlers illegally occupied "The Gaza disengagement, which is accompanied by the expansion of settlements, should be seen as another tactical step by Israel-a way to freeze the peace process and to claim East Jerusalem."

As an Israeli the strangest thing I find about Irwin's message is how mainstream it is. Browse through any of the main Israeli dailies and you'll find journalists and commentators making the same points. Much has been made of the Gaza withdrawal by Irwin's critics. But even the Israeli government itself has given up asking the UN to acknowledge that it is no longer the occupying power. The UN has given such a certificate for Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon. It is unlikely to provide such a certificate for Gaza where Israel still controls the air and the sea routes and where even registration of birth, deaths and marriages have to go through Israel's computers first.

As for the notion that the Gaza disengagement should be seen as a tactical step. What would the critics say about Israel's most important commentator, Nahum Barnea? In his Rook for a Queen analysis he wrote:

"Sharon is no dove; he sacrificed Gaza to keep hold of the West Bank. "

"If the country was chess, one can say that Sharon on Sunday sacrificed a rook so he could defend the queen."

"The Sharon government on Sunday made a bartering transaction: evacuation of the settlements in the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria in exchange for world acceptance of Israel's de facto annexation of 7 percent of the West Bank."

"Here's the main thing: Sharon believes that his plan will put off for years, perhaps forever, a withdrawal from all the territories. His tactics may have changed, but the plan remains the same: to reach a stable arrangement that will leave Israel with a large chunk, up to 40 percent, of the West Bank."

Is Barnea, a commentator for the largest circulating dailyYediot Acharonot going to be blasted for verging on antisemitism?

It's the Language

But above all it's the language that got the critics upset. Remember Milne's charge: "'ghetto', 'concentration camp' and 'ethnic cleansing', all terms associated with the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany." Well not quite: "Ethnic cleansing is an expression which only entered the English language about 15 years ago. It is almost a direct translation from the Serbian and it harks back to the war between the Croats Serbs and Bosnians. To the best of my knowledge there were no Jewish victims of that ethnic cleansing. Some of the victims of the Serbs were Christian Croats. A lot more were Bosnian Muslims. It takes real hutzpah (or in Milne's case, ignorance) to tie in "Ethnic cleansing" of Muslims with Nazi Germany's vile attack on the Jews.

Concentration camps are associated with the Nazis but they are actually a British invention dating back to the Boer War. They are different to the annihilation camps such as the six main death camps of WW2: Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Treblinka. Some like Auschwitz had both parts. Similarly the word Ghetto which dates back to the Jewish quarter in Venice is these days more often associated with African-American neighbourhoods in the US, as any Google search of the word would verify. So the linguistic tie to Nazi Germany is very loose indeed.

But be that as it may, what is important is that such language is part of the normal Israeli discourse. Israelis continue make reference to the Holocaust in their day to day lives. Two quotes from the current Leader of the Opposition, Yosef, "Tomi" Lapid to start with: Lapid, himself a survivor of the Nazi atrocities, expressed outrage at the practice of writing ID numbers on the arms of Palestinians. He said that, ". . . [the] connotation of the act is 'unbearable', noting that it was carried out at Auschwitz". He added that Chief-of-Staff Shaul Mofaz had ". . . confirmed [that] the marking of Palestinians was carried out at Tulkarm-area refugee camps" (Jerusalem Post. 13 March, 2002). Later on (when he was Justice Minister) observing an elderly Palestinian woman rummaging through the ruins of her house he said that she reminded of his grandmother during the 'thirties.

The former Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni (who a decade or so ago was a guest of honour of the Jewish community leadership that lambasted Irwin) declared in a demonstration in Tel-Aviv on 9 February 2002 (quoted the next day by Ynet): "We shoved the Palestinians into a situation similar to the concentration camps. Should we just wait till they are also gassed?"

Need I go on? Do I have to go through the way the evacuated settlers never gave up their own Holocaust analogies? Can anyone forget the prominent posters of Yitzhak Rabin in Nazi SS uniform at the rallies against him where the keynote speaker was Binyamin Netanyahu? The same Netanyahu turned up in a major event in Australia in 2001 where one of the other guests was Kim Beazley. One wonders whether Beazley had expressed his displeasure at such antics to him.

Another of Irwin's comment that has generated anger was here reference to the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem. The President of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria Michael Lipshutz suggested that the claim was untruthful. It was quite ironical that within a few days a study by Dr Israel Kimche of the Jerusalem Institute would deal with the very impact of the fence wall "enveloping Jerusalem" on the city's Arab population. It's not pleasant reading. Similar material on the way Israel is pushing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem is available in English in a UN human rights report. The most objective comment one can make is that whether or not Lipshutz finds the comments offensive, a perusal of the Hebrew media would suggest that they are not necessarily untruthful. Perhaps that's why Kim Beazley limited himself to saying that Irwin's comments were "offensive and hurtful".

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