Pearls and Irritations

Exceptional courage and commitment is needed to spend decades pursuing freedom for your people and to do so with few resources against considerable odds.

Ali Kazak has shown courage and commitment. As the key educator and advocate for Palestine in Australia, he has been running up steep sand hills with false history and Israeli tanks tied to his back, but has accepted this weight in readiness for the day when Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians ends and refugees return to their homeland.

Ali was born in Haifa. But in 1948, together with hundreds of thousands of other refugees, Ali with his mother finds safety in Syria. Unable to rejoin his father in Palestine, he did not see him again for 48 years.

Yet that experience appears to have influenced this citizen’s determination to reveal Palestinians’ experiences of massive injustice.

Educated in commerce at university in Damascus, Ali joined the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). He arrived in Australia in 1970, when Australians were fed the Zionist message that Israel was a democracy which had made the desert bloom, where as Palestinians were mostly Muslim Arabs known for terrorism, or in the judgment of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, did not exist.

Disturbed by these stereotypes, aware that the Israel lobby protested any reference to Palestine or to the PLO, Ali crafted his challenge. Assisted by ‘two great Australian friends’ David Spratt and the late Frans Timmerman, from 1979 until 1990 he edited and published the newspaper ‘Free Palestine’, and in 1981 was appointed the PLO’s representative to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific region.

In that position, in the Middle East, in European capitals, across the Pacific and Australia, Ali met political leaders, public servants, journalists, academics, anyone prepared to listen to his account of the colonisation of Palestine. In a life of travel to demanding meetings, he still found time to write books in English and Arabic, ‘The Jerusalem Question’, ‘Australia and the Arabs’ and penned the Palestinian entry in the Encyclopaedia of the Australian people.

To challenge the Labor party’s support for Israel, he developed friendships with Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, NSW Premier Bob Carr and in 1992 gave Evans a copy of Khaled al-Hassan’s ‘Grasping the Nettle of Peace.’

In the past ten years, Ali Kazak’s contribution to public understanding of death and destruction in Palestine has been two fold.

First, a regular flow of articles on the history of Palestine, on international law, on support for the ideals of a common humanity and expressing outrage at the genocidal actions of the Netanyahu government.

Second, he has been a leader in questioning the ill informed, biased commentary by Australian media on the inhumanities in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.

His selfless commentary

In articles for Pearls and Irritations, such as ‘A pro-Israel policy will become electoral poison for Labor’(6/2/24), ‘The Albanese government is isolating Australia and not serving the national interest by appeasing Israel’(21/9/24), Ali highlights injustices in Labor’s foreign policy. With the same critical vision, ‘Senator Birmingham you are bringing shame to Australia and the Liberal Party’ (22/12/23) ‘When shameful, ignorance comes from a minister of education: an open letter to Alan Tudge’, (8/8/21) Ali also castigates the Coalition for its bias and cruelty.

Public education about war crimes committed in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon can be derived from articles in Pearls & irritations and from Ali Kazak’s forensic daily blog ‘Don’t say you didn’t know’. For revelations in that journal we can all be grateful. Ali does the research. An interested public must merely wait to read.

In that blog and in the journal Arena, Ali reminds that colonisation occurs when the rights of Indigenous people are ignored. He describes the 1947 partitioning of Palestine, a newly minted UN made policy ‘against the wishes of a majority of the people’, at which point, ‘the colonial logic of might is right’ was established for the next 76 years.

Disgraceful media bias

Aware of media repeats of a self congratulating Israel narrative, in May 1986, Kazak called for adjudication by the Australian Press Council concerning ‘the untrue and stereotype reporting of Palestinians.’ The gist of that complaint was made sharper at the end of October 2023 when Ali wrote a stinging letter to the ABC’s managing director David Anderson. Ali was direct and combative. He asked, when will the ABC ‘stop dealing with the war from an Israeli perspective, adopting all its claims, propaganda and deceptions without examining their credibility.’

Comfort for Israel and indifference to Palestine highlights Ali’s accusation, ‘While Israel is bombing the hell out of the people of Gaza, the ABC bombards us with Israeli propaganda, interviewing Israelis and pro Israelis one after the other.’

He expresses despair that when the ABC interviews Palestinians, ‘They are subjected to aggressive interruptions, demanding they repeatedly condemn Hamas and the killing of Israelis.’ By contrast you (the ABC) never ask Israeli supporters ‘to condemn the killing of Palestinians, to condemn Israel’s occupation, racial discrimination against Muslim and Christian Palestinians.’

He takes particular aim at 7:30 Report’s anchor, Sarah Ferguson for giving former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a free platform to spread deceptions and propaganda.

Ali asks David Anderson to explain the huge concern about 230 kidnapped Israelis and a complete lack of concern about more than 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention camps. He finishes that letter by pleading that the national broadcasters deal with colonial apartheid Israel as it deals with all aggressive occupiers, the Indonesians in East Timor, the apartheid regime in South Africa and Russia’s war criminals in Ukraine.

The only path to peace

Advocacy for freedom is sustained by making and justifying peace with justice goals. Far more than a critic, despite his constant exposé of Israeli barbarities, Ali identifies the objective which has fuelled his writing: a solution based on the peaceful coexistence and the equality of all citizens, regardless of their religion and ethnicity, in one democratic state.

He argues that everyone should enjoy rights guaranteed under international law, under human rights conventions and numerous UN resolutions. He says, ‘unlike the Zionists, we do not mean inflicting a tragedy on anyone…The time has come for Jews in Israel and around the world to choose between the security and peace of a shared state and the ghetto of the Zionist that commits crimes against humanity.’

Ali Kazak’s papers, his records of artistic and revolutionary posters and videos of the Palestinian diaspora, the Nakba and the outcome of the 1967 invasion, a Naksa or setback, are held in the National Library. That record depicts him as a significant citizen and highly influential advocate for human rights.

But a tribute should not read like a hagiography. Ali is no saint and this profile has omitted acknowledgement of the influence of his wife and family. Ali can be like a dog with a bone, almost always exasperated, occasionally angry, never giving up, incredulous that others will not adopt his interpretation of history, would not support his campaigning for justice for the Palestinian people.

One final comment concerns his surprising feelings of optimism at a time when Israel’s killing and ethnic cleansing in Gaza has reached a climax.

As with anyone courageous enough to lead, he writes about realities but maintains hope by finding grounds for optimism. ‘The Zionist narrative is no longer as dominant as it was… The wheel of history moves forward, and the Zionists cannot push it back. It is only a matter of time before this racist colonial Zionist ideology is defeated, as all similar ideologies have been thoughout history.’

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