Victors of colonial terrorism, disguised as civilised democracy, get to write the story
Jan 26, 2021Just 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.
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