Pearls and Irritations

Sometime in 2016 , soon after I’d joined the Northern Beaches Committee for Palestine, a group of us visited the then premier of New South Wales in his Manly electorate office.

It would be safe to say that there weren’t many people on the Northern Beaches then who knew much about Palestine, or cared, but there was a Second World War connection. While hanging around waiting for Rommel to invade in what was then British Mandate Palestine, the AIF Sixth Division under General Blamey was inspired to hold a surf carnival in Gaza. This was the population’s introduction to the sport. Legend has it that Max Rose from the North Narrabeen Surf Lifesaving Club was presented the Blamey Cup by Blamey’s wife.

Fifty-four years later, Israel had pulled out of Gaza, set up its satrap Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, and put Hamas-governed Gaza under siege.

All this was known on the day we visited Mike Baird’s office. Our committee had embarked on a project to fund youth workers from Gaza to gain their lifesaver credentials, and was seeking his support. The aim of the project was to establish a program for Nippers on Gaza’s coast. Israel’s “mowing the grass” bombs had damaged most of the Strip’s recreational facilities, so the beach was where young people tended to congregate, but few of them knew how to swim or surf and there had been drownings. Inspiration for the project came from Caroline Graham of Cromer and Kolin Thumbadoo, now deceased, who was living in Manly. Shamikh Badra, a PhD student at Wollongong University, was our Gaza connection, and I was there to represent those of us Jews who knew enough about the history to deplore the direction the Zionist state had taken.

After Badra explained what his hopes for the project were, I spoke of the blue-and-white tin piggy bank that sat on the hall table next to my family’s telephone. Emblazoned with a blue Star of David against a white background, the same piggy-bank could be found in millions of Jewish homes. Supplied by the Jewish National Fund, their purpose was to collect the money needed to plant trees in Israel. Nobody told us then that the trees weren’t to green a wilderness as was claimed, but to cover the ground where some 500 Palestinian villages had been razed during the Nakba. Here I have to say that there wasn’t a dry eye in the room, including my own.

One of the few Australian politicians to have been to the West Bank, Baird was already sympathetic. He had been the guest of the mayor of Bethlehem and knew of the treatment Israel dished out to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. He gave his enthusiastic support to the project (as did James Griffin, his successor in Manly after he retired). Next we had to find a surf lifesaving club willing to train the youth workers, and the funds to bring them from Gaza to Manly. A thorough vetting of Gaza’s Palestinian Youth Organisation was undertaken to establish that it was not associated with Hamas, and two of its members were selected: Mohammed Saleh and Hasan Alhabil.

In 2019, Saleh and Alhabil arrived in Australia, to be billeted at various homes and trained at the North Steyne Surf Lifesaving Club in Manly. They met Zali Steggall, our member for Warringah, and made a deep impression. After each gained his qualification, they returned to Gaza to set up Nipper programs there. Our efforts to send equipment were scotched by Israeli authorities who even then had the strictest control over what went into Gaza. When the surfboards we sent were confiscated (owing to the fibres in their construction Israel claimed were used in Hamas missiles), Saleh and Alhabil figured out how to make their own. Two Nipper programs were up and running and plans were underway to build a surf club.

Then came 7 October 2023.

As I write, almost 11 months later, 40,000 Gazans are counted dead, a number that doesn’t include the injured or the thousands of corpses buried in the rubble. Seventy to eighty percent of the built environment has been rendered uninhabitable by Israel’s apocalyptic vengeance. Women have given birth, children have been operated on without anaesthesia, in indescribable conditions. Tent cities have become cauldrons of disease, as Gaza’s people hasten from one “safe” place to another and would-be Israeli settlers dream of high-end seaside properties. Whatever the courts might conclude, no one who has seen the pictures or learned of the statistics can call it anything other than genocide.

Two teenage girls who were Nippers were killed with their families. Alhabil and his family have been found alive, but cannot get out of Gaza. But through the help of Steggall, Saleh and his family are here, having miraculously escaped the day before Israel closed the Rafah crossing. As others who have escaped the charnel house of Gaza, they came on tourist visas because time was of the essence. I was at Steggall’s Manly office when they were reunited with her, and how moving it was.

How heartened, too, I am to know that there are politicians like her, and Baird, and Griffin, politicians who understand and care.

And then there is Peter Dutton, who allowed himself to get the full hasbara treatment in the midst of an ugly war perpetrated by a madman who couldn’t care how many Palestinians, let alone Israelis, die, so long as he can keep himself out of jail. Who calls for a blanket ban on refugees from Gaza in the name of Australia’s security. And I am angry, so very angry. Just as Steggall was angry when heckled by him in parliament. Because Mohammed Saleh and his family are people to us, not mere statistics, as if those aren’t appalling enough, and I ask myself if it’s possible that Peter Dutton and his minions have ever even met a Palestinian, one of millions of luckless individuals they are so willing to demonise, for the sake of their own political skins.

Shame, shame, shame. On them all.

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