Fellow VTJPers: I'm passing along an email Dan McGowan passed along
to me on June 26. It is an account of Dr. Uri Davis' trip to
Australia. It's long, but worth the read. The tactics used to
silence and discredit him are quite interesting, but not surprising.
Monica
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LIFTING THE VEIL ON ISRAELI APARTHEID: Dr URI DAVIS DYR- SPONSORED
VISIT TO AUSTRALIA, June 2-9, 2005
Dr Uri Davis, Palestinian Jew, academic, human rights activist,
opponent of Political Zionism and Observer-Member of the Palestine
National Council, arrived in Australia for a week long speaking tour
on June 2 as a guest of Deir Yassin Remembered/Australia. His visit
followed a week in Malaysia as a guest of Deir Yassin
Remembered/Malaysia. Predictably, his visit set a number of knees
jerking.
Although scheduled to speak at the nationally televised National
Press Club in the Australian capital, Canberra, on June 7, Dr Davis'
address was cancelled virtually at the last moment by the NPC's CEO,
Maurice Reilly who cited insufficient bookings as the reason.
Sceptical, DYR/Australia initially took Mr Reilly's action at face
value only to read in a June 3 article in The Australian Jewish News
('Controversial Israeli speaker's Canberra address in doubt')
that "Davis' scheduled address - 'The Jewish National Fund of
Australia: A Critical Assessment' - had provoked some concerns within
the Jewish community, with JNF CEO Rob Schneider warning officials of
possible legal action. 'The club could do themselves irreparable harm
and damage, and we would hold them jointly responsible for what Davis
may say that could be defamatory towards the JNF,' Schneider told the
AJN." According to the same article, Mr Reilly was quoted as saying
that "We will protect the right to free speech and debate...We also
welcome Mr Schneider and anyone else to attend to also put forward
their view."
Mr Schneider was also quoted calling Dr Davis a "non-entity"
whose "credibility is lacking" and a "self-styled academic who
publishes his own books" - quite possibly exposing himself to a
possible defamation action. The AJN article further went on to say
that "Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council executive director
Colin Rubinstein also criticised the decision to allow Davis to
address the club. He said that in the past he had offered speakers
such as US lawyer Alan Dershowitz, only to be told that the club's
program was filled."
This, the first of two items to appear in the AJN about Dr Davis'
visit, erroneously described Dr Davis' sponsor, DYR, as
a "Palestinian group...named after an Arab village near Jerusalem
which was the scene of a disputed massacre of Palestinians in 1948."
["Disputed"? As in 'disputed', not occupied territories. DYR]
Despite some evidence that registrations for Dr Davis' talk were not
being processed, Mr Reilly was quoted in a June 8 Canberra Times
article ('Club denies bowing to Jewish lobby') as saying that "We had
five or less bookings for the event and we chose to cancel it in
deference to not embarrassing the speaker...Unrelated to that
decision, there have been people who have made representations that
they didn't want this address to go ahead."
DYR's Canberra Director, Avigail Abarbanel, was quoted in the same
article as saying that "The official line from the NPC is that there
haven't been enough bookings and that's why it was cancelled and
that's what I'm prepared to accept...However, I am absolutely
appalled that the Zionist Israeli lobby is basically doing everything
it can to prevent people from speaking publicly. I was hoping people
from Zionist organisations would come to the speech and challenge Dr
Davis publicly and have a proper debate but their tactic is to
threaten and try to stop him speaking."
Dr Davis' designated address at the NPC was to be on the subject of
the JNF of Australia and its planting of a Yizkor (Rememberance)
forest on the lands of the destroyed Palestinian village of Ijzim,
ethnically cleansed by the Israeli army in the course of and in the
wake of the 1948-49 war in Palestine, and to focus on the question of
whether this planting should be recognised as charitable activity, or
rather as activity complicit with war crimes. It should be pointed
out that his call for the declassification of the JNF (and/or JNF-
related bodies) as a charity and the nullification of their tax-
exempt status under Australian law was also issued at his other
presentations in Australia. In fact, Dr Davis is not only not
prepared to take the official line of the NPC on this issue at face
value, but challenges the JNF to initiate libel/defamation charges
against him in Australia.
As far as the issue of Israel/Palestine is concerned, there have been
previous attempts to silence free speech in this country. Perhaps the
best known occurred in 2003 when Palestinian human rights campaigner
and DYR Adviser, Hanan Ashrawi, was awarded the 2003 Sydney Peace
Prize. Ashrawi became the subject of an ultimately unsuccessful
campaign which, in the words of Professor Stuart Rees, director of
the Sydney Peace Foundation which awards the prize annually,
sought "to vilify her, to ridicule the status of the prize, to
pressure the companies that are partners of the foundation to cease
their public and financial support and to petition the Premier [of
the state of New South Wales] not to give the award." [Sydney Morning
Herald, 20/10/03]
While in Australia Dr Davis was interviewed twice on the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National, the most important of our
government-funded ABC's radio stations. Given the proliferation of
Zionist spokespersons on Radio National, DYR/Australia regards it as
quite a coup to have secured these two interviews.
The first such program, Late Night Live, hosted by left-of-centre
media identity Philip Adams and broadcast nationally, went to air on
June 6 at 10 pm and was repeated at 4 pm the following day. Philip
Adams touched on the subject of the cancellation of Dr Davis' NPC
address, and announced on the latter program that LNL had contacted
the NPC's Mr Reilly. Quoting the NPC CEO, Adams reported that "while
there had been complaints about the forthcoming appearance of Uri
Davis, most notably from a highly vexed senior representative of the
Jewish National Fund in Australia, this he insists had no impact at
all on the decision to cancel Uri Davis' appearance. The cancellation
was because there were insufficient advanced bookings, and that Uri
Davis was offered the opportunity of a smaller private briefing but
he declined so there you go..."
Dr Davis' second interview, with The Religion Report's David
Rutledge, ran on the morning and evening of June 8, again to a
national audience. Typically, with respect to anyone with a critical
perspective on matters Israeli who actually manages to make it onto
the op-ed page or secure an interview, a rare enough feat in itself,
the Australian media often feels (or is made to feel) the need
to 'balance' the speaker/writer with a pro-Israel spokesperson.
Dr Davis' Religion Report interview received this kind of treatment
and was actually sandwiched between two interviews with the
Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council's Ted Lapkin. The latter
referred to Dr Davis as "hard, hard, hard left" [He is not even a
Marxist. DYR]; portrayed the JNF as innocuous tree huggers; claimed
that the war of 48 was initiated by the Arabs and that the latter had
rejected a perfectly reasonable UN partition plan [of which Israel
has been in blatant violation, annexing the city of Jerusalem and
claiming it as its capital, despite the city's designation by the
said UN Partition Plan as a corpus seperatum under an international
regime administered by the UN. DYR]; and described the
Arabs/Palestinians of that period as a "population that had already
demonstrated its genocidal, existential hostility to the very
existence of a Jewish community in Israel."
And that was only Ted's first bite of the cherry! His second
consisted of an attempted rebuttal of Dr Davis' argument for a bi-
national state of Palestine, claiming, among other things, that the
only Arabs with free speech and a right to vote were Israeli Arabs
and that Jews constituted an "ethnic nation" with a right to self-
determination. [Thus presumably meaning that they had the right to
ethnically cleanse the indigenous people of Palestine, the
Palestinian Arab people. DYR]
The result: fully half of the program was given over to a Zionist
propagandist whose sole aim was to neutralise, contain and obfuscate
Dr Davis' arguments. Little wonder then that the public tends to
place this issue in the too-hard basket...just where the Zionists
want it.
Despite this Dr Davis was able to get an airing for ideas virtually
unknown to the mainstream Australian media: the difference between
political and cultural Zionism; the incompatibility between the
claimed Zionist right to self-determination and the realty of Zionist
ethnic cleansing; the characterisation of Israel as a colonial-
settler state in conflict with Palestine's indigenous population; the
apartheid nature of a state which reserves 93% of its land in law
exclusively for Jewish settlement, cultivation and development; the
absence of "petty apartheid", the better to market Israel as the only
democracy in the Middle East; the complicity of the JNF in erasing
Palestinian villages while their inhabitants are kept in a state of
internal displacement within Israel or refugee statelessness beyond
the Green Line; and the existence of a free, democratic South Africa
as a pointer for change in Palestine.
Dr Davis also spoke at two universities in Sydney, Australia's
largest city, and one in Canberra. His first seminar, at the
Macquarie University, was hosted by the Department of Politics and
International Relations. Introduced by Dr Geoffrey Hawker, the
department's deputy head, and Andrew Vincent, who runs its Middle
East course, Dr Davis addressed around 100 people.
Dr Davis' Macquarie University seminar occasioned another article in
the Australian Jewish News of June 10 by one of its journalists, Mark
Franklin, who attended the seminar. Although invited by DYR Sydney
Director Colin Andersen to interview Dr Davis, Mr Franklin declined.
In his short account, under the heading 'Israeli Slams JNF', Franklin
wrote, inaccurately and without elaborating, that Dr Davis had
accused the JNF of "land grabs and worse". He also claimed, without
reference to the threats quoted in the June 3 issue of the AJN, that
Dr Davis' aborted speech to the National Press Club was
cancelled "due to lack of interest". He concluded his piece with a
cryptic comment attributed to JNF CEO Rob Schneider: "the JNF 'does
not wish to enhance the credibility of someone who is incredible."
Interestingly, according to the author of the aforementioned Canberra
Times report of June 8, Mr Schneider "could not be contacted".
Mark Franklin's article also managed, like its predecessor on June 3,
to cite, not Dr Davis' current book, 'Apartheid Israel', copies of
which were prominently displayed and available for sale at the
seminar, but his much earlier and out of print, 'Israel: An Apartheid
State'. A case of 'homework' not done perhaps? Equally intriguing was
Mr Franklin's description of DYR as a "Palestinian think tank"!
Dr Davis' second seminar in Sydney took place at Sydney University
and was hosted by Professor Stuart Rees' Centre for Peace and
Conflict Studies (CPACS). It was attended by around 100 persons. A
third seminar, organised by Australians for Justice and Peace in
Palestine took place at the Australian National University in
Canberra.
While in Canberra Dr Davis also met with the head of the Palestine
Delegation to Australia, Ali Kazak, and with an official from the
Department of Treasury at Parliament House, where he made an hour-
long submission and submitted, inter alia, a copy of his 50 page
research on the JNF of Australia, 'The Jewish National Fund of
Australia: A Critical Assessment', supported by a copy of his
books 'Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within'
and 'The Jewish National Fund' (in association with Walter Lehn,
author), and additional information.
On June 4 he flew to Adelaide, capital of the state of South
Australia, where he was hosted by The Australian Friends of Palestine
Association (AFOPA). There he addressed a public meeting, 'Israel, a
Democracy or an Apartheid State?', at the Pilgrim Center, followed by
a caucus meeting of AFOPA held in preparation towards his meeting in
Canberra with the Department of Treasury.
In addition to the above, Dr Davis also attended a Palestinian
community function in Sydney where he was honoured with a gift of a
beautiful piece of cross stitch embroidery from the Ein al-Hilwa
refugee camp in Lebanon. He also spoke with the Sydney-based group,
Jews against the Occupation who expressed interest in promoting
Mosaic Communities: Multinational Housing Cooperatives in
Israel/Pennies for Peace grass-root fundraising collection boxes in
Australia as a counter to the Jewish National Fund 'Blue Box'.
The importance of Dr Uri Davis' visit to Australia cannot be
underestimated. His seminars and interviews presented a breadth of
analysis missing from the usual narrow media focus on the so-called
peace process, the chimaera of a viable, contiguous Palestinian
state, and the Gaza withdrawal as a supposed indication of Sharon's
capacity for hard decisions in the name of peace.
Too rarely do we hear from someone who cuts through to the
fundamentals of the conflict - the unequal clash between a land-
grabbing colonial-settler movement and an indigenous population; the
ugly reality of ethnic cleansing and war crimes behind the allegedly
heroic myth of Israeli 'independence'; the legal and institutional
framework of apartheid which informs Israel's existence as a Jewish
state; the racist agenda behind Israel's concern to maintain a
demographic majority of Jewish citizens; and the clear distinction,
constantly blurred by Zionist propagandists, between Judaism, the
faith, and political Zionism.
Dr Davis' presentations, with their emphasis on human decency, the
principles of international law and the primacy of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, challenged the usual facile acceptance
of realpolitik which characterizes mainstream debate on the question
of Israel/Palestine in Australia.
DYR/Australia extends its heartfelt thanks to Dr Davis for visiting
these shores, recovering the question of Palestine from the too-hard
basket, discomforting those in need of it, and outlining a possible
principled solution to a conflict which has gone on now for far too
long: a binational state of Palestine/Israel (federated, confederated
or unitary) from the Mediterranean to the Jordan based on complete
equality between all its citizens - Jewish citizens of Israel, Arab
Palestinian citizens of Israel, Arab Palestinians under Israeli
occupation, and stateless Arab Palestinian refugees expelled beyond
Israel's 1948 borders.
Colin Andersen
Sydney Director
Deir Yassin Remembered/Australia
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