The Australian Greens announced a new policy on Israel and Palestine this week and it’s already causing conniptions in the pro-Israel lobby.
After the party released details about its revised position, stating that Israel is “practising the crime of apartheid” against Palestinians, both the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) and Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) issued statements accusing the Greens of anti-Semitism and extremism.
“Their portrayal of Israel doesn’t reflect reality and their suggestion that Israel is a colonialist country is a bigoted attempt to reject Jewish indigeneity to the land,” the ZFA said.
This weaponisation of anti-Semitism demeans the ZFA and AIJAC, whose influence is gradually declining, but more importantly it ignores undeniable facts on the ground in Palestine.
As the new Greens policy states, the use of the word “apartheid” is justified because in the past years, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International — along with Palestinian and Israeli groups such as Al-Haq, Yesh Din and B’Tselem — have concluded that Israel is imposing an apartheid regime.
Furthermore, just this week, ostensibly every major human rights group in Israel signed a document that found Israel is committing apartheid against the Palestinian people. Another international NGO, Defense for Children International – Palestine, issued a report that savaged Israel’s systematic denial of fair trials for Palestinian children arrested by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. As the report claims, hundreds of minors are routinely tortured and interrogated without a parent present.
Read the article by Antony Loewenstein in Crikey.