Rudd ignores plight of the Palestinians
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd won few friends in the Arab world when he supported a parliamentary motion that described Israel as a ‘robust democracy’ and a ‘custodian of freedom’.
He was helping to push through a controversial vote aimed at congratulating the Jewish state on its 60-year existence, a gesture of no international political significance that was bound to spark anger among supporters of the Palestinian people across the world.
At home, some members of the Labor Party and heads of unions who supported Rudd during last November’s elections were aggrieved enough to take out an advertisement in a national newspaper condemning the action.
They called the motion a ‘celebration of the triumph of racism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians since the al-Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948’
“Australia and Australians should not give the Israeli people and its leaders the impression that Australia supports them in their dispossession of the Palestinian people,” the advertisement said.
Like Rudd, opposition Liberal Party leader Brendan Nelson did not hold back in his gushing praise for Israel either. He said that in a region ‘characterised more by theocracies or autocracies, Israel and the state of Israel is the custodian of the most fragile and yet most powerful of human emotions – that is hopeful belief in the freedom of man, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly’.
Rudd later reiterated that he supported the peace process and a two-state solution but his statement was a mere exercise in damage limitation, tinged as it was by shallow historical generalisations.
“The 60 years since the establishment of Israel have been full of challenges and full of trials,” he said. “Similarly, the process of the emergence of a Palestinian state has come along a tortuous path – there has been too much bloodshed. But over the 60 years there has also been cause for hope.”
Perhaps a reality check is in order for the rookie premier as he moulds his country’s foreign policy. He should begin by asking Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank if their family’s lives have improved during those six decades, or even in the past few tortuous months for that matter.
Darling follows the leader
Britain’s new chancellor of the exchequer dodged the minefield of the global credit crisis in his first Budget yesterday, leaving thousands of homeowners in limbo.
The message seemed to be, if in doubt bring in the consultants to work on a consultation paper rather than engineer a much-needed short-term fix.
Unlike the United States, where money is being splurged to tackle the rot in the financial markets, Alistair Darling was left with only wriggling room for largesse.
So he ushered in another era of tax and spend government instead, marking a seamless transition from a decade of Gordon Brown’s fiscal failures.