Hazara Nation

Sydney Morning Herald
Peter Manning

Australia's a remarkable country. Cambodian, Yugoslav and Vietnamese Australians who once shot at each other now live in the same city, sometimes the same suburb. The same goes for Arab and Jewish Australians. There are Jewish fighters from 1948 who successfully established the state of Israel and there are Palestinian refugees living in Sydney who were driven from their homes.
But you should have heard the groans of disapproval when Kevin Rudd's paean of praise for Israel's 60 years of democracy in Federal Parliament on March 12 was mentioned two weekends ago at the Arab Film Festival in Parramatta. In this swinging federal seat, the largely Arab-Australian audience was not impressed.


I suspect it wasn't disapproval of Rudd's perceived romance with Israel (they're used to that with John Howard and Bob Hawke). It was the seeming insensitivity of a new Prime Minister so intent on collecting brownie points.
Mention was made of Rudd's highly popular acknowledgement in his February 13 address to Parliament of the sufferings of the indigenous people of Australia. But how could he congratulate the Israelis without even a mention of the dispossession of 78 per cent of the land of the Palestinians, an event that saw 700,000 of them (most of the population) driven out of historic Palestine?

Palestinians call it "the nakba" (the catastrophe). Today, 5 million Palestinians live in refugee camps in surrounding Arab countries, unwelcome visitors waiting to return to their homes and villages. The continuing reality of "the nakba" poisons Western-Islamic relations around the world.

This month has a particular ring to it. It is the height of "the nakba". Whereas Israelis and Jewish people everywhere may celebrate May 8 as the day Israel was created 60 years ago, for Palestinians the catastrophe of the loss of their land spread over months. It began when the United Nations voted on November 29, 1947, to partition Palestine, and it continued throughout 1948.

For many decades afterwards it was the Israeli propaganda narrative that the Palestinians had simply abandoned their country, not fought enough for it and left for friendly Arab countries. The narrative conveniently defined the Palestinians as ignorant and cowardly.

But since the opening of the Israeli archives in the past decade, that narrative has been demolished by a younger band of Israeli historians - Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev and others - who have argued that the period from December 1947 to May 1948 involved a series of massacres designed to terrorise the native population into abandoning their homes and fleeing to safety.

And in Pappe's latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2006), he draws from the archives of David Ben-Gurion, Haganah and Irgun papers and other sources to reveal how deliberate and articulated was the famous Plan Dalet of March 10, 1948 - the plan by Jewish leaders to ethnically cleanse Arab cities (like Haifa and Jaffa) and villages getting in the way of the creation of the Jewish state.

The result was a series of massacres during April and May 1948, the most important in Deir Yassin on April 9. Jewish soldiers burst into the village and sprayed it with gunfire. Those not dead were gathered together and shot. A number of the women were allegedly raped and then shot. Ninety-three villagers were reported to have died.

The Herald of April 10, 12, and 13, 1948, reported the horror as "Jewish terrorism". In such attacks, many were robbed by Jewish troops of their jewellery, furniture and goods.

Today, many Jewish Australians remember this war firsthand, even if many did not witness the sort of horrors alleged at Deir Yassin.

Equally, many Palestinian and Arab Australians have their own stories. I have spoken with some. Their memories are as sharp as a tack. One man from Jaffa recalls as a boy being fired on as he tried to board a ship to leave his home town. Further up the coast, refugees from the Holocaust were arriving on boats that were "illegal" in the terms of the British Mandate.

Jewish Australians were made to feel, once again, acknowledged and proud by their federal Christian leaders on March 12. Arab and Palestinian Australians, also damaged by their history, were left feeling outsiders, abandoned, in exile, just as a new government arrived so full of hope and promise.

It would be good if Rudd in May could redress the balance.

Peter Manning is adjunct professor of journalism at UTS and the author of Us And Them: A Journalist's Investigation Of Media, Muslims And The Middle East (Random House, 2006). He is completing a PhD on "The Creation Of 'The Palestinian' In The Sydney Press".