ECAJ takes issue with Minister for Education’s take on “intifada” and “from the river to the sea”
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has written to the Minister for Education Jason Clare about his response to a journalist who asked if “intifada” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are antisemitic.
The ECAJ quoted from The Australian on May 5 which reported the Minister’s following response. “I’ve seen people say that those words mean the annihilation of Israel. I’ve seen people say that it means the opposite. I’ve seen people say they’re slogans Israeli political parties have used…What I’d say is this. What I want all Australians to be arguing for, to be calling for, is a two-state solution: two countries, two people, two states side by side where people can live in peace without fear, without terrorism, without checkpoints, without occupation.”
In the letter, co-signatories President Daniel Aghion and co-CEOs Peter Wertheim and Alex Ryvchin wrote: “With respect, Minister, this was a deeply ill-informed and self-contradictory response.
“Intifada” in the context of the Israel-Palestinian conflict has meant successive attempts by Palestinian organisations to impose a solution to the conflict through the planned and systematic use of violence, including terrorist violence in the form of suicide bombings, rocket attacks, car-rammings and knifings targeted at Israeli civilians. It is the opposite of “peace without fear, without terrorism“.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” refers to the Jordan River, the Mediterranean Sea and “Palestine” as the territory lying between them. There is no Israel. The chant is simply and unambiguously a call for Israel to be “obliterated”, as specified in the Hamas Charter. It is completely incompatible with the government’s stated policy, and decades of bipartisan policy, of supporting “two countries, two people, two states side by side”. The unambiguously racist and eliminationist intent behind the chant is made clear in its original Arabic version, “min el-mayyeh lil mayyeh, Filisteen Arabiyyeh” which translates literally as: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab”.
The letter acknowledged that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made a corrective statement, acknowledging that the “river to the sea” chant “is a slogan that calls for opposition to a two-state solution”.
The ECAJ thanked Jason Clare for convening a meeting with University ViceChancellors and inviting our Immediate Past President Jillian Segal to participate.
The letter went on: “The widespread misunderstanding of the true meaning and intent of anti-Israel slogans, even by many of those who chant them, only serves to underline the critical need for strong, principled leadership from yourself and University administrators. At a time when the Prime Minister has repeatedly decried the fraying of social cohesion in Australian society, it is incumbent on political and academic leaders to come together with a clear collective voice acknowledging that the principles of freedom of expression have no application to calls for the obliteration of an entire nation or people, no matter how such calls may be sought to be sanitised, and should have no part in the life of our country.
The letter should not have commenced: ‘With respect,’. This is the mistake we often make, going off track with unnecessary politeness. How you start something with words sets the scene. We want to hone in straightaway on how absolutely inappropriate and incorrect Jason Clare’s statement was in every way. Basically, it was waffle, and ill-informed, misinformed waffle at that. All to avoid the issue, which is to call out antisemitism and the call for the annihilation of Israel.