Well, so much for our new government taking an even-handed position on Israel/Palestine.

Before our politicians even warmed their seats in the new parliamentary sittings, the Australian Prime Minister announced that he will lead a parliamentary motion to honour Israel on 12 March acknowledging Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's Independence Day. The Opposition Leader will second the motion. Then, celebrations will take place at a reception in the Mural Hall of Parliament House. 

If Palestinians and their supporters had any hopes of a sympathetic hearing from the new Rudd government on the multiple human rights abuses being perpetrated by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, those hopes are now well and truly dashed.  

This year marks 60 years of Palestinian dispossession and displacement and a savage, relentless occupation that is smothering the lifeblood of the Palestinians while Israel celebrates its ill-gotten gains. Palestinians are starving in Gaza, Palestinians are being sold out in the West Bank, Palestinians are dying. Their very existence is under threat. It is as simple and as awful as that.  

Every Australian ought to be asking why our Prime Minister and the parliament feel so humiliatingly obligated to Israel that they must go to these lengths to show their friendship with a foreign country that consistently violates international law, United Nations resolutions and human rights conventions?  

If supporting the Palestinian cause is too much to ask, then refusing to single Israel out for any kind of recognition would at least be sensitive to the Palestinians living here.  

The Palestinians were never asked if they would agree to the foreign imperial division of their country: most had their family homes and lands taken from them by Zionist forces ruthlessly pushing for a Greater Israel not intended by the 1947 United Nations Partition of Palestine. All suffer indescribable pain knowing their people live a hellish existence under Israel's occupation. It is on this human wreckage of Palestinian lives that Israel celebrates its independence, honoured so gratuitously by our government. 

All this falls hard on the heels of the new Prime Minister's moving apology to our own indigenous people and raises many questions about the sincerity of that momentous gesture.  

The similarity between the grievous losses suffered by both peoples--the Aborigines and the Palestinians - is not fanciful. Both peoples have been the hapless victims of the great white colonial enterprise and in both cases it would have succeeded brilliantly, if these people would have just disappeared.  

Australia's Government Continues Its Love Affair With Israel