A new book by Black Inc — Statements from the Soul — normalises Zionism through claims to Jewish indigeneity to Israel.
RAND KHATIB AND JORDANA SILVERSTEIN
APR 24, 2023
We’re seeing in stark relief the ways Zionism enjoys broad support from across the Australian media at the moment — how it is normalised, described as something that has always, and will always, exist.
This occurs not just in the language of “conflict” and recent Australian reportage on the rockets from Gaza, rather than the Israeli army’s attack on worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque in early April. It occurs in the naturalising — in the making inevitable — of a connection between Jews, Zionism and Israel.
Recently, this approach has also entered the realm of discussing the Voice to Parliament.
The Schwartz Media group has faced accusations of supporting Zionism and Israel, and of avoiding critical discussion of both, as ABC journalist John Lyons has written. Indeed, as Randa Abdel-Fattah has observed, Schwartz Media “has what seems almost a policy position of avoiding coverage of Israel (and not publishing Palestinians, let alone Palestinians critical of Israel)”.
The company is currently under boycott from Palestinian and other writers in solidarity, including many First Nations writers, because of this continued work of erasure. Projects like The Sunday Paper — in contrast to the Schwartz-owned The Saturday Paper — have arisen to highlight this and to build alternative spaces for political discussions around indigeneity and solidarity.
Establishing connections
Schwartz Media owns book publisher Black Inc. and its La Trobe University imprint. In its recently released book, Statements from the Soul: The Moral Case for the Uluru Statement from the Heart, edited by Shireen Morris and Damien Freeman, we see a normalisation of Zionism through a connection established between the idea of Jewish indigeneity in Israel and the truth of Aboriginal indigeneity to this country.
Two chapters argue for Jewish-Aboriginal connections on the basis of a shared experience of genocide, discrimination and indigeneity.
Rabbi David Saperstein says it quite bluntly: “we Jews are ourselves an indigenous people”. And rabbi Ralph Genende writes, “Our identification with those who have suffered discrimination and devastation is not merely emotional — it’s the axis of Jewish ethics”.
In extolling the virtues of the work undertaken by Noel Pearson and Mark Leibler — a tax lawyer at Arnold Bloch Leibler (a firm heavily involved in Aboriginal affairs) who has also been co-chair of Reconciliation Australia, co-chair of the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australians, and was present when the Uluru Statement from the Heart was signed — Genende writes:
[Leibler] is a champion of the Uluru Statement and was at Uluru in May 2017 when it was overwhelmingly adopted. Mark is also a committed Zionist. This is no coincidence because a connection to the land of Israel is one of the pillars of Judaism. The Uluru Statement draws our attention to the inextricable bond between people and the land of their ancestors.
This assertion tries to cover the important difference between Jewish connections to land and the work of a modern, settler-colonial, Jewish nation-state. Biblical connection and modern political formations are not the same things.
The choice to deliberately not mention Palestinians is an attempt to erase both their presence in that holy land and their existence as a group whose treatment — by Jews and others — modern Jewish ethics must surely grapple with. It is quite revealing of the way that Palestinians, and their indigeneity, are so easily dismissed.
Palestinian erasure
Statements from the Soul contains only one, dismissive, mention of Palestinians. After asserting that “for 3800 years, [Jewish] destiny has been tied up with the land of Israel”, Saperstein writes, “Of course, today, we must recognise that the Palestinians and the Bedouin communities in Israel have their own authentic claims as indigenous communities there.”
By alluding to the Palestinian “authentic” claims to indigeneity (authentic according to whom?), Saperstein gives the illusion of participating in a two-sided, balanced discourse without actually investigating the natural conclusion of that sentence: that Indigenous Palestinians should therefore be entitled to the same universally agreed upon Indigenous rights.
If we are to apply Article 10 of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, it is self-evident that the rights of Indigenous Palestinians are in direct conflict with Zionism, as it seeks to forcibly remove the native population from their lands and territories. Israel did this in 1948 — when the State of Israel was declared and the Nakba began — and continues to today.
Meanwhile, the only Palestinians with “authentic” claims to indigeneity (in the eyes of the West), the Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Naqab — who are indeed Palestinian, regardless of Saperstein’s attempt to separate them into two groups (“the Palestinians and the Bedouin communities”) — face the same land theft, forced expulsion, unlawful incarceration and ethnic cleansing that all Palestinians have faced since 1948.
In this case, hidden behind a facade of infamous foundational Zionist assertions of the project of “making the desert bloom” sits a mythos that claims this is “a land without a people for a people without a land”. In Australia, we know these well as settler-colonial constructs cut from the same cloth as terra nullius, which carry the implication of European superiority in culture and knowledge.
Just as regularly as it is asserted that Israel has a right to exist as a nation-state while Palestinians have “aspirations” to statehood, so too does this section — and this book — deliberately locate Jewish indigeneity as more real than Palestinian.
But there is another way. Jewish solidarity with First Nation peoples need not be on the basis of a shared indigeneity that tries to erase Palestinians. No one is served by such an approach — a fact some Jews have understood.
In so-called Australia, both Jews and Palestinians who do not also have Aboriginal ancestors are settlers who should grapple with the discomfort of recognising themselves as benefiting from living on stolen land. Palestinians have recognised this, which is why a six-decade-long, anti-colonial solidarity between Indigenous Palestinians and First Nations peoples can be traced, relying heavily on parallel experiences of land dispossession and human rights violations.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Rand Khatib is a ’48 Palestinian activist and community organiser based in Sydney. Born and raised partially in so-called Israel, Rand’s politics are shaped by her lived experiences as an Israeli citizen in the homeland and in the diaspora. She is a University of Sydney student and sits on the student representative council.
Dr Jordana Silverstein is a senior research fellow at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. Her upcoming book is Cruel Care: A History of Children at our Borders (Monash University Publishing, May 2023). She researches histories of statelessness, Australian child refugee policies and Australian Jewish history.