Palestine burns while Australian politicians fiddle in darkened rooms

Antony Loewenstein

“Moderate Greens” must be so pleased that Murdoch’s Australian is praising their stance to not fully embrace BDS against Israel:

Moderate Greens in NSW have welcomed the party’s decision to ditch its official support for the “destructive” international campaign to isolate Israel.

A meeting of the NSW Greens state council on Sunday resolved to rescind a motion committing the state party to the boycotts, divestment and sanctions campaign. It passed a motion that recognised “there is a variety of views within the community, NSW Greens and the Australian Greens on the BDS”.

The move brings the NSW division closer to the position of federal Greens leader Bob Brown but is being widely interpreted in party circles as a defeat for NSW Senator Lee Rhiannon.

Former state Greens MP Ian Cohen – who belongs to the more environment-focused arm of the party – said last night the shift represented the “maturation of the Greens political organisation in NSW”.

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president Yair Miller said, “We welcome this small but significant step … but reiterate that they are still wrong to argue that BDS is a legitimate tactic.”

Meanwhile, the failed rhetoric of the two-state solution, mindlessly repeated by Labor, Liberal and Greens politicians, is once again demolished, this time by leading Palestinian Rashid Khalidi (inHaaretz):

A “one-state solution already exists,” he added, because “there is only one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, in which there are two or three levels of citizenship or non-citizenship within the borders of that one state that exerts total control.”

Laying much of the blame for their situation on the Palestinians themselves, he called on them to “re-imagine” the way a Palestinian state would work. “Why not have a Palestinian state in which Jews live? What’s wrong with that?” And in what might sound as an echo of Israeli complaints about the “Tel Aviv state”, Khalidi said that Palestinian leaders need to mobilize their people and “get them out their expensive Audis and Mercedes and out of their bubble in Ramallah where everyone is prosperous and there is no unemployment.”

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