Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd wants Australia to abstain in a potentially explosive United Nations vote to recognise a Palestinian state, pitting him against Julia Gillard’s declared strong support for Israel.
Mr Rudd has written to the Prime Minister recommending Australia vote neither for nor against a resolution set to dominate a UN summit in New York next month.
If followed, the letter – sent before Mr Rudd had heart surgery on August 1 – would result in Australia trying to duck the controversy over efforts to allow Palestine into the UN as a sovereign state.
Mr Rudd’s suggested tactic is being interpreted as an attempt to avoid antagonising Arab nations and to protect Australia’s campaign for a temporary seat on the Security Council, due to go to a vote next year.
But abstaining from any vote on Palestinian statehood would annoy Israel – which has mounted a worldwide diplomatic offensive against the resolution – and would likely leave Australia out of step with the US.
Ms Gillard has made support for Israel one of her foreign policy priorities since toppling Mr Rudd for the leadership. Australia has a policy of supporting a two-state solution but has not backed unilateral moves towards Palestinian statehood in the past, calling for a negotiated settlement to the long-running conflict.
Three prominent Jewish groups held talks in Canberra with Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard in early June to express opposition to the UN vote, which is expected in late September around the opening of the annual General Assembly.
The meetings – led by Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Danny Lamm, the Zionist Federation of Australia’s Philip Chester and the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council’s Jeremy Jones – were described as a presentation rather than lobbying.
”We went to present and asked to be listened to about where we stood on particular issues,” Mr Jones said yesterday.
Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib was in Canberra last month to put the Palestinian case in favour of the resolution and met Chris Evans, who was acting foreign minister while Mr Rudd was in hospital.
Moammar Mashni, of Australians for Palestine, said his organisation had met a number of government members in June urging Australia to back the UN resolution in line with Labor’s support for a two-state settlement.

During the 2008 election, Barack Obama emerged as the consummate anti-war candidate. He wanted to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, funnel resources to the home front, and generally remedy the nation’s reputation as a global bully. Now, as the 2012 elections ramp up, he continues to carve a softer stance on foreign policy, telling voters that “the tides of war are receding.” But how much has actually changed? Neither disillusioned Democrats nor triumphant Republicans have had much data to go on. Until now.
In an exclusive analysis, Newsweek combed through a decade of military deployment history, and found only a faint line between the Bush and Obama presidencies. The number of American troops abroad has dropped less than 1 percent under President Obama, buoyed by what appears to be a sharp rise in the number of clandestine assignments, and curious growth in the number of personnel at Guantanamo Bay.
None of the robust deployment trends begun under Bush have significantly abated. And since World War II, only President Bush has scattered a greater proportion of American might overseas: 39.5, 42.8, and 39.1 percent of American troops were abroad between 2006 and 2008, compared to Obama’s 39.3 percent in 2009 and 38.2 percent as of December 2010, the most recent date for which worldwide data is available.* Even with an aggressive—or, to some minds, reckless—drawdown in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, it would take nearly another 300,000 tickets home before the military was as united at home as they were on September 10, 2001.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli academic, mother and political radical, summons up an image of rows of Jewish schoolchildren, bent over their books, learning about their neighbours, the Palestinians. But, she says, they are never referred to as Palestinians unless the context is terrorism.
They are called Arabs. “The Arab with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress. They describe them as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop,” she says. “The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer.”
Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has studied the content of Israeli school books for the past five years, and her account, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, is to be published in the UK this month. She describes what she found as racism– but, more than that, a racism that prepares young Israelis for their compulsory military service.
“People don’t really know what their children are reading in textbooks,” she said. “One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. People ask how can these nice Jewish boys and girls become monsters once they put on a uniform. I think the major reason for that is education. So I wanted to see how school books represent Palestinians.”
In “hundreds and hundreds” of books, she claims she did not find one photograph that depicted an Arab as a “normal person”. The most important finding in the books she studied – all authorised by the ministry of education – concerned the historical narrative of events in 1948, the year in which Israel fought a war to establish itself as an independent state, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the ensuing conflict.
The killing of Palestinians is depicted as something that was necessary for the survival of the nascent Jewish state, she claims. “It’s not that the massacres are denied, they are represented in Israeli school books as something that in the long run was good for the Jewish state. For example, Deir Yassin [a pre-1948 Palestinian village close to Jerusalem] was a terrible slaughter by Israeli soldiers. In school books they tell you that this massacre initiated the massive flight of Arabs from Israel and enabled the establishment of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. So it was for the best. Maybe it was unfortunate, but in the long run the consequences for us were good.”
Children, she says, grow up to serve in the army and internalise the message that Palestinians are “people whose life is dispensable with impunity. And not only that, but people whose number has to be diminished.”
 

Where is The Post going journalistically, and how will it get there?
The glaring weakness of most, but not all, of The Post’s D.C. competitors is that they’re doing journalism for two limited audiences: fat cats and power elites. The Capitol Hill publications aim for the corporations, K Street law firms and trade associations that can afford thousands of dollars in annual subscription costs. And they are selling to Capitol Hill lawmakers and staffers and executive branch senior officials who must have a constant stream of information, regardless of price.
Politico is moving to pay-per-view journalism with its PoliticoPro policy services. Bloomberg is the ultimate news outlet for comfortable capitalists. Even the New York Times has evidently decided to be the fee-based national newspaper for the liberal, cultured elite.
So what about the rest of us who want to monitor our government and not pay an arm and a leg to do so? Serving us should be The Post’s mission, pure and simple.
The Post will always compete with the inside-the-Beltway journals and with the Times. It has to. But its future lies not with the rich; it lies with the citizenry. This newspaper must be the one source of high-quality, probing Washington news that readers in this region and across the country can look to for holding their government accountable. This publication must be for all Americans.
This means that The Post can’t be a liberal publication or a conservative one. It must be hard-hitting, scrappy and questioning — skeptical of all political figures and parties and beholden to no one. It has to be the rock-’em-sock-’em organization that is passionate about the news. It needs to be less bloodless and take more risks when chasing the story and the truth.
Where do I get this crazy, almost populist notion? From the readers who write to me by the score every day. Whether they are liberal or conservative, that’s what they want. That’s what they deserve. That should be, and can be financially and journalistically, The Post’s future.