Letters - 17 November 2023
From The indigenous Voice to Ukraine and Palestine
The indigenous Voice
I too was disappointed that the Australian referendum rejected altering the constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice (‘Splitting the vote’, 27 October).
Since visiting my daughter and my sisters’ families in Queensland earlier this year, I have watched with dismay as the polls turned from sixty per cent in favour to sixty per cent against. Nevertheless, I think there are grounds for hope that a better solution may be found.
The clauses stated that the Voice could make representations on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and that the parliament would have power to make laws relating to the composition, function, powers and procedures of the body. It is difficult to conceive any issue that would not relate to indigenous people. They were guardians for 60,000 years, during which time territorial boundaries existed, and people co-existed sustainably with plants and animals.
Given the history of forcible removal of children from their families, definitions of who might qualify to contribute to the Voice might more reasonably be left to representatives of the First Nations. The Uluru Statement from the Heart (https://ulurustatement.org) came from the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, which could provide a suitable starting point for detailed considerations of how the Voice should function. The plea for a First Nations Voice and Makarrata Commission (the coming together after a struggle), surely comes from the heart and speaks to it.
The statement also refers to rates of imprisonment and alienation of children from their families. These echo problems of identity, motivation and social breakdown encountered by dispossessed people throughout history and the world.
I recognise the reluctance to make race-based laws. Aspiring to a society free from racial bias cannot restore the many indigenous lives lost through disease, slaughter and displacement. The one person, one vote mantra of democracy does not always serve minorities well.
The statement from the heart did not ask for reparations, it asked for reconciliation and recognition of traditional values alongside government based on European models. An indigenous Voice could provide a valuable contemporary contribution to: managing land use, biodiversity and climate change, and could balance the power of the mining and logging companies, personal land ownership and dominance of capitalism.
Robert Jeffery
Please stop the killing
‘Oasis of Peace’ is the name of a multi-ethnic kibbutz in Israel I try to support. And yet as a Quaker I confess to intense feelings of rage more than peace this last month: rage at the murder of many children of God working on peace and community-orientated kibbutzim, somewhere I was welcomed as a student worker over one long summer. And then, in the past few weeks, the raining of bombs of death on children in Gaza so very clinically – and at the push of a button from planes overhead.
This has upset me hugely as a former Save the Children aid worker, and also as a supporter of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, which Quakers passionately support.
So how do I move from my probably-understandable feelings of rage towards a place of peace and reconciliation, in me as much as in the biblical land known both as Palestine and Israel? Deaths continue to mount up almost hourly. So my prayer is please everyone stop the killing – by whatever name you call a truce, ceasefire, whatever. Please begin to talk – and stop the killing before yet another child dies.
I would love one day to return to Palestine. To walk to Massada in the heat, drink cold water in an oasis, and in the cool of the evening watch eagles and hummingbirds come to rest by the setting sun.
As the prophets might say, truly this land is beautiful.
Mic Morgan
Will we forget?
The state of Israel was built upon bloodshed, during which villages were raised and demolished after massacres of civilians.
The sadness of the current situation in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank continues this cycle of bloodshed. Innocent people of Gaza are no less dead than the innocent people of the kibbutzim in Israel.
While the world is witness to the devastation in Gaza and the negotiations about hostages, where is the humanity in all of this? In three or six months’ time when ordinary people are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives, will the rest of the world have forgotten?
Jill Whitfield
Sensitive and insightful
I am very grateful to Lois A Chaber (3 November) for her sensitive and insightful explanation of the very complicated, wider background to the current Hamas/Israel war. She speaks my mind. The situation is so much more nuanced than the extreme polarised attitude adopted by so many vigorous protesters, however well-meaning they are.
In considering this latest violence, I suggest we need to bear in mind the words of the Balfour Declaration of 9 November 1917, 106 years ago. It is very short.
‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’
It is clear that ‘the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ have never been recognised or respected.
My further reading in Wikipedia revealed this statement: ‘The term “national home” had no precedent in international law, and was intentionally vague as to whether a Jewish state was contemplated. The intended boundaries of Palestine were not specified, and the British government later confirmed that the words “in Palestine” meant that the Jewish national home was not intended to cover all of Palestine.’
As Lois indicates, now would be an ideal time for British religious and political leaders to urgently advocate international negotiations for that elusive long-term solution of peaceful coexistence in that troubled region.
With our peace-keeping history, Quakers are the obvious choice to set an example. I pray a way may be found… soon.
Caroline Coode
Logic will be our ally
Tim Robertson (3 November) believes that institutional antisemitism underlies Britain Yearly Meeting’s recent statement on Israel-Palestine. His reason? The inclusion of the phrase that the violence must be seen in the context of military occupation.
Yet I read this as a statement of logic: no conflict in history has taken place in a vacuum. Even the Holocaust itself had a context, and historians, including pro-Israeli historians, have written many words exploring this. To do so is not to forgive or justify the Nazis.
Of course the brutal attacks carried out by Hamas on 7 October demand a response that goes beyond mere logic.
But logic will be our ally in finding peace. It will not, in itself, be enough, but logic tells me that, at some point, people in this conflict will sit down facing those who have carried out atrocities against them and their people. This happened in South Africa, in Northern Ireland, and in Rwanda. Only when it happened did a better outcome emerge for all the people of those regions. They had to listen to the truth as those on the other side understood it.
Alastair Cameron
Ukraine and Palestine
The attitudes of Vladimir Putin towards Ukraine and Benjamin Netanyahu towards Palestine are both reminiscent of a one-liner from The Boys Own Paper about seventy-five years ago: ‘It wasn’t me who pulled the cat’s tail, I just held on; the cat did the pulling’.
Ian McFarlane
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