Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Many years ago—it may even have been before my incarnation as an MP—I sat down with my old sparring partner Andrew Hewitt, a Communist Party organiser in student politics, who was then the executive director of Community Aid Abroad, which later begat Oxfam. We reached a modus vivendi not to descend back into the days of student politics and have endless fights about the Middle East. It was a very wise policy for me and for Oxfam—we could both proceed with out lives. Unfortunately, under pressure from the mother country it seems that people in London whose decrees do not jive with the new world seem to have given the impression that Oxfam internationally is very closely associated with the boycott of Israel movement. That is very unfortunate, because Oxfam does excellent international humanitarian work and human rights work. I am sure that it does not fit with the Australian mentality. That is why a number of Labor MPs this week made it very clear that we are opposed to the boycott of Israel, just as when the previous government was in office then foreign minister Rudd, Treasurer Swan et cetera joined me, people from the current government and other people from public life at various Max Brenner outlets to show our opposition to this selective boycott.

The current focus of the concerns of this selective boycott movement is a company called SodaStream, which has one of its 18 factories in a place called Ma'ale Adumim. The factory employs mainly Palestinian workers who, I understand, are paid exactly the same wages. Ahmed Nasser, who works in the factory, when he was meeting a delegation from the Presbyterian Church said, 'They're the best conditions in the West Bank. Everything is according to the law.' He added that he receives an hour-and-a-half worth of breaks in a standard 12-hour shift and that prayer times are not deducted from break allowances. Perhaps we could institute some of these ideas in the Australian industrial relations system!

Anyone who supports this boycott, especially those who pretend to be left wingers, has to look into the eyes of those who survived the Hitler regime and their descendants when discussing boycotts of Israeli or Jewish businesses. Some years ago I received a glossy booklet from this boycott group that advocated boycotting L'Oreal, Revlon and Vidal Sassoon, none of which companies are based in the Middle East. They are all famous international cosmetic companies whose only commonality was that their owners were Jewish. It is clear that the motives of the boycott movement are not to promote peace, they are not to promote the current negotiations that are being fostered by President Barack Obama, they are not to promote a peaceful solution for the Palestinian people; the boycott is a vehicle for hardliners seeking to cloak their unacceptable political ends in the rhetoric of human rights.

Do not take my word for this. On 14 December last year, in the US magazine The Nation, Omar Barghouti the guru and founder of this international boycott campaign said, 'Going back to a two-state solution, beside having passed its expiry date, it was never a moral solution to start with.' In the same article, he said, 'Good riddance. The two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finally dead. But someone has to issue an official death certificate before the rotting corpse is given a proper burial and we can move onto a unitary state where, by definition, Jews will be a minority.'

If you were in Israel—a highly successful, high-tech, pluralist, democratic state where there are Arab members of the Knesset and of the supreme court and so on—and viewing events in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt, you would not easily be giving up the pluralist, democratic, technocratic state you live in for of the aims of very hard-line people. (Time expired)

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