Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There has been a lot of attention given recently to the assassination of senior Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. I do not know who killed Mr Mahmoud. The only people who have been arrested so far in connection with the assassination are Ahmad Hasnin and Anwar Shekhaiber, who are both members of the Palestinian organisation Fatah. Frankly, just like the murderer of Australians who met his end today, Dulmatin, I would have preferred him to have been brought to trial but, as the President of Indonesia and the Prime Minister indicated with Dulmatin, the world is better off without him. If Australian passports were used by a friendly country like Israel, it was, as the Australian government says, wrong and a mistake, but our relationship is too deep, too longstanding and too friendly for this one particular incident to disturb it in the long term.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh lived by violence, and his violent end, whoever was responsible for it, was not surprising. In 1989 he was responsible for the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers—Avi Sasportas and Ilan Sa’adon—whose murders he celebrated by standing on one of the corpses to be photographed. It is surprising that his interview on al-Jazeera boasting of this two weeks before his death has not been reported by the Australian media. He was wanted for murder in Israel, Egypt and Jordan. He was Iran’s senior agent in Gaza and played a central role in linking Hamas with the Al Quds forces of the revolutionary guards in Iran.

However, like the Goldstone commission and all of the side issues brought up by people who want to denigrate Australia’s relationship with Israel, this is, in a sense, a side issue. We have seen much more important and very positive developments happening thanks to the tireless work of Secretary of State of the United States Hilary Clinton in proximity talks taking place between the Israelis and Palestinians, resuming after many months of stalemate. This is very encouraging, as Treasurer Wayne Swan noted last night at a big public meeting that he spoke at. I congratulate both Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority for having the courage to resume talks without preconditions.

Of course, we have seen many false starts and false dawns in the Middle East before. In 2000, President Clinton and Labour Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a state on 95 per cent of the West Bank, plus Gaza. Arafat turned it down, ostensibly on the issue of the so-called right of return but really because he feared the loss of his own status if a genuinely democratic Palestinian state was established. What a tragedy that was and what a golden opportunity for peace lost.

Since then we have had the so-called second intifada, with nearly 800 Israelis killed by suicide bombers, many of them launched by Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s friends in Hamas. The derided Israeli security barrier halted that campaign last year. If you are an Israeli citizen you will have taken a lot of notice of the fact that not one single life has been lost to suicide bombers since the fence has been in place. Of course, this campaign achieved absolutely nothing for the Palestinian people.

When I look at this map of 98 per cent of the West Bank which was offered by Prime Minister Olmert of Israel recently to Mr Abbas I think that sometimes the aphorism of the famous Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban—that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity—is true. But we always have to be rational and accommodating. We always have to try to reach a solution to the Middle East problem. The solution, as we all know and as Australia has supported in the United Nations, is the partition of Palestine into two states—an Arab Palestinian state next to a Jewish state. I hope and pray this time in the negotiations we will see a more realistic attitude on all sides and a genuine and lasting peace attained for the people of the Middle East. Australians genuinely interested in peace will look forward to these negotiations producing a productive result. I seek leave to table a copy of the map of 98.5 per cent of the West Bank.

Leave granted.