Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am sorry, Senator, that you did not hear me speaking about the loss of Israeli civilians. I am here to speak about the peace that is starting to break out in the region as a result of the ceasefire, a ceasefire that the Australian government and the opposition refused to support, and that the Lebanese government has, for over a month, been calling for. If the international community had heeded that call for a ceasefire three weeks ago, thousands of civilians would not have died. There are lessons from this that we as an international community and as the Australian people need to learn. They are lessons about the importance of peace and the role that we can play. Right now, the role we need to be playing is in rebuilding the infrastructure in Lebanon. The Australian government can make an enormous contribution to that. The Greens support Australia making a contribution to rebuilding the infrastructure in Lebanon—that is what we need to be doing. We support looking at and supporting investigations into war crimes that have occurred in Lebanon and Israel—that is what we need to be doing. We need to learn these lessons to ensure that we support peace in the region.

One of the very important lessons that we need to learn about how we can support peace in the Middle East is the need for us to continue to call on the Israeli government to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories and to abide by the international resolutions of the UN Security Council so that this issue can be resolved. We all know that we cannot get just, enduring and sustainable peace in the Middle East whilst occupations continue—not just the occupation that we see in Palestine. This area of the Middle East has suffered under foreign occupations that continue in Afghanistan and Iraq. We see these occupations acting as incitements whereby, unfortunately, we all become less safe. People in Israel, people in Australia, people in the United States and people in the United Kingdom become less safe because of these continuing foreign occupations. Unfortunately, they are situations that many in the Arab and Muslim worlds point to which fuel violence against the West.

So they are the lessons we need to learn from this conflict. We need to ensure that we work constructively for peace, and that means ending the occupations in Palestine and Iraq. We need to contribute to ensuring that we can have an ongoing and lasting peace in the Middle East. They are lessons that our government needs to hear and learn.