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

I rise today to speak about the situation in the Middle East. We are all greatly relieved to see the beginning of a ceasefire now in the Middle East. Let us hope that it can hold and that people can begin to rebuild their lives. The war has devastated Lebanon and caused significant damage to Israel’s northern towns. According to the Lebanese government, over 1,000 people have been killed and over 3,500 people have been injured, with nearly one million people being turned into refugees in their own country, being displaced, as a result of the bombing campaign. According to Reuters, 157 Israelis have died, 40 of whom were civilians killed by Hezbollah rocket fire and the rest of whom were soldiers. Most of them were killed whilst fighting inside Lebanon. A thousand people have been wounded in rocket attacks in Israel, and 450 soldiers have been hurt fighting in Lebanon.

This is a toll that we could have avoided. The United Nations has indicated that, of these casualties, nearly one-third were children. We now have a devastated country that needs rebuilding. Much of southern Beirut and southern Lebanon is in ruins. The airports, the roads, the bridges and the ambulances have been destroyed. The economy is in tatters and a major humanitarian disaster is on our hands. The Lebanon Council for Development and Reconstruction put the cost of the bomb damage in Lebanon at $2.5 billion to the end of July, and more damage has been inflicted since then, with major road bombings again occurring.

I am sure that many other parliamentarians, like me, have had members of the Lebanese community visiting them and talking with them and others about the destruction that has been wrought on the country and about their concerns for the capacity of Lebanon to rebuild. I had some women in my office last week who were talking with me about their concerns as people get ready for the winter in Lebanon. There is emergency food aid coming in for refugees right now, but this time is traditionally when they would be preparing their food for winter. If they are not able to do that, if they are not able to harvest the chickpeas, dry them out and store them for winter, this humanitarian disaster will continue into the winter.

People talk about their concerns for the rebuilding of the economy of Lebanon, an economy that relies very much on tourism. Having the new airport destroyed and having oil spills right across the Mediterranean has taken away the opportunities for tourism in the area and will have a massive impact in the area. I was hearing stories last week about a milk factory in Lebanon. Previously all of the milk in Lebanon was supplied by an Israeli company that operated in Lebanon. In recent years, a new organisation had been set up, a consortium of French and Lebanese, to provide milk for Lebanon. That organisation’s factory was targeted in the bombing. The capacity to have basic infrastructure and to rebuild the country is something that we need to be very concerned about. We as Australia can contribute to the reconstruction efforts, and we should be involved in them.

I was reading this morning on a United Nations website about a factory in the Bekaa Valley which made prefabricated homes for temporary accommodation units for the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. The owner was reported talking about the bombing of his factory. He talked about the Israeli jets making several raids and he said:

When they saw one building was still standing, they returned and bombed again.

The job of rebuilding the country of Lebanon is massive, and we need to ensure that Australia is playing its part as outlined in the UN Security Council resolution.

On Sunday morning, just after the UN Security Council resolution had gone through and the ceasefire had been accepted in the UN Security Council—in the gap of time between the ceasefire resolution passing and the Israeli government agreeing that they would stop their aerial bombardment—I received a phone call from a good friend of mine, who told me about the bombing that had occurred in his wife’s town in the far north of Lebanon. The business of one of the uncles was destroyed; the business had provided all the groceries for that town. An aunt who was 60 survived the blast but received shrapnel wounds to her stomach and is covered all over her body with bruises. Her child was also injured by shrapnel. One of his cousins’ bedrooms was completely demolished—luckily, he had not been there. He had been getting ready to go for morning prayers at the mosque, otherwise he would have been there. It is a very densely populated area. Many people had moved there after previous conflicts because it was an area that had previously remained peaceful. The jets struck on Saturday night at a time when many people would have been in their homes.

Another friend of mine has a cousin in the Lebanese army who is based in the north, in Tripoli. Despite Israel’s claims of targeting Hezbollah, they bombed his barracks and killed many members of his unit. Luckily, he was not in the barracks at the time. Later, when he was sent down to the south with his unit, the Israeli jets bombed a bridge which he had crossed over two minutes previously.

I am sure we have all had these experiences in talking with the Australian-Lebanese community. A gentleman in my office last week told me about the phone calls that his family members had received—phone calls after midnight from people they believed to be Israeli agents; who knows—warning them not to take in Muslim refugees from the south. These were Christian families receiving these phone calls. He told me he had heard of a number of people around the country who had received these phone calls. That is not the kind of incitement that we want, wherever it is coming from.

People may have seen a story in the Australian on Saturday about the convoy of civilians and Lebanese security forces leaving a town in southern Lebanon. The United Nations escorted them for the first few kilometres as they went out of the town. The United Nations and Israel had been in discussions and they had been given the green light for that convoy to head out. Yet, once the United Nations escort left the convoy, the convoy was bombed, killing at least seven people and wounding 36.

We are still waiting for the report on the attacks on the UN peacekeepers, from the United Nations investigation. Part of the lessons we need to learn and part of the wrap-up from this experience is to ensure that there are investigations into any war crimes that have occurred in Lebanon and in Israel. We need to ensure that that is the next step that we take as the international community—ensure that these things are properly investigated.

Many people who will now be returning to their homes will be worried about the threat of cluster bombs that have been used in the area and the unexploded ordnance that remains in the area. Part of the negotiations between Israel and Lebanon involved Lebanon asking for maps of the landmines that had been previously planted in southern Lebanon. The ceasefire could break down at any time. Israel has already said it reserves its right to continue its attacks on Hezbollah and Hezbollah has said it reserves its right to repel Israel’s continued occupation of Lebanon. These incursions and invasions into Lebanon have been going on for many years. Since Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 there have been hundreds of violations of the blue line between the two countries. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon reports that Israeli aircraft crossed the line on an almost daily basis between 2001 and 2003 and persistently until 2006. In the past, Hezbollah has captured soldiers from the Israeli defence forces, and negotiations occurred to allow for those prisoners to be swapped and for those releases to occur. So we need to ask: why did this operate differently this time?

In the Haaretz in Israel on Monday there was a story about Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the defence minister going to visit the family of the two soldiers whose capture supposedly sparked this conflict. They indicated that they were negotiating with Hezbollah and they believed they would be successful in procuring their release. This is something that could have been done a month ago. Israel has a history of negotiating with Hezbollah for the release of captured soldiers. If that had occurred a month ago, all these thousands of people would not have been killed and would not have been injured.

The calls for peace have been consistent from the Israeli peace movement members, who have been involved in massive demonstrations in Israel throughout this conflict, and from the Lebanese community in Australia. Unfortunately, our government in their contributions during the conflict did not hear these calls for peace. I was astounded to hear the Prime Minister talk about the right of Israel to continue with its aerial bombing campaign in southern Lebanon. He was making those comments at a time when 400 Australians were in the south of Lebanon. I was quite astounded to hear the Prime Minister of our country make such comments.

I have asked questions in estimates about this, and I received information that in 2004 Australia sold almost $10 million worth of military exports to Israel. I am waiting for the answers to questions that I asked about the more recent arms exports to Israel. It is important that we have this information. The role our Australian government should be playing should be neutral—that of a neutral broker in this issue to resolve the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Unfortunately, our Prime Minister and our government have been arming one side of the conflict and have continued to support aerial bombing of areas that have included Australian citizens.

There are many lessons that the Australian government can learn from this particular conflict and the way in which we should be engaging. We all know that at the heart of all the problems in the Middle East is the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories. During the last month, the focus has been on the activities that have been going on in Lebanon, but such activities continue to operate in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank, with the bombing of homes and infrastructure. We have seen members of the parliament in Palestine illegally captured by the Israelis and we have seen ministers in the government captured by the Israelis, and this continues to go on. But we have not had any focus on that over the last month because the focus has, understandably, been on the situation in Lebanon.

Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What about the rockets hitting Israel?

Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to 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.