“Why collusion with this grotesque Israeli government?” asked 150 Australian academics in an open letter sent to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on June 14.
They said they were writing in “sadness and despair” at Labor’s support for Tel Aviv’s genocidal attack on Gaza.
The 150 scholars criticise Labor’s support for the Benjamin Netanyahu government and urged it to acknowledge the genocide, the slaughter in the West Bank and to support the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Criminal Court (ICC).
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They said Albanese must drop the excuse that Israel has to “defend itself” based on an aberrant attack by Hamas on October 7, as the war on Palestine started with the 1948 Nakba.
Professor Stuart Rees said there is “no ‘moral equivalence’” between Israel and Hamas.
“Even a cursory reading of history reveals decades of Israeli terrorism and massacres of Palestinians by Israeli forces which far outstrip the Hamas murders of October 2023,” he said.
In May 1948, Israeli declared itself a nation in “a land without a people for a people without a land”. Palestine, of course, was far from empty; it was populated by Indigenous Palestinians.
Israeli forces ethnically cleansed around 750,000 Palestinians from their own lands, pushing many into neighbouring nations, including Jordan, while others became internally displaced.
Israel’s violence against........