Australia has announced that it will resume using the term “Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Should Israel respond by calling Australia “Occupied Aboriginal Territory?”
Under the previous Liberal Party government, Australia recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and stopped using the obnoxious and historically erroneous term “Occupied Palestinian Territories.” But the Labor Party government that came to power last year has reversed both of those decisions.
There’s an important lesson for Israel and its supporters about the reliability of international promises. For decades, critics of Israel have been pushing the idea that the Israelis should surrender territory in exchange for “security guarantees” from the United States. That was the carrot dangled in front of Israel during the big push, in the 1990s, for Israel to surrender the Golan Heights.
To this day, there are supporters of the Palestinian cause who advocate stationing American or international forces in Judea-Samaria, in order to convince the Israelis that a Palestinian state there would not pose any danger.
The problem – as the Australia reversal reminds us – is that a government can offer a “guarantee,” or station troops somewhere, but then a new government can decide to cancel the guarantee or withdraw the troops.
The other important lesson from Australia’s policy reversal has to do with the concept of “Occupied Palestinian Territories.” History books and maps have, for countless centuries, called those areas by their correct historical names, Judea and Samaria. In fact, the very name “Palestine” has no historical basis; it was invented not by the people living there, but by Roman conquerors 2,000 years ago in an attempt to stamp out the country’s Jewish identity.
Those territories have never been part of any state of Palestine. Its inhabitants never spoke a Palestinian language. Nothing about their history or culture was distinctly “Palestinian.” To call them “Occupied Palestinian Territories” is an insult to the historical record.
Occupied Australia
IF YOU WANT to find some genuinely occupied territory, look no further than the country of Australia. And I don’t mean just some small part of it. I mean the whole thing.
The indigenous inhabitants of Australia, known as Aboriginals, had been living there for more than 60,000 years when the English explorer, Lt. James Cook, suddenly arrived in 1770 and “claimed” the country for Great Britain. He didn’t ask the Aboriginals what they thought about the idea of being occupied by a foreign power. Racist European colonists regarded indigenous peoples as inferior and considered their wishes unworthy of consideration.
The British occupation of Australia got underway in 1788 with the creation of a penal colony there. Those British criminals were soon followed by illegal British settlers, who seized the Aboriginals’ territory and expelled or murdered the residents when they got in the way.
The occupiers also introduced various new diseases – smallpox, measles, tuberculosis – that took the lives of many locals. By 1900, the indigenous aboriginal population of 750,000 had been reduced to 93,000.
As the years went by, the extent of the occupation widened. Australia is a huge country – nearly 3 million square miles. The occupiers gradually occupied all of it.
The occupation and mistreatment of the Aboriginals continue to this day. Amnesty International reports that current Australian government policies still “take away indigenous peoples’ basic rights [and] force indigenous people to abandon their homes and communities.”
The younger generations of Aboriginals share “their relatives’ deep trauma and anger from losing their lands, culture, and families,” Amnesty notes, and “Australia’s indigenous kids are 24 times more likely to be locked up than their non-indigenous classmates.” Indigenous Australians are just 3% of the national population, yet they comprise 29% of the country’s adult prison population.
“Occupied Territories?” “Illegal settlers?” Australia’s Labor Party government ought to take a look in the mirror before hurling false and insulting accusations at Israel.
The writer is president-elect of the Religious Zionists of America. He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995, and the author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice against Iranian Terror.