Rambam program participants talk to AIJAC
The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) has hosted a luncheon for its supporters last week to hear from two recent returnees from AIJAC’s Rambam study program trips to Israel, Senator James McGrath and Dr John Lee, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Senator James McGrath
Senator McGrath stressing the importance of such trips for politicians and said he discovered that “The issues affecting Israel are an avatar of the broader issues impacting the world at the moment.
It is important that liberal democracies stand up for other liberal democracies,” the Senator emphasised, given how few there are in the world. McGrath asserted that “the challenge for us, as the political class in Australia, is telling people why it is important to be on the side of Israel… and that’s because it’s a democracy. It’s as simple as that.” “If Israel falls over,” he said, “it means the side of darkness has won.”
Dr Lee relayed how the trip gave him a better understanding of the Middle East and allowed him to engage concretely with his more progressive, anti-Israel friends. “Amongst [my friends], there was a basic consensus that one, Israel is the troublemaker in the Middle East; two, the Palestinians were the victims; and three, if you recognise a Palestinian state immediately, that is the first step towards solving all these problems.”
In response, based on knowledge gleaned from the trip, Lee rejected the framing of the problems of the Middle East being about the Israeli-Palestinian issue. “Israel, as I found out, has normalised relations with virtually all the Arab states. The real story in the Middle East is Iran… Iran and its proxies don’t actually recognise Israel’s right to exist…The focus on Israel as the source of Middle Eastern problems is completely out of whack.”
Secondly, he put to them the question of historical Palestinian rejectionism and how they could reconcile this with solely blaming Israel. “I asked them why have Palestinian leaders consistently rejected offers of statehood” for decades. He also emphasised the fractured nature of the Palestinian national movement. Terrorist group Hamas, which rules Gaza, doesn’t recognise Israel’s right to exist at all, while the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has demonstrated through rejectionism that they “essentially don’t want a two-state solution.”
Dr John Lee
Finally, Lee said, he told his friends that “when you travel around Israel, the overriding impression is that it is a normal country. It is a country where Arabs and Israelis just want to get on with life.” While Israeli society demonstrates resilience and has simply normalised being under threat, “[the Palestinians] have normalised radicalisation, and that’s a choice.”
Lee also pointed out that Israel is in a sense a victim of its own confidence and success due to the “glorification of victimhood” in the West. Unlike Palestinian leaders, “Israel’s problem, if I can put it this way, is that Israel doesn’t see itself as a victim.”
A further issue for Israel on top of the glorification of victimhood in the West, Lee said, was pervasive antisemitism. “I’m not saying every criticism of Israel is antisemitic, but if you pull the string of the assumptions behind many of the criticisms, it fundamentally applies a different standard to Israel,” he said.
When it comes to Australia, Lee said it could learn a lot from Israel when it comes to defence policy and technology given the challenges the latter constantly faces.
Praising the Rambam program, Lee said, “They don’t have to tell you what to think. All they have to do is take you around the country, let people come to their own conclusions…from that point of view, it was life-changing.”
