The simplistic application of the “apartheid” tag to the Israel-Palestinian conflict misses the essential point that Jews and Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza are not members of the same national community. Apartheid involves separation, and different fundamental rights, between members of the same national community, based on race. Unlike the conflict in South Africa, for example, which was a struggle by blacks and coloureds for equal rights with whites, as citizens of the same national community, Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza do not see themselves, and are not seen by others, as members of a single national community. Each is a distinct national community in its own right. Each of them has a combination of shared language, customs, beliefs and traditions derived from a common past which gives them an historically determined social identity in their own eyes and in the eyes of others.

Your stated objection to Israel’s security barrier – “My take on this wall is that it is not for security, but for land appropriation.” – also turns a blind eye to facts that do not fit your preconceived view. The rate of large-scale terrorist attacks against Israeli buses, cafes and nightclubs, which were a regular occurrence prior to the construction of the barrier, has fallen to virtually nil. Many lives, Israeli and Palestinian, have been saved. Yet you did not deem this to be worthy of mention in your speech.

At the heart of the fundamental misconceptions contained in your speech about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is the disgraceful falsehood that it “began with a group of immigrants attempting to displace a local people”. Perhaps you are unaware that during World War II, the then leader of the Palestinian national movement, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was among the most devoted and loyal allies of Nazi Germany. Historians recently published a telegram to Husseini from Hitler’s henchman, Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, in which the SS chief wished al-Husseini success in his battle against “the Jewish invaders.” We would not have expected you to share a similar cynically-distorted and odious perspective of the early Jewish immigrants and refugees.

Anton Block

In truth, the Jewish people, the Hebrew language and Jewish religion and civilisation are indigenous to the Holy Land, the location of the Jewish national home in antiquity for 1,500 years. Jewish polities and state institutions existed in the land for more than a millennium until the first century CE. No Palestinian state or other political entity identifying itself specifically as the polity of the Palestinian people existed anywhere in the land at any time in history, until the formation of the Palestinian Authority after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.

The Jews who came to live in what is now Israel from the late nineteenth century onwards were not armed colonialist invaders coming to an entirely alien land, like the British coming to Australia in 1788, but masses of ordinary people returning legally and peacefully to the one place on earth that the Jewish people collectively call their nation’s home, a place crowded with centuries of Jewish memories and history, including an organised State history, and nurtured with Jewish sweat and blood.

The Jewish arrivals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not occupiers and dispossessors of the Arab inhabitants, but people who purchased land from the legal owners at often inflated prices and built entirely new cities, towns, collective farms and businesses. The economic development and opportunities they created, and the improvements in health and public sanitation which they introduced, led to a three-fold increase in the Palestinian Arab population between 1881 and 1948, and a further five-fold increase in that population since 1948.

Jewish communities have existed throughout the West Bank, Gaza and all parts of Jerusalem for millennia, including in places such as Bethlehem, Nablus and Hebron, though some were ethnically cleansed or massacred in the 20th century both prior to the creation of Israel in 1948 and during the period of Jordanian occupation of the West Bank between 1948 and 1967.

After their expulsion from the land, Jews have always returned to it. Some Jews returned after the Babylonian exile, others returned during the period of Ottoman rule, others again returned in the 19th century and millions have returned since the creation of the modern State of Israel, the majority seeking refuge from the tyranny of Soviet rule or the expropriation and massacres inflicted on Jews throughout the Arab world in the 20th century.

We find it extraordinary that you would at once deny the character and rights of an indigenous people and malign immigrants and refugees in such a way.

At present, 75% of Jewish Israelis are native-born. Yet a recent examination of the results of 400 surveys carried out by five Palestinian research centres in regular polls in the West Bank and Gaza showed that during the past 20 years 70 per cent of Palestinians have continued to seek an immediate end of the State of Israel, or to see a two-state solution as merely a stepping stone towards that goal rather than as the basis of a permanent peace. Have you nothing at all to say about that fundamental attitude, which makes any kind of peace impossible?