He should know.
Bob Carr famously complained to the ALP caucus while in government about what was he expected to say about Israel the next time he was speaking from the steps of the Lakemba Mosque.
After all, where else would you make a major policy statement affecting Israel and the Jews?
He could have kept his mouth shut I suppose given that his audience would have included supporters of Hezbollah and the PLO whose opinions about what should be done about Israel and the Jews would not suffer from ambivalence or uncertainty at least when expressed in private. Prominently it would have included the Mufti of Australia who was about to lead a delegation of Australian Muslims to Gaza to demonstrate solidarity with Hamas.
Instead he chose to say this.
” I’ve been to Ramallah, I’ve spoken to the Palestinian leadership, and we support their aspirations to have a Palestinian state in the context of a Middle East of peace. And that means respect for the right of Israel to exist. But we want that Palestinian state to exist, in the context of a peace in the Middle East, and that’s why we say, unequivocally, all settlements on Palestinian land are illegal under international law and should cease. That is the position, of Kevin Rudd, the position of the Federal Labor Government, and we don’t make apologies for it.”
Carr knows that the prevailing almost universal opinion of those with the power among the Palestinians and their supporters in the Middle East is that all the land between the river and the sea is "Palestinian land" and that all of Israel is one big "illegal settlement". Carr knows that even the "moderates", if they can bring themselves to talk about Israel having a "right to exist", for benefit of a foreign audience only, mean an Israel that does not have sovereignty over its own borders or population. An interim step to swamping the Jewish population and once again subjecting it to dhimmitude, expulsion or death as is required by what passes for a political culture that demands subjugation and submission even of their own people.
This is why the Palestinian polities and those of almost all Arab Muslim countries and Iran are tyrannies. Always have been of one form or another.
Carr knows this. And yet it is the Jews living in Jerusalem and Judea, even in those tiny areas that have always been ear marked as part of Israel where the overwhelming majority of Jews live lawfully and peacefully who are "illegal".
Is this a man who was under unhealthy pressure to signal to the world that Australia had jumped camps on the question of Israel and the Jews and their right to live peacefully and lawfully even in Jerusalem or in that tiny part of Judea that is earmarked for Israel in what remains of the Oslo Accords?
Very likely I would suggest. But there is something else in this picture.
From here this is a man who looks and sounds just like any other garden variety bigot. The world is full of them. Either you resist them or you go along with them. That depends on what kind of a future you want for the world I suppose.
cross posted
Geoffff's Joint
Jews Down Under