By Yossi Schwartz, ISL the section of the RCIT in Israel/Occupied Palestine, 25.11.2021
Australia, in support with the Zionist state, has declared Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Australia like Britain has first-hand knowledge of terrorism. It has a history of terrorism against the aboriginals. Moreover, Australia committed war crimes in the war against Iraq. The Australian military supported the use of cluster bombs against civilians during the 2003 invasion, and senior Australian military commanders are responsible for planning and carrying out multiple purported war crimes during the attack on Fallujah in late 2004. This declaration like the British conservative government’s declaration of Hamas a terrorist organization comes as Israel is declaring day after day that it is preparing a war against Iran and its allies.
Some 40 000 – 80, 00 years ago the first humans began to settle in Australia. The sea level, then because of the Ice Age in the Northern Hemisphere, was 200-250 meters lower than today. The islands of Indonesia form a land bridge, with only small distances between the Islands, which could be crossed easily with the help of simple boats and rafts.
In the age of the accumulation of primitive capital, the first Europeans discovered Australia in 1606 by the Dutch sailor Willem Jansz, and the continent began to appear in European maps. In April 1770, the British captain James Cook arrived at Botany Bay near present-day Sydney and claimed the continent for Britain. He declares the continent “terra nullius” un-owned and empty of human habitation.
We in Palestine are familiar with this concept as the Zionists claimed that Palestine was a land empty of native people: “A land without people to people without land“. As a matter of fact this slogan in the context of Palestine was used by Christian-Zionists even before the Zionists. In 1843 Rev. Alexander Keith, D.D, wrote that the Jews are “a people without a country; even as their land, as subsequently to be shown, is in a great measure a country without a people.” [i]
With the arrival of the British colonialists, the British capitalists used Australia as a convict colony to super exploit white semi slaves. There were two major convict colonies: New South Wales (1788-1840) and Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania, 1803-1853). Later on, Swan River (Western Australia) would become a third penal colony when the failing settlement demanded an injection of convict laborers (1850-1868).
The Zionist colonialists could not use convict colonies, but while the clerks managing the Baron de Rothschild 12 settlements super-exploited the native Palestinians, the labor Zionists unused to hard labor and who could not compete with the Arab labor brought cheap labor of Yemenite Jews as a source of cheap labor to replace the Arab labor.
The British brought with them diseases such as syphilis, tuberculosis, trachoma, smallpox, influenza, measles, and whooping cough. The Aborigines unfamiliar with these diseases have no antibodies to fight them and so the diseases have devastating effects. Not only this, but there is enough evidence to prove that the British used blankets with smallpox to kill the aboriginals to steal their resources like land and forests.
“In 2009 another author, Michael Bennett, concluded that smallpox was released from the First Fleet, but he suggested this was a deliberate act by rogue marines or convicts.
In effect, Bennett corroborated the earlier work by other scholars; Craig Mear, David Day, John Lampert, Norbert Finzsch, Henry Reynolds, and Noel Butlin. Where I differ from both Mear and Bennett is that a close examination of the circumstances suggests that some authority, not necessarily involving Governor Phillip, ordered the deployment of smallpox” [ii].
The Zionists also used biological warfare. Avner Cohen wrote on this issue: In 1948 Ben Gurion wrote a letter to Ehud Arviel asking him to find an East European scientist Jew who could create the capacity to kill masses or cure masses. Israel has developed biological weapons (BW) and has not ratified the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
In the 1940’s Ernst David Bergmann became the chief scientist of the Sief Institute in Rehovot. In 1948 a science corps known as HEMED was established in the Zionist army. Dr. Uri Milstein maintains that in many conquered Arab villages the water supply was poisoned to prevent the Palestinian refugees from coming back. In 1999 Dr, Salman Abu Sitta speaking before the British House of Commons said that in 1948 even bacteriological warfare was used by poisoning wells and drinking water with malaria and typhus. This was the case in Gaza in the summer of 1948 as Ben Gurion wrote in his diary. It is believed that one of the largest operations of this type of war was used in the Arab town of Acre on May 17, 1948, before it was conquered by the Zionist army. Milstein even named the commander who was involved in this crime[iii]. Of course this was a secondary means of the removal of the Palestinians. The primary mean was the 30-40 massacres in 1947-8.
In the Britannica Encyclopedia we find about Australia: “British settlement, dating from 1788, was altogether different. The arrival of carriers of a powerful imperialist culture cost the Aboriginal people their autonomy and the undisputed possession of the continent, and it forced them into constant compromise and change as they struggled to accommodate the newcomers. Initial contacts were often tentative but friendly. Although the Colonial Office in London prescribed the safeguarding of Indigenes’ rights and their treatment as British subjects, friction soon developed between the colonists and local Aboriginal peoples. Communication was minimal and the cultural gulf was huge. Once European settlement began to expand inland, it conflicted directly with Aboriginal land tenure and economic activities and entailed the desecration of Aboriginal sacred sites and property. Clashes marked virtually all situations where conflicting interests were pursued, and the Europeans viewed Aboriginal peoples as parasites upon nature, defining their cultures in wholly negative terms. The frontier was a wild and uncontrolled one for a long period. Aboriginal peoples in some areas used their superior bushcraft to wage prolonged and effective guerrilla campaigns until they were finally overwhelmed by the force of arms. In the period of “pacification by force,” up to the 1880s, a large number of Aboriginal people were killed. Others were driven into the bush, remaining in small pockets subject to the “civilizing” influence of missions, or were left to fend for themselves in the fringe settlements of cities and towns; still, others remained in camps or pastoral and cattle stations to become the nucleus of a labor force“. [iv]
“Introduced diseases exacted a terrible toll and probably killed many more Aboriginal people than did direct conflict. The disappearance of Aboriginal people in southeast Australia was so rapid that the belief arose that all would soon die out. Growing humanitarian concerns and reactions to frontier excesses led the Australian colonies to pass laws, beginning in 1856 in Victoria, concerning the care and protection of Aboriginal peoples. They were put into reserves and given food and clothing to “smooth the dying pillow” as they awaited what the Europeans took to be cultural extinction. These laws offered Aboriginal people no place in the economy or society of the colonists, and in practice, they resulted in much greater restriction and control exerted by whites over the lives of Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people were kept off their land and were therefore unable to survive by hunting and gathering. Those who survived were drawn—often forcibly, always uncomprehendingly—into wretched poverty on the margins of life in the developing colonies. Armed conflict was superseded by a more passive but determined opposition to cultural absorption by the invaders. Forced adaptation entailed impoverishment, both material and cultural, but no alternatives were left. Gradually, missionaries and government welfare agents began to have some effect, and questions of humane treatment came to have a more practical meaning. But in outlying areas, maltreatment, violence, and the forced removal of children of mixed descent lingered on beyond the 1940s. Further, wherever European settlement was intensive, miscegenation took place, and Aboriginal people of mixed descent eventually outnumbered those with full Aboriginal ancestry in southern and eastern Australia” [v]
The British army, calling the aboriginal armed resistance terror, massacred almost the entire native population of Tasmania. Even today you can find some who call themselves historians refer to the guerrilla war of the aboriginals as terror and crime.
“Keith Windschuttle claims that Aboriginal resistance was not guerilla warfare. He found no evidence of military, political or patriotic objectives– no hint of clear organization, military intelligence, command strategy, or declarations of war. Aboriginal ‘resistance’ from his perspective was a crime wave of ‘revenge and plunder’ led by ‘detribalized’ Aboriginals victimizing isolated, defenseless civilians. It was chiefly robbery and assault.” [vi]
“Black War, (1804–30), a term applied to hostilities between Tasmanian Aboriginal people and British soldiers and settlers on the Australian island of Tasmania (then called Van Diemen’s Land), which nearly resulted in the extermination of the Indigenous inhabitants of the island. Armed conflict began in May 1804, when a military detachment opened fire on an Aboriginal hunting party. The bitterness of Tasmanian Aboriginal people increased as settlers occupied choice hunting areas of the island for sheep raising and, when other food ran short, took to hunting kangaroos, greatly depleting this staple of Aboriginal people’s lives. Settlers continually harassed the Indigenous inhabitants; kidnapping, rape, and murder were common. Unable to meet the European terror in force, Tasmanian Aboriginal people resorted to attacks on isolated individuals and small groups. In the later 1820s this campaign intensified, and the term “Black War” is sometimes used only with this narrower period”. [vii]
In 2008 the Prime Minister of Australia apologized to the aboriginals. But this apology was no more than empty words.
“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 3.3% of the nation’s population. When the Europeans arrived in Australia the number of Aboriginals was 400,000 people. Today their number is 800,000. Was it not for the genocide of the aboriginals they would be millions. Geographically, 62% of the Indigenous populations live outside Australia’s major cities, including 12% in areas classified as very remote. Official government targets set for 2018 in 2008, to halve the gap between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians in child mortality, employment, and reading and numeracy, as well as closing the gap in school attendance, were not met. The target to close the gap in life expectancy by 2031 is not on track. In 2019 the High Court ruled that the Government of the Northern Territory was to pay AUD 2.53 million in compensation to the Ngaliwurru and Nungali peoples for the loss of Native Title in the entire town of Timber Creek. A house in Sidney cost a million” (American dollars 1 American Dollar is 1.38 Australian) [viii]
In 1922 there were 752,000 Palestinians in Palestine and 84 000 Jews. Today in the entire British-mandate Palestine live around 6 million Palestinians and 6 million Jews. In 1947 1,200,000 Palestinians and 630,000 Jews lived in Palestine. Today there are 7 million Palestinian refugees. Was it not for the genocide and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, at least 13 million Palestinians would have lived today in Palestine.
In Israel, the previous president Rivlin apologized for the massacre of Kfar Qasem. Yet these were empty words as the repression, the land theft and the killing of the Palestinians continues.
Israel’s prime ministers Ben Guiron, Begin, and Shamir were terrorists. The same are the heroes of Australia. The Australian Dictionary of Biography says about Macquarie that his policy concerning the blackfellas was an expression of the same humanitarian conscience he brought to other colonial matters. In 2013 the statue of Macquarie, born in 1762 in Argyll, Scotland, was erected in Hyde Park, the open space he created in central Sydney for public recreation. Yet in the real world, he was a butcher who was responsible for murdering hundreds of aboriginals.
“The massacre was a culmination of colonial violence that began with raids by the local Dharawal people on the crops and livestock of the “settlers” who had taken their land. Reprisal attacks from farmers and militias followed. Many men, women, and children, black and white, died. Macquarie’s men, accompanied by Aboriginal trackers, shot and hung the two Dharawal men and one woman in trees to terrorize the other Indigenous people, before hacking off their heads as trophies that ended up at Edinburgh University. Captain Wallis who oversaw the murders recounted: “I formed line ranks, entered and pushed on through a thick brush towards the precipitous banks of a deep rocky creek, the dogs gave the alarm and the natives fled over the cliffs. A smart firing now ensued – it was moonlight, the grey dawn of morn appearing, so dark as to be only to discover their figures bounding from rock to rock had ordered my men to take as many prisoners as possible and to be careful in sparing and saving the women and children … I regret to say some had been shot and others met their fate by rushing in despair over the precipice“. [ix[
In the 17th century, the aboriginal nomads controlled the entire continent. Today a total of 134 million hectares of land in Australia (17%) is Indigenous-owned; of which 22 million hectares is forest. A total of 174 million hectares of land is under some form of Indigenous management (22%). [x] In 1948 the Zionists owned less than 6% of the land of Palestine today Israel controls the entire country.
The ruling classes of the imperialist states are war criminals that endanger the existence of humanity. As Lenin said, for humanity to live imperialism must die.
Down with imperialism-for a world socialist revolution!
Endnotes:
[i] Diana Muir, “A Land without a People for a People without a Land”, Middle Eastern Quarterly, Spring 2008, Vol. 15, No. 2
[ii] Chris Warren Was Sydney’s smallpox outbreak of 1789 an act of biological warfare against Aboriginal tribes? 17.4.2014 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/was-sydneys-smallpox-outbreak-an-act-of-biological-warfare/5395050
[iii] Avner Cohen Israel and Chemical\Biological Weapons: History, Deterrence, and Arms Control Avner Cohen In Israel and Chemical\Biological Weapons: History, Deterrence, and Arms Control 2001.
[iv] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal/Aboriginal-peoples-in-Australian-society
[v] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal/Aboriginal-peoples-in-Australian-society
[vi] Ray Kerkhove Tribal alliances with broader agendas? Aboriginal resistance in southern Queensland’s ‘Black War https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/mcs/article/view/4218/4491
[vii] https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-War
[viii] https://www.iwgia.org/en/australia/3642-iw-2020-australia.html
[ix] n.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2016/apr/05/lachlan-macquarie-was-no-humanitarian-his-own-words-show-he-was-a-terrorist
[x] https://www.awe.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/ABARES_Aus_Indig_land_forest_estate-Separate_reporting_FINAL_02Dec20.pd