A Balcony Over Jerusalem

by John Lyons

  Soon afterwards, Rudd was a guest at one of Albert Dadon’s banquets at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Sylvie and I went along to cover the event. The evening had been going calmly – Christopher Pyne had given a passionate speech about his commitment to Israel – when the mood in the room suddenly changed. An unwelcome guest had just arrived at the banquet, courtesy of the internet. My interview with Kevin Rudd in which he declared that Israel should not be exempt from international inspections had just been published online. People were standing looking at their phones and reading the story. The anger started bouncing off the walls.

  Sylvie came over to me: ‘That man over there is telling people that you’ve verballed Kevin Rudd in your interview!’

  ‘That man’ was Yuval Rotem, Israel’s Ambassador to Australia – who had travelled to Jerusalem for this trip. Last time I’d spoken to Rotem was in the cafeteria at The Australian’s head office in Sydney when, ironically, he’d praised me for a series of articles about Kevin Rudd. But tonight it suited him to attack me instead.

  By now it was fair to say I was pretty fired up. So often people instinctively blame the messenger if they don’t like what someone has said. And so I went looking for Rotem. ‘Ambassador, I hear you are telling people that Kevin Rudd did not make those comments about nuclear inspectors.’

  Rotem seemed uncomfortable that I had challenged him. ‘Well, no Australian foreign minister has ever said that before,’ he answered. ‘Why would Kevin Rudd say it?’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s a question for you to ask Kevin Rudd?’ I responded. There are two tapes of that interview – I have one and Mr Rudd’s staff have one. Would you like a copy? And Mr Rudd is just over there …’

  Just then Rudd’s chief of staff, Philip Green, walked past. I beckoned him over. ‘Philip, Mr Rotem is saying Foreign Minister Rudd never called for international inspectors for Israel’s nuclear facilities.’

  ‘He did,’ replied Green. ‘We have no problem with your story.’

  I then went looking for Danby, who was also telling people in the room he doubted the story, and explained the same thing to him. Danby then switched his anger from me to Rudd. ‘I’m going to take this up with Andrea Faulkner,’ he said, referring to the Australian Ambassador to Israel. (Rudd was standing 20 metres away – but Danby had backed Julia Gillard when she deposed Rudd, and I knew he and Rudd rarely spoke.)

  Now that it was clear that the quotes were not made up, the gates of fury opened against Kevin Rudd. The next morning I saw huddles in the foyer of the King David Hotel as different groups from Dadon’s delegation discussed the issue.

  Dadon told me that while theoretically Israel should be under the same regime of inspections as anyone else, in reality they should be exempt. He was going to talk to Rudd and insist that he say at his upcoming press conference with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman that Israel had ‘unique security circumstances’.

  At the press conference, Lieberman addressed the nuclear issue. ‘What is important is not whether any country is a member of the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty] but whether it is responsible,’ he said. ‘Israel does not regard any inspection as necessary, as it is a responsible country, and we have proved this for many years.’

  Then came Rudd’s turn to speak. He concentrated more on Iran’s situation, saying Australia was deeply concerned about Iran’s nuclear program. Then he mentioned Israel. ‘We recognise … Israel’s unique security circumstances … but in terms of our fundamental position on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as it applies to this region … all States should be in, including Israel.’

  And so, while he had restated his position, he had added the words that Dadon told me he had wanted him to add.

  Dadon could not come to the press conference but, knowing that I was going along, telephoned me at home that night. He asked: ‘Did Kevin use the phrase “unique security circumstances?”’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Good.’

  Fast-forward to late 2012, and a new foreign minister, Bob Carr, was facing the diplomatic quandary of how Australia should vote on 29 November when the United Nations General Assembly considered a resolution to upgrade the UN Observer status of the Palestinian delegation from ‘Entity’ to ‘Non-member State’. It would mean Palestine could call upon assistance from the UN, and even prosecute for war crimes.

  Former Labor Foreign Minister and head of the International Crisis Group Gareth Evans told Carr that to vote against it would be the worst Australian foreign policy decision in a generation, and put Australia on the wrong side of history. Evans carried a message from former Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke reiterating the opinion that Australia could not vote against the motion and kill any Palestinian hopes of their own State. Within the Labor Party this was a powerful trio; Hawke, Evans and Carr, all from the right wing, all long-time supporters of Israel.

  When I interviewed Carr for this book, he told me: ‘From my point of view, I believed that voting in favour of the upgraded status would send a message to the Palestinians that there was hope for them, they had friends and supporters in the world, including nations who have strongly supported Israel’s right to exist provided they continued to cleave to the peaceful path. It would send a message to the Israelis that their arrogant expansion of settlements and their mistreatment of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza was losing them nations that had previously been strong friends. It could only do good.’

  Carr was also surprised by how many on the centre and right of the Labor Party supported his position. The initial thinking was that Australia would abstain from the vote, but he became convinced that there was enough support for Australia to vote yes. ‘It’s as if years of watching the news out of the West Bank had produced this shift,’ Carr reflected. ‘That is the only way I can explain it, the impact of what had been happening year in, year out in the West Bank. In the Labor Party, no one could defend the expansion of settlements which are clearly designed to prevent the establishment of the Palestinian State and no one could overlook the heartlessness and the cruelty that a right-wing Israeli cabinet under Benjamin Netanyahu was now directing at a majority Palestinian population.’

  Armed with the knowledge that his own New South Wales right-wing faction was supporting him, Carr entered the Cabinet room in Canberra on 26 November. He told me that when the UN vote was discussed, ‘I was surprised by the strength behind a pro-Palestinian vote. There were people there who I had not spoken to about the issue. I had no idea that Simon Crean, for example, given his background with the Victorian right, would launch out strongly, or that Craig Emerson would lay down his support. I had no idea that was Peter Garrett’s view. I had never had a conversation with him about it.’

  But there was one obstacle to Carr’s push to change Labor Party policy: the Prime Minister. Gillard had made public the fact that her personal position was to support Israel and oppose the resolution. This was not the first time Gillard and Carr had clashed on issues concerning Israel. Carr explained to me: ‘As Foreign Minister I was blocked from making criticisms of Israeli settlement expansion by Bruce Wolpe in the Prime Minister’s Office.’ Wolpe had been tasked by Gillard with liaising with Australia’s Jewish community.

  At the Cabinet meeting, Julia Gillard adopted what in Carr’s view was an ‘utterly remarkable’ position. ‘The bottom line of what she was saying was that despite the opposition from Cabinet it was still her call. For someone like me who had chaired Cabinet meetings, it was surprising. I thought the wiser course would be to say, “Well, you have strong views on this, and I will consider the opinions around the Cabinet table and I might reflect further overnight.”’

  As they left Cabinet, Carr made a plea to Gillard: ‘Please reconsider your position overnight. It’s very clear, despite all the free trips to Israel, that at the Cabinet table and in the Caucus, based on the evidence out of the West Bank, there is a majority who want to vote yes to upgrading the Palestinian status.’

  T
hat night, working late, Carr wandered through the ministerial suite in Parliament House. He came across Treasurer Wayne Swan, who was in his office talking to Defence Minister Stephen Smith. Swan and Smith, Carr recalled, were ‘just shaking their heads with disbelief’ that the situation regarding the vote had got to where it was.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Carr asked them. He was conscious of the fact that both Swan and Smith were strong Gillard supporters and determined to prevent any return to Kevin Rudd as PM. Gillard’s prime ministership was coming under growing pressure. That morning, The Australian had published a Newspoll showing that, as she prepared to begin the final parliamentary sitting week of the year, she was facing electoral defeat by 51 to 49 per cent, based on the preference flow from the previous election. ‘This is not a pro-Rudd move,’ Carr told them. ‘It’s just a move on the basis of the evidence, Australia’s diplomatic position and Australia’s reputation for fair play in the UN, a principled position, it has nothing to do with Rudd’s position.’

  Carr was surprised that the Rudd forces had been slow to exploit what amounted to a revolt against Gillard. ‘At this point, there had been no speculation in the media whatsoever. I sure as hell was not leaking it because of the high probability that at the end of the day my position would not get up,’ Carr said. ‘I had no interest in leaking it. I did not want to destabilise the government anyway, but as it turned out, from this Cabinet debate there was nothing in the media. The Rudd forces had not caught up with the divisions. It was uncharacteristic of them. Normally they were after any potential mischief to hurt Julia.’

  The next morning, Carr dropped around to see Gillard in her office. Despite his words to her the previous night, it was clear that she thought the Carr motion would not pass. Carr repeated that he had no doubt there was sufficient support in Caucus for a motion that Australia should abstain from supporting Israel at the UN. ‘When I left her office she was somewhat shocked,’ Carr said to me.

  Meanwhile, the 102 members of Labor’s Caucus gathered with a sense of anticipation. Most were about to vote for a position with which their Prime Minister disagreed. Gillard turned up late and immediately outlined her support for Israel and a two-State solution. But, realising that she had little backing in Caucus, she ended the speech by accepting that Australia would not vote with Israel in opposing the Palestinian upgrading but instead would abstain.

  After the meeting, Gillard and Carr met and agreed that Carr would attempt to protect Gillard by appearing as soon as possible on Sky News to praise her for changing her position. They discussed how Bob Hawke had reversed his position under party pressure over the MX missile issue. (Hawke had confirmed an agreement made by the preceding Liberal government for the US to land two MX missiles in the Tasman Sea – but after a party backlash he backed away from it.)

  Many in Israel were surprised that one side of the Australian political system had broken from unconditional support for Israel. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy praised the changes Bob Carr had made to the Labor Party’s position. ‘It always seemed that Australia was a lost cause,’ Levy said. ‘It’s very good news.’ According to Levy, if more members of the Jewish community in Australia knew the reality of modern Israel they would push for change.

  Meanwhile, the Rudd forces seized on the issue, leaking to the media how Gillard had been ‘rolled’ after resisting the view of the majority of the Cabinet. The next day the story hit the media, and the rivalry between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard took off, leading to Rudd’s eventual ‘revenge coup’ against Gillard. At the following election, which Kevin Rudd and a divided Labor Party lost to Tony Abbott, Carr retired from politics.

  Carr’s first bruising battle with elements of Australia’s Jewish community began when he was Premier of New South Wales. Each year, the Peace Centre at Sydney University chooses a recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize. In 2003, the centre selected prominent Christian Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi, a woman who has long argued for a peaceful two-State solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. An invitation arrived on Carr’s desk for him to present the award. He decided to accept, reasoning that ‘if we encourage Palestinian leaders like Hanan Ashrawi who favour a negotiated peace path to nationhood surely we are helping to produce a peace where Israel is secure’.

  But Carr had no idea of what was about to be unleashed upon him by sections of the Jewish community. ‘All hell breaks loose,’ he recalled in our interview.

  The Peace Centre board included two conservatives: Kathryn Greiner, wife of Nick Greiner, Carr’s Liberal predecessor as premier; and Lucy Turnbull, the Lord Mayor of Sydney and wife of Malcolm Turnbull, then trying to gain pre-selection for the Sydney seat of Wentworth and who would go on to become prime minister.

  There’s talk of an online petition, we are getting protest calls at the office, there are attacks in the Jewish media and there is pressure on Kathryn Greiner and Lucy Turnbull to withdraw support. The Chancellor of Sydney University, retired judge Kim Santow, starts to respond to pressure. There is pressure on him from donors to the University of Sydney to close down this event. It was classic Jewish lobbying – classic. Threatening to withdraw money, punish people and to extract political retaliation if people did not withdraw.

  While Carr was coming under pressure, so too was the director of the Sydney Peace Foundation, Professor Stuart Rees. But while both battled opposition, they were receiving extraordinary support. Carr told me there was no other issue during his time as premier over which he received such strong public backing.

  Reflecting on the time, Kathryn Greiner told me years later that she withdrew her support for Ashrawi because she thought ‘the greater good’ was in the preservation of the foundation, and that if they went ahead with the award they would lose corporate funding. She believed the foundation had never recovered from the episode. But she clearly felt resentment at the demands placed upon her.

  There was huge pressure from the Jewish lobby not to go through with the award. I withdrew from the award, as did Lucy. Malcolm [Turnbull] would have been told in no uncertain terms that support for his preselection battle against Peter King in Wentworth would have gone back to Peter King if Lucy did not withdraw from supporting Hanan Ashrawi. I got the impression Lucy was under attack from a number of directions.

  On reflection, I regret that in this country people so forcefully put opposition to our decision. That is not the Australian way. The pressure that the Jewish lobby applied was far greater than warranted. I think you’d have to call it a form of bullying. If attacks come at you from a multitude of areas I think you can call it bullying and harassment.

  As for Carr, today he considers the campaign against him by elements of the Jewish community as extremely unfair. ‘I used to run a factional party school where I drummed into the members of the right faction that support for Israel was in our DNA because we had been shaped by the Israeli Labor Party, because Israel only wanted to survive within secure boundaries, because it was a democracy and a social democracy. And even before I entered Parliament I had launched Labor Friends of Israel in the Sydney Trades Hall in 1977.’

  Despite a massive campaign of intimidation, Hanan Ashrawi’s voice was heard. Ashrawi, Bob Carr and others refused to be silenced. But such voices of moderation have not been heard enough in Australia, or indeed in other countries.

  In 2012, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard convinced Bob Carr to come out of retirement. As Foreign Minister, one of his Cabinet colleagues was Mark Dreyfus, the Attorney General. But that relationship soured after Carr left politics and began the Australia China Relations Institute, funded by Chinese businessman Huang Xiangmo. Carr was outraged when he discovered that in the early weeks of the 2016 election campaign, Dreyfus and Michael Danby had gone to see Mr Huang. Carr told me:

  The purpose of the visit by the two Labor figures was to protest that I had the audacity to occasionally criticise Israel for spreading settlements on the West Bank. As it happened, I simply restated the policy of the Labor
government that Dreyfus and I had been a part of and I used language little different from that used by the Obama administration. The implication of the Dreyfus–Danby meeting with Huang was that he should use his position as financial supporter of the think-tank that employed me to press me to cease expressing my opinion about Israel. It was, without any doubt, an attempt to pull levers to silence me from making points I’d made, on behalf of the last Labor Government of which Dreyfus and I were part.

  (When told of Mr Carr’s claim that the meeting was an attempt to ‘silence’ Carr, Mr Dreyfus said: ‘Bob Carr is not speaking on behalf of the former Labor Government, and should not pretend to do so. The meeting to which Mr Carr refers was private.’)

  In June 2014, the Australian Liberal Government made a dramatic change to the way it saw the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Traditionally, Australia has accepted the view that the West Bank was ‘occupied’ by Israel after the 1967 war. This is a term that many Israeli politicians and even military lawyers accept; Israel’s Supreme Court stated in 2004 that ‘Israel holds the area in belligerent occupation’. Soon after I arrived in Israel, I asked an Israeli military commander, Lieutenant Colonel Eliezer Toledano, the operations officer for the Israeli Army in the West Bank, whether he regarded the West Bank as ‘occupied’. He looked puzzled. I explained that for years the pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne had insisted to me that the West Bank was not ‘occupied’. ‘If this is not occupied then the media has missed one of the biggest stories of your time, our withdrawal from the West Bank,’ the commander responded, laughing.

  So when, in 2014, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Attorney General George Brandis tried to walk away from describing East Jerusalem as ‘occupied’, it signalled a major shift in policy. It put Australia at odds with most countries, as well as the European Union and United Nations.