This essay began in a cobbled street in the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.

As I gaze uncomprehendingly down into an open archaeology dig, roped off and with informative plaques, I become aware of a strident voice proclaiming the meaning of the damaged columns and beams of an earlier structure to an audience of what appear to be American college students. Jews loom large in the guide’s interpretation. He passionately proclaims the meaning of this place as personal and his, and he wants to make it theirs. I see that they are also Jewish, as some of the boys are wearing kippas. I am led to wonder whether tourist guides in Australia link their personal sense of national belonging to accounts of the country’s history. 

That thought remains. I know there are brochures in which the Bluff Rock massacre of Aboriginal people is made into a tourist attraction, but it is not a site of triumphal or righteous assertion. On the contrary, Australians are more likely to be found apologetically, even shamefully, acknowledging Aboriginal history and the injustices therein.

And yet, in a purely formal sense, the Zionist claim that Israel is a Jewish state has much in common with Australia’s assumption, or perhaps acceptance, that it is predominantly the Anglo citizens and traditions that define Australia’s character. In both cases ‘a people’ with a specific cultural persona has established and legitimised its presence in a particular space or country. In each case the newcomers assumed dominion over the people who had resided there before. It took over a century for the English in Australia to establish effective control, often with violence, over the whole land and its Indigenous population, and now virtually no one challenges ‘Western’ or ‘European’ hegemony. It thus appears that the question that Israel is constantly and aggressively engaged in answering—who belongs here—has been settled in Australia by time. Is it simply the passage of the years that legitimises cultural belonging?

The constant and comprehensive, violent and discursive, disputation about Israel’s legitimacy, in particular as a Jewish state, has many manifestations, and the effort to claim the past seems a relatively benign one, and common to many nations. But the intensity and emotion of Israel’s assertions betray their provisional nature. Sporadic, ineffective physical resistance by long-term residents to the Judaising of this land, and the persistent and vigorous attempts to silence, remove and disempower the Arab presence, ensures continuing conflict in many parts of Israel/Palestine. In Australia, by way of contrast, colonisation began and succeeded long ago, so that the cultural self of white Australia is quite comfortable, facing no apparent violent conflict or serious challenge to its presence. I say apparent because I believe the efforts of Indigenous writers and artists to disrupt the complacency of the white presence does create a certain psychic anxiety; more of this below.

Despite emotional and even violent moments of resistance, Israelis’ authority over Israeli territory—that within the 1967 green line—faces no more immediate threat than white Australia’s authority over this continent. Yet Israel’s constant assertion of an exclusive Jewish sovereignty over the land hints at an unadmitted fragility in the nation’s moral claims. The frequent, confident complaint that Israel’s very existence is still rejected by its Arab residents and neighbours becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, independent of its facticity. However, there may be a long-term threat to the Jewish nature of Israel stemming from the fact that Israel’s population is static and deeply divided along ethno-racial and religious lines, while the Arab population is more unified and growing. Aggressive assertions that Eretz Israel is a Jewish land with a Jewish history and should be a Jewish state, and the Judaisation process that is apparent on even a brief visit to Israel, may indicate a lack of confidence about Israel’s own legitimacy.

The comparison with Australia is not intended to lead to history lessons—there are immense differences between the two situations—but to explore the explanations, justifications and subjective orientations that accompany the sovereignty claims of a particular people when they make their home in a place already occupied by other people with whom the newcomers do not want to identify. There are many examples of course, but I want to pursue these two a little further. Those in Australia who righteously berate and condemn Israelis for trying to make the land they claim into exclusively Jewish land are beneficiaries of an equivalent cultural hegemony. Thus it seems appropriate to ask why the desire of many Jews to have a state of their own, stamped with a religio-cultural identity, seems so unforgivably colonial. Time has allowed Australia to become post-colonial and able to write new history, recognise Native Title, and apologise for past violence without endangering its sovereignty and cultural dominance. The people the Jews are still displacing are alive, present and objecting, whereas by and large Aboriginal people only object to the conditions under which they currently live—which the nation officially regrets.

The other reason Australians can complacently criticise Israel’s Jewish exclusivity is that it flouts modern egalitarian principles that had not taken hold when Australia was claimed by Captain Cook and subsequently colonised. Modern nation-states insist that all citizens have equal rights, irrespective of race, religion or national origin, let alone gender or sexual preference. Rafts of anti-discrimination law and international charters are based on such principles; indeed Australians are scandalised at the suggestion that the selection of immigrants is based on race. Israel’s practice of accepting only and all Jews as entitled to full citizenship is popularly viewed as unacceptably discriminatory. The inferior form of citizenship available to Arabs and other non-Jews is well-documented, though deniable due to the complexity of the legislative and administrative practices. The vigorous denial itself constitutes an admission that such discrimination is wrong. There are peculiar consequences of the entitlement of all Jews, from anywhere in the world, to a place in Israel. For instance, someone whose family has been Australian for generations is entitled to become a citizen of Israel if she or he has female Jewish forebears, whereas a non-Jew whose ancestors have lived in Israel for as long as they remember is not entitled to full and equal citizenship. Perhaps there is a faint echo in the entitlement of family members to enter Australia on the basis of family reunion provisions in the immigration laws—albeit very faint as this is a purely genealogical question, and applies independent of race and religion.

National Belonging

Human beings everywhere probably prefer conditions where the strangeness of the world is muted, where common language and others’ ways of relating present no challenge to an everyday sense of legitimacy. Nationalism can be seen as the attempt to remove the discomfort or insecurity that otherness poses. Yet elements of otherness are also, and always, inside a nation. Some ‘difference’ escapes control and remains a potential threat that nations must be vigilant in defining, containing, domesticating. Indeed it may be that some form of otherness helps, and may even be created as the enemy within, to identify the national self. We must be able to distinguish ‘our’ ways from the ways of some alien ‘others’.

The extent to which Anglo-Australians have established their homeliness here is illustrated in the limited hospitality afforded to non-English speaking immigrants who make up a substantial proportion of the population, and by the fact that Indigenous people find themselves made ‘other’ in their own land. A more interesting contrast with Israel is in the element of discomfort that was inserted into Australians’ consciousness when the injustices of the colonial past were brought to public attention and received extensive recognition in the 1980s. Historians and others now insist that the British heritage of this country includes not only the triumphs but also the destruction and oppression that accompanied white supremacy over the Indigenous population. A sense of shame in relation to the descendents of dispossessed Aboriginal people is now evident; but however deeply felt by some, these responses are, I believe, mainly intellectual ones. That is, while there have been extensive, sometimes extravagant, gestures towards righting the wrongs of the past, there is little evidence that Anglo-Australians’ sense of belonging in their own cultural space has been disturbed. There is certainly no equivalence to the ongoing painful sense of shame that some Israelis and many Jews feel about the continuing attempts to dispossess the Arab inhabitants of Jerusalem and the West Bank. One Israeli friend spoke of ‘our wretched country’. The area left for a potential Palestinian state has been shrinking ever since the occupation began. Before examining some of the current ways Jewishness is being implanted in memories and maps and in the very earth, let us compare the explicit reasoning that the British and the Jews used to assert their rights in these two cases.

Rational Nationalism

The ostensible justification of British settlement in Australia was the popular evolutionary theory of human social development. It was then simply common sense that more advanced peoples were entitled to displace those who were socially and technically, if not biologically, backward. God blesses those who produce from the land, as against those who merely harvest its bounty. Similar arguments surfaced to justify the Jewish claim to the land once known as Palestine, land where some Jews had lived for centuries as one ethno/religious group among other Semitic peoples. But from the earliest Zionist movement to create a Jewish homeland, three other themes keep emerging—biblical authority, historical connection and need. Old Testament words may be disputed by biblical scholars and are ancient superstition to many non-religious Jews, but these proclamations nonetheless carry a cultural weight of some magnitude. The strident enunciation that ‘God gave this land to the Jews’, supplemented by later historical claims, has continually inspired the settlers to take possession of more land, and even secular Jews may find it hard to disown those who claim to be living out the founding myths of the Jewish people. Perhaps an admiration for Australia’s pioneers is not radically different, though we now sharply differentiate the murderous brutes involved in massacres from those who treated the Aborigines they were displacing humanely.

The need of Jews for a homeland is the most widely acknowledged, historically important and internationally accepted justification, and perhaps it has a faint echo in the British need for somewhere to put their criminals in the 1770s, and later the needs of an expanding population. Perhaps ‘desire’ or ‘opportunity’ are more appropriate terms. The Jewish need was of a different order, based originally on their chronically oppressed conditions in many parts of Europe. This need was articulated by the early 19th-century Zionists who systematically bought land and established communities in the then Palestine long before they were offered a recognised place there. When, after World War II, the extent and hideousness of Nazi anti-Semitic genocide became known, European nations accepted some responsibility for the extreme suffering of Jews, and they accepted the need for a Jewish homeland. The British, and later the United Nations, solved the problem by offering them a substantial part of what had become the Mandated Territory of Palestine. There is no doubt that the insult and injury to the Palestinians was recognised by those responsible, but the land was eventually handed over to the Jews for their own state despite vigorous protests from the incumbents and other Arab countries.

The early settlers of Australia did not need to consciously promote a specifically British state. Establishing ‘facts on the ground’ was taken to be a virtuous, progressive and brave endeavour, and only occasionally was there a need to preach the virtues of our cultural heritage. Aborigines who disputed ‘the white man’s’ right to be here were overwhelmed by the numbers, the guns and the technological power, against which their moral claims only allowed for a rear guard action that continues in a different form today.

Cultural Claims

Putting biblical justifications aside, for who in the modern secular world takes them to have serious political force, how are the cultural claims of each of the dominant groups—Anglo-Australians in the one case and Jewish Israelis on the other—actualised? Australia is saturated with cultural mores that came from Britain in the late 18th and the 19th centuries. The English language, the built environment, the legal system, and so on and on, stem from the colonisers who gradually and unevenly re-formed the whole continent that was named Australia in 1824. The Jewish settlers of the country that became Israel likewise reshaped the land, and sought to conceal evidence of its Palestinian past. After the Nakba of 1948, when over 700,000 Palestinians were driven or fled from their homes and were not allowed to return, their villages and other traces of their existence were systematically destroyed. However, what is startlingly apparent when visiting Israel is that this reshaping is not complete but is being advanced at every turn against imagined and real denials and contestation. Even in areas that are unambiguously and internationally known and accepted as Israel, there is a sense of unfinished identity, and Judaisation is being actively pursued, not least in the attempt to change the character of East Jerusalem. It is evident in museums, in the naming and renaming of villages and settlements in Hebrew, in tourist brochures, in historical accounts of all kinds of events in the past. For instance. in a small local museum in Petach Tikva, the history of an early Jewish settlement is told in graphic and heroic detail with little mention of other, earlier peoples in the district. The erasure of evidence of earlier Palestinian villages, named memoricide by Ilan Pappe, is being protested vigorously by some Jewish groups within Israel. Ted Swedenburg details the way various sites and episodes from the past are memorialised to privilege some events and erase others.

Archaeology and Owning the Past

The moment in the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem that started this train of thought was one of a series of observations of the vociferous assertion of the primacy significance of Jews in the region’s history. These narratives position others who built and rebuilt cities and villages and occupied them for generations as temporary interlopers, sometimes helpful but often destructive of Jews. The work of archaeologists makes crucial contributions to this process. Nadia Abu El Haj has shown that there is no simple archaeology in Israel. Rather, Israeli archaeology is inextricably tied to establishing the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.

It is the public face of archaeology in Israel and in Australia that most clearly illustrates the difference between the two forms of national belonging. There is no more secrecy about the efforts being put into Judaising Israel’s past than there was about Australia’s earlier white triumphalist history. The contrast is evident when archaeologists who uncover evidence of an ancient human past in Australia dutifully, even gleefully, name it Aboriginal. There is virtue and redemption attached to acknowledging Aboriginal claims to ancient habitation, ancient spiritual connections, ancient knowledge of the country. Intellectuals readily confess that settler Australians have shallow connections with the land and cling to the edges of the continent as if afraid of its interior power. The lack is even claimed as a feature of Australian identity. Unlike Israel, where Jewish settlers (in the widest sense) are aiming to legitimise the continuity of their ownership over three millennia, we Australian settler descendents are so confident in our ownership that we readily admit the limits of our historical connections. Indeed, our ability to recognise the deep spiritual connections of Aboriginal people with the land confirms our benign intentions and our legitimacy here. Acknowledging the depth and power of Indigenous spiritual connections with the land enhances our virtue while posing no threat to our mundane political and legal ownership.

Thus, all kinds of meetings are regularly opened with a formal acknowledgment of the traditional owners of the land on which the meeting is being held, or a ‘welcome to country’. Human remains dating from before European settlement are routinely named Aboriginal remains and contemporary Aboriginal people are accepted as the descendents with rights over their disposal. Dissenters exist among museologists and archaeologists who argue that remains from the deep past should be considered as simply human, and held in the custody of museums for the sake of science and human knowledge. But such an argument has not carried much weight in the face of our national desire to recognise Aborigines as the spiritual and symbolic, if former, owners of the continent.

Emplaced Nationality

All nations try to build a definitive character, fashioned out of particular historical events that become the national story, often a complex, morally fraught one that changes emphasis over time to fit changing moral and philosophical demands. Nations imagine themselves as one, as unified, as sharing some essential national identity, despite being internally complex and disparate. The process of forming ‘a people’ with a distinctive identity is primarily an imaginative process, but one that can flourish when that people and its leaders command a place or space. This is equally well illustrated in the formation of Australian and Israeli national identity.

The majority of Australians have had little immediate connection with either the early or later stages of the process of Indigenous dispossession, although there were always authors and intellectuals who explained and rationalised the necessity, inevitability—or the tragic injustice—of asserting their exclusive ownership of the country. While Australian innocence has been challenged and modified in recent years from immigrant and Indigenous quarters, and the nation’s culture is far more open and diverse, this is still a predominantly ‘white nation’.

The active Judaisation apparent in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City involves the resident Israelis today. The Jewish quarter has been refurbished. Houses with shining doorknobs and stylish window boxes enhance the attractively clean and well-preserved cobblestone streets. Stalls and old-style shops are overshadowed by expensive boutiques and wonderful displays of old treasures. As in other quarters, places of worship abound. A troupe of school children goes by one day, some boys wearing ringlets and little kippas, charming and innocent of what we are hearing about on the news: the aggressive dispossession of the Arabs of East Jerusalem. It is this news, along with the vast and ugly wall, the IDF soldiers and the armed settlers, that gives a chilling edge to assertions that Jewishness lies deep in the city’s soil.

We Australians plead guilty but feel innocent of the dispossession our forebears perpetrated. When a Jew asks us about oppressed Aborigines today, we are nonplussed; we are building houses for them, not tearing them down! We are expressing admiration and care for ‘our Aborigines’. But the question leads me to wonder, were our white place in our Australia threatened by millions of Aborigines refusing us legitimacy in the land, would ugly emotions arise and overwhelm our desire to recognise their equality and their cultural rights? The answer must be yes, as evident in the secreted seam of fear and hostility that emerged when the High Court of Australia pronounced that Native Title still exists and must be recognised in Australia.

What we cannot abide is the unflinching claims the Jews are making now against the resident Arabs whose houses are regularly demolished. The stories of particular acts of violence—house demolitions, settlers’ attacks on West Bank villages, the walls and electrified fences that constitute the Security Barrier—outrage us. If our grandparents did such gross things in this country they were wrong. Don’t the Jews understand such blatant dispossession by force is now unacceptable, that the legitimacy once attached to colonial dispossession has eroded?

I have not intended a moral, or even a political treatise, although there are both moral and political implications here. My aim has been to set out some parallels and contrasts in Australian and Israeli colonising processes so that we in Australia know from what position we are speaking when we try to understand and solve the problems of the claims of Jews and Arabs to the places we now call Israel and Palestine.

Bibliography

Abu El Haj, N., Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2001.

Anderson, B., Imagined Communities, Verso, New York, 1983.

Ben-Porat, G. et al., Israel since 1980, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008.

Collins, J. et al., (eds) Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime, Pluto Press, London, 2000.

Cowlishaw, G., Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1999.

Everett, K., ‘Welcome to Country (Not)’, Oceania, vol. 79, no. 1, 2009.

Hage, G., White Nation, Pluto Press, London, 1998.

Lattas, A., ‘Aborigines and Contemporary Australian Nationalism’, in G. Cowlishaw and B. Morris (eds), Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and ‘Our’ Society, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1997.

Sand, S., The Invention of the Jewish People, Verso, New York, 2009.

Schlunke, K., Bluff Rock, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 2005.

Schulman, D., Dark Hope, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007

Swedenburg, T., Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past, University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, 2003.

Gillian Cowlishaw

On reflection many will realise that this overall orientation masks a deep-seated ambiguity. To grasp how this works requires an appreciation of the role played by cultural blindness in the way people usually think about social conflicts.

In Afghanistan (and Iraq before it) Australians have exhibited a blindness not dissimilar to that involved in the interventions by Australia and other Western colonial countries in the Middle East after the break-up of the Ottoman empire (Gallipoli included). Today, though, there is something new: the culture we take for granted and wish others to adopt is now far more clearly a poisoned chalice (if left unexamined its assumptions will lead to consequences far beyond the legacy of colonialism).

Typically, the role of social, ethnic and religious bonding grounded in the deep history of other cultures is absent in the thinking of the West and its agents. The people being opposed can then be regarded as no more than troublesome social atoms or alien evil gangs who need to be ‘dealt with’. They are beyond being understood. Often they are thought to be sub-human and not worth being understood, unless, that is, they agree with us. Even then those who do accept our ways are usually regarded as the flotsam of war and conquest, grist for the mill of Western cultural superiority. These populations may even be considered ungrateful, not appreciating our helping them to enter the democratic world. Certainly it is beyond most Westerners to understand today how offers of democracy are really much more than this: there is a widespread incapacity to grasp the social assumptions that are embedded in our ‘gifts’.

With this in mind, the debate in the Australian parliament has been morbidly interesting. With the Greens’ welcome insistence that this debate be held, we can now see why there was no earlier one. Rather than dig into the meanings of the cultures we are seeking to transform, or clarify our strategies and consider opposing ones, our parliamentary leaders and their supporters think debate requires no more than a presentation, a performance that dazzles. In this they reflect other expressions of a widespread incapacity to genuinely reflect on our actions and values.

Media debates and media celebrity are key examples of this incapacity. Even more disturbingly, media-style performance resonates with changes in the academy, where the process of listening, thinking and mutual exchange around core assumptions that may be interrogated and defended at face-to-face conferences has been displaced by personal performances, which are the end of the story. The assumption that ideas need to be challenged and worked out in social interchange is now in default. University media campaigns like Melbourne University’s, to ‘Dream Large’ within the spirit of entrenched assumptions, stands in place of philosophically searching inquiry concerning the changing institutional arrangements of social life.

Increasingly, parliamentary discussion is marked by narrow, self-referential thinking. At the heart of this crisis of debate, speakers and listeners seem to have nothing to learn from each other. This is a self-defeating approach for any culture and polity seeking to renew itself while confronting a deep-seated crisis.

Instead of a searching discussion of Australia’s forces in Afghanistan, we circulate and re-circulate narratives that simply drive the ‘need’ to be there. The primary rationale, which framed both leaders’ and just about everyone else’s speeches, is the need to defeat terrorism, even though it does not take much thought to understand that terror is never defeated head on. After all, terror usually has an underlying context. And if the same background issues that generate terror remain, terror will return in one form or another. The Western strategy to transform that background is to promote democracy and other Western institutions, including the neoliberal market.

Yet it is clear enough that in Afghanistan and other places in the Middle East the West is the background issue for many people. As a few commentators have pointed out, far from providing security in Afghanistan the presence of Western forces ensures its absence, as was the case in Iraq and the emergence of the insurgency, and with decades of uncritical US support for the state of Israel, giving rise to the intifada. Given the history of Western relations with Arab and Muslim peoples for the last half-century, and of course for much longer, such attitudes are not going to change for at least a generation. For any prudent Western leader this should in itself be enough to lead them to look for ways other than warfare to achieve their ends, or to reassess the ends themselves.

Instead we soldier on; we do not give up easily; resilience is the name of the game. Of course resilience is to be valued, but without the capacity to take on board how others see their place in the world and then make in-depth judgements, it can become a tragic flaw and be utterly counter-productive. It does not say much to observe that the West’s grand conceit is beginning to falter. Even commentators from the Right such as Greg Sheridan in The Australian are now realising that it will not work; that the West should pull back (in his argument, to preserve some possibility of the United States staying in Asia to balance the rise of China). For Sheridan it is Pakistan that has made Afghanistan unworkable. There is no doubt that even before the recent floods Pakistan was a powder keg, but that is only one element in the West’s failed strategy. These issues, however, do not seem to have an impact on the political warriors in Canberra: they will corral their vision to focus on ‘terrorism in one country’, as if the West has nothing to do with the insecurity besetting the world.

To penetrate this closed circle of ideas it is necessary to dig into the core project of the United States in the Middle East. This is no longer spoken of directly, not since the demise of the Iraq occupation, but it remains an underlying preoccupation. The aim is to create ‘jewels’ of freedom and democratic process throughout the Middle East, with the view of transforming Islam into a member and supporter of the West. We—Australia accepts its role in this massive campaign—will assist Islam to modernise on our terms. This is the grand strategy—not merely to fight terrorism but to remake Islam in our image. Afghanistan cannot be understood outside this broader range of reference points, points no one wants to discuss any more. Why talk when ingrained assumptions provide the answers? Above all, this mindset ignores the main forces producing world insecurity. The West carries gifts of a more gentle culture and democratic interchange in social affairs, which key thinkers like Adam Smith associated with the rise of the market. But whatever the truth of that in Smith’s own time, today cultural assumptions largely left unquestioned in his day contribute to an emerging, worldwide crisis. When things go wrong that shock us—be it to do with war, as in Afghanistan, or the economy, as in the GFC—we tend to attribute such events to individuals and surface forces. We find it hard to see that they are a consequence of institutional change. And not being able to see allows us our aura of ‘innocence’.

Our way of living has radically moved on from the world of Adam Smith. If his was the world of capitalism, ours is of a different order. It is capitalism radically enhanced by a revolution in technology, set in train by the techno-sciences in the new academy. This revolution makes possible a whole range of developments that seem unrelated: a new individuality, radically distanced from family and community; the rise of global markets; an assault on the limits of nature; the genius of the pilot-less weapon now striking Pakistan and Afghanistan and producing such contradictory results. In this more abstracted world, community no longer requires face-to-face interaction, bank loans are no longer sourced to knowable people, biotechnology celebrates the possibilities of an endlessly malleable self, warfare is universalised with the prospect of displacing face-to-face combat.

This is a radical culture that takes nothing for granted except the means of its own techno-transformation. This is the true background to ‘democratisation’ and it is not only blind to cultures constituted in very different social relationships, where the face to face remains a primary cultural form, it is actively hostile towards them. It is here, in this change, that we can source the true core of the insecurity that typifies our world. It is this gift, with its attendant social assumptions, that we carry in ‘innocence’ to the peoples of the non-Western world, and we are shocked when they do not take the opportunity to accept it. Rather than persisting with this futile quest the West needs to turn its attention to the reconstruction of its own way of living before it overwhelms us all.

John Hinkson

Israel remains by far the most powerful military state in the Middle East. It has somewhere between 200 and 500 nuclear weapons and an estimated 50 Jericho-II long-range missiles capable of carrying them across the Middle East (or into the heart of Western Europe, for that matter). It is acquiring new weapons all the time, most recently two more nuclear-armed Dolphin submarines (bringing its total to five) and ninety F16I fighter aircraft capable of reaching Iran without needing to be refuelled in mid-air. Its surveillance and early warning network includes its own Ofek-3 military satellite and data provided from the US satellite network. Its Arrow anti-ballistic missile system is the most advanced in the world. By contrast, Iran has a small number of short- and medium-range missiles (actual range and capacity to reach Israel uncertain) and an obsolete air force. While it is developing nuclear energy it does not have nuclear weapons, and neither is there any evidence that it is developing them.

The Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Dr Mohamed el Baradei, has been under sustained pressure from the United States, exercised directly and through the UN Security Council, and has criticised Iran for failing to implement transparency measures connected with the ‘one remaining major issue, namely clarification of the cluster of allegations and Secretariat questions relevant to possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programs’. The allegations have been made largely on the basis of ‘documents’ stored in a laptop computer obtained by the CIA from the Iranian opposition group Mujahidin-i Khalq (MEK). The veracity of any documents coming from such a source is obviously questionable: there is a clear parallel between these ‘documents’ and the ‘intelligence’ provided by the Iraqi National Congress purporting to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Iran claims the ‘documents’ are forgeries and is being asked to prove that they are without being allowed to see them. According to Dr Baradei, ‘the agency received much of the information concerning the alleged studies only in electronic form and it was unfortunately not authorised to provide copies to Iran’.

However, the IAEA head has concluded time and time again that there is no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. In the report he presented to the IAEA Board of Governors on 2 June this year, he noted that ‘the agency has been able to continue to verify the nondiversion of declared nuclear material in Iran’. In the context of the allegations made by the United States, he emphasised that ‘the agency currently has no information — apart from the uranium metal document — on the actual design or manufacture by Iran of nuclear material components or of other key components of a nuclear weapon. Likewise, the agency has not seen indications of the actual use of nuclear material in connection with the alleged studies’. The ‘uranium metal document’ was passed on to Iran in a bundle of documents on centrifuges made available by the Pakistan nuclear scientist Dr A. Q. Khan. According to the former UN weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter:

Far from being a ‘top secret’ document protected by Iran’s security services it was discarded in a file of old material that Iran provided to the IAEA inspectors. When the IAEA found the document Iran allowed it to be fully examined by the inspectors and answered every question posed by the IAEA about how the document came to be in Iran.

In a report issued in November 2007, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), representing all US intelligence bodies, asserted that Iran had a nuclear weapons program until late 2003. This itself is questionable, but what is relevant to the current situation is the NIC’s main conclusions: ‘we assert with moderate confidence [that] Tehran has not restarted its nuclear program as of mid- 2007’ and ‘we continue to assert with moderate to high confidence that Iran currently does not have a nuclear weapon’. Furthermore, even if Iran did want to produce a weapon, ‘we judge with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015’. This compares to the claim by Israel that Iran would be capable of producing a nuclear weapon some time in 2009.

None of these very salient facts and findings have made any difference to the campaign being directed against Iran by the United States and Israel. Unilaterally and through the UN Security Council, the United States is threatening Iran with even more punitive economic sanctions and possibly the use of force (‘all options remain on the table’) unless it abandons its uranium enrichment program in return for political and economic ‘incentives’. Against this background, some more salient points need to be emphasised:

1. The current crisis was initiated by the United States and Israel. They began threatening Iran with military attack in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. Iran has warned in response that if it is attacked it will strike back, in accordance, of course, with its right under international law to defend itself.

2. The demand that Iran abandon its uranium enrichment program has no basis in any treaty, convention or law. The IAEA is striving to establish a regime for the multilateral supervision of uranium enrichment but has not yet been able to put it together. All countries with a nuclear development program remain free to enrich their own uranium.

3. Iran’s nuclear program dates back to 1957. It acquired its first reactor (from the United States) in 1967 and signed up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. It allows IAEA inspections of all its nuclear facilities. Israel is not a signatory to the NPT, ignoring nineteen resolutions passed by the IAEA or the UN General Assembly since 1987 calling on it to put its nuclear installations under IAEA supervision. All Arab states have signed up to the NPT and have shown their readiness on numerous occasions to turn the Middle East into a nuclear free zone. Israel has not responded positively to any of these initiatives. It has reportedly threatened to use nuclear weapons at least once (in the first week of the October War in 1973, when Israeli positions in the occupied Sinai were overwhelmed by Egyptian forces). It has launched at least one military attack on a nuclear installation (Iraq’s Osirak reactor, destroyed in 1981. In September 2007 Israeli aircraft bombed a site in northern Syria which Israel claims was a nuclear ‘facility’. This was denied by Syria. The IAEA inspected the site in June this year but has not yet issued a report on what might have been there).

4. Whatever criticism might be made of its abuses of the human rights of its own people, Iran has no record of external aggression to justify the accusation that it is a standing menace to regional and possibly world order. Since the Islamic revolution of 1979 it has attacked no other country. It does not occupy the land of any other state or people. Israel, by contrast, has invaded Lebanon twice (1982 and 2006), occupying the southern part of the country from 1978 until driven out by Hizbullah in 2000. It has ignored all UN resolutions demanding that it withdraw from the occupied Golan Heights and the Palestinian territories seized in 1967. Its policies in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank (that part of it not swept up into ‘greater Jerusalem’) have been characterised by numerous international human rights organisations as racist and inhumane. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in its attacks on Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank since the 1967 War.

The military preparations for an attack on Iran have been completed, but serious divisions within the US administration, and opposition from senior military commanders, have increasingly thrown the focus on to what Israel will do. Writing in The New York Times on 18 July, the Israeli historian Benny Morris asserted that Israel ‘will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months’. If the attack fails ‘an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable’, turning Iran into a ‘nuclear wasteland’. The idea is apocalyptic madness, but the view that Iran must be forced to abandon nuclear development whatever the cost is being expressed virtually every other day by senior figures in the Israeli military, intelligence and political establishment.

While Israel naturally wants to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East, it is clear that hysteria over Iran’s nuclear development is being deliberately whipped up to justify an attack which both the United States and Israel want anyway. Through economic sanctions and clandestine surveillance and sabotage operations, it might even be said that the United States is already at war with Iran. It declared a trade embargo in 1979 and has tightened sanctions several times in recent years, orchestrating its actions through the UN Security Council. The EU has been fully supportive. A particular target has been Iran’s national bank (Bank Melli), which withdrew US$75 billion in deposits from European financial institutions just ahead of a freeze on Iranian assets ordered by European governments. Undoubtedly Iran has been damaged by the sanctions, but to a degree the withdrawal of European companies from Iran under US threats has simply opened up opportunities for Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and Arab investors. Since 2005 the volume of China’s trade with Iran is estimated to have nearly doubled (from US$10 billion to $18.5 billion).

In an attempt to tighten the screws even further, a resolution was introduced into the US House of Representatives in May calling on the President not just to tighten financial and commercial sanctions but to impose ‘stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains and cargo entering or departing Iran [and] prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran’s nuclear program’. The resolution has not yet been put to the vote but clearly such a blockade would be no less than an overt act of war.

US policies towards Iran in terms of the ‘national interest’ would seem to be both contradictory and counterproductive. Through sanctions, the United States has cut itself off from the rich prizes of Iran’s privatisation program, which now allows 100 per cent foreign ownership of Iranian corporations (including those presently owned by the state) and the transfer out of the country of all profits. Indeed, just as one motive for the invasion of Iraq might have been to short-circuit the redevelopment of the oil industry by Chinese, Algerian, French and Russian concerns, so it might be said that sanctions against Iran are not so much connected with nuclear development as intended to cut off the flow of Iranian state assets into other hands until the achievement of ‘regime change’ opens them up to the United States. While seeking broad support for sanctions, the United States has aroused the deep suspicion of both Russia and China by its aggressive policies in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Middle East and Central Europe. Military bases, oil resources and existing or projected pipelines are the dots that need to be connected in the matrix of US interests across this vast region. Russia and China are going along with the demands being made of Iran for the time being, but behind the facade of concerted UN Security Council action they both maintain a strong relationship with the Iranian government. They have no reason to weaken it for the sake of the United States and Israel.

Israel’s determination to block Iran is more likely to arise from its central place in the strategic alliance with Syria and Hizbullah than from its nuclear development. In the past decade Hizbullah has inflicted a string of defeats on Israel and the United States; firstly, by forcing Israel out of occupied southern Lebanon in 2000; secondly, by forcing Israel to call off its attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006; thirdly, by successful diplomacy inside Lebanon which has ended in the formation of a government declaring in a cabinet communique ‘the right of Lebanon’s people, the army and the resistance to liberate all its territories in the Sheba’a farms, Kfar Shuba Hill and Ghajar [a town on the armistice line]’; fourthly, by compelling Israel to negotiate to secure the return of the remains of captured Israeli soldiers. The reported installation of missiles in the Lebanese mountains now gives Hizbullah the capacity to shoot down Israeli aircraft violating Lebanese air space. The organisation already has anti-ship missiles which could be used against the Israeli warships inside Lebanon’s territorial waters in the event of another crisis.

While planning for the next war with Hizbullah, Israel has simultaneously sought to isolate Syria and engage with it through Turkish mediation. The prize dangled before Bashar al Assad is the possibility that Israel might be willing to return the Golan Heights. Neither approach seems to have worked. President Assad was warmly received on his recent visit to Paris and signalled through a visit to Tehran not long afterwards that he has no intention of abandoning the strategic alliance with Iran and Hizbullah for the sake of negotiations with a collapsing Israeli government. Whether the corrupt Olmert actually had the power to hand back the Golan, whether any of his successors would even be willing to relinquish it, are other questions.

The central arch of what Israel regards as a multilayered threat to its existence is Iran. The fact that there is no evidence showing Iran is moving in the direction of nuclear weapons development has been smothered in the flow of war propaganda. By asserting that Iran’s nuclear program is a ‘danger to peace’ (Angela Merkel), that ‘I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon’ (Barack Obama), that Iran must ‘suspend its nuclear program and accept our offer of negotiations or face growing isolation and the collective response not of one nation but many nations’ (Gordon Brown), that ‘an Iran with nuclear weapons is unacceptable to my country’ (Nicolas Sarkozy), numerous heads of governments and contenders for high office are playing into the hands of those calling for war. So does Condoleezza Rice’s remark that ‘we don’t say yes or no to Israeli military operations’. Given the influence the United States could wield to prevent an Israeli attack, her statement is tantamount to yet another green light being flashed in Israel’s direction.

Numerous other signals are pointing in the direction of an attack some time before George Bush leaves office in January, unless Iran accepts the package of ‘incentives’ being offered in return for the abandonment of its uranium enrichment program. But so far it has made it plain it will not back down. There is almost no talk in the media of civilian casualties or the contamination of the environment arising from a military attack on a nuclear installation. It is surreal that we should even have to think about such a nightmare, but the nightmare is the reality the world is now facing.

Jeremy Salt teaches in the Department of Political Science at the University of Bilkent, Ankara.

Academics and intellectuals as always can play an important role in fostering the growth of such a non-violent movement within civil society. It is in this spirit that we call for a boycott of research and cultural links with Israel. We urge our colleagues not to attend conferences in Israel; to pressure our universities to suspend any existing exchange or linkage arrangements; and to refuse to distribute scholarship and academic position information. We note that while some academics and intellectuals in Israel oppose the government and some also are involved in cooperative Israeli/Palestinian research projects, the vast majority have either supported the Israeli Army onslaught on the Palestinians, or failed to voice any significant protest against it. The boycott we propose will inevitably also adversely affect those who don’t deserve it, and we regret that this has to happen. We ask our Israeli colleagues and friends to bear with us in solidarity. They know as well as we do that what they will endure because of these boycotts is minimal compared to what the Palestinian people and their academics continue to endure. As with boycotts against apartheid South Africa, urgent international action is now required to stop the massacres perpetrated against the Palestinian people.

Signatories to Boycott Israel Letter (please note that all signatories are signing in a personal capacity; institutional affiliations are given only for identification purposes).

Ghassan Hage, University of Sydney

John Docker, Australian National University

Stephen Muecke, University of Technology, Sydney

Craig Reynolds, Australian National University

Ann Curthoys, Australian National University

Eva Sallis, University of Adelaide

Ray Jureidini, Monash University (currently American Univ. of Beirut)

Ian Watson, University of Sydney

Ien Ang, University of Western Sydney

Jill Julius Matthews, Australian National University

George Morgan, University of Western Sydney

Neil Maclean, University of Sydney

Debjani Ganguly, Australian National University

Graeme Nyberg, LaTrobe University

David Carter, University of Queensland

P.N. (Raja) Junankar, University of Western Sydney

Robyn Moroney, University of Western Sydney

David Wright, University of Western Sydney

Nectarios Costadopoulos, University of Western Sydney

Frances de Groen, University of Western Sydney

Therese Davis, University of Newcastle

Phil Andrews, Monash University

Glenn McConell, Monash University

Stuart Bunt, UWA

Felicity Jensz, Universtiy of Melbourne

Mike Clear, University of Western Sydney

A.G. Khan, University of Western Sydney

Livio Dobrez, Australian National University

Jeannie Martin, University of Technology, Sydney

Glenn Moloney, University of Melbourne

Ray Markey, University of Wollongong

Jock Collins, University of Technology, Sydney

Sebastian Job, University of Sydney

Carol Reid, University of Western Sydney

Taimor Hazou, University of Melbourne

Ned Curthoys, Australian National University

Liz Reed, Monash University

Brett Neilson, University of Western Sydney

Georgine Clarsen, Australian National University

Marsha Rosengarten, University of New South Wales

Marta Romer, University of New South Wales

Helen Macallan, University of Newcastle

Paula Gonzalez, University of Sydney

Bronwen Phillips, University of New South Wales

Meaghan MorrisLingnan, University, Hong Kong

Jane Lydon, LaTrobe University

Glenn Humphreys, University of Western Sydney

Ali Farhat, University of Sydney

Roger Markwick, University of Newcastle

Christopher Forth, Australian National University

Frances Parker, University of Western Sydney

Ibtisam Abu-Duhou, University of Melbourne

Peter Johnston, RMIT

Desley Deacon, Australian National University

Richard Baker, Australian National University

Noel McEwan, LaTrobe university

Lesley Sayer, LaTrobe University

Gerry Gill, LaTrobe University

Lyndall Ryan, University of Newcastle

Sue Gillett, LaTrobe University

Anna Haebich, Griffith University

Subhash Jaireth, Independent Scholar, Canberra

Edward Scheer, University of New South Wales

Michael Mawal, RMIT

John Castles, Independent Scholar, Canberra

Ian Maxwell, University of Sydney

Sara Wills, University of Melbourne

Karen Gai, Dean University of Ballarat

Christine Maher, LaTrobe University

J.L.Harland, RMIT

Bill Deller, LaTrobe University

Bashir Sumar, University of Western Sydney

Paul Tabar, Notre Dame University, Beirut & UWS

Rosemary Webb, University of Canberra

Laleen Jayamanne, University of Sydney

James McArdle, LaTrobe University

Terry Irving, University of Sydney

Ann Genovese, University of Technology, Sydney

Erik Eklund, University of Newcastle

Jeremy Smith, University of Ballarat

Anne Rutherford, University of Western Sydney

George Kouvaros, University of NSW

Stephanie Tarbin, Australian National University

Charles Livingstone, LaTrobe University

Lew Zipin, University of Canberra

Hana Adra, University Of Western Sydney

Trevor Batrouney, RMIT

Bill Adra, University of Western Sydney

Scott Poynting, University of Western Sydney

Jeremy Beckett, Sydney University

David Lemmings, University of Newcastle

Parviz Doulai, University of Wollongong

Peter Vial, University of Wollongong

Caroline Alcorso, University of Sydney

A decade later, US government intervention in Colombian internal affairs has escalated to an unprecedented level. In July, former US President Bill Clinton signed into law a massive two-year aid package for the Colombian government. Eighty per cent of the US$860 million has been allocated to Colombia’s security forces in the form of equipment and training, reinforcing Colombia’s status as the third in US military assistance after Israel and Egypt.

President Clinton had earlier criticised the Senate for jeopardising ‘national interests’ by delaying passage of the aid, but following its authorisation he lauded Congress for collaborating in the ‘war on drugs’.

Prior to the ratification by Clinton, a joint House-Senate committee reconciled the discrepancies in the packages approved by the two houses of Congress. The final aid legislation virtually abrogated the human rights stipulations included in the Senate version since the president was permitted to override these provisions on ‘national security’ grounds. Given the US government’s Orwellian definition of ‘national security’, its operative meaning referring to investment security for US corporations, Clinton was afforded ample discretion in heightening US support for Colombia’s terror state, and in August he predictably issued the waiver. In one of its final official acts prior to relinquishing power in January, the administration resorted to a dubious interpretation of the legislation in order to release the second portion of assistance without either certifying or again waiving the human rights conditions.

The legislation includes dozens of helicopters for US-trained army battalions, and although the number of US troops and civilian contractors allowed in Colombia at the same time are limited, the president can veto this restriction for ninety days if there is ‘imminent involvement’ of US personnel in conflict. In addition, according to the legislation, ‘tested, environmentally-safe myco-herbicides’ may be applied to eradicate coca fields. Despite research suggesting its capacity for destroying food crops and damaging ecosystems, US officials are seeking to experiment with the fungus fusarium oxysporum, a variant of which is classified as a biological warfare agent.

Both international and local human rights monitors have documented the involvement of the Colombian military in widespread atrocities perpetrated by paramilitary associates against noncombatants. According to a February publication from Human Rights Watch, half of the army’s brigade-level units are complicit in egregious paramilitary violence. Another recent HRW report revealed that the 1991 US-supervised restructuring of Colombia’s military intelligence incorporated the paramilitary apparatus to form ‘killer networks.’

Paramilitaries have murdered some twenty-five thousand Colombians since 1990, accounting for 75 per cent of politically motivated killings compared to 20 per cent attributed to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas. Peasants in particular have been selected for savage torture and murder by death squads but other victims include scores of trade unionists, human rights monitors, Church and indigenous activists, leftist politicians, university professors and independent journalists. Colombia’s largest labour confederation has documented the assassination of forty-five union leaders in the first nine months of 2000, confirming that Colombia is indisputably the world’s most hazardous country for unionists.

This military-paramilitary model is analogous to the approach employed in East Timor last year by the Indonesian army, which organised and then managed ‘pro-Jakarta militias’. The similarity is attributable to the US advisors who instructed both the Colombian and Indonesian armed forces in counter-insurgency strategies. An academy renowned for its alumni of Latin American dictators and brutal human rights violators, the US army’s infamous School of the Americas, has trained more officers from Colombia than any other country.

Scores of media commentators have entered into the debate on US military aid to Colombia. While many of the op-eds and editorials have expressed scepticism about assistance for the Colombian military, most of the apprehension is driven by concern over a Vietnam Syndrome recurrence featuring militant domestic and international popular opposition.

Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland illustrated this logic:

Humanitarian restrictions on US aid have to be designed and implemented to protect Americans, not Colombians or other potential targets of abuse … Americans need to be protected against the folly of unsustainable commitments abroad, which drain national treasure and credibility.

Once the aid bill was passed by Congress, the New York Times finally printed a piece regarding the military–paramilitary alliance. The article reported on the collaboration of a Colombian army unit in a massacre committed by paramilitary groups six months earlier.

US government and military spokespersons and the establishment media have deliberately misrepresented the crisis in Colombia as an armed conflict between drug-trafficking guerrillas — the so-called ‘narcoguerrillas’ — and a besieged yet incorruptible military. To the extent that the existence of paramilitaries is acknowledged, they are generally portrayed as an autonomous force attacking the civilian base of the guerrillas while the state struggles to protect innocent Colombians. Twenty years ago, US officials and the major media depicted Central America’s wars in the same duplicitous fashion.

Although the FARC and ELN finance insurgency through taxes collected on drug production in territories under their control, the paramilitary groups are ideologically and politically aligned with the narco-traffickers. They are united in defending the neo-liberal order from even minimal reform. The landowner–narco-trafficker–paramilitary nexus has resorted to unmitigated violence to preserve this ‘democratic’ system. Such repression is essential for the ruling class to maintain social control in a country where 40 per cent are indigent and a land-owning oligarchy monopolises the arable land.

Washington’s justification for the material backing is to combat the flow of illegal drugs from Colombia to the United States, but Colombia’s guerrilla insurgency and popular movement are the obvious targets. US policy may actually undermine the official counter-narcotics objective. US-devised ‘anti-drug’ operations are concentrated in areas of intense guerrilla activity in southern Colombia, while the paramilitaries are granted freedom of action in coca-producing regions.

Paramilitary leader Carlos Castano has publicly admitted that 70 per cent of the organisation’s funds are derived from drug trafficking. Several Colombian military officers have been implicated in drug smuggling and through military–paramilitary ties. Some of the US assistance may be diverted to fortifying rather than incapacitating the narcotics trade. Nor has the US government sought prosecution of the banking institutions mired in the laundering of drug money and the companies exporting the chemicals utilised in the production of cocaine.

To evaluate the international drug war, US policy toward Colombia must be considered in a regional context. US officials have expressed concern that the Colombian war could transcend national borders and destabilise the entire Andean region.

Colombia itself is a major ‘national security’ dilemma for US policymakers. Colombia’s guerrilla war has imperilled the considerable Colombian investments of US-based transnational corporations, notably oil companies whose pipelines and other facilities are routinely bombed by the armed rebels. A 1997 White House report indicated Washington’s intention to reduce reliance on Middle East petroleum by shifting to imports from Colombia and other nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The US aid package is one component of Plan Colombia, a US$7.5 million strategy designed by the Colombian and US governments. Colombian President Pastrana has pledged US$4 million from his government and requested the US$3.5 million balance from foreign sources. The European Union (EU) and its member states, however, have rejected the plan’s military emphasis and the US agenda of bolstering Colombia’s counter-insurgency forces. In late October the EU and European donor governments announced a commitment of approximately US$400 million, only a fraction of the amount the Colombian government had intended to procure from the EU. The European Commission also determined that most assistance would be channelled to non-governmental organisations (NGOs), bypassing the Colombian government.

Plan Colombia’s economic policies represent an entrenching of the neo-liberal model imposed by the US government and US-dominated global financial institutions, namely the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The authors of the plan maintain that the measures will foster development and prosperity, providing the social conditions to facilitate the peace process. In reality, these policy prescriptions exacerbated poverty and inequality in both urban and rural Colombia throughout the 1990s, and an intensification of neo-liberalism will occasion the conditions for the guerrillas to recruit more members and a subsequent increase in the repression of the broad-based popular movement.

For Washington, the ‘democratically elected’ Pastrana is playing a similar role as José Napoleon Duarte in El Salvador and Vinicio Cerezo in Guatemala during the 1980s. In both these cases, the civilian presidents were victorious in aptly labelled ‘demonstration elections’ — borrowing a term from US foreign policy critic Edward Herman. After Duarte and Cerezo took office their respective militaries retained all de facto power and continued to rule, assassinating and massacring with impunity while the civilian heads-of-state loyally obeyed prescribed parameters which strictly circumscribed their actions. This democratic facade served a legitimising function for US policy and the Central American military forces. In contemporary Colombia, US foreign policymakers have pursued this arrangement in conjunction with Colombian authorities.

A key advisor to George W. Bush has publicly intimated that his incoming administration intends at minimum to maintain the counter-insurgency-oriented strategy for Colombia.

The architects and endorsers of the Colombia military package are on the verge of sponsoring state terrorism to a degree exceeding US support for El Salvador’s death-squad regime. If US-backed state terrorism in Central America and elsewhere is any indication, this US wherewithal will translate into more death and devastation for Colombians.

The pretext for US intervention in Latin America has shifted from Soviet-exported communism to narco-trafficking in accord with international political reconfigurations, but the motivations remain unaltered. Only an expanded and vibrant US-centred mobilisation in solidarity with the popular struggle in Colombia, rooted in the Central America solidarity movement of the 1980s, will deter US imperialism from further contributing to the ‘Central Americanision’ of Colombia.

Joseph Raso is a PhD candidate in Politics at Macquarie University in Sydney

So why now? Far from being an unrepresentable event, the Holocaust has become ubiquitous in Western culture, especially in the United States. Some examples: remaining survivors tell their stories on the Jerry Springer show; the pre-war photos of Anne Frank appear in a new Microsoft advertisement; and her story is dramatised in an upcoming Spielberg film. Meanwhile, Hadassah Lieberman, wife of the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, never loses the chance to gain currency by introducing herself to voters as ‘a child of Holocaust survivors’. Some examples are more exploitative than others, but they all work to normalise if not commercialise the Holocaust. In her recent book Remembering to Forget, Barbie Zelizer remarks on the iconic status of certain Holocaust photos, how the same photos are repeatedly circulated and reproduced, thus flattening historical detail and inviting tragic (if fleeting) emotions, but not understanding.

In one sense the Holocaust comedy is a welcome antidote to what can be described as the Schindler’s List phenomenon — the short-term catharsis revealed through the vicarious experience of horror and brutality, without context or understanding. The Holocaust simply polarises into a struggle between absolute evil and its hapless victims. The depoliticisation of the Holocaust does not begin and end with Spielberg however. A recent wave of criticism at the ‘Holocaust Industry’ — not only the exploitation of the Holocaust in certain quarters but also the elevation of the Holocaust to mythical heights — reveals what is problematic in such a move. Some Jewish critics have pointed out how the entire history of a people has been reduced to a decade-long tragedy. Others, such as Norman Finkelstein, have revealed how the ‘sublime’ nature of the Holocaust is used to deflect criticism of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. The circulation and repetition of Holocaust imagery means that it now appears everywhere, understood paradoxically as a unique event of pure inhuman evil. Other forms of genocide aided and abetted by Western states — Rwanda, Timor — pale by comparison, and are largely unrepresented (as opposed to unrepresentable).

Enter the latest Holocaust comedy, Train of Life. The humour of the film relies on the absurdity of its plot and the madcap nature of the village’s inhabitants. Hearing that the Nazis are coming, the villagers decide — via a plot hatched by the village idiot — to fake their own deportation. They somehow get a train; some of the villagers are trained to speak German and German uniforms are made; while others pose as communists and the rest pose as victims. No sooner do they escape their village than some of the role players come to believe in their roles — the communists rebel, the ‘Nazis’ become more authoritarian, and so on. In the midst of this are the humourous struggles — of a religious, sexual and social kind — that occupy everyday ‘Jewish’ life.

As in Life is Beautiful, the film relies on a massive deception in order to ensure the survival of its characters — faking the Holocaust. The charge of Holocaust trivilisation is countered through arguing that the triumph of the human spirit is revealed in the face of hopeless odds. Of course there are records of the type of gallows humour used in the camps, most notably by Stephen Lipman in his study Laughter in Hell. Part of the marketing package that goes with Train of Life is a special section on the specific nature of Jewish humour — pointing out how humour was, for Holocaust sufferers, a ‘defiant cry for life’.

Yet there is an important difference between modes of experience here — between those who experienced the camps, and those who experience its mediated representations. One of the problems with Life is Beautiful is that the comedy works to shield us from the reality of the Holocaust in the same way that Guido, the hero of that film, shields his son from the true nature of the horror. Train of Life attempts to avoid this problem via its conclusion. The whimsical, caper-like comedy is undercut by the final scene which reveals the ‘reality’ — the village idiot framed in a single shot inside a death camp — and we realise that he has fantasised the whole story — that he will not ‘survive’.

It is a powerful twist, yet ultimately it is asked to do too much. The final image, the tragi-comic face of the main character framed by barbed wire, proves to be too existential — a condemned man dreaming his escape — and lapses into the kind of iconic status linked by Zelizer to the act of forgetting. The edginess and potential radicality of a Holocaust comedy is all too quickly drawn back into our received patterns of reception. Witness the response to the film at the Venice Film Festival — a ten-minute ovation, and a demand that the film be considered for competition. Is this ready-made success in fact indicative of its status as affirmative culture — that we are ready for comedies about the Holocaust precisely because the free-floating nature of contemporary emotional life allows us to experience moments of humour and tragedy while the events which produce them are decontextualised — simply part of the universal flow of images?

If the Holocaust comedy can be regarded as the most recent ‘popular’ attempt to represent the Holocaust, the exhibitions and presence for the Melbourne International Festival of Daniel Libeskind — the designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin amongst other things — represents one example of how the ‘Holocaust’ circulates within the sphere of high art. Libeskind’s architecture is visually stunning — full of exposed structures, fissures and partial forms. Informed by poststructuralist ethics, it creates an architecture of fragments. For instance, the Jewish museum in Berlin has no ‘entrance’ — one must pass through the older Berlin museum to gain access. Inside are dead ends, places which suggest exile, others which link to the older museum — emphasising links and discontinuities between the past and present, between Gentile and Jewish culture.

Such a building is highly effective in Berlin for obvious reasons. But what are we to make of Libeskind’s work outside of its ‘place’ — as a mobile work of art? Libeskind now designs buildings in the United Kingdom and the United States as well as Europe. The success of Libeskind’s style, in an era of endless arts festivals, faces the danger of transcending its connection to the historical events it attempts to invoke. If this is the case, then Libeskind’s radical architectural form simply becomes a high-art version of the same detached sublimity experienced in more popular modes such as film. In other words the ethics of avoiding co-opting the Holocaust into a singular, commodifiable narrative can all too easily be conflated into an uncritical celebration of discontinuity, which avoids the Holocaust’s historical context. The obvious influence of Libeskind’s work on the shard(s) of Federation Square (which lack any historical context) reveals the way in which aesthetic forms can be easily detached from their historical connections, emptying out the grounds from which architectural form, or even the radical possibilities of Holocaust comedy, might open the space for remembering as a political act.