A Way Forward for Palestine?

Sir: Brian Wimborne (June 2014) correctly points out that Palestinians will never achieve independence until they renounce violence and terrorism and recognise the State of Israel.

Israel’s inevitable long-term strategies would have to include effective internal and external security measures, such as the devastating infrastructure-destructive response against Hezbollah in south Lebanon in 2006 extending up to Beirut International Airport, and subsequent crippling incursions against Hamas in Gaza. This would be combined with encouraging rapid economic development in the West Bank and Gaza.

A burgeoning Palestinian middle class will be less inclined to support terrorism. A recent television program about high schools in the West Bank showed many kids wearing orthodontic braces, a sure contra-indication to becoming a suicide bomber.

Ultimately over two or three generations there may well be a peaceful subsumption into a greater Israeli-Palestinian political and economic conurbation. This could well be an acceptable challenge to Israel’s Jewish identity.

Ian Bernadt
Swanbourne, WA

No Way Forward for Palestine?

Sir: Those who support the mythical nation known as “Palestine” should read carefully the following articles in Quadrant, June 2014: the Chronicle by Keith Windschuttle, “The Looming Prospect of a Second Cold War” by Daryl McCann, and “The Tactical Myth of Palestinian Identity” by Brian Wimborne.

They should then question why so many states in the Middle East sharing racial identity and religion with their brethren who call themselves “Palestinians” have, since Britain abandoned its mandate in 1945, refused to offer them sanctuary and an Arab identity.

I suggest, after absorbing the evidence that the Holocaust actually happened, that Holocaust deniers are proven liars.

Finally, they should read Rabbi Avigdor Miller’s book, Defence of Hashem in the Matter of the Holocaust (now available in Australia).

After reading those articles and the book, it is clear that anyone encouraging the “Palestinians” to go to war in order to expel the Jews from their Promised Land will undoubtedly bring on the final war and the end of Western civilisation.

Mark Braham
Rose Bay, NSW

Whitlam’s First Act as Prime Minister

Sir: Hal Colebatch’s piece, “The Whitlam Government and the Betrayal of the South Vietnamese” (June 2014) is, I think, a major item of modern Australian journalism and will be seen as such in brighter times than ours.

That is partly to do with the inherent historical and moral significance of the events he describes. But it surely has something to do with Gough Whitlam’s imminent death. There still seems to be some kind of adherence, publicly at least, to the rule of courtesy about not speaking ill of the dead just after they have gone. I would not want to be seen as one who would demur from such a rule. So I suppose I should say what I want to say about Whitlam while he is still alive. I have long wished to say something about him.

I was seventeen when he was dismissed by Kerr. I was repeating my matriculation, at a public school; I had failed lamentably the year before, at a private one. He was dismissed just when I was cramming for my exams. I had left my run very late—again. This time I made it. In fact, I was top of the state in two history subjects that year. I won the Annie Montgomerie Martin Medal. I mention this because I want to make it clear that history, and clarity about history, really matter to me. They did when I was seventeen. They do now.

Colebatch’s article about Whitlam’s treachery and his hard-heartedness to our anti-communist allies affected me deeply. It reminded me of matters that I read of and heard of—on the radio, on the television, in the papers—at the time. I was so ashamed of my government. I was so angry about Whitlam’s conduct. I was certain that my feelings were right. But I was a young man and we feel things strongly when we are young. But my feelings are even stronger now.

I was fourteen when Whitlam was elected. He and Lance Barnard ruled as some kind of interim executive—they came up with a Latin-sounding description of it, I remember—for the first few weeks. Many of the adults around me seemed very excited. Certainly I remember ABC journalists (was it Today Tonight?) being very animated. Someone called Smacka Fitzgibbon—I have never had to recall the name to this day, but he was a very mellifluous singer, balding but urbane—sang a song on one of their shows called “The Adventures of Edward Gough Whitlam” the day after his election. It was a take-off of a popular song of the time. It was sung in a very adulatory way.

I remember these things distinctly. I remember something else very distinctly about those first days—something Whitlam did that adumbrated the vindictive, callous, deliberate abandonment of the South Vietnamese to a cruel enemy—of theirs and ours—that Colebatch has so carefully chronicled. It was almost Whitlam’s first public act and, with his charlatan’s reflexive love of the mock-theatrical that he was to exhibit frequently throughout his brief period in office, we can be reasonably certain that he would have deliberately chosen it as his first act. He wanted to tell us all what was most important to him at the very first opportunity. Well, I was listening, Gough, and I remember. He gave Wilfred Burchett his passport back.

Burchett is to treachery and totalitarian infatuation what Byron is to romanticism, or Bismarck is to militarism—a byword.

Whitlam was the man who gave Wilfred Burchett his passport back. The Australian journalist who worked assiduously for the triumph of communism when the war against it by the West was at its zenith, and who was there—in spirit, in explicit encouragement, and almost certainly in person—when Australian and allied soldiers were tortured by the North Koreans, and who—because we could not shoot him as he deserved—had his passport taken from him, as was right, legal, and proper, by Menzies—had it given back to him by Whitlam as his first act as our first minister.

The man who gave Wilfred Burchett his passport back. That is how I have remembered you, Whitlam, and will always. Hal Colebatch has now given us all an additional perspective on your vanity and heartlessness and the pettiness and cruelty that simultaneously informed your anti-anti-communism.

So vale Edward Gough Whitlam. The rest, as far as I am concerned, will be silence.

Stuart Lindsay
North Adelaide, SA