The Australian government’s refusal to grant a visa to former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked is outrageous. It’s also incredibly hypocritical.
Australian Immigration Minister Tony Burke has said that Shaked will not be allowed to enter Australia, because she was strongly critical of the Palestinian Arabs in the aftermath of the October 7 massacres and rapes.
It’s remarkable that the leaders of a country steeped in extremist violence against minorities should presume to lecture Israel on morality.
The first foreigner to “discover” Australia was a violent settler named Captain James Cook. Schoolchildren around the world today are taught that he was a famous explorer. And he was. But the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific remember him a little differently.
In 1770, Cook and his settler gang landed in New Zealand, where they murdered members of the indigenous Maori tribe. Then they headed west to Australia, landing there on April 29 and shooting a member of the Dharawal/Eora nation who opposed them. It would not be the last act of violence by the Cook settlers.
Eight years later, violent British settlers established a penal colony in Australia. European criminals were not the only dangerous import. The settlers also introduced tuberculosis, smallpox, and measles.
Australia is almost three million square miles in size. That’s 350 times the size of Israel. You’d think the violent British settlers who took over Australia could have left at least part of the country to the indigenous tribes, known as the Aboriginals. But no, the settlers had to have the entire thing. So they expanded, and they expelled, and they murdered. Within a century, the Aboriginals, who had numbered 750,000, were down to less than 100,000.
What was it like for victims of British settler violence in Australia? Hannah McGlade, a member of one of the Aboriginal tribes, the Kurin Minang Noongar, spoke about it at a United Nations forum last year.
“My people, the Noongar, were violently dispossessed from their lands by the British, and were basically enslaved,” she said. “My great grandmother was an indentured child labourer. People who resisted the very cruel laws of the time were incarcerated and taken from their countries by chains to an island prison, where many died. Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families, en masse, as part of a policy called assimilation.”
Ayelet Shaked and her colleagues do not enslave Palestinian Arabs, force Arab children to become indentured child laborers, take them away in chains, or forcibly remove Arab children from their families. But the descendants of the Australian settlers who did that to the Noongar now have the chutzpah to call Israel’s former justice minister too extreme.
Has the mistreatment of the Aboriginals ended? Hardly.
According to Hannah McGlade, the Noongar to this day face “the removal of children from their mothers,” “high incarceration rates,” “very inhumane prison conditions” and, as a result, “more Aboriginal suicides.” McGlade said the Noongar suffer from “the shocking, ongoing impacts of colonization and we know that systemic and institutional racism and discrimination is a key driver of these issues.”
She pointed out that the Australian government is still refusing to embrace the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which the UN issued more than ten years ago. “Australia cannot claim leadership internationally, without respecting its international commitments in respect to indigenous peoples,” McGlad said.
There’s another important aspect to the hypocritical Australian action against Minister Shaked for her post-October 7 comments.
One of the victims of the Hamas pogrom on October 7 was an Australian. If you didn’t know that, it’s because Australian officials hardly ever mention her.
A grandmother named Galit Carbone, who was born and raised in Sydney, was among those who were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists at Kibbutz Be’eri. Her brother Danny, who lives nearby, later recalled the phone call he received from Galit, who was huddled in fear in her home as she heard the terrorists approaching. “And that was the end,” he said. “I didn’t hear anything from her afterwards,” he said.
“You were always full of love, of helping, of nonchalance and of giving,” Galit’s daughter, Maya, said at the funeral. “You taught us to look at the world with wonder and you taught us values. You pushed us to be independent and reminded us to be ourselves.”
So where are the Australian sanctions against the Palestinian Arabs who took part in the mass murder on October 7?
Why doesn’t Australia impose sanctions on Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, which has boasted that it participated in the October 7 terrorist attack?
Why is Australia giving $20-million to UNRWA this year, even after it was revealed that hundreds of UNRWA staff members are Hamas terrorists, and some were involved in holding Israelis hostage?
Maybe instead of focusing on ways to smear and bar Israeli leaders, Australia should focus on holding the perpetrators of October 7 violence—including the killers of an Australian woman—to account.
[Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.]
