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| Australian Jewish News, September 13, 2013 |
The War of Atonement and the Australian Campuses
Arnold
Roth
A version of this article appears in the Australian Jewish News, September 13, 2013
My
family and I have made our home in Jerusalem for twenty-five years. Aliyah for
us meant the complicated events of a previously-distant Middle East merged with
our own lives over the years. They morphed with time into neighborhood issues
and family matters and were no longer the remote and distant news events that
they had been in the Australian chapter of our lives.
I
was a Monash law student and active in Jewish student circles when the Yom Kippur
war erupted. Three weeks earlier, I had visited Jerusalem to take part in the
once-in-four-years congress of the World Union of Jewish Students. I remember
it as a buoyant time when people spoke expansively, ambitiously, confidently.
There was no inkling of the deaths, destruction and waste that were shortly to
unfold.
If
I was preoccupied with anything other than the mundane matter of studies, it
was with very local politics. AUS, the national union of Australian tertiary
students, had just pulled off a nasty stunt, narrowly (by a vote of 74 to 62) adopting
a resolution at its August 1973 council meeting that was a harbinger of a much more
comprehensive and equally nasty campaign of demonization and delegitimization
of Israel that was about to unfold. The assembly of senior university union
officials in their wisdom called for Israel’s national student union to be no
longer recognized by the Australian student unions, and requested that it be
expelled from the Asian Students Association. Israel’s place was to be taken by
a Palestinian Arab group.
Others
will undoubtedly be recounting in this edition of the AJN the historical
aspects of those tumultuous days. In terms of my subjective recollections, the first
war news from Israel was jarring and bad, though with the distance and clarity
of time we understand that it was nowhere near as bad as the reality.
Egypt
and Syria had managed to assemble, and to hurl against Israel’s defences, a
force equal in size to NATO’s entire European deployment. Israel’s 150 tanks came
under attack from no fewer than 1,400 Syria tanks. The ferocity of that
fighting can be guessed at by the video clips we see on our news screens in the
2013 Syrian-on-Syrian bloodbath.
Few
ordinary citizens outside Israel can have had any inkling at the time that things
looked so diabolical for Israel. On the Suez canal and in Sinai, the odds were
staggeringly unbalanced. What would have been the level of morale of Jewish
communities around the world had they known that 500 Israeli soldiers were
confronting some 80,000 Egyptian troops. Iraq sent 18,000 soldiers into the
war, along with a squadron of jet fighter planes that had been relocated to
Egypt some months earlier. Saudi Arabia, which had bankrolled the refurbishment
of Egypt’s military troops, delivered 3,000 of its men to the battle. We now know that the Arab side included
material aid from Libya, Tunisia, Sudan, Morocco and the Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan.
Twitter
and breaking news reports in their various forms can provide a degree of
accuracy that is as good as the source supplying the information. But forty
years ago, the channels that sent text and images to the world’s television
stations and newspapers operated according to a different paradigm. A Sunday
newspaper that has long ceased to operate, the Melbourne Observer, devoted its
entire front page two weeks into the war to a single screaming headline: “Syrian
Jews Swoop | Haifa Burns”. The report below it said Haifa’s oil
installations were burning and witnesses said the city was “a blazing inferno”
with “many people”, meaning Israelis, killed. It was 100% total nonsense.
I
kept that page in my files [and posted online] as a reminder to myself of something that has gotten more evident over the
years: the people packaging and delivering news to us ordinary people, far from
the scene, will rarely if ever disclose that they actually have little – and sometimes
no – idea whether their reports are accurate or even true. They publish what
they receive from their “sources”; until proven otherwise, this is the
reality to which they choose to align themselves. Consumers
today, no less than four decades ago, cannot afford to read or view the news
without a significant degree of discernment.
Something
similar was happening inside the leadership of the utterly non-transparent,
ideologically extreme Australian Union of Students at about the same time.
Their reality, the one with which they chose to align themselves, evolved by
January 1974, at the time of their annual conference in Canberra, into one in
which Israel, the state, was not something the AUS any longer “recognized”.
AUS grandly demanded the release of “all members of the Palestinian resistance” from “jails
in occupied Palestine” and so on. I attended that conference and spoke for a
pro-Israel viewpoint. Though relatively few participants gave any sign of
having strong views on the Middle East issues, the extremely vocal minority who
stood behind the anti-Israel resolutions and spoke in their favour were
venomous.
In
the first months of 1974, we began to be aware of how perilously close Israel’s
lines of defence had come to failing. During exactly that same period, we
Australian Jewish students fought for, and then engaged in, a campus-by-campus
process of awareness-arousing about Israel intended to overturn the
massively-hostile list of AUS resolutions. Pro-Israel students prepared, and
distributed across Australia, a four-page document [I posted that online] stating the AUS anti-Israel
manifesto, and making a strong argument against it.
While
this debate went on, I learned that several of the Israelis I had met in
Jerusalem in that previous September’s WUJS event had been killed in the Yom Kippur
fighting. It seemed absurd that an actual life-and-death struggle being
conducted in the Sinai and on the Golan was being echoed in far-away
Australia’s coffee shops and campus quadrangles.
The
end-result of the Australian campus debate about Israel’s right to exist was
decided overwhelmingly in favour of our side, the pro Israel side. Another clipping from that period (from the AJN edition of April 19, 1974] quotes me as president of AUJS saying that the key anti-Israel resolutions “were rejected at every Australian campus without exception”. A Melbourne Age report from April 16, 1974 is headed "Student vote rejects pro-Arab poll".
Though I (and of course others) spoke in the debates at campuses in several cities, the experience for me is mostly a
blur four decades on. The impression that accompanies me today is that, apart from
a hard core of ideologically-motivated activists who were few in number but
well organized and dedicated, the rank and file of Australian tertiary students
were intuitively on the side of Israel.
In
the years since then, and particularly during this past decade, the discourse
over Israel and its conflict with the Arabs has changed shape considerably,
compared with 1973. The language of those debates in the seventies featured
such terms as imperialism, liberation and colonialism. Today the argument
centers, to a great extent on human rights. The conflict itself, once framed as
the Arab states versus Israel, a kind of Arab Goliath against the Jewish David,
today it is much more characterized as Israel against the Palestinians. It’s still
David versus Goliath, but for reasons worth pondering, and beyond the scope of
this comment, Israel is perceived – absurdly - as the Goliath.
Some
things have not changed in all these years. As I sit here, preparing these
lines, my family’s upgraded gas masks have just been delivered to our door. And while
the news media have gone through a Facebook/Twitter/Youtube revolution, on the
ground, the tensions and dangers are as old-fashioned and serious as they ever
were.
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