Call to action

THE topic of refugees, boat people and asylum seekers seems to be a perennial hot-button issue. It also ignites uniquely passionate feelings within the Jewish community.

Looking back over Jewish history, particularly our local Jewish narrative, this is not all that surprising. For many Jewish families, the story of flight from persecution is not something that happens to other people -– it happened to us, or people we know.

The passengers on the Dunera are a perfect example of that. These young men -– more than 2000 of them, mostly German or Austrian refugees -– were residing in Britain during World War II, having fled Nazi Europe.

In 1940, they were shipped off to Australia and interned as enemy aliens. Many of these “Dunera Boys” and their descendants live in our midst today and have contributed immeasurably to our community and Australian society. Countless others tell personal stories of displacement, rescue and refuge.

Despite a unique history, Australian Jews are not united in their response to the current refugee question. We are unquestionably a compassionate people, but when the conversation drifts to the phenomenon of people-smugglers, or whether a policy may unintentionally encourage or discourage people to seek asylum on our shores, it becomes apparent how complicated this subject really is.

What is evident is that concerning this polarising quandary, most agree on the humanitarian imperative to do something for those genuinely in need, but disagree on how to go about it.

So, if we can’t agree on the right collective path to take, is that a good enough reason to sit on the sidelines?

The simple answer is no. Following the popular wisdom often attributed to the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. The Torah gives its own admonition: “lo ta’amod al dam re’eka” – it is forbidden to stand idly by the blood of one’s neighbour. The common denominator is a call for action.

While searching for an answer to a humanitarian question, the only truly wrong response is a non-response. In this regard, the greater Australian community’s wishes and Jewish community’s beliefs are one and the same. We must act, each according to our own personal convictions – but most importantly, we must act.

Silence not the answer

AUDIENCE members at John Pilger’s Sydney Peace Prize address at the Opera House on November 5 would have heard him defend Iran as a country whose “crime is its independence”, and a regime that “hasn’t attacked any country”.

They might have wondered if the journalist and filmmaker had heard of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats against Israel, Iran’s thinly disguised nuclear weapons program, or of its terrorist client Hezbollah.

More profoundly, they might have questioned on what planet the decision was made to confer a peace prize on Pilger, a polemicist who, despite early promise, has generally championed despots and terrorists.

But the Sydney Peace Prize has often been awarded to swashbuckling Leftists whose views appear to overlap with those of the Sydney Peace Foundation, which bestows the prize.

Interestingly, the Jewish community’s response to Pilger’s award has been muted. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (JBD) voiced their displeasure when the award was announced in August.

But there was none of the strong reaction that accompanied the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize for Palestinian activist Dr Hanan Ashrawi, an icon of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, whose work for peace was similarly inscrutable.

Perhaps the reserve shown by the Jewish community was a result of the intensity of reaction in 2003. At that time, legitimate Jewish lobbying against the choice was presented in the mainstream media as some sort of sinister attempt by Jews to silence their critics.

And tensions developed between the JBD, which wanted a low-key approach, and the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, a privately run organisation that was accused by some Jewish figures of representing itself as the community’s official voice.

Whether or not there were attempts to dissuade then NSW premier John Carr, he went ahead and presented the prize to Dr Ashrawi as planned.

Communal spokespeople took away the lesson that they had been too leadfooted. This time, they have overcompensated. Pilger is a bizarre choice for a peace prize in anyone’s lexicon and that should have been reiterated last week.