SYDNEY — Some opponents here of Israel’s right to exist and defend itself portray the conflict since the Hamas slaughter of Jews Oct. 7 as a fight between “indigenous Palestinians” and “colonizing Jews.” They seek to link it with the just fight for Aboriginal rights in Australia.
The day after Hamas’ pogrom, Aboriginal Sen. Lidia Thorpe, who speaks for the “Blak Sovereignty” movement in Parliament, announced on social media, “I stand with Palestine!” One indigenous community organizer, Meriki Onus, told the Australian Nov. 15, “Almost every Aboriginal person I know understands the position of Palestinian people experiencing genocide and dispossession.”
Marcia Langton, a long-time fighter for Aboriginal rights, answered these statements in that paper the same day. She expressed horror at Hamas’ murder and kidnapping of Israelis, and its using innocent Palestinians as human shields. It is “simply untrue,” she wrote, that “indigenous Australians feel solidarity with Palestinians.”
“It is the view of a tiny few, if put in those words. Most of us are aware of the complexity and that there is very little comparable in our respective situations, other than our humanity.”
“I am aghast and embarrassed,” Langton wrote, at the refusal of “Blak Sovereignty” advocates to condemn Hamas for what they did to the Jews in “the largest loss of life in a day since the Holocaust.” She referred to “people deluded about terrorism who have used their protests as a cover for antisemitism,” adding, “No legitimate Aboriginal leader will permit our movement to be associated with terrorists.”
On Nov. 9, a meeting of 600 people was held here by the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies marking the 85th year since Kristallnacht, “the Night of the Broken Glass.” Nazi thugs launched a murderous nationwide pogrom Nov. 9-10, 1938, targeting Jewish shops, synagogues and homes. Many were killed and hundreds sent to concentration camps.
The meeting honored the Aboriginal leader and trade unionist William Cooper. His great-great-grandson, Michael McDonogh, attended.
Cooper worked as a farm laborer and sheep shearer, and took part in the giant strikes in that industry in the 1890s. He later wrote, “I was a member of the Shearers Union from the time of its organisation until I got too old for work.
“I am now retired and for the last 10 years I have devoted my energies to the emancipation of my people,” he wrote at that time. He helped to found the Australian Aborigines’ League in 1933.
After reading about the horrors of the Kristallnacht, Cooper organized the League on Dec. 6, 1938, to march from his home to the German Consulate in Melbourne to deliver a protest letter against the pogrom.
“On behalf of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, we wish to have it registered and on record that we protest wholeheartedly at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government in Germany,” it said. They demanded that the Jew-hating violence “be brought to an end.”
But the consulate’s doors were locked, the letter was passed on to a guard, and it was not delivered. In 2017, nearly 80 years later, Cooper’s grandson, Alf Turner, and others delivered it to the German government in Berlin.