Hi, M I am also disgusted with the response of various 'intellectuals' and writers to the present crisis, though I haven't been following the X debate. I wrote in a long poem the other day pointing out that whilst praising Sharon's 'war between civilisations' speech, people simultaneously use the events as a way of focussing their hatred on Jews.

Controlled rage.
You run an Arabian Nights restaurant,
your name is bin Laden (Powell:
bihi, bini, ba ba ladle), you are not
wanted here, but I am an American citizen,
get out; a mosque fire-bombed in Queensland,
excrement wiped across a mosque in Perth,
this is Australia. Joining the Israeli PM's
"this is a war between civilizations",
just as rapidly they turn on Jews.
I am what I am told I am
on television. I am what I watch.

Anti-Semitism lurks just below the surface in what often seems the most supportive debates regarding Israel - it saddens me that so much of this support comes out of various foreign policies that are implemented out of fear of the Arab 'other', and Islamic fundamentalism more than anything affirming or positive. Australia is a racist nation taken as a whole - I make such a blanket statement because its racism is written into the fabric of its public and communal institutions. It's implicit in the discourse of nation. Remember, this is a nation founded in genocide and fear - of the Asian 'other' in particular. The simultaneity of the so-called refugee or boat people or asylum seekers or detainee 'crisis' is testament to this. Testament? Yes, it's part of the witnessing of Australians to their own interiorised sense of destiny. The more physical room one has, the more vulnerable one feels. Defence policies become concerned with cultural identity and reinforcing a sense of self as much as real defence 'needs' - the seeming impossibility of defending its ‘vastness’ physically is seen to necessitate defences of prejudice and quarantine. It is not surprising that Muslims have become targets for racial vilification (in often the most cowardly and secretive ways - but also in the letters pages, the media generally, the super-market, and the petrol station!), because that's how Australian society deals with its pseudo grief - it lashes out, it blames. I say pseudo-grief, because no matter how hard CNN tries, it can only be simulacrum to the Antipodeans. Australians feel they must display grief - as allies, as sign of their sympathy, even empathy - as part of their general humanity.

Islamic culture has made great contributions to Australian society, but even if it hadn't, such reactions would be indefensible. The point is, it IS Australian society, as much as anything else. The Christian churches have a vested interest in implying or saying this is not the case, but it is. Last week I received some vile email via an Australian literature list basically saying my attitudes (along these lines: specifically calling the treatment of the refugees on the Norwegian container ship - the Tampa - Australia's shame) were ignorant and offensive to Australia. I was criticised for speaking in campuses in Europe and America 'against Australia', and for being one of those who facilitates the movement of rapists, heroin dealers, terrorists and the like to the virgin soils of Australia, land of the Olympic Games. That's the tip of the iceberg. Post the trauma of aggressions in the US, links have been made between 'my kind' of thinking, and the importation of terrorism into Australia. If one sympathises with refugees, one invites death and destruction. The absurdity of this doesn't need illustrating. In truth, should those refugees have been anything other than 'Christian' in nomenclature (remember, Christ on the cross was very white, as we know from medieval and renaissance paintings!), they would have suffered the same vilifications. If they had been Buddhist, Hindu, or Sikh. Also, ironically, if they'd been Jewish. I say ironically as Australia is deeply indebted, as are all western nations (and others) to Jewish traditions and ways of seeing. But as a Jewish friend said to me on the phone from the states - getting on the airline as a small dark Jewish woman at the moment would have me scrutinised very closely - like the Arab other.

Jewishness has been a key to the way I have structured my life. It is pivotal to my being a poet. I am not Jewish, but I have often wished it were the case. Ethnically, but also intellectually. Spiritually - I can't say, my sense of spirituality is highly mobile. At an early age I buried myself in the mysteries of cabalistic literature - sounds strange, but it's the case. It came through reading Paracelsus - the connections I've made in my life only follow on certain levels of logic. It's also about a sense of belonging - I am saturated by the Australian landscape, by a sense of place, but I've always felt very outside Australian society. The sense of being an outsider AND belonging - always seemed to me part of the Jewish identity. This is an untruth as much as a truism, and comes out of selective reading and listening in Sunday school for the Church of England! Poets have a habit of distorting things to create ambivalent alternatives that suit their own needs for personal and collective visions.

As a teenager, I was attracted to the notion of the PLO, without appreciating the difference between people of violence and 'the people'. I have always sympathised with those I feel are 'oppressed' - but was divided over the mutual oppressions of Jews and Arabs. I felt for both peoples. Zionism was a dirty word when I started university, and it was used to dissemble and define an alternative point of hatred without being 'anti-Semitic'. That is, good Jews didn't like Israel - a colonisation - while bad Jews were Zionist. Good Jews had lost family in the camps, Zionists' family histories weren't relevant. This was post the sympathies of 'exodus', and during the age of Palestinian awareness. Gradually the balance shifted and it became a question of reconciliation. Sympathies and loyalties could be divided. This is all semantics, because the underlying prejudices against any 'other' remain - it's a universal condition. Internal and external. The problem is its deployment for the politics of self - of using another's plight to shore up one's own power-base. The support of the PLO in Australian universities was as much about guild politics and an association with an array of policies as it was about any concern for Palestinians per se. Same applies for support of Israel by certain elements of the right in Australia - because Judaism was/is closer to Christianity than Islam? The Right? The Right that would turn on Jews the moment they had/have the chance?

My sympathies wavered and shifted. The idea of representation was astray. I re-analysed the implications of Munich, and came to see this as not the expression of an oppressed minority, but of hatred towards life, towards the soul. And things are like that for me now. I am a pacifist. I would die before defending myself. Would I defend others? Verbally, and without physical aggression - to the point of my own death. I'd die for my words, but I won't attack. And defence can be a form of attack, to invert the equation. A lot of inversions here! I have analysed my feelings towards Israel closely, and this is what I've come up with:

The question of Israel versus Palestine is an indigenous rights issue. As a (pacifist) anarchist, I find the idea of a centralised state loathsome to begin with, but, having said that, I fully appreciate the necessity for the existence of the state of Israel in the world as it is. What people conveniently forget is the role Britain and other European powers had in constructing Israel as an 'idea' of convenience, yet another example of their dissembling in face of the guilt of the Holocaust. But thinking outside the construct, the ongoing connection with a place for over 8000 years is reason enough to want to formulate community and both spiritual and geographic connection. Palestinians have the same claims, of course, and that has necessitated the politics of land sharing, and autonomy. Both states have the right to exist, and the peace process has been an effort to see such a possibility turned into a reality. The question of the west bank has to be considered outside the territorial debates re the war and Jordan, given it was and is, like Gaza, considered Palestinian lands anyway. Now, this is not to reduce the complexities of these issues to a few glib statements, but to simply say I believe in the peace process and recognise the rights of mutual co-existence.

Now, from a personal pov, I have to say that I have a great love and respect for Jewish traditions and culture(s). Since I was a teenager, my closest friends have been Jewish - and this isn't just a case of closet bigotry ('but some of my best friends are...'), but a genuine 'feeling'. It comes out of intellectual affiliations and needs, as much as anything else, and an identification with a sense of isolation. My closest friend in Geraldton (very isolated country coastal town in Western Australia) when I was fifteen and sixteen was Jewish, which was an unusual ethnicity to be in that part of the world. It was a complex interaction, but the Christian-Jewish dichotomy was enriching and enlightening - for both I believe. My friend talked of Israel constantly, and suffered from bigotries that come out of defensiveness (because he suffered their implications daily) towards Muslims, particularly Arabs. Now, in my spiritual quests (there were many), I thought of converting to Judaism - out of a feeling of solidarity with him as much as anything else - but also to Islam! Then it was Catholicism and Buddhism. It wasn't a matter of spiritual shopping, but a need to understand. To join religions together into an idea. It was an intellectual pursuit. Israel, in many ways, became the focus of this pursuit - and much of my work has it as a subtext, in the same way as it has the indigenous rights of native Australians as its basis. They are keys to the traditions I come out of and wrestle with. The conflation of the religious and secular, of the Israeli citizen and the religious believer, are tactics of isolation. Western governments pretend to be on the side of Israel, but it's not that at all - Israel is usable for them, a convenience. Most Israeli intellectuals (and many others) are aware of the limitations of this good will, and thus the necessity in their minds to create independence of being, to develop within themselves. A bad, militaristic leader like Sharon exploits this disquietude and the media vilify the whole country because of his 'public image'. Questions of terror inside and outside Israel become conveniences for campaigns that have little to do with the people - Israeli or Palestinian, Jew or Arab. If American soldiers start dying in a war that is perceived as being a holy war, Israel will suffer. That's why Israel is allowed to exist from the West's pov. This all disgusts me - anti-Semitism at its most blatant.

As for those jumping on the bandwagon and using Israel as a scapegoat, it's largely because of both a spiritual and intellectual fluidity. There are no concepts to hide behind here - just basic human principles. Violence is wrong in any form. Vengeance will bring darkness. Hatred is a living death. Platitudes, but platitudes for a reason. Like the truth that is the core of a cliche - fetishised for public consumption, but coming out of the inviolable. I've often found, that behind the talk there is nothing but selfishness and vanity. I was deeply embarrassed by an article by an Australian published in an Australian newspaper shortly after the WTC attacks (what does the word 'attacks' mean here - it's not the right word - it's too general and evasive and belongs to a discourse of states, not the inverted) - she had been in the immediate vicinity and turned her experiences into a self-conscious lit excursion through her own creative psyche. An elegy it wasn't, unless for that part of oneself one loses in moments of trauma... you know, that kind of thing. I have been thinking of the inadequacies of Blanchot on disaster, the inadequacy of anything but the notion of suffering. To share in the grief of others in so public a way is voyeurism, to make use of this directly affected to grieve in a way that one is expected to grieve. The state (through the media) makes use of this for its own self-affirming and shoring-up reasons. Attacks on humanity, on freedom, on civilization, are just stock epithets, ways of coping with grief on the surface, but ways of retaining control in times of crisis. Language comes up for scrutiny after a while - crusade means, well, crusade... noun, verb, historical precedent... the poets leap to attention - words are ours, we invest them with more than they have! And then the shallow self-serving crap really starts to flow. The least bigoted of them forget the power of words and betray their prejudices and so on.

I knew a woman - a Christian fundamentalist - who had a picture of a solider picking up a small boy with the caption "to Israel my son". This woman had no liking for Judaism, which she held accountable. What she liked, was the defence of the holy land scenario - defence just long enough for it to return to the fold. A keeping of the ground until tribulation and rapture. An apocalyptic pragmatism. Now, that's not the Israel I recognise. The Israel I believe in - have learnt to believe in - is not just a refuge for the victims of a collective (which is not to put the rest of humanity against Jews - another common racist posturing) hatred and vilification and genocide - but a cultural entity. It is the focus of a process of thinking, of critiquing the self in existence. It is a place of questioning and hope. It is also a place where a consciousness of responsibility to all peoples is acute - and that should be supported and not blurred by other agendas.

Best,
JK