ACTU releases skewed statement on Gaza
The ACTU called on the government to press for an immediate ceasefire and sanction certain Israeli officials.
A former vice-president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) felt “shocked and ashamed” after the union peak body released a sharply worded broadside at Israel but glossed over Hamas, October 7 and Israeli hostages.
The ACTU statement, on the eve of Pesach, castigated Israel for “the deaths of over 34,000 civilians since 7 October” and “the use of starvation as a weapon of war”, and expressed concern “that Australian companies supply parts used as part of global supply chains, including to F-35 fighter jets”.
The ACTU called on the government to press for an immediate ceasefire and sanction certain Israeli officials. “The ACTU calls for an end to the occupation of Palestine and a just and sustainable peace … We call on all countries to recognise, without delay, Palestine as a sovereign state with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
Describing the statement as “unbalanced” and “unfair” and “something I felt shocked and ashamed about”, Michael Easson, a former ACTU vice-president and former secretary of the NSW Trades and Labour Council, told The AJN this week it was “beyond the pale” and “Green, left nonsense”. “Given the Holocaust-type massacre that occurred on October 7, Israel has the right to defend itself.”
Australia’s labour movement “should have the strongest relationship” with Israel, said Easson. “That doesn’t mean we should be completely one-sided. [But] viciously attacking Israel is not in keeping with Australia’s tradition and indeed with the Labor Party, and with the labour movement.”
Michael Borowick, national convenor of the Australia-Israel Labor Dialogue and a former ACTU assistant secretary, who is Jewish, told The AJN the statement “adds little to navigating a balanced solution to the current hostilities. [It] ignores the current realities for Palestinian workers and their families, who live under tyranny and oppression”.
“The statement also conveniently ignores the impact of terrorism on Israeli workers and their families. Hamas could have reasonably foreseen the response to their barbaric onslaught on October 7, yet sacrificed the wellbeing of the Palestinian people in Gaza regardless.”
Jeff Lapidos, a branch secretary at the Australian Services Union, also Jewish, responded to the ACTU statement with an email to its secretary Sally McManus and president Michele O’Neil, stating, “Your assertion that over 33,000 Palestinian civilians have died in Gaza since 7 October closes the ACTU’s eyes to the fact that at least 10,000 of these were combatants for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
“You imply that the dire circumstances facing the people of Gaza is the responsibility of Israel, when this is far from true,” stated Lapidos, who will be a delegate to the ACTU Congress next month.
“The leadership of Hamas continues to have the power to bring about an immediate ceasefire by releasing their hostages and surrendering their arms … Where is the ACTU’s condemnation of Hamas? Why haven’t you condemned its sexual violence against Israeli women and girls?”
Former member for Melbourne Ports Michael Danby, who was an industrial officer for the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association, said, “Women leaders of the ACTU are silent about Jewish women held hostage and sexually violated by Hamas … [The] current ACTU are an unrecognisable rump of the organisation that passionately supported Israel’s establishment.”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Peter Wertheim said it is hard to believe “that the ACTU is not aware that Hamas is a designated terrorist organisation that demonstrated its genocidal agenda against Israel and its Jewish population in the most graphic way imaginable last October”.
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