Miller calls for shift in Israel policy

A principled call for Australia to relocate its embassy from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem, to reverse the Australian government’s recent voting record on Israel at the United Nations, and to cease funding of the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, was made outside Parliament House in Canberra on December 6, by Indigenous Friends of Israel International (IFII) co-founder Munganbana Norman Miller.

“I am standing here as an Aboriginal leader, on the 86th anniversary of the stand of Aboriginal William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League in Melbourne,” Miller said.

“It was a stand against antisemitism then, and mine is a stand against antisemitism now.”

The statement slammed the Australian government for “reversing 20 years of bipartisanship”on December 3 when supporting a UN resolution that demanded an end to Israel’s “unlawful” presence in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories”.

“For a start – the Jews are Indigenous to Israel,” Miller said, adding how “Jews have been systematically ethnically cleansed from Arab lands”.

“While the request for a Palestinian state is understandable, this has been offered to them many times, and they have refused.

“Considering that the blood of Australians – black and white – has been shed for the freedom and right to life and safety of Jewish people in Israel, it is reprehensible that the Australian government would sell out Israel today, and reward terrorist groups who committed the atrocities of October 7, with [backing] an ‘irreversible pathway to statehood’ – without a guarantee of an agreement regarding the survival of the Jewish state, and agreed upon boundaries.”

“Doc Evatt – who was at the forefront of accepting Israel as a member of the UN – would be disappointed to see where Australia and the Labor Party are now.”