The atrocities being committed against Gazans bear similarities to the brutality carried out against Indigenous Australians during colonisation, writes Bilal Cleland.
MOST VICTORIANS are familiar with the Great Ocean Road, built from 1919 to 1932, which extends from just past Geelong to the Surf Coast then to the huge sandstone cliffs of Port Campbell and on to Warrnambool, Port Fairy and Portland.
The road along the cliffs of the Surf Coast is remembered as one of the great projects of the immediate post-war era when the Government was forced to create jobs for returning soldiers.
What not many travellers remember is that this journey covers a sad and distressing history of First Nations dispossession, resistance and genocide, in the Eumeralla Wars of the 1830s and ’40s.
Settler colonialism
The colonisation of Australia by Britain was based upon the doctrine of Terra Nullius, a land without people.
This is similar to the later Zionist assumption that Palestine was a land that belonged to no one.
Theodor Herzl, the Father of Zionism, spoke of settlement in Palestine in terms of “a people without a land to a land without a people”.
Of course, both assumptions were false and were soon demonstrated as such by the resistance of the Indigenous inhabitants who had inhabited the lands for thousands of years.
Looking at the process of colonisation, there is a common theme whether in Palestine or Southwestern Victoria.
Imperial entitlement
Identified as the Dhauwurd Wurrung language speakers, composed of 56 clans and five sub-dialects by Ian D Clark in his thorough Scars in the Landscape, the inhabitants of the Warrnambool, Port Fairy and Portland districts suffered from British whaler incursions from 1810.
The Convincing Ground massacre of 1833 or ’34 was the first recorded of a series of clashes and massacres that went on for decades.
The European settlers regarded the land as unoccupied and open to their sheep.
The Gunditjmara waged guerrilla war, taking their animals for food and threatening their shepherds.
The British textile industry maintained a high demand for wool.
Drought from 1838, then a colonial depression, intensified the pressure on the squatters and the locals, leading to worsening conflict.
In 1837, settlers in the Portland Bay District appealed to Governor Richard Bourke for protection from attacks.
In 1838, a group of 82 settlers threatened to declare a “Black war” if authorities did not give them further protection but in fact, rapes and massacres were already occurring.
Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, was also seen as a land for the taking and there were sporadic attempts to settle European Jews there, beginning with sponsored refugees from the Czarist pogroms following the assassination of the Czar in 1861.
Herzl’s Zionist vision was of a secular Zionism that denounced theocracy and espoused liberal European values.
But it was from the beginning a colonial project, as Herzl explained in his letter to Cecil Rhodes.
Palestine’s significance increased once Britain had taken control of the Suez Canal, the route to India and the East.
During the war in 1915-1917, several developments drove the British Government to announce its support for a Jewish state in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration.
The Palestinians objected.
The Palestine Arab Delegation’s Observations on the High Commissioner’s Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine during the period 1st July 1920 – 30th June 1921 stated:
‘What confusion would ensue all the world over if this principle on which the Jews base their “legitimate” claim were carried out in other parts of the world! What migrations of nations must follow! The Spaniards in Spain would have to make room for the Arabs and Moors who conquered and ruled their country for over 700 years…’
Reason had no place before imperial ambition.
Dehumanisation
Dehumanisation, which elevates the status of the invader and portrays the dispossessed as inferior in every way, makes dispossession palatable to the settler, whether in Palestine or Southwestern Victoria.
The Gunditjmara, like all the tribes, were regarded as devoid of culture, devoid of history and unworthy to occupy their lands.
Typical was the attitude expressed in a meeting between leading colonists and officials in Portland with the Chief Protector of Aborigines, George Robinson, where it was said ‘they thought the local Aboriginal people were barely human and that soldiers should be brought in to shoot whole tribes along the Glenelg’.
Ian Clark, in Scars in The Landscape, documents dozens of massacre sites in Southwestern Victoria.
The Zionist colonisers of Palestine reflect similar attitudes to the occupied.
Herzl, in The Jewish State, echoed by his followers over the years, wrote that the Zionist project ‘shall be a sector of the wall of Europe against Asia, we shall serve as the outpost of civilization against barbarism’.
Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery wrote:
‘[Herzl’s] sentence could easily be written today. American thinkers propound the “clash of civilisations”, with Western “Judeo-Christian” culture battling “Islamic barbarism”. American leaders declare that Israel is the outpost of Western civilisation in the fight against Arab-Muslim “international terrorism”.’
Genocide as the Final Solution
The Gunditjmarra killed sheep and cattle, and the occasional shepherd.
Like the response of Israel to resistance, this was met by massacres, Native Police attacks and poisoning.
There were many cases of damper laced with arsenic being provided to hungry families who died in agony. Robinson recorded that he saw several who had survived but who could not walk.
Squatters and their henchmen went on shooting parties, comparing Black hunts to kangaroo hunts.
Thomas Browne, alias Rolf Boldrewood, like Herzl and his original liberal European values, defended the local inhabitants as fine but wronged people until a party of them stole food from his house.
He called on the Governor for help and a party of police was sent after the perpetrators.
They were tracked down and many killed, and ‘when the troop turn their horses’ heads homeward, all the known leaders of the tribe are down’.
Another threat eliminated.
The remnants of the Indigenous population were herded onto a mission station at Lake Condah where their culture was forbidden.
This genocidal pattern is still underway in Palestine.
Francesca Albanese, speaking at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, presented her report, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’.
Albanese said:
“Following nearly six months of unrelenting Israeli assault on occupied Gaza, it is my solemn duty to report on the worst of what humanity is capable of, and to present my findings.”
A leading American Islamic scholar, Omar Suleiman, summarised the situation in Gaza:
‘This time, the Nakba is being televised, and it has a stench of finality to it. What is happening in Palestine can no longer be described as genocide or even ethnic cleansing. It is beyond mass extermination — it is total erasure.’
The difference in response to Indigenous rights in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa seems related to whether the Indigenous inhabitants were able to assert their rights or whether the Indigenous were suppressed.
Bilal Cleland is a retired secondary teacher and was Secretary of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Chairman of the Muslim Welfare Board Victoria and Secretary of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils. You can follow Bilal on Twitter @BilalCleland.
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