An open letter to Louise Adler

I read your opinion piece (21/09) with an open heart and mind. I was originally quite captivated by the headline and excited to read on.

In your opening argument you insisted that concern for the ‘other’ should be premised on shared humanity, rather than a specific Jewish experience. Nevertheless, you went on to share your family’s Jewish history. You wrote that your parents narrowly escaped the clutches of Nazism, fleeing Germany in 1938 for Australia. How lucky they were to secure refuge despite an extremely restrictive immigration policy in Australia. Your grandfather, as a teenager, was a member of the French resistance. Sadly, he was murdered in Birkenau.

That history resonated with me, as a Jew and also a descendant of Holocaust survivors. My grandmother too engaged in resistance during the war. She trained and fought in the Zhukov unit of the Russian Partisans. Almost my entire family, bar my grandparents, were murdered in the Treblinka death camp. And I too, like you, have great affinity for asylum seekers. In fact, after surviving the Holocaust, my own grandparents languished in DP camps for five years. My mother was born in a DP camp in Germany.

You went on to affirm once again, that your father’s decision ‘to take a stand‘ derived from his own father’s experience and horrors of war since then. You wrote that these same experiences contributed to your own ‘understanding’ of the world. I have to confess feeling a little confused as to how this accorded with your thesis that empathy for others should foremost be predicated on shared humanity. Incidentally, I don’t have an issue acknowledging one’s lived experience or the concept of shared humanity to support human rights. In fact, I see these two factors as complimentary to one another.

Your reference to your past involvement with a socialist Zionist youth movement interested me a lot, even if I didn’t understand why you were still talking about yourself. I too attended a socialist Zionist youth movement. However, unlike you, I went of my own volition. I did wonder why, if your parents were not Zionists, they did not encourage you to attend a non-Zionist Jewish socialist youth movement? Another disturbing difference became apparent to me. Unlike you, my political views were not passed down to me by my parents. I must confess, at this stage, the sting was leaving your article.

A summer trip, sponsored by your non-Zionist parents I presume, appears to have been a major factor in forming your views on Israel, aged 18. I am not sure if that 1972 trip was the last time you visited Israel or not? I also went to Israel after high school (and have been there multiple times since, including two sabbaticals) but, unlike you, I went for a year. On kibbutz I did not pluck any turkeys or pick oranges, as your parents feared you would. However, I did pick bananas, helped birth a calf, worked with Ethiopian immigrants, studied Zionist and non-Zionist thinkers, went to the Occupied Territories, and attended multiple seminars alongside Palestinians and Israelis with the ‘Peace Now’ movement.

Perhaps our difference in age accounts for these divergent experiences. I never racially profiled the airport personnel like you did. I never thought of the chain smoking, hairy chested passport control officers as European Jews, as you did. On Kibbutz, we did not have Palestinians cleaning our toilets (sadly we cleaned our own) and we had Mizrachi (Middle Eastern Jews) as members of the Kibbutz.

Despite the outbreak of the first Intifada, I spent hours in the Arab souk sipping tea served to me by Palestinian shopkeepers and chatted to them about their hopes and dreams. Certainly, there was entrenched racism in Israeli society, as there was in Australia, and still is. In fact, when you left for your sojourn in Israel, the White Australia Policy was still in existence. It formally ended in 1973.

I have not read Saree Makdisi but I know enough about politics, law and government to know that the ideas of Israel and democracy do not contradict one another. Israel was Terra Nullius? Louise, you may not be a Zionist, which is a vulnerable place to come from when discussing Israel with Jewish people. I accept that. However, to deny the long historical, spiritual and cultural connection of Israel to the Jewish people is factually incorrect, and unfortunately, deprives your argument of any merit.

I read on but your arguments became so polarised that I decided not to dissect them in detail any further. Save to say, my heart too breaks for what is occurring in Gaza. Your conflation of the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza is not the first but does not mean it is not a distortion of the Holocaust. I too call for a ceasefire in Gaza, but also, unlike you, I call for a return of the innocent Israeli hostages, and condemn the massacre of October 7 by Hamas, a proscribed terror organisation. I call for enactment of the principles enshrined in the Israeli Declaration of Independence:

The state of Israel will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex. 

Louise, is it possible at all, that some of your thinking may have come about, not because of your humanitarian stance, but, rather, because of your early views which have remained largely unaltered, and closed to divergent narratives? I cannot help but wonder what your views may have been if your Jewish family were denied refuge in Australia, as most were, and instead granted asylum in Israel?

All I know is that if we truly want peace between Palestinians and Israelis, we are going to need to acknowledge for once and for all, that no one is going anywhere. Palestinians deserve rights. Israelis deserve rights.

We are all victims of our own pasts. The challenge is to transcend and look beyond ourselves. I have an arts degree, a law degree and a postgraduate degree in human rights law. But the best piece of learning I ever gained was one word. I learned this word in, of all places, the Zionist socialist movement on my gap year in Israel on a Kibbutz in 1987.

The word is ‘moratorium’. Suspend all previous beliefs. Listen. Learn. Relearn.

Feel free to write back if you wish to discuss this further.

Sincerely,
Fiona Kelmann