Chasm between liberal values and action exposed again

Creative artists who platform against genocide should be applauded, not vilified, writes Rosemary Sorensen.

IS IT BRAVE TO DO what Brisbane jazz musician Kellee Green did — naming her piano composition ‘River to Sea’ and urging people in her winner's speech at the Queensland Music Awards (QMA) to boycott Israel-connected businesses?

In her acceptance speech for the Jazz Award, Green said:

"Our own government is complicit in war crimes: by supporting Israel both in words and actions; by allowing the export of weapons and weapon parts to Israel to directly kill innocent Palestinian men, women and children."

She continued:

"I urge you to please educate yourselves about this ongoing genocide and take action by protesting, contacting MPs – some of whom are here tonight – and boycotting where you can, so this government knows that these war crimes are occurring without our consent.”

Let’s put it this way — it’s uncommon. And when musicians and other creatives do it, there are consequences. In Green’s case, her public criticism of Israel and of Australia’s support earned her abuse from the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Adrian Schrinner, who accused event host QMusic of promoting antisemitism, and Ms Green of 'vile hate speech'.

Here we are again, witnessing what happens when someone stands up and speaks out, the quick, over-the-top, punitive response from people with a bit of power, and the pathetic cowardice of a cultural institution that, instead of telling the politicians where to stick their puny funding if it comes with such censorious and immoral conditions, whimpers and ducks for cover.

Ms Green gets it. She wrote her music because, like anyone with a conscience, every day, as life goes on, she knows another child, another journalist, another doctor is killed with weapons supplied by the United States — with both rhetorical and actual support from the Australian Government. As Egyptian-Canadian writer Omar El Akkad says, it ought to be impossible not to see and not to speak out if you’re in a position to do so.

Deception and genocide part of Israel's arsenal against 'terrorism'

Under the pretence of fighting terrorism, Israel has bombardment thousands of innocents in its ongoing destruction of Gaza.

“Change comes slowly,” El Akkad said to David Marr on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live this week, talking about his book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

El Akkad said:

“Something is changing, people are willing to stand up and be troublesome. It’s so much easier to look away, there are no consequences to that.”

In his book, El Akkad sweeps away all the excuses we hear for not condemning the genocide of Palestinians. With his name, his ethnicity and his personal history (he was born in Egypt, migrated with his parents to Canada where he became a journalist with the Globe and Mail, and is now an American citizen), he knows the racism behind the repulsive acceptance by otherwise progressive liberals of the ongoing massacre of Palestinian civilians. When you have seen children shot in the head, he says, it is impossible to accept what is happening in Gaza as politics — as unpleasant but necessary to rid the world of an evil "other".

The book is like a clear, hard, shining rock in the middle of a murky swamp. To every “how can this be okay?” – like the Lord Mayor who calls a woman’s plea for the lives of Palestinian children to be saved 'vile hate speech' – El Akkad has an answer. It’s not okay.

David Marr, quite rightly, praised the book as excellent, but still, possibly under instructions to try to give the Israeli perspective on the wanton, unprincipled, flagrantly unlawful killing of Palestinians, he asked a couple of weird questions.

One was that “yes, but…” question that came up constantly at the beginning of this latest and most devastating assault on the sliver of land left to Palestinians, following the terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. It’s usually framed as “Do you support Hamas?”, meant to cancel the speaker’s right to criticise Israel. In this instance, the question was less vulgar and Marr would have known the answer, having read El Akkad’s book, but there it was anyway.

David Marr asks El Akkad:

“What do you think of Hamas?”

Patient, tolerant, and very experienced at having to reply to such questions, El Akkad is scathing of Hamas’s oppression and violence. But that, apparently, is not enough for someone with brown skin named Omar to say, because, well, he’s got brown skin and is named Omar, so he could be a terrorist himself, right?

Weaponising antisemitism

A campaign by right-wing Liberals to link Muslims with fascism and anti-genocide demonstrations to antisemitism is on shaky ground.

One of the chapters in the book describes how the word attaches like filings to a magnet to people designated, en masse, as the scary "other" — vermin, as American politicians have described them.

And so, Marr follows up his rather offensive question with another that El Akkad has heard a lot:

“Isn’t the real world solution to Hamas going to be violence, with terrible consequences?”

Again, in his book, El Akkad points out that this is classic bullying logic: see what you made me do.

To Marr, El Akkad responded:

“For the entirety of my life, the Palestinian people have been living under a state of occupation… I simply submit to you — the entirety of our conversation is predicated on where you think history begins.”

As I’ve written before in Independent Australia, one of the outcomes of the bullying by Zionist supporters here in Australia is that now we can’t say we didn’t know about how Palestine was taken from its people, and how the repression has been violent and increasing over many decades (and how that predates the very existence of Hamas). Indeed, it has clarified the history of Zionism and made it impossible not to support the Jewish resistance to antisemitism.

But that question about Hamas was Marr’s second go at finding a way to lessen Israel’s crimes. Discussing the point of El Akkad’s book – which is to show the “chasm between the performance of liberalism and the reality”, something we’re grappling with here as we watch cultural institutions fail miserably to uphold liberal values — Marr asks El Akkad whether the “chasm between decent values and horrid outcomes” is just a political reality.

Creative Australia's shameful dumping of Khaled Sabsabi

If Creative Australia thinks it's reducing the risk of losing public support by cancelling Khaled Sabsasi, surely the question is, who is this “public” it is worrying about?

And the sentence that comes out of Marr's mouth to follow up that question is this:

“In a purely technical way, it’s almost admirable, the skill, the power of the Israeli state.”

Surely Marr doesn’t mean “admirable”? Whatever he does want to say here, it’s not admirable, the ability to surge on destructively and take government and institutional approval with you. There is nothing admirable about U.S. President Donald Trump’s nihilistic agenda, just because it’s happening with such speed and, for now, efficiency.

This, you’d think, was a lapse – an error of judgement – brought about by the interviewer aiming to cover certain ground, in this case, trying to find out from El Akkad what he thinks about people’s desire to continue to support Israel, against all the evidence of death and destruction. And yet, there’s another moment that is disturbing in this interview.

El Akkad writes about how the American and Canadian media have failed to find a way to deal with the truths of this genocide. We see it here – the both-siding that’s been going on for the past two years – sounding more and more pathetic as the months and murders roll on.

El Akkad describes that thing you see in reports, where, following another assassination of a Palestinian journalist, another mass grave, another report of food and aid denied, the journalist adds a summary of the “conflict” since 7 October and quotes what “Israel said”. Because they think they must. Because not to would bring wrath and unpleasant outcomes down on their head.

Even a vice-chancellor of a once-liberal university will use power to respond to demands to crush any sign of sympathy towards a people being annihilated with “admirable” determination by a ruthless army.

El Akkad’s book was published before the latest assassinations of Palestinian journalists, so his description of how the brave work of these writers is discounted, their lives less valued, is now even more distressing. But Marr found a both-sides question to ask this man who describes how every morning he wakes to see in his news feed the most horrific things, the children beheaded, the starvation, the dead journalists, but who also tries not to lose hope that the resistance of people campaigning for Palestine will eventually bring an end to the carnage.

Marr asked:

“Do you think Israel’s argument would be better heard, better respected, if it did allow traditional news sources to observe what was happening, and to report without censorship?”

There was a small pause, as El Akkad considered his response, then said:

“I doubt it very much."

Please read One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. To hear politicians screech “antisemitism” in response to a musician who bravely uses her small public moment to support a people being obliterated must induce rage. And close on that, resignation.

El Akkad’s hopefulness at the end of the book is muted — because he’s not a fool and knows that what we’re up against is, right now, fuelled by powerful forces. But it’s there. Writing like this provides clear and useful reasoning that must be in place if there is to be a future.