MP slammed over Israel speech

FEDERAL NSW Labor MP Laurie Ferguson has roused the ire of the community leadership after delivering a speech slating Israel in the House of Representatives last week.

In the address, the Member for Werriwa spoke of Israel’s “mistreatment of Palestinian children” in detention, and accused the Israeli military of employing a “strategy of mass intimidation and collective punishment”.

“The direct losses of the three Israeli military operations that took place between 2008 and 2014, excluding the people killed, was equal to three times the size of Gaza’s local gross domestic product. This meant that the 2014 war displaced half-a-million people and left parts of Gaza destroyed,” Ferguson said.

He added that the blockade of building materials is “crippling even where capital is available to rebuild, with 22 years required to repair the outstanding damage from previous conflicts and 76 years to rebuild the overall housing shortage in Gaza”.

Ferguson also spoke of the “widespread, systematic and institutionalised” ill-treatment of Palestinian children who come in contact with the military detention system for merely “rocks being thrown”.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry executive director Peter Wertheim said it is “astonishing” that Ferguson bewails the devastation that Gaza has “undoubtedly suffered” in wars with Israel in 2008-9, 2012 and 2014, “but utters not a word of criticism of Hamas and other Islamist groups for having precipitated those wars in the first place”.

Stating that Hamas deliberately fires rockets at Israel’s civilian population centres and by tunnelling into Israel “diverts the very construction materials that Ferguson wrongly complains are not getting into Gaza for the civilian reconstruction effort”, Wertheim said, “It is perverse to turn a blind eye to the leaders of Hamas, whose genocidal charter impels them to attack Israelis whenever Hamas deems it advantageous to do so, while criticising Israel, and Israel alone, for having the temerity to defend itself.”

He said Ferguson’s concerns about the detention of Palestinian youths for throwing rocks is similarly blinkered.

“Just days before Ferguson’s comments were made, Alexander Levlovitz was killed when his car was pelted with rocks, causing him to lose control of his vehicle and collide with an electricity pole. Earlier this year, four-year-old Adele Biton died after more than two years of suffering from the acute brain trauma she suffered during a rock attack on the car she was travelling in,” Wertheim said.

“Such incidents are not isolated nor are they trivial. Ferguson’s description of the ‘savage destruction’ of olive saplings contrasts sharply with his silence on the destruction of human life by mobs hurling bricks and cinder blocks through car windows.”

EVAN ZLATKIS