Unionists report back

TRADE Union representatives who participated in an Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council Rambam mission last November reported their impressions at a lunch in Sydney last Thursday.

“There are certainly some in the labour movement, within some organisations, who have a very strong preconception of the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” said Assistant National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union (AWU), Scott McDine, who participated in the trip.

He recalled discussing his experience with a representative from a union which endorses Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), noting that the representative subsequently enquired about the next mission.

“That’s where I can actually play a role, having actually gone to Israel and participated in the delegation,” he said.

Assistant Secretary of the Newcastle Branch of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA), David Bliss, said he felt “far better equipped now to make a positive contribution, backed not by prejudice or not by preconceptions, but by a little bit of on-the-ground knowledge”.

“It’s very hard to put yourself in the shoes of the Israeli people and how they have struggled in the 60 years of the existence of the state to actually push away the many threats which surround them,” he said.

“When people criticise Israel about how it defends itself and the measures it takes to protect its people – we live in a very kind of sheltered existence – I think it’s very precious and wrong of us to judge.”

Federal Election Campaign Coordinator of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Daniel Mookhey, recalled witnessing “a blistering, no-holds-barred industrial relations dispute” upon arriving in Israel. “What was most striking about that particular meeting was its very ordinariness,” he said.

“And the reason why I think its ordinariness is in itself extraordinary is because you wouldn’t think, reading the press about Israel … that something so ordinary happens in practice day-to-day, because the view that you get of Israel is a view of a militaristic state.”

“It’s certainly not something that is worthy of sanction, boycott or divestment,” he said.

Jewish member of the delegation, Assistant Secretary of the ACTU Michael Borowick, said “It’s critical that Israel remain a bipartisan political issue in the Australian body politic. It’s in no one’s interest that any one party own the Israel issue … and certainly the mission plays its role in anchoring this strategy,” he said.

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