Christian, Muslim and Jewish community leaders unite for a just peace, condemning the ongoing atrocities committed by Israel in Palestine
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Christian, Muslim and Jewish community leaders united for a just peace, condemning the ongoing atrocities being committed by Israel in Palestine, during the weekend’s International Day of Peace commemorations at St John’s Anglican Cathedral
Christian, Muslim and Jewish community leaders united for a just peace, condemning the ongoing atrocities being committed by Israel in Palestine, during the weekend’s International Day of Peace commemorations at St John’s Anglican Cathedral.
Advisory committee member of the Jewish Council of Australia, Louise Adler AM, and president of the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, Nasser Mashni, gathered with the Cathedral Dean, Peter Catt, and south-east Queensland community members on Saturday night for the Cathedral’s 13th annual Brisbane Peace Lecture.
The lecture, with the theme “Uniting for a just peace”, was hosted three days after the UN General Assembly voted to adopt a resolution that demands that Israel ends its “unlawful presence” in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Jewish woman and former publisher Louise Alder said that while her family’s history has shaped her beliefs, she is “an ally…of Palestinian people…because as human beings, injustice and inequality demand that we all care”.
“Yes, my own family history has shaped my political views,” Ms Adler said.
“My father’s father was deported to Beaune-la-Rolande in the first round up of immigrant Jews in Paris in 1941 and then sent to Birkenau where he was murdered.
“I have discovered that it is impossible to ask, however hesitantly, whether anyone feels that the images from Gaza on our TV screens are reminiscent of the brutal and now iconic images from last century, of the photos of the Jews rounded up in the Warsaw ghetto — that is to break a taboo.
“In this small corner of the world, there are 120,000 Jews.
“I have learned that it is not acceptable to ask, ‘What is our relationship to the modern state of Israel? What is our response to the occupation of Palestine and the plight of the Palestinians?’
“My response is to ask whether empathy, an acknowledgement of our shared humanity, is such a risk.”
Ms Adler said that it was during a 1972 visit to Israel, where she volunteered on a kibbutz upon completing school, that she was first educated about the plight of Palestinians.
“I imagined that I was landing in a socialist utopia, instead the reality of the Zionist project made itself explicit at the airport.
“European Jews stamped my passport, Middle Eastern Jews manned the luggage carousels, while Palestinians swept the floors and cleaned the toilets.
“It was the beginning of my own education regarding the entrenched racism underpinning the establishment of the state of Israel.
“I have been repeatedly berated for failing to refer to October 7th and mentioning the Holocaust.”
Advisory committee member of the Jewish Council of Australia and former publisher Louise Adler AM co-delivered the 2024 Brisbane Peace Lecture at the St John’s Anglican Cathedral International Day of Peace commemorations on Saturday 21 September 2024
The killing of over 40,000 Muslim and Christian Palestinians, largely women and children, in Gaza over the last year is being condemned worldwide.
In March, following nearly six months of research and 12,000 reported deaths in Gaza, UN human rights expert Francesca Albanese found that there are “reasonable grounds” that genocide is being committed in Gaza.
While presenting her “Anatomy of a Genocide” report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Ms Albanese called member states to heed their obligations “to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide” by imposing an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel.
“The genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians,” Ms Albanese said.
Ms Albanese criticised governments, including Australia’s, for having “amnesia”, “myopia” and “living in an alternative reality” when asked about its response to the war on Gaza.
Israeli military assaults are a near daily occurrence in the occupied West Bank, with the UN reporting that the number of Palestinian children killed by Israel Defense Forces’ live ammunition has almost tripled over the last year.
Hundreds of children in the West Bank have also been detained without charges, and children from Gaza are among the thousands of Palestinians who have been similarly detained, with torture reported.
Muslim Palestinian Nasser Mashni said that the nature and history of Zionism and settler-colonialism must be recognised in authentic discussions about peace.
“Palestine is more than just the land, it is also a people,” Mr Mashni said.
“In Palestine the British gave away land that was not theirs to others based on the racist, supremacist ideology that the natives mattered not!
“The father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, wrote to Cecil Rhodes in 1902, one of the most famous colonialists of his period, yes that Rhodes — Rhodes Scholarship fame: ‘You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews…How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.’
“Zionists never denied they were colonialists; they did though claim that Palestine was ‘a land without people for a people without a land’ — their own version of terra nullius.
“Palestinians don’t deny Jewish connection or historical links to the land — we just don’t accept that it is superior to ours.
“Jewish connection and the Zionist enterprise of the state of Israel today are two very separate connections.
“The Zionists’ conundrum is that they want all of the land of historic Palestine and want it to be a Jewish state and they want it to be democratic.
“But it can only have two of the three!
“Jewish, democratic, but not all the land.
“Democratic, all the land, but not Jewish.
“Or the reality of today, all the land, Jewish, but not democratic — and there is a word for it, ‘apartheid’.
“The problem with Zionism is that its basis in supremacism means Zionists only feel secure when Palestinians are totally insecure.
“This is aided and abetted by a compliant and sycophantic West.
“Peace is closer when everyone and every country is treated equally and fairly — when double standards and hypocrisies are no longer entertained or allowed, be it in Palestine or Ukraine.
“I dream of the Jerusalem my father was born in — where Ibrahim, Avraham and Abraham…all played marbles together in the Old City, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but on Friday Ibrahim went to Al Aqsa Mosque, on Saturday Avraham went to temple and the Wailing Wall, and on Sunday Abraham to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
“On Monday morning they were playing marbles together again.”
This was the first time that the Brisbane Peace Lecture was co-delivered.
Australian Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni co-delivered the 2024 Brisbane Peace Lecture at the St John’s Anglican Cathedral International Day of Peace commemorations on Saturday 21 September 2024
In his introductory remarks, the Anglican Dean of Brisbane, Peter Catt, said that it was important for Muslim, Jewish and Christian community leaders to speak unequivocally together about a just peace.
“In terms of dealing with the complexities that drive many of the world’s conflicts, instead of bombing we need dialogue, we need truth-telling and truth-listening,” The Very Rev’d Dr Catt said.
“In the current circumstances to have a Jewish person and a Palestinian, standing side by side, looking for a way to bring peace, is a practical way of dismantling the destructive binary — the either-or places — before us.
“We are, if you like, seeking to find the third way and looking for what might emerge.”
The Anglican Dean of Brisbane, The Very Rev’d Dr Peter Catt, introduced the 2024 Brisbane Peace Lecture speakers, Louise Adler AM and Nasser Mashni
The St John’s Cathedral International Day of Peace event was co-hosted by the United Nations Association of Australia — Queensland Division and Just Peace.
The United Nations marks the International Day of Peace annually on 21 September, after being first declared 43 years ago as a shared date for the world to build a culture of peace.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ International Day of Peace message was read by United Nations Association of Australia — Queensland Division intern Elisabeth Haugland Austrheim.
“Everywhere we look, peace is under attack,” Mr Guterres’ said in his message.
“From Gaza, to Sudan, to Ukraine and beyond we see civilians in the firing line; homes blown apart; traumatised, terrified populations who have lost everything — and sometimes everyone.
“This catalogue of human misery must stop.
“Our world needs peace.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ International Day of Peace message was read by United Nations Association of Australia — Queensland Division intern Elisabeth Haugland Austrheim at the St John’s Cathedral International Day of Peace commemorations on 21 September 2024
St John’s Cathedral is the Cathedral for the Anglican Church Southern Queensland, which stretches from Coolangatta to Bundaberg and out to the borders of the Northern Territory and South Australia.
Since March, the Anglican Church Southern Queensland has been co-hosting “Gathering to Pray for Gaza” inter-faith ceasefire prayer vigils in Brisbane, with 80 recognised Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Baháʼí and Buddhist community leaders reciting from their holy texts and leading intercessory prayers across the vigils.
The 2024 Brisbane Peace Lecture may be viewed on the St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane YouTube channel.
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