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Leaders of the Yes Campaign for the Voice referendum released on Sunday night, 23 October, an anonymous statement condemning Australians for voting no to their proposal to enshrine a Voice in the constitution. They are not accepting the democratic process in this nation and are calling it a shameful act that promotes colonialism.

They also said that racism, ignorance, and misinformation were factors, and they have received a bitter lesson from the vote. This ignores the fact that it was not a referendum where non-Indigenous people voted no, and First Nations people voted yes. There were yes and no voters in both camps.

The Guardian reported that the statement said that the Voice referendum ‘unleashed a tsunami of racism’ and Australia had chosen “to make itself less liberal and less democratic” by voting no. It continued that the result was so mean-spirited it would remain “unbelievable and appalling” for decades to come.

Occupied Territory?

More seriously, they have accused Australians of non-Indigenous heritage, who may have been born here and had many generations of family members living here, as illegal occupiers who need to have First Nations people recognise their right to live here. Who would do that? The government-appointed Referendum Working Group, who, along with Prime Minister Albanese, have managed to divide this nation with this referendum proposal? The editorial in The Australian on October 24 says the statement by the Yes campaign said:

“It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around. Our sovereignty has never been ceded.”

So, do they want all non-Indigenous Australians to leave Australia, or do they want co-sovereignty and co-governance and laws that will flow from this that will greatly change Australian life? If it is the latter, it is true that First Nations People did not cede sovereignty. However, two court cases have determined that First Nations Australians no longer have sovereignty — Coe v Commonwealth 1979 and the Mabo native title decision of 1992. Regarding the 1979 case:

“The leading judgment was delivered by Gibbs J, who held that it would be difficult to find that the Aboriginal people of Australia were a separate political entity to the rest of Australia’s inhabitants. This made it difficult to assert that an independent Aboriginal political entity could exist within Australia that could exercise its own sovereignty.”

Regarding the alternative of non-Indigenous Australians having to leave the land they have illegally occupied, what about those of mixed heritage? Do they stay or go? Do families get split up as there are so many happy mixed marriages? Would the finances poured into Australia generally, as well as to First Nations Australians, go overseas with those kicked out?

While the plans for moving forward need to be revisited, it looks like the government and the Referendum Working Group are working on parts 2 and 3 of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, i.e. treaty and truth-telling. Many Australians may have thought that in voting against the Voice, part 1 of the Uluru Statement, they were voting against the rest of the Statement. Voice campaigners will also push for a Voice that is independent of the constitution and legislation.

The push for sovereignty, treaty, and reparations is alive and well. In fact, the Yes campaign response to their loss seems to bring them closer to the progressive no-campaign view held by Senator Lidia Thorpe and her Blak Sovereignty movement.

Lidia Thorpe has long spoken about her support for the Palestinian viewpoint that Israel is a settler apartheid state occupying Palestinian land, i.e. all of Israel. She recently appeared in the Senate wearing a Palestinian scarf or keffiyeh and made this point.

On Q and A, October 24, panellist Larissa Baldwin-Roberts from the Bundjalung Nation and CEO of progressive activist group GetUp, said she did not interpret “From the river to the sea,” as genocide, and she wore a Palestinian scarf throughout the program to show support for Palestinians trapped in Gaza.

The sentiment of allying the Aboriginal cause with the cause of the Palestinians is not new and not widespread, and probably few of the Yes campaigners would agree with it. Yet there is a difference in the rhetoric of the Yes campaign, seeing Australia (like Israel) as a racist settler occupier state. It also fits in with the cultural Marxist oppressor-victim narrative.

The timing of events in Israel on October 7, followed by pro-Hamas demonstrations in Australia and the Voice referendum on October 14, seems to have elicited supposed parallels. The macabre slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of Israeli civilians in their homes, including decapitating babies and killing elderly Holocaust survivors by the Hamas terrorist group on October 7, is appalling. That Australians of Palestinian descent would celebrate this publicly in large numbers with chants of “Gas the Jews,” a reference to the Holocaust, is also appalling.

The loss of Jewish life on October 7 was the most in one day since the Holocaust, and one journalist has described it as ISIS on steroids.

Indigenous of Israel

A few First Nations people have joined pro-Hamas rallies in Australia with Aboriginal flags. So, what is the basis of this support? It is the lie that the Palestinians are the Indigenous people of Israel and that the Jews living there are white Europeans who came there after the Holocaust.

However, the Jewish people are the Indigenous people of Israel, having been there since Abraham 4,000 years ago, and King David ruled Israel from Jerusalem 3,000 years ago. While the Jews have always had a remnant living in the land of Israel, there have been dispersions caused by Assyria, Babylon, the Romans, etc. The Muslim Arabs conquered Jerusalem in comparatively recent times, about AD 636-637, 1300 years ago. What we have is not the colonisation of Israel by Jews, but decolonisation.

Israel is one of the most multicultural nations in the world. It is not a white European nation, with many of the Jews living there having families that have lived in the Middle East for generations.

When the state of Israel was reformed in 1948, there were as many Jews displaced from Arab lands as there were Arabs displaced from Israel. Jews who had lived peacefully in Arab lands for thousands of years were forced to leave when the UN proposed a partition plan. They never received compensation or support from the UN that has been given to Palestinian refugees and their descendants:

“Throughout 1947 and 1948, Jews in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Yemen (Aden) were persecuted, their property and belongings were confiscated, and they were subjected to severe anti-Jewish riots instigated by the governments.”

First Nations Australians should be aligning themselves with Israel as fellow Indigenous people, not the terrorist-run Palestinian cause. Israel does not occupy Gaza, having moved its settlements out in 2005.

There have been many opportunities for the Palestinians to have a peace deal with Israel and a Palestinian state, but they have rejected them all, starting with the UN partition plan of 1947. Peace deals offered by Israel were rejected by the Palestinian Authority under Arafat in 2000 and Abbas in 2008, and later offers have also been rejected.

While we don’t want to see hurt feelings, gaps in socio-economic conditions, or especially, loss of life, it is important that we look at what is happening in Australia, the Middle East, and around the world, not through an ideological lens but through the lens of truth, reason, and goodwill.

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Image by Török Töce Tibor from Pixabay.