This week sees the 30th anniversary of the shameful, ill-advised Oslo Accord between Israel and Palestine. In the game of life, like a game of cards you can only play the hand you are dealt and not the hand you wish you could have. In any card game a seasoned, accomplished player plays the people Continue reading »
Religion and Faith
The UN International Day of Peace is next week, September 21st. It is a day for rekindling our noblest aspirations. Imagine even a day when the whole planet was at peace. A day when our most attractive power, our capacity to love, was all one could see. A day when not one person was killed Continue reading »
It is time for us to use the words Occupation, Illegality and Apartheid. We are applying these words to an occupying power truculent and implacable in its determination its occupation will never end, committed to a creeping annexation to deliver it a permanent hold over Palestinian land and Palestinian people. … Twenty years ago it Continue reading »
Peter Wertheim (July 24, 2023) suggests that the Government should resist the call by Former Foreign Minister Bob Carr to recognise a Palestinian state. However, Wertheim’s remarks reflect widespread misapprehensions about relevant history, facts on the ground and international law. British MP Sir Anthony Nutting described the “sordid” history of Zionism and its “Legacy of Continue reading »
Official surveys all show that the Catholic Church in Australia is in serious trouble. Any refusal by the church to be fully inclusive of women and diverse sexualities will almost certainly lead to a much smaller church than has historically been the case in Australia. If the church cannot accommodate greater inclusion and equal human Continue reading »
The Statement from the Heart’s affirmation of the spiritual sovereignty of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their ancestral ties with the land is welcomed with gratitude by the Religion and Social Policy Network of the University of Divinity. RASP is humbled by the audacious generosity extended to the non-Indigenous Australian people through Continue reading »
The alleged branding of the Star of David on the face of a Palestinian man by Israeli police has left many around the world aghast at the barbaric cruelty and violence of such an act. It has been reported in numerous media outlets yet is, so far, glaringly left out of others. This kind of Continue reading »
How is it that the Uluru Statement from the Heart is even slightly controversial? How is it that the request for better listening which shapes the request for ‘Voice’ is found problematic? I have brought these Australian perplexities with me this week to the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago. Time and again, it is Continue reading »
The 1948 Palestinian catastrophe, known to Palestinians as the Naqba, saw 750,000 of their predecessors driven from their lands, over 500 villages and towns destroyed, the extent of the killings, destruction and dispossession denied and no-one held accountable. How should Australia respond? Powerful countries’ collusion with decades of Israeli governments’ racist based cruelties towards Palestinians Continue reading »
Australia’s minister for foreign affairs, Penny Wong, has announced Australia will return to use of the term “occupied Palestinian territories”. The Australian government will use this phrase to describe the territories in the West Bank and Gaza that Israel occupied in 1967. Australian officials have generally avoided the use of “occupied” and “occupation” in relation to Palestine since 2014. This move Continue reading »