NSW Labor

We read in the Koran and in the book of Genesis how it all began. Abraham's wife, Sarah expelled her maid Hagar and her son Ishmael, fathered by Abraham, into the desert.

Fugitives narrowly survived, and thereafter became enmity between Ishmael and his half-brother Isaac. And how between the Ishmaelites and the Israelites there has been a great bond of blood.

Two peoples, two faiths who lived as neighbours and fellow citizens for many centuries, but then faced insurrection, skirmish, civil war. The story goes on. Its now in its third millennium.

And all one can say is that two things are certain: neither tribe will be extinguished; and neither tribe will accept overlordship by the other. So we are all forced to be students of this region—its rich cultures, its intractable conflicts.

Students as well of the twentieth century, and of the European catastrophe the Shoah that made the State of Israel necessary, at the same time dislodging another people. And hence we can look at the Middle East as a drama—a clash of two just causes. Conflict resolution is not easy. But it can work. In South Africa, the experts expected for 50 years that it would end it must end it inevitably would come to a bloodbath.

But it didn't end in a bloodbath, because negotiators of genius de Klerk, Mandela, Tutu worked out a way of bloodlessly ceding power. Of peacefully achieving by delicate procedures and rituals of absolution an outcome which if disrupted could have resulted in a million deaths.

A similar approach was tried, most honourably tried, in Israel in 1977. Menachem Begin, a student agitator whose parents and brother were murdered in the Holocaust, who survived the Soviet Gulag and helped force the British out of Palestine—on becoming Prime Minister of Israel called on the neighbouring Arab rulers to meet him.

Too much Jewish and Arab blood has been shed in the region, he said. Lets put an end to bloodshed. And quickly he got a response. Anwar Sadat—a revolutionary comrade-in-arms of Nasser, an admirer of Gandhi, a graduate like Begin of prison—offered to go anywhere even to Israel and even, casting caution to the winds, to address the Knesset in person.

Quickly he was invited. His speech even today is radiant with excitement. What is peace for Israel? Sadat asked. It means that Israel lives in the region with her Arab neighbours in security and safety. Is that logical? I say yes. It means that Israel lives within its borders secure against any aggression. Is that logical?

I say yes. It means that Israel obtains all kinds of guarantees that will ensure these two factors. To this demand, I say yes. Camp David followed. Sadat was murdered. And Begin ended his days a controversial figure believing his life a failure. And yet the peace between Israel and Egypt endures.

And so it is tonight that Sydney we honour another person whos made difficult choices and taken awful risks. A woman who is a university professor and dean. A Member of Parliament and Minister. A passionate advocate of the Palestinian cause. A poet. A defender of the fundamental rights of every human being has garnered the recognition being accorded to her tonight.

Welcome as a fellow parliamentarian to this parliament. Welcome as one who condemns delusions that feed violence.

Welcome as one who speaks out against fundamentalisms. Welcome as a woman of courage who resigned from Chairman Arafats administration over corruption and the summary execution of suspected collaborators.

Welcome as one whos made enemies on all sides in the quest for the long-awaited peace. Dr Ashrawi,

We are all of us I think uncomfortably aware tonight that for you these things are not an academic argument.

They are the life you have lived every day. You wrote a poem to a teenage woman, 18 years of age, killed in cross fire.

You wrote these words:

Wafting through the hills of Hebron,
yours
Is no abstract death
And mine is no impersonal sorrow.
Your Mother has granted me the right to share
Her grief,
a mother too in the heart of bereaved Jerusalem.
Lamentations.
No, no wedding ululations,
False courage before cowardly death,
Forging endings way before Time,
and your breasts, have ripened.
You will not learn, Areej,
the full Fact of your death,
Nor he. But we do, and shall.
Forgive me for not letting it pass Unnoticed,
hovering in numbers,
Headlines,
and withering wreaths.

Dr Ashrawi you've argued with Arafat and Netanyahu, and the murderers of Hamas, with Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, with the potentates and big shots of Wall Street, and the inquisitors of Fox News.

You've seen Palestinian children born without a citizenship, growing up without nationality. Taught by their parents of a homeland, a village, a church, a mosque, they may never see. Youve seen Jewish families setting off to synagogue on Shabbat. Tel Aviv teenagers going out for coffee on a Saturday night, uncertain they will survive the journey.

You've seen camps filled with refugees living in dust and despair, no nationhood, no citizenship, no passports. And youve gone there and youve counselled hope.

You have argued for womens rights and childrens rights, the rights of neighbours and prisoners, for freedom of worship for all religions, for an end to theocracy.

And for the clear air in which contentious human thought may flow. Not just in the Middle East, in Kosovo and North Africa, through the World Bank and the United Nations.

So here in Sydney, we join with Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu and UN High Commissioner Mary Robinson themselves past recipients of this award to honour you.

My friends, for a thousand years, great oratory has been spent on the Middle East. For example from Yitzhak Rabin, who said on the White House lawn a decade ago: Let me say to you, the Palestinians, we are destined to live together on the same soil in the same land.

We, the soldiers who have returned from battles stained with blood; we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes; we who have attended their funerals and cannot look in the eyes of their parents; we who come from a land where parents bury their children; we who have fought against you, the Palestinians; we say to you today, in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears.

Enough. The Palestinians have no homeland. Israel has no peace. In one fact, Hanan Ashrawi knows, lies the solution to the other. It will not happen in the next hundred days. It may not happen in the next five years. But a beginning must be made. It cannot happen unless the violence stops.

As I said on the floor of this Parliament three weeks ago, challenged as to why I would present this award: Violence only ever serves to retard the Palestinian cause. Israel will never consent to the creation of a Palestinian state under the duress of terror.

You cannot bomb your way to statehood. You cannot bomb your way to peace.

So there must be an end to bloodshed and terror. And competing tribal narratives of victimhood.

In their place, for every Arab and for every Jew, for every quarrelling descendant of Isaac and Ishmael, may there come the day when, in the words of Palestines poet laureate, Mahmoud Darwish:

the planes disappear, the white, white doves
Fly off and wash the cheeks of heaven
With unbound wings taking radiance back again,
taking possession
Of the ether and of play.

In the hope of that luminous day of atonement and accord, I salute tonight one hopeful voice. A voice that calls for peace with justice, and more than the laying down of arms for a new way of thinking, a new era of equity, freedom from want and ignorance and disease.

These are these things of which Hanan Ashrawi risking her life, burying her friends, mourning her stricken country and crying with the late great Rabin—Enough of blood and tears. Enough has spent a lifetime telling us. These are the things for which she has been unanimously awarded this prize named after a beautiful city, a city of tolerance, peace and diversity which is now my honour to confer.