I remember first hearing about Nova Peris when she became the first Aboriginal to win an Olympic gold medal, as a member of the victorious Hockeyroos team in Atlanta’s Olympic Games, 1996. Amongst her many elite sporting accomplishments, Peris is one of few athletes who have represented their country in two different sports; hockey and athletics, and separate Olympic Games.
In 2013, Peris became Australia’s first Aboriginal woman elected to federal parliament as a Senator for the Northern Territory in Julia Gillard’s Labor Government. More recently, Peris has offered an unequivocal, outspoken, and compassionate voice advocating for the Australian Jewish Community and the State of Israel following the murderous acts of Hamas on October 7th 2023.
Peris does more than just offer lip service when it comes to supporting Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself against acts of barbarism, slaughter and genocide. Peris acts on her beliefs. This is evidenced by her recent resignation as co-chair of the Australian Republican Movement. This came about after her co-chair (former Australian Soccer Player) Craig Foster wrote a letter to the various global soccer bodies, asking them to suspend Israel from an upcoming FIFA conference because of its involvement in the Gaza conflict.
Recently, Peris took it upon herself to visit Israel in a strong display of solidarity with the Jewish people, wanting to see first-hand how Hamas destroyed the lives of so many innocent Israeli victims. Peris was deeply impacted by what she experienced there. “I’ve shed many tears listening and bearing witness to the stories of horror,” she said. “To the Jewish people, I’m truly sorry. I share your pain.”
Fighting back against the emergence of the Australian Indigenous and Palestinian Solidarity Movement
As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, “Peris is a staunch supporter of Israel and has publicly disavowed attempts by pro-Palestinian activists to co-opt the Aboriginal rights movement and frame Israel as the colonial oppressor of indigenous Palestinians, an approach critics say ignores the ancient, continuous connection Jews have to the same land.” Peris told the media outlet that “it should concern all Australians that some people are suddenly siding with a barbaric terrorist organisation and denying that Jews are indigenous to Israel, while hypocritically occupying stolen Aboriginal land.”
In return for her outspoken support for Israel and the Australian Jewish Community, Peris has copped a tirade of abuse from the dark and murky, extreme-left elements of the media. Here’s a taste of what Peris is having to endure from anti-Israel activists such as Michelle Berkon, a Jewish Australian, aspiring mosaic artist, and former teacher. “In repeating blatant Zionist propaganda to justify her support for Israel, Nova Peris erroneously and harmfully conflates Jewish identity with support for the Zionist project in Palestine, which in effect depicts all Jews as complicit in Israel’s criminality. Her abject apologism also betrays all indigenous peoples’ struggles against colonial oppression.”
The narrative from Peris on the Israel-Hamas conflict has been refreshing, welcomed, and appreciated. She has offered a productive, alternative view to venomous Pro-Palestine Indigenous leaders such as Senator Lidia Thorpe, and provided an effective counter argument to various assertions that are clearly placing all the blame on Israel. This has been helpful as Peris has effectively debunked the fallacy of Australian Indigenous struggles being coflated with the plight of the Palestinian people, both as victims of settler-colonialist regimes. Peris has emphatically declared the use of the term ‘settler-colonialists’ for Jewish people in Israel as being a lie. Palestinian-Indigenous solidarity is a rapidly growing movement and body of thought that Peris is challenging head on, with strong conviction.
There are countless groups who are advocating for the opposite of what Peris stands for. For example, the Freedom Socialist Party is a feminist, working-class organization made up of people of many races, nationalities, genders, sexual orientations and ages. They are on record stating that “Australia’s Indigenous people strongly support the fight in Palestine for self-determination. Land theft by capitalist settler states lies at the root of both groups’ oppression. Their joint actions have cemented in public consciousness the international nature of colonisation and imperialism, and that struggle and liberation for oppressed people everywhere are inextricably linked. Central to both the Palestinian and First Nations struggle is dispossession of land.” This is at the heart of the extreme left’s argument and should be challenged to the fullest for the false narrative this presents.
All of this talk about Israel being a settler-colonialist state drove me to clarify what this term actually means. It gets thrown around in protests across Australia with no great challenge or consequence. According to Veracini, L. (2015), The Settler Colonial Present, settler colonialism is a “distinct type of colonialism that functions through the replacement of indigenous populations with an invasive settler society that, over time, develops a distinctive identity and sovereignty.” Veracini says this is characterised by three key features:
- Settler colonisers “come to stay”, intending to permanently occupy and assert sovereignty over indigenous lands.
- Settler colonialism persists in the ongoing elimination of indigenous populations, and the assertion of state sovereignty and juridical control over their lands.
- Settler colonialism seeks its own end. Unlike other types of colonialism in which the goal is to maintain colonial structures and imbalances in power between coloniser and colonised, settler colonisation trends towards the ending of colonial difference in the form of a supreme and unchallenged settler state and people.
Veracini’s book argues that for a regime to be considered as settler colonialist, there needs to be a “clear attempt to eliminate the challenges posed to settler sovereignty by indigenous peoples’ claims to land. This is achieved by eliminating indigenous peoples themselves and asserting false narratives and structures of settler belonging.”
When it comes to the critical question of who are actually indigenous to the land of Israel, Peris says that “it is historically and archaeologically proven that they (the Jewish people) were there fighting for their freedom in Israel before the birth of Christ and over a thousand years before the advent of Islam.” The assertion by anti-Israel activists across Australia is that the Palestinian people are indigenous to the land of Israel and the Jewish people settled the land at a later date. This is simply untrue.
I believe that it’s so valuable to have prominent Australian indigenous leaders like Nova Peris to support the Jewish people’s historical rights to the land of Israel as their true indigenous inhabitants. Peris passionately advocates for the delineation and separation of the Australian indigenous and Palestinian historical narratives that are sadly being coflated across the country right now. We need more Australians like Nova Peris who have the intestinal fortitude to stand up and tell the truth about who are the rightful, historical, and biblical inhabitants of the land of Israel, the Jewish people.
9 thoughts on “Nova Peris rejects the Australian Indigenous and Palestinian Solidarity Movement ”
Thanks for highlighting the stand of prominent Indigenous Australian Nova Peris who supports the truth that Jews are Indigenous to Israel. The anti-Israel lobby is trying to conflate the Australian Indigenous cause and experience to that of Palestinians and it is good that she is pushing back on this misconception.
Nasser Mashni is another such troll who has mastered the art of blood libel accusations. Is there not a way legally to shut him up. Surely there are laws against his type of free speech.
Hi Shane, I have been following Mashni for years. Did you read my article about him? Here’s the link: https://adamkreuzer.com.au/spotlight-the-cult-of-nasser-mashni-and-the-apan/
Rahman “Yasir” Arafat was an Hussein on his mother’s side. Back in the mid 1970s when the first biography of Arafat was written, by an American, the author said that the Hussein family was demonstrably descended from the seventh daughter of The Prophet Mohammad. If Mashni is from this family, we may have to tone down or even censor, the common irreverent Melbourne chant: “From the Tulla to the Gee, let’s get rid of Nasser Mash Knee!” 🙂 🙂
Nearly fell of the computer chair, when I saw this yesterday on X:
MENACHEM VORCHHEIMER OF MELBOURNE [FATHER OF FOUR, ACCOUNTANT, PHD CANDIDATE AT MELB UNI IN JURISPRUDENCE. HE IS ON TWITTER BUT NOT ON FACEBOOK.]
TWITTER/X JUNE 29TH 2024:
Shaher Hussein el-Mashni, is the father of Sydneysider Nasser Mashni, head of the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network, “APAN”. [Nasser Mashni’s parents are both from Amman, Jordan.]
When Shaher Hussein el-Mashni died in 2007, he was eulogized by Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political bureau.
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Hi Shane, when we feel in the mood for very florid confrontation, we check out Richard Medhurst on Twitter. He relates that he has been permanently banned by YouTube and Facebook. No great surprise there! Right at the moment, there is a speech he gave at a rally in Vienna Austria, very recently, on his Twitter feed. British father, Syrian Arab mother. His father was attached to the UN, so Junior spent quite a bit of time in the States, in his formative years. Pond of Pure Poison, is the only descriptor I can conjure up. Like John Menadue now 90, Max Blumenthal, Jonathan Cook and our very own Antony Loewenstein, he describes himself as an “independent journalist.”
“She has offered a productive, alternative view to venomous Pro-Palestine Indigenous leaders, such as Senator Lidia Thorpe and provided an effective counter argument to various assertions, that are clearly placing all the blame on Israel.” Good point, about creating balance in the current Australian discourse. ~~~ Vis-a-vis balance, it is mind boggling how those of Acerbic Assertions cast a veil over what happened in the north of Gaza. One does not wish to diminish the sufferings of the northern Gazans but the horrid fact kept tucked behind the tapestry by the Prime Mover Activists, is that initially, late Oct last year, 1.2 million needed to evacuate Gaza City and environs for the south, for the IDF was about to invade and the war start. Initially they all refused. Then on Day four of five, 900,000 changed their minds about going to Allah and did move south, leaving 300,000 behind. Those 300,000 we now know, were then peppered with Hamas fighters. Enough Hamas fighters in tunnels and imbedded among civilians, to force the Israelis to conduct 2 extra ops in the north west, which caused Israeli deaths and casualties. The 300,000 were warned copiously by the IDF that it would very likely be fatal to stay but they obeyed the Hamas. Plus warned they would be absolutely cut off as the military cordon was erected, with no food, water, fuel or electricity. Then there were logical catastrophic outcomes and those of acerbic assertions, screamed from the rooftops for the next 7 months: “murderous, genocidal, apartheiding and ethnic cleansing Israelis!” The 300,000 Egypto-Gazans ensnared in the north, had an extra 4 days to move 8 miles/14k to just south of the Wadi – because of the stay on the IDF invasion, due to the Americans needng to arm up bigtime in Iraq, from Ramstein in the Rhineland Palatinate. Am amazed at how the Greens’ leaders for example, submerge these facts. They don’t seem to have followed carefully what happened over those five fateful days, in the way that many of the rest of us did.
“Craig Foster, wrote a letter to the various global soccer bodies, asking them to suspend Israel from an upcoming FIFA conference because of its involvement in the Gaza conflict.” ~~ This action is despicable and un-Australian. This feels like the “thin edge of the wedge” where the next step would be to lobby FIFA, demanding that Israel be banned from playing internationally, simply because Israel continues to have a presence in the Contested Territories [now 500,000] and because it is defending itself in the FOURTH war which the Hamas has mounted against Israel since 2009, backed by Qatar and the omnipresent Iran.
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“Peris passionately advocates for the delineation and separation of the Australian indigenous and Palestinian historical narratives, that are sadly being conflated across the country right now”.
My family voluntarily maintained the sealers’ graves and general landscape [rabbits had been introduced unfortunately] of the island Din Mar Gunditjamarra, which is 5 miles off the coast at Yambuk, Victoria – for 40 years. It is dangerous to get to by boat because of a nearby rock pinnacle, then you have to climb up a cliff path. [Also known as Lady Julia Percy Island.] It is a 7 million year old, dead oceanic volcano and massive basaltic extrusion. I know for a fact that elder, Banjo Clark Gunditjamarra, of the Warrior Gunditjamarra, would not have wanted the “Palestinian-Arab” cause to piggyback on the Indigenous Australian one. We understand that Professor of Australian Indigenous Studies, Marcia Langton of Sydney, feels the same. Also that the piggy backing was initially started in Melbourne, by a part Indigenous guy called Gary Foley, who was very active in Aboriginal activism back in the 70s, in Victoria.
“The assertion by anti-Israel activists across Australia, is that the Palestinian people are indigenous to the land of Israel and the Jewish people settled the land at a later date. This is simply untrue.”
An uncle of mine, used to say, that you just have to go up to the Temple Mount and have a good look around, insofar as you can and only the blind will not see who got there first and it was not 7th century AD Islam!
Yasir Arafat did not even start to talk about an autonomous state for the Egypto-Arab Gazans of The Strip and the Jordanian-Arabs of Judea Samaria, until 1974. Perhaps because he never thought at that time, that it could ever be achieved? It was also in the mid 1970s, that Arafat started to preach that the Jews had never had a Temple on Temple Mount in Yeru.
Certain Western academics and virtually all of the Arab protest movement, romanticise Judea/Samaria as it was in the 1800s. As Julia Gillard is now bravely saying, they need to check their history. JSam under the Ottomans, was like the end of the world. Ruled by distant and indifferent Turkish pashas, it was neglected, remote and decaying. There was terrible poverty, among the Arabs in particular. There was no modern farming and the landscape was inhospitable. There was no police force or local militia and the Arabs interfought like Pitbulls, with very regular murders. The Christian there were diminishing because of the violence of the Arabs. There were plenty of Jews also, who lived set apart from the Arabs. The Russian and British consuls strove to maintain law and order and mostly failed. Quite a few of the towns on the pilgrimage route down to Jerusalem, were too dangerous to stay in. It was not an Arab province but merely part of Turkish Greater Syria.
Ancestors of mine witnessed this, after they established in Yeru in 1870, or they heard about it in local oral histories. Some anti-Zionists, argue that “the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia betrayed their religion, by not going back to Judea in greater number.” They did not do so because there was no economy except sheep and goat grazing. Better to be a tailor or cobbler in Plonsk, until the great Russian pogroms of the 1880s and 1890s.
The Arabs were proudly indigenous to ha Hijaz, the Arabian Peninsula. That they continued to drift over through Jordan, into J.Sam over many centuries, especially after 1700, does not make them indigenous to Judea Samaria! The same with the Egypto-Arabs of Gaza whose ancestors came across to Gaza from Alexandria and the Maghreb, after the Arabs did their 100 year sweep across northern Africa in the late 600s AD, with hooves of iron and blades of steel. There is a reason, why the bottom half of the Saudi flag is a scimitar.
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