Sydney Uni is exhibiting all the symptoms of a sick institution: bureaucracy, endless forms and breakouts of middle-management. Stuart Rees dons the mask and attempts a diagnosis

A serious disease has re-appeared at Sydney University. Like tuberculosis, as soon as a cure is found and staff have been inoculated, a more virulent strain emerges. It has been labeled “hyper managerialism” and its symptoms are “efficiency in the name of inexplicable time wasting”, “infinite make-work-form-filling” and “gobbledegook language to organise thinking”. So far no test has been found which might identify early onset of the disease.

A similar outbreak at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and at the ANU was reported by Adam Brereton in New Matilda concerning the application of the childishly named Behavioural Capability Framework to assess staff obedience and productivity. The strain of the disease causing anxiety at Sydney has generated academic fevers, disbelief at the intellectual poverty of the illness and associated mind boggling hypertension.

A brief case study of one patient’s debilitating experiences may be helpful.

Four weeks ago while attempting to appoint someone to a part time position in a Foundation which raises its own money and operates autonomously, I was startled by the arrival of forms labelled “permission to hire”, “permission to appoint” plus requests for a job description completed many years ago. Those controls seemed laborious but the germs they carried were not immediately obvious.

Over the next few weeks at least 12 people were consulted, three quarters of them from an office called “resources for humans”, the remainder from management with hyphenated titles who indicated that they were not responsible for the disease and had been isolated from it. I had contracted something dire.

In order to probe the mysteries of my condition, I became a self taught epidemiologist trying to separate the treatment from its cause. In this search, several individuals from the “resources for humans” office said in hushed voices that they were ashamed of their practices and that, although they washed their hands after receiving filled in forms, they had no alternative but to continue to ask for irrelevant information and to request numerous signatures to approve what was in the forms.

These innocents did ask “How can I help?”, an offer which gave the suffering patient a ray of hope. Yet as novice nurses in a stifling system, as soon as responsibilities reached a more senior consultant, usually with a title such as “executive to the executive” or “assistant to the executive to the executive” the helpful noises were replaced by telephone calls neither answered nor returned and emails which disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole.

I was then persuaded that if the appointment of the proposed Foundation employee was to be made before winter arrives — several years ago such a transaction took no more than 10 minutes — the protocols would have to be followed, boxes ticked, questions answered and signatures of approval gathered. For internal and external contacts that might be made by the appointee, questions included “How often does this interaction occur with the main contact and for what purpose does this position interact with the main contact?”

When my pain became almost unbearable I identified the chief of the “resources for humans” office and phoned him in a fit of fever and consternation. I thought the disease was a form of constipation which desperately needed a laxative and inquired as to whether he could kindly apply it to any part of the management anatomy.

He returned my calls, was courteous and gave another ray of hope, “Perhaps this appointment need not have been included in our usual vetting, consulting, form filling, signature collecting system.” At that point I also spoke with a senior academic whose colleagues were in bed, stricken with the disease. He advised that a laxative was relevant but not strong enough: “The whole system needs to be purged.”

Almost four weeks into fevers and hypertension but with the form filling now aided by an “executive to an executive” who put the job description into neat sentences in separate boxes, subsequently followed by constructive expletives from me — “Jesus you must be joking” — the day came to collect signatures from four worthy individuals, one described as a “line manager” which seemed to have something to do with country dancing.

Some of these individuals knew little about the job or the activities of the Foundation but in order to maintain the symptoms of the disease — “create information for the sake of it” — the signatures had to be collected, scanned and sent to almost any administrative officer prepared to check them. One of the signatures referred to “Finance Officer” but no-one in resources for humans knew who this might be, so I volunteered to visit a bus shelter on Parramatta Road and collect the signatures of the lonely looking people who wait there. Most look as though no-one has ever asked them for their autographs so they could have found my request therapeutic. A helpful assistant to an assistant from resources for humans found this suggestion original but unacceptable.

On day three of the fourth week, with the disease at an acute stage, a laxative of some kind appeared to be having an effect. Motion was reported by a personal assistant to an executive director which in effect meant that the appointment could be made on the date requested and would be approved even if it had not been approved. I was enormously grateful for such imaginative discretion but then someone suggested my appointee would have to go before a “classifications committee”, who would be making a classification, who might interpret the results and indicate whether complete health would ever be regained.

Into the fifth week of form-filling, signature-pursuing-trauma, the appointee received her letter of appointment but the offer was for a position for which she had not applied to be conducted in association with a person with whom she will not work. In vernacular parlance — let’s leave the medical model aside for a minute — this is a bureaucratic cock up. The resulting pathologist’s report said, “This looks like hyper managerialism — a form of inefficiency in the name of efficiency prompted by MBA type wisdom.”

One hundred and fifty years ago, in Little Dorrit, the novelist Charles Dickens observed the same disease. It came, he said from the “Office of Circumlocution” whose purpose in the administration of government was to generate work which was of enormous significance because it would hinder or prevent other people from doing their jobs.

Like the epidemiologist which I have tried to become, Dickens wrote, “No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie and the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong, without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office.”

The source of the current disease cannot be sheeted home only to the department of resources for humans. This is only one feature of a culture of darkness and dampness which helps the growth of bureaucratically infectious fungi. Another part of the circumlocution culture is the university’s “Council for the Proliferation of Generals”, whose website says it employs 31 people at least 26 of whom appear to be lawyers whose purpose seems to be to write rules to discourage dissent and to identify which big brother or sister should watch over people who don’t fill in forms and so limit any growth of ideas which might trespass beyond the boundaries of the official views of how a management efficient organisation would be run, or could be prevented from running.

Sorry I’m still infected with the disease, hence this strangled prose.

When a serious disease persists, the source needs to be identified and so too the personnel responsible for the persistence of infectious practices. In the case of universities intent on rule bound circumlocution, the chief managerialist must be held accountable. In a spirit of reconciliation I’m willing to have a look at his job description and the size of his remuneration. I could offer my signature but I don’t want to fill in any more forms.

This article was first published by New Matilda 23/04/2012

The deal was announced when US President Barack Obama visited Darwin last year, with the Northern Territory welcoming the first wave of 200 US troops earlier this month.

The number is set to build up in coming years to reach 2500 by 2017.

At the launch of a new coalition of anti-war groups on Tuesday, Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon said China was watching the Darwin deployment.

“China sees this as being about them,” she told AAP.

“This is not a responsible foreign policy, the Greens argue, in the 21st century, in terms of dealing with one’s neighbours.”

Also at the launch of the Keep War From Our Door coalition, academic David Palmer warned that “a kind of new Cold War” was emerging.

“We are sending China a signal, ‘Oh, the US is building up its troops’ and China will respond,” Dr Palmer told the crowd of around 100 academics and peace activists.

Stuart Rees, director of the Sydney Peace Foundation, said Australia needed to strengthen its ties to China and other Asian powers rather than focus on defence.

“It would be better if we went and had tea in Beijing,” Professor Rees said.

“This kind of dialogue is what will produce a sense of security,” he said.

Keep War From Our Door opposes military build-up in the region.

It has support from groups including the Australian Anti-Bases Campaign Coalition, the Stop the War Coalition Sydney, the Sydney Peace Foundation and the Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney.

The coalition group released a statement on Tuesday – the Global Day of Military Expenditure – calling for the Australian government to “base the US-Australian relationship on our non-military ties”.

15 march 2012: Why Kony Is Not the Main Game, by Stuart Rees. Published in New matilda.

There is a growing danger that the political leaders responsible for the greatest single atrocity of recent years will suffer no consequences. Journalists, not governments, have taken a lead in raising the issue to the international agenda of command responsibility for violations of humanitarian law in Sri Lanka.

The UK’s Channel Four has now screened the second of two hard-hitting documentaries, containing compelling visual evidence that civilians were knowingly targeted, and surrendering prisoners executed, on orders issued in a direct chain of command from the country’s president Mahinda Rajapaksa.

The second documentary – Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished – screened Wednesday night UK time and contains a photo of the dead body of 12 year old Balachandran Prabhakaran, son of Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai.

According to experts consulted by Channel 4, the manner of Balachandran’s wounds indicate he was executed at close range, with one expert speculating he was made to watch his bodyguards being killed before being shot himself.

Out of step with the UN

Australia has never backed the call, originally made by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, for an independent, international investigation of war crimes allegations against both sides – the government and the Tamil Tigers – in the civil war.

As months dragged into years, DFAT hid behind the mantra that international actors had to wait for the Sri Lankan government to investigate itself, which it did in the form of the so-called Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission, which finally issued its report late last year.

But the LLRC report does not address the issue of command responsibility for military action resulting in avoidable civilian deaths. With the significant Tiger leaders all dead, the focus of any such investigation would be on the actions – and omissions – of the President and his senior ministers.

A damning history

This problem cannot be adequately dealt with by Sri Lanka itself. A UN panel of experts, appointed by Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to examine evidence of war crimes, found that up to 40,000 Tamil civilians died as a result of bombing and shelling by government forces, or of a sheer lack of food and drinking water in the so-called “no fire zone”. Channel 4 reveals evidence that the government knowingly understated the numbers of people involved, thus under-calculating the amounts of supplies required to keep body and soul together.

Crucially, the UN panel report also noted that the country’s criminal law “does not expressly provide for … command or superior responsibility as a mode of liability of military commanders or civilian superiors for failing to prevent or punish crimes committed by subordinates”.

Between September 2008 and 19 May 2009, the UN report goes on, “the Sri Lanka Army advanced … into the Vanni [region] using large-scale and widespread shelling, causing large numbers of civilian deaths.”

Rajapaksa had given an order to stop shelling of a designated no-fire zone on April 27th. But a cable from the US Embassy, disclosed by Wikileaks, shows he was given a warning, backed by photographic evidence, that the attacks had continued after that date. This came when the President attended a meeting with senior diplomats on May 5th, along with Foreign Minister Palitha Kohona. Rajapaksa requested a briefing from the US Ambassador on the progress of the campaign, saying “you are probably better informed than I am”.

The Ambassador showed him satellite pictures of civilian areas in the zone, before and after the supposed ceasefire date, which revealed the effects of continuing bombardment. An Embassy note remarks, “Our effort still could lead to the President conducting his own inquiries and a possible change of the Sri Lankan Army’s conduct of the battle in progress.”

There is abundant evidence that no such change occurred. The UN panel provided detailed reports of shelling of a civilian installation, Mullivaikal hospital – in a no-fire zone designated by the Sri Lankan army – right up to May 19th.

A dire precedent

Rajapaksa was explicitly warned that policies being carried out under his orders were resulting in the large-scale killing of civilians, but they continued for another two weeks, while he did not, apparently, lift a finger to stop them – making him potentially guilty of command responsibility for war crimes.

The LLRC report pronounces itself “satisfied that the military strategy to secure the LTTE [Tamil Tiger] held areas was one that was carefully conceived, in which the protection of the civilian population was given the highest priority.”

If there is not now a proper, independent investigation, carried out by internationals and under UN auspices, an atrocity will have been met with impunity, and that is a dire precedent for a government dealing with an internal conflict.

If such an investigation is now ordered – with support from countries like Australia – and if that results in, say, indictments by the International Criminal Court, would they do any good, in the context of the overall conflict?

How Australia should respond

The Tamils’ political aspirations have not gone away – drawing, as they do, on a historically transmitted and continuing collective experience of injustice. The Tamil National Alliance, which campaigns for strong regional autonomy, swept the board in recent local elections in the country’s north.

The demand for self-rule will have to be treated in some substantive way, if further violence in future is to be avoided. If Rajapaksa and senior colleagues were under threat of arrest, then prosecutions could be deferred as an incentive to negotiate, in good faith, on Tamil rights and freedoms. Criminal justice would have been traded off against political justice.

How will Australia respond? When, shortly before his failed leadership bid returned him to the back bench, I asked Kevin Rudd that question, he promised that his then department would be “mindful of the contents” of the UN report, and compare it with Sri Lanka’s own, when deciding what to do.

The theme of his remarks that evening was that Australia stands to benefit from an international order based on the rule of law. There could not be a more compelling case to put that principle into action.

Jake Lynch is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney.

This article was first published by The Conversation, 16/03/2012

The frenzy of conversation about the reach and effect of the Kony 2012 video has covered a lot of ground. What hasn’t been addressed, however, is the Uganda government’s complicity in the oppression of the Acholi, Teso and Langi people — and the international community’s blind co-operation.

Discussing the video is no substitute for talking with Ugandans about the causes and consequences of the Lord’s Resistance Army, no substitute for considering the complexity and complicity involved in this long lasting catastrophe.

In 2005, the UN special envoy for children in armed conflict, the courageous Ugandan Olara Otunnu received the Sydney Peace Prize for his “courage in advocacy of universal human rights with reference to freeing child soldiers and fostering the UN’s programme for such children’s rehabilitation”. In the 1970s, as a student leader, Otunnu opposed the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and soon after Amin’s downfall, Otunnu became his country’s foreign minister for a short time.

But Otunnu is an Acholi leader. Ugandan governments following Amin, in particular the ones led by the West’s much-lauded President Museveni, herded an estimated 95 per cent of the Acholi and others into 200 refugee camps . Thousands of children died each week in what Otunnu called “the secret genocide”. It was secret in part because Koni and the LRA — as depicted in the Invisible Children film — gained attention and diverted focus from government atrocities to the LRA’s abduction of children. The message, “Get Kony and all will be well” was misleading then and it still is. As Otunnu wrote, “The truth is that reports of indisputable atrocities of the LRA are being employed to mask other serious crimes.”

The atrocities committed against the Acholi and their children were also secret because powerful governments, UN agencies, NGOs and human rights organisations stayed silent. Despite evidence of years of corruption and the plunder of resources from the Congo, they had decided, that Museveni, in Otunnu’s words, “was a new breed of African leader”.

We support Otunnu’s analysis. The Ugandan government still does not have the political will to see the war in northern Uganda come to an end and should not be trusted.

The government’s efforts to capture Kony, in association with US forces, and bring him to the ICC would appear to be in everyone’s interests — and money from social media campaigns might be useful.

But that’s not the issue for the people of northern Uganda. Capturing Kony might relieve them from fear of his return but such action is not their highest priority. The people need financial help for projects which would rehabilitate and rebuild the long neglected public infrastructures. There are thousands of orphans and widows, hundreds of thousands of traumatised people. That’s the health care and social welfare which people need. Capturing Kony is a diversionary political agenda.

Nine years ago, following the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Kony for crimes against humanity, the Ugandan government forced the Acholi and Langi residents of the camps back to their villages, albeit without compensation or other resources. Many had been in the camps for over 20 years, some did not know where they came from. Villages had been mined and they returned to locations with neither roads, schools nor health care. Museveni did not ask for international assistance. Healing and re-building lives after years of containment in camps remains a massive humanitarian challenge.

An even more damning appraisal of the Invisible Children film comes from Adam Branch, a senior research fellow at Uganda’s Makerere Institute of Social Research. He is also the author of Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda. Branch writes that the debate generated by the film is “not about Uganda, but about America.” He confirms accounts of the powerlessness of the millions returning to their homes but adds that the most significant problem is that Acholi land is being grabbed by “speculators and so called investors, many foreign, in collaboration with the Ugandan government and military.” This is land “that the Acholi were forced from a decade ago, when the government herded them into internment camps.”

The reference to American involvement is more than an observation about the makers of the video. In 2009, in response to lobby groups in Congress, President Obama agreed to send 100 Navy SEALs to contribute to the hunt for Kony. Our Uganda sources claim that there are now 500 US SEALs in northern Uganda who make regular flights across the country to survey existing oil exploration sites and to search for other mineral deposits.

Rumours circulate about the Americans’ purpose. Ugandan Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi doubts their claims about searching for Kony and is unhappy with their presence. Other commentators think the Americans want another foothold in Africa to contest Chinese influence and that pursuit of the ragtag LRA is just an excuse for further militarisation of the region. The call to arms in the Invisible Children video is another part of this process.

Publicity surrounding a video gone viral may raise public awareness and challenge the conscience of politicians but within a month is likely to be replaced by revelations about another massive injustice.

Instant publicity about the Joseph Kony atrocities may have been achieved but campaigns to attain human rights require careful organisation and the selfless commitment of activists sustained over a long period. In northern Uganda the immediate need to sustain the lives of millions of vulnerable people will take a minimum one to three years. The economic and social development required to re-build lives and create opportunities will take a generation.

Don’t let’s be fooled. One video might re-charge efforts to bring Kony before the ICC but ignores international commercial interests in that part of Africa — let alone the day to day predicament of Olara Otunnu’s people.

Professor Stuart Rees is the Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation

James Dhizaala is a Ugandan-born PhD candidate at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, the University of Sydney

This article was first published by New Matilda Online, 15/03/2012

Well done Rap News!

http://thejuicemedia.com/

In the Khan Younis area of southern Gaza, the Qdeh family’s modest rabbit farm is one of several Australian trade union humanitarian aid (Apheda) projects which is bolstering food security for poor families.

On a Spring evening in April 2011, Najah Qdeh and her 21-year-old daughter Nidal were in their backyard preparing their family dinner over an open fire. Before the meal had been cooked, both women were killed by a missile fired from an Israeli drone. An eight-year-old daughter watched her mother and sister bleed to death. She became mute. Another daughter was seriously injured and still has shrapnel in her head.

The Israeli government held no investigation and would not consider holding anyone accountable. Who cares about poor Palestinians?

In January 2012, the America Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich said that Palestinians were “an invented people”. A few days later Mustapha Tamini, Bahjat Zaalan and his son Ramdon from Gaza were killed by the Israeli Defence forces, an organisation, comments Israeli author Miko Peled, which is “supported, funded and armed by the US”. The Israeli court system, says Peled, will ensure that the deaths are never brought to justice. Who cares about an invented people?

On February 27th, the Gillard-Rudd contest ended with references to the blood spilt in the conflict over the Labor leadership. Australian media were obsessed with this soap-opera while real deaths and serious injuries were occurring in many parts of the world, not least in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Gillard-Rudd soapie may have been full of sound and fury signifying almost nothing, but Palestine does matter. The trouble is that the public may feel fatigued over the issue.

After recently spending two weeks on the West Bank, in Gaza and in Israel, how do I summarise the killings, discrimination, demolition of homes and imprisonment of a whole people? How can stories be told without them being stifled by charges of anti-Semitism, by arguments that other international crises merit more attention, or by claims that I’m not being fair to countries such as the USA and Australia which give humanitarian aid to Palestine, but remain complicit in the destruction of Palestinian lives, lands and identity?

I could try understatement, euphemisms, avoid emotion, attempt ‘balance’ by listing atrocities against Israelis as well as against Palestinians, repeat clichés about peace talks and governments’ commitment to a two state solution.

An Australian diplomat in Jerusalem advised that references to cruelty and the organised slaughter in the so called Gaza war were “probably too emotional, better to use other words”.

If I take that advice, I’d be repeating the habits of the past 64 years which have kept people in a state of ignorance about the Israel-Palestine conflict, have enabled governments to continue their support for Israel at the expense of justice for the Palestinians and have colluded in saying that when it comes to Israel’s ‘security’, international law and UN resolutions matter not one iota.

In addition to accounts of deaths – of members of the Qdeh and Zaalan families for example – something extra is needed to stir the consciousness of public and politicians, including Australia’s new Foreign Minister Bob Carr. The matter is urgent. Justice-oriented Israelis, Palestinian leaders and UN officials are more pessimistic than ever about a just end to this conflict.

What to do, what to say?

At the Allenby Bridge on the Israeli-Jordan border, young men and women in uniform look like year 10 students completing a work experience assignment. They are the soldiers and customs officials who decide how long you must wait – five hours in our case – who can cross into Israel, who should be refused. They keep prospective travellers’ passports, occasionally shout people’s names and to any inquiry about delays, the answer is “wait”.

However, that is a cakewalk experience compared to the science fiction horror movie scene of walls, wire, guns, cameras, microphones, x-ray machines, heavily armed black clad secret service personnel plus the almost three kilometre Erez walk of shame between walls of wire and concrete which eventually gains you entry to Gaza and to the brief check from Hamas officials at the end of that crossing.  

We should expect such checks because ‘the enemy’ are on the other side. Those dangerous people are a defenceless population which includes 800,000 children. By contrast with hostile and armed Jewish settlers who are protected by the Israeli army, who have stolen the centre of the Palestinian city of Hebron, who pour rubbish and excrement onto Hebronites who dare to visit their market in the old town, diverse Gaza citizens were courteous, generous and welcoming. They may be desperately poor, they may merely want ‘the right to exist’, but they should be treated as less than human because they are the ‘enemy’.

The dignified Mayor of Bethlehem, Victor Batarseh, describes his famous town as cut off by the wall, cut off from any contact with Israelis with whom he wants to live. Spasmodic purchases made by Christian tourists do not compensate for stolen water, the decline of businesses and the destruction of other resources. Batarseh explains,

At the beginning of the year, 7,000 olive trees belonging to 180 families in Bethlehem were destroyed. Control and destruction is everywhere. Even to pray where we want to – in the Al Aqsa Mosque or in the Church of the Nativity – you have to seek permission.

To avoid the charge that these are stories told by one observer, the following account of water allocation uses UN figures. Per capita Israelis receive 300 cubic metres of water per year. Palestinians receive 35 -85 cubic metres while the WHO recommends a minimum of 100 cubic metres. Israeli settlers on the West Bank are allocated 1,500 metres and may live with green lawns and swimming pools while many Palestinians receive no water at all. In Bethlehem, the Mayor describes another consequence of the occupation,

We can take 17 per cent of the water supply from our wells, 83 per cent goes to the settlements who already have direct mains supply. We are not allowed to dig for water unless they (Israeli authorities) give us permission.

If these stories can’t be remembered by a public used to hearing a version of history which claims one side ‘good’ the other ‘bad’, the figure 500 could help to re-interpret the past and the present.

In the 1948 war, over 500 Palestinian villages and towns were erased from the face of the earth. Residents who survived the slaughter fled their homes on the assumption that they would return. Tens of thousands remain imprisoned in Lebanese refugee camps such as Burj al Barajneh, Sabra and Shatila. Many of these refugees were farmers from Galilee. For decades they have lived in slums without gardens, trees, grass, space and without hope.  

The figure 500 also depicts the means of controlling Palestinians’ freedom of movement. Over 500 internal checkpoints, roadblocks and other physical obstacles restrict Palestinians within and beyond the West Bank. Although settlements are illegal under international law – they violate Article 49 of the Geneva Convention –the dividing wall and the hundreds of other controls exist to protect settlers and to facilitate their travel to and from Israel. Who cares about the Palestinians?

Anyone who cares for an equitable and sustainable future for Palestinians and Israelis should care deeply and should insist that the cruelty in this conflict must end. How?

Public awareness needs to be increased a million fold. Reporting the history, telling these stories, and taking action is imperative, even if it stirs emotions. Palestinian father Khader Adnan has been in Israeli administrative detention since December 17th. To protest against all arbitrary and illegal imprisonment he engaged in a hunger strike which lasted for 66 days and ended only with his near death. But Adnan, in common with more than 300 other Palestinians imprisoned under similar circumstances, is still detained even though he has not been charged with any offence and has not been implicated in any violence against civilians.

Another Palestinian, Hosni Abo Taka, a resident of Burj al Barajneh, has never received any publicity, let alone the attention given to Khader Adnan. In that wretched refugee camp, where Hosni has survived for 64 years, he pleads “We simply want to prove to the world that we are human beings.”

Palestine matters. Australian soapies do not.

Stuart Rees is Professor Emeritus of the University of Sydney and Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation.

This article first appeared on the ABC’s The Drum Online 06/03/2012

Khader Adnan spent 66 days on hunger strike, a symbolic, self-denying act of non-violent resistance to Israel’s practice of “administrative detention” or imprisonment without charge. His story quickly became well known and began to inspire other Palestinian political prisoners to follow his non-violent lead.

But Adnan’s is merely the latest episode in a growing wave of Palestinian non-violent resistance. While Palestinian non-violence has been a historic part of the struggle for Palestinian rights, armed struggle has been a component of resistance that often dominated the headlines.

Today things are changing significantly. More than ever, polling data shows, Palestinians are supporting non-violent resistance. A series of polls of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza which included a question on non-violence reveals an undeniable trend in the past 18 months. In June of 2010, for example 51 per cent of Palestinians polled responded that non-violent resistance was a preferred alternative to stalled negotiations. In the most recent poll conducted at the end of 2011, that number jumped to over 61 per cent.

There are several factors that contribute to this undeniable shift.

First, there is a continued call by Palestinian and international civil society for non-violent resistance. Advocacy and solidarity along these lines has reverberated through Palestine and internationally thanks to the internet and social media. It took several days of the twitter hashtag #KhaderAdnan trending globally before international mainstream media took note, forcing the Israelis to address what had become an embarrassing situation by cutting a deal with the hunger striker.

Second, we can not discount the effect of the Arab Spring and especially the success of revolutions in Tunis and Egypt where people power triumphed over repressive regimes and relatively light force was used before the multitudes brought swift change upon the regimes.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Palestinians have seen firsthand the difference in effect non-violent resistance and armed resistance has on them and the Israelis. Armed resistance to the occupation, while encouraged and supported by some and protected by international law, can come at a high cost.

The Israelis are well armed with F-16s, tanks, Apache helicopters, drones, laser guided missiles, and armed robots (most courtesy of the US). But the killing of several civilian non-violent activists aboard the Freedom Flotilla, the shooting of several unarmed demonstrators in the Golan, Lebanon and Gaza at events commemorating Nakba Day last year, and the routine arrest, beatings and often killings of non-violent protesters in the occupied territories has proven the old adage, “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

This sentiment was reflected by Major Amos Gilad, an Israeli military official, to American diplomats in a WikiLeaks cable last year when he confessed “we don’t do Gandhi very well”.

Non-violent resistance is like Judo – the Japanese martial art based on using an enemy’s strength and momentum against him – and the Palestinians find themselves facing a 300 kg Sumo wrestler. It is a strategic choice to resist the occupation.

Increasingly, Palestinians are realising the effectiveness of this strategy. Large swaths of the Palestinian public are in support of these non-violent methods today, but for how long?

For years, many asked where the Palestinian Gandhi is. Well, today, you are starting to hear about the ones imprisoned or shot because the internet has levelled the information battlefield.

Fadi Quran, a non-violent protester who was forcefully arrested this week under false pretenses, was released on bail by the Israelis after a YouTube video of his arrest – rifled around the world through Twitter – was published. It showed Fadi was pepper sprayed and forcefully arrested by Israeli officers for no crime at all. Had this happened 10 years ago, Fadi might still be in an “administrative detention” and we would have never have heard of him.

In nearly each and every high profile act of Palestinian non-violent resistance the official Israeli response has been demonisation of the protesters while the American response, more often than not, has been silence.

As the great Dr Martin Luther King taught us, “silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the oppressor”.

Today, however, the cost of remaining silent for the United States is not merely complicity with the oppressor, but also missing a critical opportunity. This is a moment when Palestinians are increasingly choosing non-violent resistance, a point President Obama highlighted in his important Cairo speech in 2009, and the United States should support this effort.

The window, however, to grow Palestinian support of non-violence may close as quickly as it opened if continued Israeli repression is not condemned forcefully by Israel’s principal ally. Should the US continue to support repressive and colonialist Israeli policies, the pendulum of public opinion may soon swing back to armed resistance as another generation of Palestinians grows up dreaming of freedom from occupation.

Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of the Palestine Center in Washington, DC.

The article was first published on Al Jazeera English Online Opinion, 3 March 2012

I would even say that the conflation of national history with military history, that is, the assumption that national history is military history, is pretty much complete. Rather than celebrating the diversity of Australian historical and cultural experience, it seems the only thing recent governments want to commemorate is Australia’s involvement in warfare.

Take as a case in point the Bombing of Darwin Day, newly added to our national calendar. Australia now has five national days of remembrance: two used for decades to commemorate those who lost their lives in war, Anzac Day (April 25) and Remembrance Day (November 11), plus a further three days, all added in the last five years, Battle for Australia Day (first Wednesday in September), Merchant Navy Day (September 3), and now Bombing of Darwin Day (February 19).

I am not saying we should not honour the sacrifice of Australians who have lost their lives in war – of course we should. However, if we are to continue this trend of adding national days each time a certain event or anniversary captures the public or political imagination, we could end up with as many national days commemorating war as we have war memorials in Canberra (which is a lot, more than 35 at last count).

The commemoration of war in Australia seems to be out of control. And things aren’t likely to improve ahead of the extravaganza marking the centenary of Anzac in April 2015.

Equally as worrying is the way in which the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) has quietly redefined its mission since the late 1990s to ensure that commemoration and education are now central to its work.

Of particular concern is the systematic distribution by DVA of curriculum materials - books, websites, posters, class exercises and prizes for essays - to all schools, primary and secondary, throughout Australia. A mass education program has been taking place without the public realising that DVA is spending millions of dollars of government funding in this way. Whether it is the job of the federal Department of Veterans’ Affairs to prescribe schoolchildren’s understanding of national history is surely debatable. Has the equivalent happened in any other democratic country?

In her book History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom Anna Clark notes that:

“Anzac history certainly generates more education funding than any other areas of Australia’s past.”

A sobering lesson of the skewed sense of history this creates in young people was provided a couple of years ago when a young man from Victoria, interviewed on Anzac Day at Gallipoli, explained that he was there:

“Because this is where Australian history began. Nothing happened before Gallipoli.”

Really? What sort of history lesson is this?

The relentless militarisation of Australian history has successfully marginalised other national stories, other historic sites, and other conceptions of national values. It distorts our understanding of Australian history and particularly serves to obscure the proud achievements of men and women in civil and political society in building our nation prior to 1914.

Of course, the Australian nation was not born at Gallipoli in 1915, but with the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. Significantly, ours was a nation made in peacetime, not war. It was, it should be remembered, a national vision resting on more than a century of dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples; and a vision initially constructed in terms of racial exclusion. But history also teaches us that political mobilisation in civil society was effective in ending the White Australia policy through commitment to the values of multiculturalism, non-discrimination and racial equality.

The Australian Constitution was created by men who had never been to war, such as Andrew Inglis Clark, Alfred Deakin, HB Higgins, Edmund Barton and Charles Kingston. Contrary to the popular idea that Australian values were forged in military service, the majority of Australian nation-builders, including John Curtin and Robert Menzies, never served in war.

Australian nation-building was applauded internationally for its innovative experiments to promote social justice and equality of opportunity between the classes and sexes. In the first decade of the new Commonwealth, the Australian Labor Party came to power for the first time, forming the world’s first ever national Labor government. Subsequent Liberal and Labor governments introduced advanced reforms, such as conciliation and arbitration, old age and invalid pensions, and one of the most radical maternity benefits in the world, which extended to unmarried mothers. Notably, Australia’s granting of full political rights to women was a world historic first, changing international political and social relations forever. Aren’t these achievements worth commemorating?

Australian historians have an important role to play. The predominant Anzac mythology is serving to suppress the equally important narrative that the Australian nation was formed in peacetime by men and women who gave years of their lives to help build an innovative democratic progressive society committed to the values of equal citizenship and opportunity. This significant achievement of Australian civil and political society should also be commemorated on an annual basis by our nation. As should the fact that Australia achieved a world first in according full political rights to women.

This article first appeared on the ABC’s The Drum Opinion, 24 February 2012

Marilyn Lake is Charles La Trobe Professor in History at La Trobe University.