Hajaj, Khaldoun --- "A Refugee's Reflection on a Treaty" [2002] IndigLawB 76; (2002) 5(21) Indigenous Law Bulletin 18

A Refugee’s Reflection on a Treaty

by Khaldoun Hajaj

Being born a refugee tends to provide an individual with a unique perspective on the world. Spending a lifetime being unwanted anywhere instantly draws one to feeling that they are society’s ‘other’, in a permanent state of flux, neither here nor there.

My family and I arrived in Australia in the mid 1980’s very much feeling the strain of not being welcome anywhere. This is a fate shared by some six million other Palestinian refugees. While Australia in 1983 was a very different country to the one we now inhabit we were not exactly made to feel welcome. However, we were given residency status and subsequently citizenship. Citizenship was a unique thing for all my family, as none of us had ever experienced it before. However, with citizenship comes certainty and this breeds a sense of reflection on one’s existence.

I have never sensed what it is to be Australian. Perhaps it’s the daily bombardment of images which somehow do not match my skin colour. Eventually, it occurred to me that I am suffering the fate of so many displaced people who have found a safe haven though not a nationality. Houses as opposed to homes. In Australia we have stopped being refugees and settled into a comfortable pattern of exile.

Exile is an amazingly contemplative experience. As such, I was somewhat struck to learn that Australia was stolen from its native population under an aegis of terra nullius. This was shocking for me to learn, as my family’s state of exile was induced in 1948 by European colonisers, positing that my country Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land.

The hurt of my exile was somewhat ameliorated in the knowledge that the Aboriginal peoples of this country are more likely to understand my anguish than virtually any other people on Earth. Both our collective humanities had been denied. Our lands had been taken away and our people have been killed.

The Palestinian struggle has received far greater international recognition than that of Aboriginal Australians, however, there are commonalities. The first and greatest commonality is the manner of dispossession. The fact that both Aboriginal Australia and Palestine had been taken as vacant and empty land meant that the new rulers were able to establish what they deemed a totally new society without paying any homage or compensation to its original owners.

Recognition of Palestine’s people as constituting a national identity did not gain any real currency in Israel and in the West until both Israelis and Palestinians finally came together in the early nineties to thrash out a remarkably compromised peace agreement and process of Palestinian national determination. In return Israelis were provided with the national certainty they craved. This so called ‘peace of the brave’ ended abruptly through the bullet of a Jewish fundamentalist. The assassination of Prime Minister Rabin and the subsequent destruction of the Oslo accords remains a source of remarkable sadness for millions of Palestinians and Israelis. However, the 3-4 years of relative peace and seeming prosperity that existed during the height of Oslo provided a generation of Palestinians and Israelis with hope that a solution will come.

No such hope seems to exist in Australia. Generations of politicians have totally rejected the prospect of a treaty. A brief interlude occurred where some lip-service was paid. However, this was all too brief as the exigencies of paranoid nationalism, as embodied by Pauline Hanson and John Howard, became the dominant political paradigm.

Whilst the Palestinian/Israeli peace process is in shatters, a flame for co-existence and mutual recognition still exists amongst a critical mass of the respective populations. The Australian community has been truly muted. The scope for any recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty has all but disappeared. However, this is not to suggest that all hope is lost. To the contrary, we have a sufficiently developed sense of democracy and acceptance of others to eventually realise that the unchecked denial of Indigenous land rights, the subjugation of Indigenous law and the oppression of Indigenous nationality will only lead to an inherently inferior international opinion of this country’s already rundown reputation.

Khaldoun Hajaj is a part time graduate law student at UNSW.