Tight-lipped on the BDS taboo

Even for Greens candidates who firmly believe in it, the pro-Palestinian campaign to boycott business with links to Israel is one topic strictly taboo when it comes to talking to the mainstream media.

The Greens were stung at the NSW election last year when The Australian exposed Greens Marrickville mayor Fiona Byrne's support for the international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state.

Ms Byrne's position, from which she tried to back away as the election drew closer, destroyed her otherwise good chance of seizing the state seat of Marrickville, held by Labor's Carmel Tebbutt.

Since then, strategists appear to have given their candidates in the "green zones" of the inner city councils the instructions along the lines of the Irish folk song: "Whatever you say, say nothing, when you talk about you know what."

When The Australian this week approached Marrickville Greens councillor Marika Kontellis, who is running for re-election tomorrow, she said: "I have no comment at all on BDS."

Ms Kontellis would not even confirm she was one of the minority on council who last year voted to retain its BDS policy when other councillors mounted a successful move to overturn it.

Ms Kontellis last month attended and made pro-Palestinian comments at the Byron Bay BDS conference.

Paradoxically, the attitude of some Greens in privately supporting BDS while publicly refusing to talk about it angers both the Jewish and pro-Palestinian lobbies.

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive Vic Alhadeff said: "People have a right to their views and a right to moderate or even change their views, but they should be open."

Jamal Daoud, the spokesman for the Social Justice Network, which supports causes including Palestinian rights, said he and many of his members had resigned from the Greens in disgust over what he said were the party's gutless backdowns.

"They talk a lot about Palestine, but they do nothing," Mr Daoud said. Serving Marrickville Greens councillor Max Phillips, who is up for re-election, insisted yesterday that the Marrickville branch of the party had abandoned BDS and would not be returning to it, but the party has chosen a hard-line anti-Israel campaigner as one of its prospective incoming candidates in Marrickville.

Karel Solomon, who grew up in South Africa, last year branded Israel a racist state.

"As someone who suffered under apartheid, it is all too clear that what exists in Israeli today is apartheid, make no mistake about that," Mr Solomon said in a speech last year when he presented a letter from South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu supporting BDS to Ms Byrne.

"People were forcibly removed from their homes and dumped into refugee camps, based on one criterion and one criterion alone -- by the race, by an accident of birth.

"When Israel demands to be recognised as a state that is defined by race, then it is an apartheid state. (It is) a racist policy."

Mr Solomon, who is in South Africa, could not be reached for comment last night.

The Greens' candidate for lord mayor of Sydney, Irene Doutney, told The Australian she was "absolutely not" talking about BDS to constituents. But a couple of years ago, in an interview with The Alternative Media Group, Ms Doutney said she was personally "in favour of a full boycott of Israel".

In Leichhardt, Greens Mayor Rochelle Porteous avoided direct questions about BDS.