The Anti-Israel Agenda: : Inside the Political War on the Jewish State by Ryvchin & Alex Ryvchin

Author:Ryvchin & Alex Ryvchin [Ryvchin, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Gefen Publishing House LTD
Published: 2017-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Role of Governments in the Assault on Israel’s Legitimacy Part II – The Case of Marrickville

ALEX RYVCHIN

The corrosive and destructive legacy of the Marrickville Affair still lingers.

Four miles to the southwest of the center of Sydney, Australia’s most populous city, lies the suburb of Marrickville. Its main street is a mix of faded postwar signage, Vietnamese traders, Greek social clubs, and an assortment of modern amenities, textile stores, and borderline hip cafes. Wander the backstreets and a single glance will encompass gaudy two-level town houses set on impressive-sized lots, meager red-brick workers’ cottages and the polished chrome and fresh cement of newly finished apartment complexes towering overhead.

The alleyways reveal rows of workshops and light industrial units punctuated by moody graffiti and the easy beats of electronica drifting out of bars that look so self-assured that they seem to neither want nor need your business.

Marrickville is little more than a couple of miles from Sydney’s only airport, so the aircraft noise overhead is a constant and overbearing presence. Planes fly so low you can count the windows and feel as though you’re one clean look from making out a stewardess going over the safety instructions. The mix of people reflects the disorder of the streetscape. Old Greek migrants bark greetings and lamentations while a young mother in designer sunglasses, orange hair, and vintage store handkerchief casually walks her children, impervious to the roar of jet engines or Mediterranean neighbors.

Strolling its suburban streets and laneways opening out onto warehouses and vintage shops, one discovers a place caught between places.

Just to the north and east of Marrickville are Sydney’s hubs of inner-city bohemian chic. Immediately to the east is Sydney’s working-class heartland. And to the south are the dockyards where massive shipping containers are hauled and unloaded, and the hangars and warehouses surround the bay and the airport. Marrickville takes something of the distinct character of each of its surrounding precincts. It is hip, cosmopolitan, and functional.

It is a migrant area with fewer than 38 percent of residents having both parents born in Australia. Greece and Vietnam are the most common countries of origin, with nearly 35 percent of residents speaking a language other than English in the home.1

Marrickville Council, the municipal authority responsible for providing local services, boasts that the area is a “hub of independent arts and community values,” and that it “contain[s] one of the highest percentages of artists, cultural workers and arts industries of any [local government] in Australia.”2

The area has a long tradition of boisterous activism. It spawned Euphemia Bridges Bowes, a pioneering campaigner for prohibition in what was then the colony of New South Wales. Louisa Lawson, a Marrickville native and the mother of the great Australian poet Henry Lawson, was a fierce campaigner for social reform and feminism in the late 1800s.

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