Australian media fails to understand history of the Middle East, and its coverage of the war is puerile

Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, left, pictured in 2003 with US President George W. Bush and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Picture: AP

Israel was once the darling of the international left, its kibbutz commune movement lauded as practical socialism in action.

The Australian Labor Party was a staunch ally of Israeli Labor. Former prime minister Bob Hawke was a hero in the Jewish homeland for his role in negotiating the right of return for thousands of Jewish refuseniks from Russia in the 1980s.

Now a dumbed down media and international humanitarian law infected by the politics of identity are inverting history to support puerile allegations of genocide against the only nation on Earth that truly understands genocide. This against a democracy where Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze can all vote.

A couple of prominent Jews in media here, Louise Adler and Antony Loewenstein, have been at the forefront of criticism of Israel. Loewenstein believes Israel’s Jews could thrive in a single state including all of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

This one-state idea is just as naive as continued faith in a two-state solution in the face of Palestinian statements advocating the murder of Jews.

The truth is Israelis who once supported a two-state solution now have a clear understanding of what a Palestinian state would look like: Gaza.

And they know what such a state gave Israel for its self determination: October 7.

When then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon pulled out of Gaza in August 2005, removing Israel Defence Forces troops and forcing Israeli settlers to leave, he in effect created the first ever Palestinian state. That state voted in 2006 for Hamas – an Islamist terror organisation formally committed in its 1989 charter to the destruction of Israel.

Yet as The Australian’s columnist “Jack the Insider” wrote on Thursday, the Western left sides with this cousin of ISIS that executes gays, bans abortion and accepts child marriage for Palestinian women. Too many journalists in Australia ignore the protection that women and gays enjoy in Israel, which decided in 2022 to give refuge to persecuted Palestinian gays from the West Bank and Gaza.

What is happening here? Too much media coverage is informed by the idea Israel is a colonial European power even though more than half its Jews are descended from people who never left the Middle East when the Romans expelled them in 19AD.

Israel’s critics use the language of black oppression borrowed from the US, especially after the Black Lives Matter movement. Intersectionality says all systems exist to oppress non-white people. It is therefore the responsibility of moral people to oppose whiteness – giving Israel’s critics the opportunity to criticise Jews by racialising them as white. Yet most Jews in Israel are Mizrahi and look pretty much the same as most Palestinians.

This ideology attributes the success of Jewish society to white privilege. It infantilises Palestinians and absolves their leaders from responsibility for their people.

Young journalists interested in the truth should read a January 28 Newsweek piece by West Bank-based Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid.

“This truth must be told: it is Israel – and the Zionist Jewish community preceding independence – that consistently offered compromise, dialogue and a two-state solution. And it is Palestinian demagogues valuing personal power over the good of their people who have rejected these open-handed offers,” he wrote.

This column has previously traced the failures of Palestinian leadership since 1947. Eid goes back to 1922 and the League of Nations vote to establish a Jewish state and a separate Palestinian state comprising all the West Bank, Gaza and all of what is now Jordan. Arab leaders rejected the idea.

In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed a partition giving Jews a tiny Israeli state while Palestinians (called Arabs at the time) were to receive the rest of the British Mandate Palestine as a Muslim state. Palestinian leader Haj Amin el-Husseini rejected the idea and as this column outlined on October 14 went on to collaborate with Adolf Hitler and Germany’s Nazi Party.

Also collaborating with the Nazis at the time were Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which gave birth to Hamas. This is the background of groups the left media is now supporting.

So how did the left come to see Israel, attacked by its Arab neighbours in 1948, 1967 and 1973, as the real aggressor?

Tablet magazine on December 6 published an analysis by historian and columnist Gadi Taub, under the headline: “Why Israel is the #1 target of the global left”.

“Anti-Semitism has evolved through a breathtaking dialectical leap: it is now conveyed through the (language) of human rights. This is how a host of liberals and progressives – many of them Jews – have been seduced into supporting NGOs that claim to promote human rights, but are in fact promoting a racist view of Jewish people,” he wrote.

How can the idea of universal human rights be so distorted as “to yield an argument for the targeting and exclusion of Jews” from the right to self-determination?

NGOs portray Israel as a violator of human rights but say little about China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and most of Israel’s neighbours.

Taub discusses the preference of the UN and other NGOs for channelling a rights agenda through global institutions that undermine national democracies.

“As a nation state sworn to protect the rights of its citizens, Israel must protect itself from anti-democratic influences while respecting the choice of Jews in the diaspora to live their own versions of their Jewish identities,” Taub concluded.

Israel has started fighting back against these NGOs. Last week it formally complained about the involvement of 12 UN workers paid by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on October 7. Some journalists here criticised Western countries that suspended aid to UNRWA.

Yet the relationship between UNRWA and Hamas has allowed aid meant for ordinary Palestinians to be siphoned to Hamas, including materials used for the building of tunnels that had been donated by Western countries for building houses. Australia has given UNRWA $200m, the Adelaide Advertiser reported last week.

Revelations last week by Canadian lawyer and human rights advocate Hillel Neuer on CNN and on Sky News Australia’s Sharri Markson program of an UNRWA Telegram social media group of 3000 that celebrated the October 7 massacre are consistent with UNRWA’s track record.

One freed Israeli hostage has revealed she was kept in the home of a UNRWA health worker inside Gaza.

As far back as 2014, UNRWA was forced to apologise for the placement of Hamas rockets inside UN schools.

Israeli intelligence last week passed details to the US showing 23 per cent of all male UNRWA staff are Hamas members compared with 15 per cent of all male Gazans.

Israel’s leftwing Haaretz newspaper on December 12 published an article by journalist Ronny Linder detailing the celebration of terrorist “martyrs” in Palestinian school text books.

Linder asks why the UNRWA – set up in 1949 to deal with 700,000 Palestinians – is still active?

Why does UNRWA class Palestinians, who have settled in Jordan and are Jordanian citizens, as Palestinian refugees, Linder asks?

With 30,000 employees and a budget of more than $US1bn a year, isn’t the self interest of UNRWA – like that of Hamas – in keeping Palestinians poor?

Journalists, even from the ABC, need to ask such questions.