After almost a year of Hezbollah rockets being fired into its northern border areas, displacing tens of thousands of civilians, the state of Israel has begun to hit back at the Iran-backed terrorist organisation, which sits like an incubus upon the state of Lebanon.
Our Labor government expresses “concern” over the widening conflict. But the Greens, on the crossbench, are beside themselves. Deputy leader Senator Mehreen Faruqi declares the Albanese government’s responses “unacceptable” and denounces what she dubs “Israel’s killing machine”. She calls for the Israeli ambassador to this country, Amir Maimon, to be expelled, and asserts (on Instagram) that our Prime Minister and Foreign Minister are “complicit in genocide”.
Greens defence spokesman Senator David Shoebridge has added a further strange assertion to the outbursts by Faruqi. He declares that Israel’s attempts to knock out Hezbollah rocket arsenals and key commanders are like the Russian invasion of Ukraine of early 2022.
Senators Faruqi and Shoebridge, as citizens of this liberal democracy and as elected members of the national parliament, enjoy freedom of speech. They are at liberty to make statements such as these. But the workability of freedom of speech requires that they be challenged, not genuflected before.
Do you acknowledge that Hezbollah is, in fact, a brutal illegal terror militia, which is heavily armed, is a client of Iran, and is bent on the destruction of Israel?
Do you acknowledge that Hezbollah has been attacking Israel with a sustained barrage of close to 9000 missiles and drones since October 8 last year? Can you think of any other country that would tolerate such a sustained assault without seeking to suppress it at source? Can you conceive of a better way to do this than what the Israel Defence Forces is doing?
Israel is facing a fight for its existence against enemies who do not seek a moderate mutual understanding or a few concessions to the Palestinian Arabs.
They openly and repeatedly declare that their goal is to obliterate Israel and possibly its whole Jewish population. That, not settlers on the West Bank, is the strategic reality. If the good senators are not across this, they are off with the fairies.
Could Israel fight its long war differently? Perhaps it could, as Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff argued, regarding Israel’s last campaign against Hezbollah back in 2006, in their book 34 Days: Israel, Hezbollah and the War in Lebanon. But Faruqi and Shoebridge are not offering strategic advice about how better to check Hezbollah. They are accusing Israel of genocide – as so many have in the case of Gaza. Theirs is a polemic against Israel, not a debate about how best to protect it against ruthless and relentless enemies.
The enemy is not Lebanon, but a heavily armed alien enemy that has colonised Lebanon. As Matthew Levitt spelled out in his path-breaking analysis, Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, this is not an organisation with which peace and co-operation are possible. That the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the mullahs in Tehran are behind it (as well as Hamas, the Houthis and the militias in Syria) is the big picture here. None of these parties are misunderstood innocents with reasonable agendas.
The message from our government, from our democratic parliament, should be to declare loud and clear: “Ambassador Maimon, we understand the challenges you face. How can this war now be won?”
How can Hezbollah be eliminated, and Lebanon returned to a condition, or a past dreamt of by Samir Kassir, in his beautiful history, Beirut, before he was assassinated in 2005? What, other than craven compromises with fanatics, can be the future of the Middle East? Isn’t that where to look, rather than denunciations of Israel’s defence against those very fanatics?
Paul Monk is a former senior intelligence analyst and the author of Dictators and Dangerous Ideas, among a dozen other books.
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