Battle for Israel is part of the fight for the free world

Pro-Palestine protesters who tried to set up a “roadblock” outside Pine Gap on Friday were aiming squarely at Australia’s partnership with the United States at the crucial joint defence facility. They chose the wrong target on the wrong day. Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, is an essential component of regional security. It is the type of co-operation that keeps democratic nations free – the freedom US President Joe Biden championed in his White House address only hours after the protesters camped out on the remote road.

In contrast, Hamas, which rules Gaza with brute force, is one of several Iranian terrorist proxies and part of the anti-freedom, anti-democratic axis of evil that includes Russia, which is receiving weapons from Iran and North Korea to use against Ukraine, as Mr Biden said in his powerful address from the Oval Office. Unless the US led the global struggle against anti-democratic forces, Mr Biden said, the wars in Israel-Gaza and Ukraine would give a green light to tyrants in other conflicts around the world, including the Indo-Pacific.

Mr Biden did not need to mention China by name. When Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin met his “dear friend” and Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing this week, Mr Biden said current conflicts were “common threats’’ that had strengthened Russian-Chinese co-operation. China’s pro-Hamas stance on the war sparked by the terrorists attacking Israel on October 7 is clear from a statement by Chinese leaders in the Global Times, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece.

In addition to its main backer and overlord, Iran, Hamas is connected to a wider network. Evidence gathered from dead militants in the current war shows what appear to be North Korean-made F-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers. And on Thursday, a US navy ship in the Red Sea shot down three missiles and drones that had been fired by Iran-backed Huthi rebels in Yemen, possibly aimed at Israel, the Pentagon said. Sudan and Syria have also been implicated in Hamas’s weapons purchases, The Times reports.

When leaders across the Western world such as Mr Biden, Rishi Sunak and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz speak with piercing moral clarity in defence of Israel, and rush to be by its side, it gives Jewish people comfort that Israel has support where it counts, former treasurer Josh Frydenberg said in a speech in Melbourne this week, published in The Weekend Australian. And when “thousands of Israelis line the pavements waiting to donate blood, open their homes to fellow citizens who have lost theirs and volunteer to serve in the army before they’re asked”, Mr Frydenberg said, it gives hope that Israel’s debilitating internal divisions can be relegated to the past. “As a person of Jewish faith who has only ever known of a confident and strong Israel, I never thought I would feel, as my parents did in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War, the existential threat facing Israel. But now I do. As a person of Jewish faith growing up in a tolerant and multicultural Australia, I never thought I would feel, as my grandparents did in 1933, the rising tide of European anti-Semitism, which would consume their families in the flames of the Holocaust. But now I do.’’ For more than 2000 years, the enemies of Israel have sought its destruction, Mr Frydenberg said. The Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Nazis and others “are no more’’. Despite huge challenges, the lessons of history “tell us the light will shine again’’.

On the ground in Gaza, those challenges are military. The annihilation of Hamas, hard as it will be, is essential if a sustainable, two-state settlement is to be reached between Israel and the Palestinian people – a worthwhile goal reiterated by Mr Biden. The ground battle, as Hamas anticipated when it killed 1400 Israelis, mainly civilians, on October 7 and kidnapped 200 others as hostages, will be slow and bloody. It will involve armed combat, in tunnels and civilian streets, where Hamas fighters base themselves. The Israeli Defence Forces, in line with the rules of military engagement, will be trying to keep civilian casualties to a minimum – for the sake of the innocent civilians of Gaza and for the sake of Israel’s reputation. Israel and the Jewish diaspora around the world, including in Australia, are also engaged in a different battle – the propaganda war. Too often they are losing in debates involving malicious opponents and those who are ignorant and naive. Some of these lament civilian loss of life on both sides. But most overlook Israel’s right to defend itself. Nor do any critics understand the links between Hamas and its parent, the Muslim Brotherhood, and German Nazism and to Jew hatred that predated the Third Reich, as Chris Mitchell wrote a week ago. The Jewish state is being maligned unfairly usually for no good reason. That was clear this week when many critics, despite strong evidence to the contrary, preferred to blame Israel rather than Islamic Jihad for the inhumane strike on the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Hundreds of patients and medical staff died.

Israel’s struggles in the propaganda war are also clear in a letter this week from trade unions in Australia, including the NSW Teachers Federation, the National Tertiary Education Union, the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association, the Australian Services Union and the Health Services Union. The letter, released on the Sydney branch of the Maritime Union of Australia’s Facebook page, said signatories were “horrified” by the conflict between Israel and Hamas and the “unspeakable bloodshed”. The tragedy, it claimed, was “ a direct result of Israel’s blockade and siege of Gaza, and of the apartheid and ethnic cleansing it maintains in the West Bank and within its own borders”. The letter called for governments and police in Australia to “facilitate” further demonstrations and protests in support of Palestine. Education authorities have a responsibility to ensure those distortions are not passed on to school and university students by teachers.

There were reports on Friday that the IDF is stepping up the assassination of Hamas leaders. Major General Jihad Muheisen, commander of Hamas’s national security force, was killed in a strike in Gaza City. So was Jamila al-Shanti, the widow of a founder of the Islamist movement and the most senior woman in the organisation. Such strikes will help lessen bloodshed for Palestinian civilians and IDF soldiers during the ground offensive. Israel’s aim, ambassador to Australia Amir Maimon has vowed, is to “depose the Hamas regime, destroy its military capabilities and remove the terrorist threat”. Doing so will come at a high price. But it is essential. As Mr Biden says, the free world is at a tipping point. Democracy in Israel, Ukraine and elsewhere is at stake. So is the global balance of power in which the US, Australia’s greatest ally, is the “essential nation’’.