Bringing a lasting peace to Gaza

The withdrawal of support for Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, is further evidence of our national malaise. Unspecified “increased Australian aid for Gaza”, promised by Foreign Minister Penny Wong in Europe last week, is all very well. But it is unlikely to do anything to help achieve the changed mindset that is the prerequisite if Palestinians are ever going to break out of the crazy, self-destructive trajectory leading to impoverishment they have been on since Israel withdrew every Jew – soldier and civilian – from the territory in 2005.

As Robert Gregory, of the Australian Jewish Association, wrote on Saturday, under Israeli rule Gaza had become an agricultural powerhouse. It supplied 15 per cent of Israel’s agricultural exports and 65 per cent of its greenhouse vegetables. There were the green shoots of real prosperity for the Gazan people. But optimism about Gaza’s future didn’t last long. Within four months of Israel’s withdrawal, Gazans elected the Hamas terrorists – best known for their bombing campaign on Israeli buses and cafes – to rule them. It has been downhill ever since: the greenhouses that held such promise were given to Gazans but quickly looted and destroyed. Pipes were dug up and turned into crude missiles to attack Israel.

Conflict led to more conflict as Israel was forced to invest billions in the Iron Dome and other defensive systems, and Gazans sought to weaponise every object they could lay their hands on. The Gazans’ answer to Israel’s building of a sophisticated fence to prevent cross-border attacks was wave after wave of balloons, including inflated condoms, floated across to Israel to start massive fires.

Yet with each escalation of the conflict, Western leaders, as Mr Gregory wrote, have “showed up with their cheque books”, just as Senator Wong was intimating in Europe. “Gaza has already been rebuilt several times this century,” he argued.

It has; yet the same ill-considered, trite and ultimately pointless rhetoric is being trotted out by the Albanese government. Irrationally, and against all the evidence, it seeks to make the argument that pouring more “humanitarian aid” into helping and rebuilding Gaza is the solution to the devastated territory’s future. It isn’t. As Mr Gregory pointed out, history’s most successful nation-rebuilding projects have been Germany and Japan. Both have been transformed from aggressive nations hellbent on militarism into immensely prosperous democracies.

It is doubtless true that ordinary citizens of Gaza, many who are fiercely opposed to Hamas and the deprivations it has caused, face a terrible predicament. But the answer lies in political transformation, not more aid. “The Palestinian Arabs,” Mr Gregory noted, “are the globe’s largest per capita aid recipients. The West has turned them into the world’s perpetual welfare junkies. Western aid often has served as a money-making scheme, filling Swiss bank accounts for decades. Many have grown incredibly wealthy.”

That is the context in which Senator Wong should think again before she dispenses more of our taxpayer dollars into unsupervised and unaudited recipients such as the UN refugee agency UNRWA, whose employees took part in the October 7 slaughter of Jews and whose school textbooks inflame the anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews that has brought Gaza to its current sorry pass.

New thinking – not the same obsequious hand-wringing and tired old claptrap – is needed. Having alienated Jews and Muslims, the most sensible contribution by the Albanese government would be to make it clear Australia will not go on offering handouts to Gaza until the Palestinians are themselves prepared to break out of the mindlessly self-destructive path they have been on for far too long.

Gaza can return to its promising trajectory, pre-2005. It has the potential to recover in the way Germany and Japan did. But it is unlikely to have the mindset to do so while it is being foolishly mollycoddled with handouts and aid that cushions it from its own stupidity.