How Israel’s trauma exposes our weakness at home
Here, on the other side of the world, where everyone enjoys freedom of religion, expression and opportunities for prosperity, we have seen young people in our streets openly supporting murderous Islamist terrorist groups.
The moral depravity and intellectual decay of Western liberal democracies are laid bare by what passes for public and political debate on the Middle East conflict.
The opponents of Israel do not seem to know or care what is right, factually or ethically.
Political leaders, especially of the left, fail to assert the facts or explain the proper course of action to defend human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Instead, they meekly bend to an ill-informed and hateful zeitgeist, and hope that it will all go away.
Here, on the other side of the world, where everyone enjoys freedom of religion, expression and opportunities for prosperity, we have seen young people in our streets openly supporting the murderous Islamist terrorist groups of both Hamas and Hezbollah. And we have had people wildly celebrating the death of innocent Israelis, and intimidating and threatening their Jewish compatriots.
This spits in the face of everything our country stands for, yet the response from the Prime Minister and other leaders and authorities has been timidity and equivocation. A country that historically has prided itself on stoicism, mateship and fairness now displays cowardice, abandonment and equivalence.
Once a self-professed clever country, we now cower to radical dunces and their social media memes. The same can be said of the ironically named “progressive left” in the US, Britain and Europe.
While many of us, quite rightly, are preoccupied with the threats to Israel, the loss of innocent lives and the future of peace-loving people in Israel, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, we also need to reflect on our own fate.
What this debate reveals about our own society is deeply worrying – it is frightening.
Nothing we have been given by the blood and toil of our forebears – not our prosperity, democracy, freedom or sovereignty – will survive unless we embrace and defend the values that have delivered them. If we cannot defend these values for an ally under attack such as Israel, we will inevitably meet a similar fate – perhaps by different means from other enemies, but all in all, a similar fate.
As Bob Hawke warned more than 50 years ago: “If the bell tolls for Israel, it won’t just toll for Israel, it will toll for all mankind.” Yet now the inheritor of Hawke’s ALP mantle, Anthony Albanese, responds to a year of deadly attacks on Israeli citizens by Hamas, Houthis, Iran and Hezbollah by calling for a ceasefire and Israeli restraint – and at home he is insipid in the face of anti-Semitism, hate-preaching and protesters endorsing terrorist organisations.
The Islamist fanaticism directed at Israel, of course, is also anti-Christian, anti-Hindu, anti-agnosticism, anti-modernity and anti-West. However fanciful it sounds, the only end point for these extremists is a global Muslim caliphate, a theocratical monoculture. Ultimately, this is what the useful idiots of our university campuses are supporting.
This nihilist ideology manifests itself through terrorism in the flashpoints of South Asia, attacks on Western targets, and is reflected in the anti-US, anti-Australia and anti-West rhetoric at pro-Palestinian rallies. “Shame, shame Australia” is what the mob chanted that same night they chanted “Gas the Jews” or “Where’s the Jews?” on October 9 last year at the Sydney Opera House.
Think of the families slaughtered, the women raped and murdered, and the hostages still unaccounted for, and it is easy to comprehend the repugnant immorality of those who portray Israel as the aggressor.
I have delved too far into the video evidence of October 7 and cannot unremember the atrocities, but the horror that haunts me most involves no bloodshed on tape – it is the Bibas family.
The haunting pictures show young mother Shiri, traumatised in the hands of armed Hamas terrorists, clutching her beautiful red-headed boys Kfir, nine months, and Ariel, 4. We know the boys’ maternal grandparents were murdered and their father, Yarden, also was taken, but we do not know the fate of these innocent children and their parents.
In what obscene distortion of diplomacy and public debate do these people and the other hostages not figure as the first demand, the immutable precondition for any relent in Israel’s counter-attack? How do the anti-Israel activists rationalise their callous disregard for the murdered partygoers at the Nova music festival and the innocent hostages?
Equally difficult to comprehend is the denial of facts, the invention of a new reality that portrays the victim, Israel, as the aggressor and excuses the barbarity of the Islamist terrorists as some kind of justified resistance. No rational person armed with the facts could come to this conclusion – either hatred demands deliberate ignorance, or ignorance fosters inexplicable hatred, take your pick.
Take the words of globally recognisable activist Greta Thunberg who now promotes a boycott of oil and gas giant Chevron because it operates in Israel. “In Palestine and all over the world, the fight against colonialism and corporations’ destruction of the planet are intrinsically linked,” Thunberg rants on social media. “Look at Chevron, everyone knows that Chevron is one of the world’s biggest climate criminals, but the oil giant is also fuelling Israel’s genocide in Palestine.”
Thunberg has given up saving the planet for long enough to malign the only liberal democratic and multicultural nation in the Middle East. Israel “bombs hospitals, homes and schools in Gaza” while committing “genocide” and imposing “apartheid”, which makes all this a “climate justice issue” because it is “destroying Palestinian lands and resources through its warfare and industries”. This stuff is literally insane. But it differs little from the rhetoric of the UN Secretary-General or an endless list of green-left politicians.
The words coloniser, apartheid and genocide must have lost all meaning. Israel is a state established under a UN mandate on what was a British-ruled territory in which Jewish people had lived for thousands of years, predating Palestinians and the Islamic religion. In Israel all citizens, including Arab Muslims, vote and can be elected to the Knesset. And as for genocide, the Palestinian population, even on Israeli-occupied territory, has grown faster than the Israeli population.
This week the focus shifted to southern Lebanon when Israel responded to Hezbollah. Suddenly a dozen significant countries, including our own, were calling for a ceasefire and the reimposition of a UN Security Council resolution banning Hezbollah instalments close to Israel.
When Hamas slaughtered 1200 people and took 250 hostages on October 7 last year in Israel’s south, Hezbollah responded the following day by firing rockets, indiscriminately, into the cities and villages of Israel’s north.
The bombardment has not stopped – more than 8000 rockets in the 11 months since.
Where were the calls for ceasefire? Where was the enforcement of the UNSC resolution? Only when Israel strikes back to protect its people does the international community react.
When innocent Israeli blood was spilled by Hamas, Hezbollah took its cue to try to kill more Israelis. Sunni and Shia, south and north, each organisation is funded, armed and controlled by Shia Iran – these groups share an Islamist extremist determination to eradicate Israel and Jews.
The Houthis, also backed by Iran, fired a rocket into Tel Aviv and after Israel (we presume) killed the Hamas leader in Tehran, Iran sent an armada of drones to attack Israel. The fanatics have a never-ending queue of martyrs lining up to attack Israel and Iran bankrolls them.
Yet Western media and politicians fit up Israel as the instigator. As West Point’s Modern War Institute urban warfare studies chair John Spencer put it this week: “It’s just crazy.”
He referred to a description of Israel’s pager attacks as terrorism. “People have lost their minds on who are the terrorists, who are actually defending their civilians, who are trying to get their civilians killed, people are trying to rewrite borders, and call people resistance fighters.”
Spencer lashed out at narratives blaming Israel for a war operating on two fronts. “The headline should be Israel is defending itself in a seven-front war, that there has been 8000 Hezbollah rockets attacking Israel for over a year and the world is saying, well, you shouldn’t do anything about that. I mean it’s crazy, you have 80 to 100,000 Israelis homeless in the north … if any other country was in this situation, these wouldn’t be the questions we would be asking.”
At the UN General Assembly this week Joe Biden underlined the foreign policy weakness that has characterised his term. This President abandoned Afghanistan in humiliating chaos, saw Russia invade Ukraine, watched Hamas invade Israel and allowed China to thumb its nose at the world.
And on the Middle East Biden now offers the usual platitudes about ceasefires and hostage deals and the chimerical two-state solution. It is nauseating.
“But we are stronger than we think,” he told the UN. “We’re stronger together than alone.” Saying you are strong does not hide your weakness. It reminds me of that wonderful Margaret Thatcher quote: “Being powerful is like being a lady; if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
Israel has no choice but to defend itself and its citizens. It is strong because it has no alternative – if Israel, for a moment, showed the political and security weakness that has become endemic in Western liberal democracies, it would no longer exist.
This is not to say Israel can act with impunity; it must hold itself to much higher standards than the terrorists and state-sponsored actors who target its people. Yet there is no evidence of Israel targeting civilians, and the hysterical charges of such intent are factually absurd and morally corrupt.
No country has ever had to defend itself from repeated murderous invasions with more restraint and transparency than Israel. The twisted criticism of Israel – remember the world’s media condemning it for killing 500 people by bombing a hospital when the episode involved an Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that killed about 50, or the claims, proven incorrect, that the Israel Defence Forces targeted aid workers – only impedes Israel’s defence and boosts the morale of its enemies.
The hypocrisy of the fanatical critics is breathtaking. Silent on the slaughter at the Nova music festival, silent about ongoing hostage trauma and silent on years of missile attacks on civilian targets, they now characterise civilian deaths in Gaza and Lebanon as Israel’s doing rather than the inevitable and desired consequences of atrocities committed by Hamas and Hezbollah. Yet the lies have a material impact, forcing political responses.
Britain has banned some weapon supplies to Israel and diplomatic support from the US, Australia and others has weakened. The global focus is on restraining Israel, making Israel the pariah, while the malevolent force of Iran is largely ignored, and the necessary and just cause of eliminating all Hamas and Hezbollah operatives is portrayed as a war crime.
The West has lost its moral compass. And the evil of Islamist extremism feeds off this vacillation. Calls for ceasefires are calls to keep the terrorists in place, and leave the fate of the people of Israel, Gaza and southern Lebanon in the hands of extremists who are controlled by Iran.
That is not a solution, that is not peace; that is a continuation of the state of siege that the mullahs in Iran desire, and the people of Israel must never tolerate.
Denouncing Israel at the UN this week for “atrocities” and “desperate barbarism” was Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, who arms, funds and controls Hamas and Hezbollah – the discordance would be laughable if it were not so sickening. This from a regime that sponsors terrorism, crushes democracy, attacks Israeli civilians and criminalises its own women over head coverings.
All the while Iran continues to work on procuring nuclear weapons. And political leaders in the West tell us Israel is the problem.
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