A true hero isn’t a luvvy in a keffiyeh – it’s Ben Zussman

Ben Zussman.

“If you’re reading this, something must have happened to me.”

I almost scanned over this post when I first came across it on social media, scrolling past. It’s so easy to do these days. So much heaviness and heartache. So much ignorance.

Curiosity arrested me, and here we are. You’re reading the words of 22-year-old Ben Zussman. He was killed in a battle with Hamas in northern Gaza on December 3. Before going into battle, he wrote a letter that his family received two days after his death. They have given it to the world, and what a gift it is.

The words are fierce and tender, full of joy, purpose and staggering, heartbreaking courage.

Barely a man, Zussman would have known the risk of not just death but worse. Being taken hostage by Hamas and tortured, then executed. Killed more than likely in public or on a live stream. Or as Hamas did with an elderly woman on October 7, uploading to her Facebook page a video of her lying on the floor of her home, dying, surrounded by terrorists, so the woman’s granddaughter and family could see.

This is Hamas. This is who our federal government chose to stand with this week at the UN. Hold that thought for a moment, while I talk a little more about courage.

Zussman had strict instructions for his family should he be captured, warning them in the letter not to mince his words.

“I’m not prepared for terrorists to be released in exchange for me in any way, shape or form. Please don’t violate this,” he wrote.

It’s the most jarring of contrasts, isn’t it? In Israel, a young man with his whole life ahead of him considers the cost of this war on terror and willingly pays the price.

By staggering, embarrassing contrast, in Australia this week a few thousand folk in the arts sector (colour me shocked) engaged in what they called a day of action. They wore keffiyeh, Palestinian scarfs, during various perform­ances across the country. They think this is an act of courage. They call it taking a stand. This isn’t courage; at best, it’s accessorising. They’re pulling a cheap stunt, at no cost, before an audience of friends. Nothing brave about it.

Australia, where is our courage? I wish to ask our federal government that question directly. From the start, this government’s position on Israel has been a flim-flam of spineless confusion, blowing this way and that like a reed in the wind, double minded all the while.

Harry Greenwood, right, along with co-stars Megan Wilding and Mabel Likeffiyeh scarves during the encore at the opening night of the STC production of The Seagull at Sydney’s Roslyn Packer Theatre. Picture: Instagram

This past week, in a backflip worthy of Nadia Comaneci, Australia, before the world, stood with the likes of Iran, Afghanistan and other such human rights luminaries in voting for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Without any reference to Hamas, without any demand it surrender, without so much as a word to acknowledge the 138 hostages still rotting away underground or any demand for their safe return.

This is not courage, this is caving in. To what and to whom, I’m not sure. Others are more versed in the backroom machinations of federal Labor than I am or care to be, but I will say one thing with certainty. History will remember this moment, this lack of moral clarity and failure of courage. History will remember the side they chose.

Such are the shifting sands beneath what was once our nation’s steadfast moral centre. The ability to know right from wrong, truth from fiction, courage from cowardice. While it took no courage for the federal government to abandon Israel, it does take a PhD to try to make sense of its position.

By way of reminder, Hamas is the government of Gaza, government being a somewhat loose term given there hasn’t been an election since 2006.

Hamas sponsored the invasion of Israel on October 7, it boasted about it, it gloried in it, and it has publicly stated since that it intends to repeat these atrocities as often as it takes to wipe Israel and the Jewish people from the map.

On the one hand, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong want you to believe they stand with Israel.

On the other hand, they just chose to side with Hamas. The same Hamas that broke the first ceasefire within a week of it starting, reneged on handing over the hostages, and sent a suicide mission into Jerusalem in which three civilians were murdered while waiting for a bus. The same Hamas Australia rightly proscribed as a terrorist organisation on March 4 last year.

In voting for the UN resolution, the message from Australia to the people of Gaza was this. You don’t deserve freedom. You don’t deserve democracy, like ours. You are not worthy of being liberated from the heavy hand of tyranny. To borrow an expression from my late father, federal Labor is trying to ride one horse and lead another.

Cowards use hospitals and schools as a base for military operations. Cowards take babies and the elderly hostage. Cowards sexually brutalise women, so violently that their victims’ bodies break. These are the obvious faces of cowardice. Closer to home, the weaklings are middle-class intellectuals who organise protests from the safety of tenured academia. Who rip down posters of kidnapped civilians. Cowards cover their faces and scream anti-Semitic slurs and call it activism.

And at the top of it all, cowards crumble under pressure when the world is watching.

In his death, Zussman gave us a gift. An enduring picture of courage and conviction. He understood that democracy is fragile and worthy of defending.

Israel is many imperfect things, but it is a democracy. The only functioning democracy in the region. A society in which people of all faiths, races, sexualities and beliefs live side-by-side under a system of governance with the rule of law. The UN, and the Australian government in voting the way it did, has failed it.