From vows of ‘Never again’ to a ‘here we go again’ shrug

Cyclists protest in support of Gaza in London. Picture: Getty

Speaking on the ABC’s Insiders last Sunday, Foreign Minister Penny Wong made some contentious statements about the Gaza war that were swiftly condemned by Jewish leaders. Some of the early rebukes might have been reactions to misleading initial reports that misconstrued Wong’s infelicitous wording.

She noted that a ceasefire could not be one-sided and Hamas was a terrorist organisation still holding hostages. She affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself. But she also called for steps towards a ceasefire; said Israel must be held to a higher standard as a democracy and comply with international humanitarian law; and it must stop attacking hospitals. In contrast, British Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said if “1400 Brits had lost their lives, the idea that we wouldn’t pursue the terrorist organisation when we knew where they were and that anyone would tell Britain that we shouldn’t do that … would be rather improbable and extraordinary”.

Yet even Shapps is wrong. Relative to their populations, the equivalent British numbers would be 10,000 killed and 1700 taken hostage. The corresponding numbers for Australia would be 3850 killed and 650 abducted. Suppose a terror group based in a neighbouring country had carried out such an attack on Australian territory, would we take kindly to foreign counsel of a halt to hunting down the terrorists?

Ramesh Thakur.

The immediate analogy for Israel’s 10/7 was America’s 9/11. However, scaled to the US population, the numbers killed and abducted are closer to the 58,000 US soldiers who died in the entire Vietnam War. Recalling the traumatic legacy of Vietnam on the American imagination, register the reality that an equivalent number of Israelis were methodically massacred in just one day. The savagery was filmed by the murderers and gleefully beamed to the world – “Dad, Mum, I killed 10 Jews! Check your WhatsApp!”

The US has conceded that the claims of more than 10,000 civilians killed in the Gaza war are correct. Physicians for Human Rights head Saman Zia-Zarifi laments the erosion of the norm of protecting hospitals. He blames the current problems in Gaza on past failures to investigate and hold accountable those responsible for violations of the norm. However, the failure to punish abuses of healthcare sanctuaries by Hamas, something that everyone has known about for decades, made Israeli attacks inevitable.

The fourth Geneva Convention (1949) deals with the protection of civilians during armed conflict. Its prohibitions cover both state and non-state actors, but the world has yet to figure out how to enforce them on the latter. This has created a de facto imbalance that is simply not sustainable in the long run. The protection of hospitals is covered in article 19. It states that their entitlement to protection ceases if “they are used to commit … acts harmful to the enemy”. A commentary published in 1958 by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the custodian of the Geneva Convention, clarifies that examples of such harmful acts “include the use of a hospital as a shelter for able-bodied combatants or fugitives, as an arms or ammunition store, as a military observation post, or as a centre for liaison with fighting troops”.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has confirmed that Hamas is using hospitals as command and control centres. This makes them legitimate military targets, and the responsibility for all resulting loss of life rests wholly and solely with Hamas.

People protest in support of Gaza in the UK, calling for a ceasefire. Picture: Getty

The mask of fitting in with host-society norms slipped from the thousands of immigrants who celebrated 10/7. As a show of strength, they have been impressive and effective. The same social-justice crowd that insists words are literal violence wants us to contextualise actual violence as a necessity, rape as resistance, incineration as liberation. Young people whose self-introductions include preferred pronouns have adopted the chants of a genocidal death cult as anti-Semitism moves in from the fringes to occupy the public square.

Support from many political, cultural and intellectual elites puts on public display the moral and spiritual hollowness at the heart of contemporary Western society. There could be no better example of this than the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter using a paraglider, a symbol of mass death, as a symbol of liberation from “white privilege” Israeli settler-colonisers.

The solemn pledge of “Never again” has given way to a “Here we go again” shrug at the return, 78 years after the Holocaust, of the threat of Jewish extermination. The chants have called for Jews to be gassed, taunted them that the army of Mohammed that massacred Jews in the seventh century will return, urged the globalisation of the intifada and issued a call to arms for jihad. The terrorists have been valorised, Israel vilified, Jews attacked and threatened, posters of the missing hostages torn down.

The brutal reality is that if a ceasefire was declared, Israel could not resume the war on Hamas absent a major fresh terrorist attack. Hamas wants the extermination of Israel, not reconciliation with it. Its explicit, charter goal is to liquidate Israel and ethnically cleanse Jews “from the river to the sea”. Its strategy is to delegitimise the Jewish state. Its tactics are to target Israeli civilians and endanger Palestinian civilians as human shields by placing fighters under hospitals and ammunition in schools.

Hamas and Israel cannot coexist. Hamas must be forcibly removed from power. Its 30,000 fighters are an armed militia, not soldiers in uniform. The objectives of 10/7 were to kill, rape, maim, mutilate, burn, kidnap and subject to public humiliation on the streets of Gaza as many Israelis as possible; undermine Israelis’ confidence in their government’s ability to protect them; provoke a reaction of extreme violence from Israel that would kill huge numbers of Palestinian civilians, the more the better to inflame the Arab street, enrage Muslims worldwide and flood the streets of Western cities with massive crowds shouting pro-Palestinian/Hamas slogans and spewing Jew hatred; secure the international isolation of Israel; dismantle the Abraham Accords; and disrupt the process of normalisation of relations with Arab states.

The international humanitarian law requirement of proportionality does not mean in proportion to the initial attack but in relation to the military objective. If the number of civilians killed in the war is very high, that’s due to Hamas hiding fighters and weaponry deep amid civilian populations. Israel does try to do everything possible – from initial advance warnings to vacate, to choice of targets and weapons – to minimise casualties. But not if that means allowing Hamas to continue as a threat to Israel.

The biggest constraints are operational. Israel wills the end but is it strong enough to prevail? Does it intend to kill all Hamas fighters or annihilate its high command? Is the military goal feasible and achievable? At what cost? What about the hostages?

Wong has taken sides. It may yet turn out to be the right side of history, given the muddled morality of the huge numbers of rabidly anti-Jewish protesters across the West. But it is unquestionably the wrong side of morality. She should watch Israel’s 43 minutes of raw footage from October 7 using CCTV security cameras, dashcams and GoPro cameras used by the terrorists. No context is needed to know that burning children and parents tied together and raping women next to the bodies of slain revellers are evil.

The West gave us the Enlightenment and Enlightenment values are worth fighting for. Israel has become the frontline in that war.

Ramesh Thakur is emeritus professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN assistant secretary-general.