Labor turns a blind eye to facts as details emerge on hostage abuse
Our government remains weirdly, unhealthily, obsessed with demonising Israel while ignoring the obvious. Are they wilfully ignorant or just a bit dim?
Less than a week ago the UN received a report compiled by doctors, specialists and psychologists that spells out in horrific detail the torture and abuse of hostages held by Hamas since October 7, 2023.
You’d be forgiven for missing it, so underwhelming was the response to the initial detail, which was submitted to the UN’s special rapporteur on torture.
So far some of the more graphic information has been withheld and it’s unclear if it will be made public. What we do know is that while held in captivity, many by civilian families, hostages were forced to perform sex acts on each other. They were sexually abused by their captors. Some were branded with hot irons, whipped, starved and subject to other forms of torture. The report was compiled from the testimonies of hostages released in November 2023 as well as those rescued by Israeli forces.
One freed hostage, a woman I was able to speak to when in Israel in December, told me she was treated quite well given that she hadn’t been raped. She was held by a civilian family – “Hamas sympathisers” rather than soldiers, is how she described them.
I asked her what she spoke to them about. “Everything,” she told me. “From the dogs and the cats and the kids, to what do you like to eat … there was a lot of discussion about why the Jews feel we have a right to be here. That was something that was very unclear to them.” Process that if you can.
Personal testimonies at two ends of the spectrum: one an organic conversation I had; the other, meticulously documented medical and psychological survivor reports that were compiled across the course of a year. What I can almost guarantee you is that both will be dismissed, diminished and discounted by the usual suspects in this country and, obviously, at the corrupt and captured UN.
In a tough field of worthy contenders, there’s one thing that has come close to breaking my resilience this past 15 months: the intellectual dishonesty and absurd historical revisionism that seems to apply only to this conflict, to the Jewish people and to Israel more broadly. It defies even base level intelligence and knowledge of history, let alone acceptance of the documented atrocities of October 7, 2023. Revising the past, ignoring the present.
This week, Hamas scuttled yet another ceasefire deal. At the last minute, it refused to hand over any living hostages, offering instead to return only bodies of those it has killed. Even the Tikva Forum for families of hostages has had enough, demanding the Israeli government cease negotiations and send more troops into northern Gaza. Time for their loved ones is running out.
Why is anyone surprised that Hamas has gone back on its word here? History, facts (not feelings), paint a clear picture of a pattern of behaviour since the beginning.
At every turn, under every iteration of leadership, the Palestinians have walked away at the 11th hour from every deal offered to them, most notably at Camp David under the Clinton administration. Everything was on a silver platter but Yasser Arafat said no, it’s not enough.
Which of course raises the obvious questions: what would ever be enough and when? This is not the behaviour of an actor with good intentions that genuinely is seeking peaceful coexistence. To deny this is to deny facts; saying “Oh yes, we want peace and coexistence” while every action speaks to the contrary.
One such action maintained by the Palestinian Authority is its so-called Pay for Slay policy, whereby families of suicide bombers are rewarded financially. Back in 2007 the World Bank warned that the payments, which are cloaked as humanitarian, “did not seem justified from a welfare or fiscal perspective”. Well, obviously.
Our government remains weirdly, unhealthily, obsessed with demonising Israel while ignoring the obvious. Are they wilfully ignorant or just a bit dim?
Worse still, Australian Labor and the Greens have flipped the victim-perpetrator paradigm on its head. The political parties that claim to believe all women (that’s on the off chance they can define what a woman is) tell Israel: you deserved it. Yes, you have a black eye but you shouldn’t have worn that miniskirt.
Let me give you just a couple of examples that speak loudly to how hideously disproportionate the government response to the war in Gaza is, in relation to other conflicts and global issues.
The war in Sudan started roughly six months before the Hamas attacks of October 7. So far, roughly seven million people are displaced and about 65,000 have been killed. Like the war in Gaza, it is a foreign conflict with huge loss of life far from our shores. Our government is silent.
In the past year, the Taliban (close cousins of Hamas extremists) has passed 21 laws that have, one by one, stripped basic freedoms from the women of Afghanistan. Women in that country can no longer go to school or university, or drive a car. They can’t speak in public, look at a man, look out the window of their own homes. It’s bloody obscene. These women are being erased before the entire world and the UN gives these savages a seat at the table.
Our own government is flogging them with sodden vegetables. I questioned, for example, if we played cricket against the team. They are not allowed to come here but our Aussie cricketers will play them overseas if required. No prizes for guessing what happened to the Afghan women’s cricket team.
Six days ago, the UN issued a longwinded word salad of a statement that said: “The members of the Security Council reaffirmed their strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity of Afghanistan.” A long couple of paragraphs later it said something flaccid about what was happening to women and girls. It did not mention the Taliban. You couldn’t find a more soggy tissue with which to be attacked. Our government has had nothing to say.
Hamas has turned hospitals into military bases, hospitals that are run by doctors who also happen to be terrorists. Hamas is embedded in any and every level of Gazan society and community.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese fall over themselves at every step to chide and chasten the one country that is doing the world’s heavy lifting on this. Revising history, immediate and past. Continuing to turn a blind eye to the present.
I’m by no means an expert but having spent more time now in Israel and the Middle East than probably half of the federal cabinet and definitely the entire parliamentary Greens party, let me tell you this: There is a reason the federal government’s current travel advisory prohibits travel to the West Bank. It’s not safe; it describes the security situation as “volatile and unpredictable”.
It’s not safe because it’s not stable. It’s not stable because of deathly intrafactional fighting, not because of Israel.
It is history on repeat. Fatah and Hamas fighting for territory, power and control and the Palestinian Authority fighting for life.
Which brings me back to the start. Revising the past, ignoring the present. Wanting to reward a regime that has shown no capacity to self-govern, that financially rewards suicide attacks, that cannot hold elections, that has no fiscal probity, that subjugates women and minorities, has no capacity to deal with Hamas, that continues to play the victim on the world stage.
Our government is choosing to reward this sorry mess with statehood and legitimacy, without any requirement for change or reform. It is Chamberlainian appeasement on speed. I am bereft as to the government’s reasoning but one thing I do know is this. History will judge accordingly. It always does.
