In the past weeks, various reports have started to emerge pointing to the awful truth that Hamas has fewer than 40 living “humanitarian” hostages left. No cattle to trade. No chips with which to bargain. Humanitarian hostages are women, the elderly, the sick. We all know what Hamas does to women. Why is anyone surprised that so few of this cohort are alive still?
Although still not confirmed formally, the soft drip of information has the look and feel of a deliberate attempt to soften the news when and if it is. And why wouldn’t this be true? There has to be a reason Hamas repeatedly refuses to accept any of the dozen or so ceasefire deals that were all contingent on freeing the people they dragged from their homes at gunpoint six long months ago. How can you agree to a deal when you have nothing left to trade?
After enacting the most horrendous savagery, the most horrific slaughter of the world’s Jewish community since the Holocaust, the members of Hamas, like the cowards they are, remain in hiding in hospitals, tunnels, schools. Using civilians as human shields, all the while egged on by useful idiots and cretinous fools in the NGO sector and the West more broadly.
This awful conflict, this terrible lonely war that Israel is fighting, should have been over. It never needed to be this way. Naive? No, just pragmatic and easily proved with one simple question.
What if? What if, six months ago, in the days and weeks following the October 7 massacres the international community had stood united and unequivocal in support of Israel, and demanded the safe return of every hostage? Every single one, immediately, alive and unharmed.
What if, after the broken, semi-naked body of Shani Louk was paraded like a trophy through streets lined with cheering Gazans, the international community had done something other than offering Hamas a level of appeasement that made British politician Neville Chamberlain look like a hawkish warmonger?
The war would have been over in weeks. Countless civilian lives saved in Gaza. But no, the West, including the Australian government, were friends in name only to Israel, the only functioning democracy in the region.
What if? Two simple words that in the context of the past six months are pregnant with grief. Heavy with lament. What if?
This question should haunt the terror apologists, the great (intellectually) unwashed and morally homeless who still contort themselves in an effort to justify the unjustifiable. The ones who lecture Israel from the safety of their parliamentary offices, their university lecture theatres, about as far from danger as you can get on the other side of the world.
I can’t make this make sense. Our Foreign Minister’s astonishing (not in a good way) suggestion that Palestinian statehood be on the table is breathtaking. Again, not in a good way. It’s like finding out your kid has been picked up for aggravated assault and buying them a car as punishment.
The world has seen the fruit of appeasement; it’s called the Holocaust. And while many voices are calling for calm and de-escalation, it ignores the truth that it’s a bit tricky while the Islamic Republic of Iran is lobbing hundreds of suicide drones and ballistic missiles into Israel; while Palestinian terrorists are still carrying out suicide attacks from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. De-escalation is another way of saying: Israel, just cop it sweet.
The world has shown its weakness in spades. The federal government’s response has been awash with mixed messages. War is bad. Hamas probably shouldn’t have taken those hostages. Israel, chill out a moment. Hamas, ease up, will you? Iran shouldn’t attack Israel. How about Palestinian statehood while we’re at it?
It’s a mess of contradictions, lacking in moral clarity. If 253 Australians had been held captive for six months after being dragged from their homes, if our borders were under attack while suicide missions were being carried out every single week for half a year, what would we do? I propose that we wouldn’t know where to start.
It was highly instructive and equally as telling that as hundreds of rockets and suicide drones rained down on Israel over the weekend, it was defended by a coalition of the US, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Britain.
It shouldn’t be lost on us that the Arab states know full well the kind of havoc Hamas is trying to wreak here, and they have acted accordingly. Not one has offered to take displaced Palestinians. The Egyptian border with Gaza at Rafah remains tightly closed. Are we waking up yet?
Make no mistake. Extremism of any kind, in any shape, is emboldened by weakness. NSW police looked the other way when angry mobs descended on the Sydney Opera House forecourt and burned Israeli flags on the night of October 9. They made excuses.
Then this week, after a stabbing at Christ the Good Shepherd Church at Wakeley in western Sydney on Monday evening that has been declared a terrorist act, they spoke of hunting down members of the community who turned up at the church on that night.
Yes, that was a fraught situation, no more so than the night of shame on the Opera House steps. The response was embarrassingly and enlighteningly disproportionate and points to an unspoken, two-tiered approach to policing.
The hubris of our nation’s leaders to think the same issues with extremism that are infecting other Western democracies won’t touch Australia. This is a social cancer that has metastasised around the globe and we cannot deal with it with word cuddles. Obvious statements such as “there’s no place for extremism in Australia”, while of course true, will be politely ignored by said extremists, who are not inclined to play by the rules.
If a murderer turned up on your doorstep, would you invite them in? If a madman climbed through the kitchen window, would you pour them a drink? The weakness of the West, Australia included, has been costly. At the beginning of this war, I wrote about the disaster of appeasement and how there was some degree in which they could be forgiven in the 1930s because we didn’t have social media.
There are no excuses left. We can’t pretend; we must take notice. We’ve watched it unfold in real time and still we have stood by and done nothing. So, it brings me back to my original, grim conclusion. The quiet part, the whispered part, that needs to be screamed from every rooftop.
I have another question, one I will leave you to consider. What will our government say, what will the Foreign Minister say if the terrible rumours are true and there are indeed few, if any, hostages left to bargain with? Will they have the courage to ask themselves, and face the truth of the answer?
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Most, if not all, of the remaining hostages being held by Hamas are more than likely dead. There, I said the quiet part out loud. In truth I feel like screaming it, this quiet, wretched part that up until now has rarely been spoken of and only in reluctant whispers – as if hushed tones somehow may mean it isn’t true.