You don’t have to back Netanyahu to know Israel fights for what we take for granted

While my hair has committed many a crime against fashion through the years, I never have had to consider how walking around with it uncovered might get me thrown in jail or killed.

Iranian women praying under the leadership of Ali Khamenei at Tehran Mosque last year. Picture: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

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I have a lot of hair. Tonnes, in fact, and it’s naturally pretty curly and very long and somewhat chaotic.

My dad, being 50 per cent responsible for this unruly situation on my head, became less of a fan the longer I grew it. “Cut your bloody hair, Gemma!” I can still hear his voice following me down the hallway at my parents’ house.

For reasons that were never clear, he preferred my late 1990s, Ray Martin-inspired, television journalist haircut. It was not a good moment but, for whatever reason, old mate loved it.

While my hair has committed many a crime against fashion through the years, I never have had to consider how walking around with it uncovered might get me thrown in jail or killed. 

As I’m sitting here writing, there’s a soft, late afternoon summer breeze across the piazza in our hometown in northern Italy. My sister-in-law is sitting across from me; a writer, she is deep in concentration, too. Both of us have our hair uncovered. We’re dressed for summer. She’s in shorts. Our arms are bare. I’m drinking a gin and tonic. She’s having a prosecco.

This is normal life for any and every woman in the West should she so choose. So unbelievably banal that we often don’t give it the time of day.

But it’s not for women in Iran, Iraq and anywhere else that sharia law keeps women under the heavy weight of misogyny dressed in the boot of vile religious extremism.

Yet this past week, as Israel launched an attack on Iran, women in Australia and across broader Western democracies have shilled for the enemy. Have attacked, again, the only place in the Middle East where they would be able to live in freedom.

The politics of this war is for others to interrogate. I am a reluctant supporter of this latest escalation. I say reluctant because no sane person wants war. But as history shows, time and again, sometimes war is required to enforce peace. Don’t write me emails; go educate yourself. Do your own homework. Civilians will die in war and every death is a tragedy.

Greta Thunberg on the Freedom Flotilla. Picture Instagram @chris_kebbon

The social politics, however, are another thing and this one, truly from my heart, goes out to the ladies among us who consider themselves advocates and activists and feminists and the like. The women whose names we’d know if I were inclined to platform them, which I am not, and those who blindly follow. You know who you are.

You post on social media and use words such as genocide and apartheid. You got all giddy about Greta Thunberg’s odious selfie flotilla sailing to Gaza. You talk about things you have cosmetic knowledge of, at the very best. And you personify suicidal empathy. Since the escalation of hostilities in the Middle East, you’ve mostly forgotten about Gaza. (All eyes on what now??) You’re saying Israel should back off. It shouldn’t have taken out much of the Iranian nuclear facilities or senior members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

You’re not the activists you think you are. You’re simple props, occupying your own time.

Worse still, you’re the enemy of women in other countries who literally would die for the freedoms you take for granted.

I’ll go one further. You are the enemy of women everywhere. You possibly couldn’t find Tel Aviv or Tehran on a map.

I’d be willing to bet none of you knows the UN (hopeless and corrupt but, nevertheless, it has some uses) issued an update on the plight of Iranian women in September 2024. It is awful, terrible to read.

Let me quote from it directly: “Iranian security forces have escalated pre-existing patterns of physical violence, including beating, kicking and slapping women and girls who are perceived as failing to comply with the mandatory hijab laws and regulations … State authorities have also increased monitoring of hijab compliance in both the public and private spheres through the increased use of surveillance, including drones.”

In simple language, the Islamic regime uses drones to make sure women keep their hair covered, among other things. If they don’t, the consequences are potential lethal. Like they were for Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by Iran’s morality police in Tehran in 2022 for not having her hair covered correctly. Beaten to within an inch of her young life, she died in hospital. She was 22.

The UN data goes on to say that across the past two years, execution of women has risen dramatically. At the time the update was published there was a hijab and chastity bill in the final stages of approval in Iran.

Many Israelis are highly critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but they understand what Western liberal women do not: existential threat.

When Israel is doing the world’s dirty work for it, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said at the G7 summit this week, these women across the West say things like: ceasefire now.

Ladies, let me help you out a little more. In December 2024 the Centre for Human Rights in Iran detailed a surge in executions in Iran and, concurrently, a sharp rise in the number of women sent to the gallows. Yes, Iran hangs women. At least 29 executions of women in 2024 are known of. Scores of others are unconfirmed.

The women often are young. Minorities. They often are victims of child marriage. Let’s call that what it is: child rape. And it is legal in Iran.

There is something truly, substantively grotesque about women in countries such as Australia who, from the safety of their homes and universities and Instagram accounts, take the side of regime such as this. Such is your hatred for Israel you deny its right to self-defence and advocate for a regime that executes more people per capita than any other country in the world. That would allow little girls to be married off the minute they get their period.

A person doesn’t have to support the Israeli government politically (many Israelis do not), but there is a special kind of ignorance that cannot differentiate between a functioning, pluralist democracy and an evil regime that legalises child rape and beats women to death for showing their hair.

Many Israelis are highly critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but they understand what Western liberal women do not: existential threat.

They know what it’s like to live under the shadow of an enemy that has vowed, repeatedly, to wipe your entire nation from the map just because you’re Jewish.

Australia’s Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, perplexes me greatly. As a woman even more so. Her position on the Middle East makes no sense, shows no leadership.

It is based on what appears to be some fantasy that negotiation is viable. I’ll repeat what I’ve said before. Appeasement is the road to hell. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain tried in the 1930s and all the world paid the price, but none so heavily as the Jewish people.

Speaking to the ABC this week, Wong said: “We continue to urge de-escalation and the prioritisation of dialogue and diplomacy.”

There is a doomsday clock in the main square of Tehran that counts down to the annihilation of the Jewish people. Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei repeatedly has stated his intention to destroy Israel and the US.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s position on the Middle East makes no sense, shows no leadership. Picture: NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

In 2024 Iran fired hundreds upon hundreds of missiles at Israel, unprovoked. What part of that behaviour says: Yes, these are rational people with whom one might negotiate?

I want to hear something from Wong, as a leader, as a woman, that resembles strength commensurate with the women in Iran who are fighting for the mundane things we take for granted. Who are prepared to die for the right to have their hair uncovered, tousled by a warm summer breeze. To drink a prosecco in the sun while wearing shorts. If they choose, if they want to.