Campbell: Australian criticisms of Israel are helping Hamas close in on victory

Every time the Australian government criticises Israel, far from helping to bring peace, it is sending a message that Hamas’s violence is bringing it closer to victory, writes James Campbell.

Arriving at Ben Gurion Airport on Thursday night, the woman helping me with my bags had the question everyone seemed to want answered: “Why does the world hate us?”

The mother of four, 46, has been back at work only for six weeks after 2½ months serving in Gaza with the Israel Defence Forces, and had that day been told she would soon return to base. She hadn’t been told where she was going and was worried this meant war with Iran’s proxy Hezbollah was imminent in the north.

Her question, or some form of it, must have been asked by nearly every Israeli I spoke with in the five days I have just spent in the country.

Eight months after Hamas fighters burst from Gaza and murdered almost 1200 people, including 796 mostly unarmed civilians, the trauma is still fresh.

The bewilderment at how it could come to be that, after enduring that savagery, they have ended up being painted the villains is accompanied by anger at the world’s indifference to the fate of 120 hostages still unaccounted for.

A family member or representative of Israelis who were kidnapped or murdered on October 7 in front of Parliament House last November. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Israelis are also offended by the alacrity with which the foreign media reports alleged crimes committed by its military, in many cases simply regurgitating Hamas propaganda.

The reason for that is unlike our bonsai volunteer military, Israel’s is a true citizen army in which the overwhelming majority of people – non-Druze Arabs and religious Jews are exempt – from 18 years old must serve 32 months if they are men and two years if they are women.

Nearly everyone I met in the past week had either served themselves in the current war – Israelis remain army reservists until they turn 40, older for officers – or had children who or would soon be.

Israeli soldiers operating in the Gaza Strip. Israelis are proud of the way they have kept civilian casualties to a minimum. Picture: Israeli Army/AFP

There is also anger at the hypocrisy of the way they are being pilloried for the civilian deaths they have caused in Gaza, given the much bloodier record of some of their critics. It will come as a shock to Australians appalled at the daily images of Gazan suffering but Israelis are proud of the way they have kept civilian casualties to a minimum. Israelis maintain that by mid-May, of the 30,000 people who had died in the war, the ratio of combatants to non-combatants is close to one-to-one sounds pretty grim. But it’s a good deal better than the one to 2.5 ratio the Americans and their allies achieved in Mosul.

Israelis also say the criticism of the death toll is doubly unfair because they are battling an enemy that not only doesn’t wear uniforms but has embedded itself in Gazan society.

Indeed, Israelis will tell you foreigners fail to grasp that, as bizarre as it sounds, for Hamas, civilian casualties are not an accidental and regrettable consequence of the fighting, they are something its leaders exult in.

You don’t have to take my word for it. The evidence is clear from the intercepted messages from its leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, to his underlings that were published in The Wall Street Journal this month.

The deaths of Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honour”, he told a colleague who had lost family members.

And since for Sinwar every civilian death weakens the world’s support for Israel, the more the merrier.

“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” he was recently reported to have told his colleagues. What is even harder to get your head around than the depravity of that thinking is the delusion Hamas is winning. How could that be?

Apparently in three ways.

Its first victory was the October attack itself that showed that Israel was vulnerable. Its second is that, despite its military setbacks, it remains intact and still in charge of Gaza. As for its third victory, sadly, this is where countries such as Australia come in.

The mistake many of us have been making for much of the past year has been looking at the protest against Israel with its nonsense talk of settler-colonialism – as though the Jews are not native to the land of Israel – and its wholesale adoption of the Palestinian claims to all the real estate “from the river to the sea” and to think they’re having no impact there. But they are because they help Hamas convince Palestinians that they are winning because the West is with it.

So every time our government criticises Israel or votes with its enemies at the UN, far from helping to bring peace, we are sending a message that Hamas’s violence is bringing it closer to victory.

James was the guest of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council

Originally published as Campbell: Australian criticisms of Israel are helping Hamas close in on victory