Should auld acquaintance be forgot?
No no no no no!
Australia will be there, Australia will be there!
—‘Australia will be there’, Skipper Francis, 1914
The unresolved question of Palestine has for decades caused devastation and death, and is now doing so on an unprecedented scale. Long before Benjamin Netanyahu responded in force to Hamas’s violent outbreak on 7 October 2023, Israel had many times attacked Palestinians in Gaza: most recently in 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2021. The latest assault was hailed as a second Nakba by Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, referencing the ‘Catastrophe’ of 1948, and has since reduced the Palestinian population of 2.1 million in Gaza by more than 32,000. Netanyahu has made it clear that Israel’s target is not just Hamas, but all of Gaza and the West Bank too. ‘Collective punishment’ has entered our lexicon, together with ‘potential genocide’.
Along with the horrors unfolding before our eyes comes the question of the breakup and realignment of global powers. The rest of the world will not easily forget the scale of destruction wrought by Israel and its allies, and this may well signal the moment when the Anglo-US alliance starts to decline in terms of military, economic and ‘moral’ power.
Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza is inspiring terror there and militarism elsewhere. Repercussions have spread quickly across the region. On 2 February the United States resumed bombings in Iraq and Syria. The attacks, which have killed many civilians, are America’s retaliation for the deaths of three of its military personnel in Jordan, blamed by Washington on the Iranian-backed Iraqi group Kata’ib Hezbollah. President Biden said that Iran, having supplied the weapons, was responsible for the deaths. What responsibility the United States itself has for generously supplying weapons, finance and intelligence to Israel he didn’t say, but complicity in genocide springs to mind.
On 27 January 2024 the International Court of Justice found South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel plausible, ordering Israel to prevent it and alleviate a human catastrophe. Israel was ordered to move immediately to deliver humanitarian assistance and essential services to the Palestinians in Gaza. This order was twice ignored, and on the day of the ICJ’s ruling, Israel distractingly, and inaccurately, alleged that twelve members of the United Nations Works and Relief Agency for Palestinians and Refugees (UNWRA) had collaborated with Hamas during the 7 October outbreak.
Between 7 October 2023 and early February 2024, Israel killed 152 UNWRA staff and damaged 147 of its installations. On 30 January, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called its allegations against UNWRA staff ‘highly, highly credible’ even while admitting that the United States had not investigated them. Sky News and Britain’s Channel 4 did investigate, however, and found no proof that UNRWA members were involved in terror attacks on Israel, while the Financial Times later found that four, not twelve, UNWRA workers were accused of collaboration. Israel nevertheless seized the opportunity to shut down UNWRA. The United States and sixteen other major donors, including Australia, immediately suspended their financial support for the UN’s oldest such organisation. Citing only Israel’s claims, members of the US Congress accused UNRWA of having ‘longstanding connections to terrorism and promotion of antisemitism’. Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong later acknowledged that Canberra had joined its allies in suspending funding without having seen proof of Israel’s claims against UNWRA. None has since appeared, and Wong has had to restore Australia’s funding.
Wars are rarely waged on the spur of the moment. The carnage in Israel and Gaza is the culmination of a long sequence of events, the most recent of which dates from two years before the 7 October outbreak. Netanyahu, facing public opposition to his Supreme Court measures and allegations of corruption, needed a cause that would unify the nation and appeal to his rightist government; a war against Hamas would divert American military funding from Ukraine and refocus Washington’s attention on the Middle East. What the Americans knew we can only speculate, or find out from Wikileaks. But it’s unlikely that Netanyahu did not warn Biden to prepare the United States for this result.
After the 7 October breakout, a hasty tweet from Netanyahu’s account denied that he had been forewarned about ‘Hamas war intentions’. It said that all his security officials had ‘again and again’ assessed that Hamas had been deterred and was ‘looking for a settlement … up until the outbreak of the war’. That tweet was soon taken down, but an Israeli publication, Yedioth Ahronoth, reported that the head of Shin Bet had travelled to the south on 6 October and ordered a special counterterror force to confront any potential incursions from Gaza. Young Israelis were not warned away from their music festival.
The atrocities currently taking place in Gaza are the worst since the Holocaust, which inspired the Genocide Convention. This irony has led some friends of Israel to change their view, not about Jews in general but about Zionists, and Israel’s leaders. It has also confirmed Israel’s enemies in their convictions, and made a mockery of the Abraham Accords reached in 2020 between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, to which the Palestinian Authority was not a party. The spectacle of Israel’s collective punishment, strategic deadlock, escalation consent and rejection of mediation in Gaza has shocked all but two members of the UN Security Council, all but one justice of the International Criminal Court, and all but thirty-three member states in the UN General Assembly. But Gaza calls on the world to apply its collective mind to a process that was happening well before the search for a Jewish homeland began in the last century, and act at last to end it.
The many faces of terror
The atrocities in Gaza reveal both the horror and the complicity of Israel and its Western allies—a situation where the mask has well and truly slipped. However, this has also, simultaneously, generated a further hardening of positions, with the discourses of ‘terror’—a term that has become more expansive and distorted since 9/11—being used to justify what is happening in Gaza and elsewhere.
In mid-January, for example, American and British forces, backed by a coalition of seventeen nations including Australia, began bombing Yemen. Members of Houthi group Ansar Allah had been attacking military and commercial ships bound for Israel in the Red Sea since the IDF blew up the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza on 17 October 2023. Despite being targeted for several years by Saudi Arabia, and always called ‘rebels’ in Western reports, the Houthi are in nominal control of Yemen and intend to continue their missile and drone attacks until Israel ends its war in Gaza.
Even after American missiles hit targets in Yemen with another round of attacks, on 4 February 2024 Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder told reporters that the United States was not at war with the group—perhaps because the new war had no chance of being authorised by the UN Security Council. It may not be authorised by Congress either, if the administration is found to have lied about another illegal war. Media in Hong Kong reported that after the Davos meeting on 9 February, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan asked China’s Foreign Affairs Minister Wang Yi to mediate in the dispute with the Houthi: clearly, the last thing the United States needs is another unwinnable war. At minimum, Washington prefers its wars to be deniable.
Instead of treating the Yemen deployment as a war that requires Congress to consider a new Authorization of Military Force, President Biden thus invoked the approvals that funded the ‘War on Terror’ two decades ago. Although the current hostilities in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, Biden cited Article 51 of the United Nations Charter and invoked the right to self-defence, implicitly against terrorists, who can be anyone he designates. His new ‘axis of evil’ is North Korea, China, Russia and Iran.
While the Houthi are ‘rebels’, Hamas fighters are regularly described as ‘militants’, and their Islamic resistance movement, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, has been listed as ‘terrorist’ by several governments, including Australia’s. The United States has done so three times. The same applies to Hezbollah in Lebanon, where Israel resumed attacks in late March. Any state can declare whatever it likes to be ‘terrorism’, since no universal agreement has been reached on what terrorism is.i The BBC scrupulously avoids describing anyone as a ‘terrorist’, while Murdoch headlines are indiscriminate with the term. Pope Francis has condemned any anti-Semitic ‘manifestation against Jews and Judaism’, but has also said that what’s happening in Gaza ‘is not war, it’s terrorism’. By most definitions, ‘terrorism’ refers to sudden attacks by individuals or groups whose motives are to achieve political or social change—and, some add, to seek vengeance for attacks on fellow believers.
Islamists have been targeted in the War on Terror since 2001, but many other groups have also been targeted in the past, and are still labelled ‘terrorist’ by those who oppose them, notably the IRA by Britain and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Ukraine says Russian speakers in Donbas are ‘terrorists’, as Russia for years named its Chechen citizens.ii Uighurs in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) made several terrorist attacks on Han Chinese during the Islamist uprising, but some Uighurs also joined fellow Sunni in Syria to fight the Alawite government as notional allies of the West, and hence were not ‘terrorists’; on returning to Xinjiang with American support, they could be used against Beijing.iii Uighur groups in exile in the United States have dubiously accused Beijing of genocide in Xinjiang, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the 2022 Beijing Games ‘the Genocide Olympics’. iv In Canberra, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has since 2018 promoted such allegations.v It fails to compare them with the genocidal onslaught in Gaza.
The leaders of the United States and Israel assert their right to defend their nations against terrorism, even if that means killing and injuring many non-terrorists inside or outside of both their countries, and even if doing so violates many UN instruments. They do not admit that they are inflicting terrorism on Palestinians, who also have a right to resist aggression. Instead they cite the 1988 Hamas manifesto calling for the destruction of Israel—which Hamas dropped in 2017—to justify their own intention to destroy Hamas. They point to the repeated firing of rockets from Gaza into Israeli communities as evidence of terrorism, but not the bombing of Gaza by the IDF. In fact, what Israel itself has inflicted on the Palestinians both before and since October 2023 is terror. While Israel and the United States declare Hamas and Hezbollah to be ‘terrorists’, their own governments’ behaviour and motivations should, if a proper definition existed, be described as State Terror.
The risks of escalation are mounting, and they include nuclear war. The Netanyahu government, which can dictate to both sides of US politics and get paid for it, blames Iran for attacking US assets, apparently seeking to draw its American ally into a wider war against Israel’s neighbours and its Iranian arch-enemy. Both Israel and the United States would welcome an opportunity to gain control of the Middle East and overpower Iran: Israel has for years wanted to destroy Iran’s nuclear industry before it gets atomic weapons.
Settler colonies and new alliances
With the collapse of European empires after the Second World War came wars against revanchist colonial powers, then development, self-determination and non-alignment. The independence process continues, with the Rest now outnumbering and outperforming the West by many measures and the centre of economic gravity shifting to the Global South and East. South Africa, a former Dutch and British settler colony, has joined China, now the world’s largest economy, in the nine-member BRICS group. Some forty nations have applied to join their non-militaristic collaboration.
None of the settler colonies—Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States—shows an inclination to join BRICS, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Shanghai Consensus or the Non-Aligned Movement. Britain and its other Anglo allies hold the pious hope that American military supremacy will protect them. But a former prime minister has argued that it is particularly our alliance with the United States that endangers Australia.vi Whoever its next president is, the United States will face intractable problems, and war on several fronts. China and Russia have found recent American leaders to be untrustworthy negotiators, and in November America will become a less reliable ally than ever. Nations have permanent interests, not permanent friends, as the huge costs and dubious benefits of AUKUS demonstrate.
Complicit in atrocity
Nations have good reasons for mutual mistrust. Governments lie to each other and to their people, and they rarely apply their own rules to themselves, nor those they have agreed on with allies. Those that can, subvert and destabilise other nations. Those that can’t, suffer what they must. Therefore, Australia is timid: we fear China, depend on ANZUS and AUKUS for security, and are irrationally complicit in successive US atrocities. Our government doesn’t trust the international rules originally devised by the United States, and favours the ‘rules-based order’ that Washington claims has replaced it instead.
Looking back no further than the years of the Cold War, the United States’s record of deceptive activities doesn’t justify such trustful sycophancy from Australia. A selection of such events from A. B. Abrams’s wide-ranging 2023 book Atrocity Fabrication and its Consequences shows why.
Australian solidarity: With whom?
Although ancient enmities in the Middle East should not involve Australia, they did so in both British imperial wars and two world wars. Then, because of the ANZUS Alliance, Australia was conscripted into the American wars in Korea and Vietnam and the United States’s ‘forever war’ on terror. And because of Australia’s solidarity with Israel, affirmed by Foreign Minister Wong, ANZUS involves us in the current life-or-death struggle in Gaza, where Israel targets not just Hamas, as it claims, but all Palestinians.
If the Australian government continues its military collaboration with Israel and continues to allow intelligence and logistic functions at Pine Gap to benefit the Israel Defence Force, it may be complicit in State Terror and in war crimes. If it fails to fully and promptly reinstate UNWRA funding, it will be in breach of article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention, because it will be ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’.
After supporting the West’s century-long search for a Jewish homeland, Australia is now a multicultural society with many more Arab Australian than Jewish Australian citizens. Unaccustomed as Australian leaders are to making independent foreign policy decisions, this is their moment to decide whose side Australia is on, as many Jewish Australians have courageously done.
Every time Australian governments have faced the choice between identity and geography, they have defaulted to the Anglo alliance. Now this alliance ties us to illegality, aggression and the prospect of a losing war against our major trade partner. Nations in the Global South and East have turned away from war as a means of resolving differences, and Australia should join them before it is too late. Our future course should be armed neutrality.
More than ever, along the lines of new powers in the world, the possibility of new alliances and the final assertion of brute force, all the legitimating discourses have been exposed for what they are: Australia’s choice.
May 2024
i See C. A. J. Coady, The Meaning of Terrorism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
ii But enmity between Russia and Chechnya is reported to be over.
iii A. B. Abrams, Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order, Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023, p. 450.
iv Abrams, Atrocity Fabrication, p. 501.
v Abrams, Atrocity Fabrication, p. 493.
vi Malcolm Fraser, Dangerous Allies, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2014.