Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong took a long time just to call for a ceasefire. And their belated declaration of Palestinian statehood is an empty gesture when we are still sending F-35 Jet components to Israel.
But Wong says that there is a need “to end the cycle of violence.”
What “cycle of violence”? Hamas is not destroying Israeli hospitals, schools and synagogues.
Albanese and Wong have been making excuses for doing nothing, saying that we are so far away and not having much influence, not being a great power. But, as Chris Sidoti just explained at the National Press Club in Canberra, this is the wrong question.
In fact, it’s a dereliction of legal and moral responsibility. As Sidoti explained, the primary question is: What are our pressing obligations under international law and the Genocide Convention which we are not acting on.
With US President Trump’s latest so-called “peace plan” things are in flux right now and it’s not clear what will happen.
Trump’s so-called “peace plan” requires that the victims of the genocide — not its perpetrators, Israel — must be “deradicalised” and demilitarised.
But, of course, our Prime Minister thinks it’s all fine. Albanese said: “Australia welcomes progress on President Trump's plan to bring peace to Gaza” and “I reiterate our call on Hamas to agree to the plan, lay down its arms and release all remaining hostages without delay”.
Of course, the plan was presented to the Palestinians as an ultimatum: They were told “Take it, or leave it” — in which case, Israel would be permitted to “finish the job”, that is, their genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Palestinians were not consulted and the plan offers no path to statehood.
In fact, speaking in Hebrew to reporters immediately after the plan was presented, Netanyahu rejected the idea of Palestinian state.
What the Palestinians are being “offered” now is not rights or self-determination, but a permanent apartheid.
Trump’s overall message was that Palestinians must surrender their fight for liberation and submit to subjugation by Israel. This is not a peace plan, but just terms of surrender for Hamas.
Trump’s 20-point plan transforms the Gaza Strip from a graveyard into the French Riviera, governed by the former British prime minister and war criminal Tony Blair through a “Board of Peace.”
But Blair should be on trial at The Hague, not running Gaza. As one British commentator Ash Sarkar said: “They got Tony Blair because Satan was unavailable.”
But of course, again, Albanese said: “Tony Blair is someone who has always played a constructive role”!
It seemed that Hamas could neither accept Trump’s plan nor reject it. But Hamas did a bit of both, and they achieved the appearance of a diplomatic victory. Trump actually posted the Hamas response on his social media.
But Israel was not happy.
Journalist Jeremy Scahill reported that Netanyahu “told Trump this is nothing to celebrate, and that it doesn’t mean anything”. Trump shot back: “I don’t know why you’re always so fucking negative.”
Of course, Trump is unpredictable and Israel can always blow up any deal, to continue the genocide and blame Hamas.
Whatever happens, in the wake of the genocide in Gaza we — especially Jews — are facing one of the great moral tests of our time. Genocide scholars now suggest that the true number of Palestinians murdered in Gaza may be in the hundreds of thousands.
Israeli journalist Gideon Levy points out that Israel is a lunatic state: More than 90% of people support what Israel is doing in Gaza and most think Israel is not going far enough.
The journalist Mehdi Hasan recently said that if you support what Israel is doing in Gaza, you are a sociopath.
But it’s much worse than that: Supporters of Israel are not sociopaths, but perfectly ordinary people. That’s the problem. This is what the Jewish academic Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil” referring to the Nazis.
There has been a taboo about making comparisons of Israel and the Nazis, but no longer. In fact, as early as 1948, Arendt, Einstein and other Jews signed a letter in the New York Times describing the Herut (Freedom) party as “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal, to the Nazi and Fascist parties”.
That party was the forerunner of today’s Likud — Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing party. That letter by Arendt and Einstein warned against exactly what we see today: The fatal combination of “ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and a propaganda of racial superiority”.
Today, I am proud to be among very many anti-Zionist Jews, here and around the world, who have been protesting what Israel is doing in our name.
And, as always, I want to give a shout-out to those holding the banner “Jews Against the Occupation ‘48.” Our presence refutes the smear that our movement and these rallies are antisemitic Jew-hate rallies.
Nevertheless, the notorious Israel lobby organisations continue to harass prominent critics of Israel’s crimes on the spurious charge of antisemitism.
This is a McCarthyite, or Stalinist, witch hunt targeting decent heroic people such as Antoinette Latouf, Mary Kostakidis, Nick Riemer and John Keane, and now the highly esteemed Dr Peter Macdonald at St Vincent’s Hospital who is facing absurd accusations.
This witch hunt is not new. Years ago in an interview, the late Israeli parliamentarian, Shulamit Aloni, said of anti-Semitism that “It’s a trick we always use” to silence critics of Israel.
Fifty years ago, the distinguished Israel diplomat Abba Eban said: “One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the … [non-Jewish] world is to prove that … Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism.”
In particular, Palestinians are expected to put aside their suffering, trauma and grief and to pander to Jewish discomfort about a slogan, or keffiyeh, or a watermelon. In these circumstances, the current obsession with a definition of antisemitism is obscene.
The reason for this tidal wave of propaganda is that the intense efforts by the Israel’s apologists to deny Israel’s vast crimes is not working. That’s because everyone can see the truth on our mobile phones. Gaza looks like Hiroshima after the atom bomb in 1945.
Who in their right mind can believe that this is in self-defence, targeting Hamas militants?
So, Israel and its flunkies in the Zionist Lobby have had to turn to their traditional methods to distract attention from the horrors of Israel’s genocide. We are being inundated with moral panic about an alleged explosion of antisemitism and concerns about Jewish safety since October 7, 2023.
But anger at people who are guilty of committing or supporting oppression, war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid is not racism. It is moral outrage and contempt for what they do, not what they are.
I know antisemitism when I see it. My mother and grandmother survived the World War II Nazi Auschwitz extermination camp, and I grew up with their stories. As it happens, I’ve just returned from my first visit to that awful place in Poland.
Their experience of racism and prejudice is the reason I stand in solidarity the Palestinians because, today, Jews are not the victims, but we are the perpetrators.
Indeed, there is nothing more despicable than to see Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, wearing a Yellow Star to play the victim. It desecrates the memory of my parents and the victims of real antisemitism when it is weaponised to silence justified criticism of Israel’s crimes.
My mother always asked why did the world look away from the genocide of the Jews and do nothing? Why were they silent?
Today we know the answer because we know what this complicity looks like.
The moral predicament has been forcefully illustrated by the Israeli journalist Amira Hass, writing of her mother’s experience entering the Nazi concentration camp and seeing German housewives who were spectators. She refers to their “despicable watching from the side”.
Jews are placed in an invidious position by the fact that Israel claims to be acting on behalf of all Jews everywhere. And, of course, leading Jewish organisations such as the Jewish Board of Deputies, Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Australia Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Zionist Federation of Australia are enthusiastic propagandists and apologists for Israel’s crimes.
The famous New York Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who marched with Martin Luther King said in a decent society that is not indifferent to suffering and cruelty “Few are guilty, but all are responsible”.
This is what Jews around the world mean when they say: “Not in my name” and “Silence is complicity.” Of course, it’s the same sentiment expressed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu who said: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
Finally, it’s important to say something about our chant heard at rallies around the world, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” This is always condemned by apologists for Israel’s crimes as antisemitic, calling for the murder of Jews and the annihilation of Israel.
The slogan was condemned by Albanese as “very violent” and having no place in Australia, but he has never condemned Israel’s bombing of refugee tents, hospitals or mosques as “very violent”.
In the context when Israel has officially declared that there will be no Palestinian state “from the River to the Sea”, it should be obvious that the slogan is a plea for liberation and justice.
Dr Lana Tatour has pointed out: “They ought to listen to Palestinians who have been articulating liberation as an inclusive project of equal rights for all.” She says, this liberation means “equality for all the inhabitants of the land – and the dismantling of the settler colonialism and the apartheid regime that exist now”. This is “The demand for … the right of Palestinians to live in dignity and equality in their homeland.”
This is not antisemitism.
The point has been made by US Palestinian Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib who said “a call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence” is “not a call for death, destruction or hate”.
Among Palestinians who are articulating liberation as an inclusive project is Nasser Mashni, President of Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, who said eloquently: “If you have a problem with freedom and justice for everyone, the problem is not the chant, it is you.”
We have a shared vision for the future of all the people of the region, Israelis and Palestinians alike. So we must demand an immediate, permanent end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the assault on Gaza.
And we must bring the war criminals and their accomplices, like Albanese and Wong, to account in the International Criminal Court.
We owe it to the memory of the victims. And we owe it to the future prospects of a just peace for all the peoples in historic Palestine.
That’s what we mean when we say “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
[Peter Slezak is an Assoc Professor of Philosophy at the University of NSW. He delivered this speech to a vigil, organised by Palestine Action Group, on October 6, at Sydney Town Hall square on Gadigal Country/Sydney.]