By Jeremy Salt
Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. (Image: Palestine Chronicle)
Neither have any of the politicians and media commentators who abuse the anti-genocide demonstrators uttered one word of condemnation of Israel for the murder of tens of thousands of children.
Australia is a rock-solid member of the US alliance, a junior member, of course, and in 1975, after the government was overthrown with a push from the CIA, had to learn the lesson of all junior members and naughty children, which is that if you don’t do what you’re told or what we expect of you, we’ll teach you not to do it again.
The lesson was learnt, and Australia has never done it again. Bound to the American chariot, Australia has been pulled into one war after another, either sending off soldiers to fight them or ‘supporting’ them politically and logistically. Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghans, Iraqis, and Syrians all had to be killed to keep Australia ‘safe.’ This was the deeply immoral trade-off.
Basically the alliance was and remains a racket. In return for the theoretical protection provided by the alliance, Australia attacks America’s enemies, buys America’s weapons and has inserted itself into the ‘five eyes’ (Australia, NZ, Canada, the UK and US), the joint intelligence and ‘security’ network, as it is usually called. Israel is an ex officio member of this alliance, with Mossad sharing and receiving intelligence secrets from the CIA, MI6, Australia’s ASIO and other agencies.
There is no evidence that any of the countries Australia has attacked on behalf of the US ever had any intention of attacking Australia or could have attacked it, but joining the US in attacking them and killing their citizens in American or Israeli interests is the endless down payment Australia makes on future protection for when the time comes.
The theory has never been put to the test. As there are no friends in politics, only interests subject to change, would the US really intervene to save Australia if its own interests weren’t involved?
In other words, the protection racket is actually like a hedge fund, a gamble, an investment that promises a good future return but without any guarantees. There is also a strong argument that this alliance is now outdated and does Australia more harm than good, especially when it comes to China, which is surely entitled to feel threatened by the large number of US military and communications bases in Australia.
Part of the alliance is being friends with America’s friends. Accordingly, bound to the US, Australia is bound to Israel as well. It can’t just break away. That would be a very unfriendly act, for which Australia would be punished.
We don’t know what politicians really think of Israel, or what they say in private, but it is not likely to be flattering. They know perfectly what is going on in Gaza, but like Brer Rabbit, they are stuck in the bramble bush of the alliance and can’t get out and say or do what they might prefer to say or do.
While the other Albanese, Francesca, is sanctioned and threatened with death for holding Israel to account, and now for seeking the suspension of Israel from the UN, Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister, is bending over backwards to accommodate it.
He has just invited Israeli president Herzog to visit, not to tell him off but to express solidarity with the state of Israel and the Jewish ‘people, ’ as Albanese put it, maybe everywhere but certainly in Australia.
Herzog is part of the genocide. He has held all Gazan Palestinians collectively responsible for the attack of October 7, 2023; he has described both Israel’s bombing of hospitals and the ICJ case against Israel as blood libels, and late in 2024 even uttered the gross lie that Israel has been going to great lengths to provide humanitarian relief for the people of Gaza. Many Australians, including those in his own Australian Labor Party (ALP), will be asking why on earth Albanese is inviting this man to their country.
Not once has Albanese condemned the massacres and the physical obliteration of the Gaza Strip, even if he doesn’t want to call it genocide. What he expects to gain from the Herzog visit, if he actually turns up, is up to him to explain, but inviting the president of a genocidal state to pay a visit is not going to go down well with a large percentage of the Australian public.
It can’t be votes because the Jewish population of Australia is too small for that. It could be political donations, especially at election time. The invitation will allay some of the antagonism in the Murdoch media towards Albanese for recognizing Palestinian statehood and allegedly failing to prevent antisemitic attacks, but photos of him standing next to Herzog and expressing solidarity with Israel will damage his party in the eyes of voters and would do more damage were it not the opposition so strongly attached to the genocidal state itself.
Much is being made in the rightwing media of how the Bondi massacre brings to a head the deterioration of public culture in Australia. Nothing expresses this culture better historically than the intrinsically democratic idea of the ‘fair go’ for everyone. This is not to say that everyone has a ‘fair go,’ but they should have one.
Australians can see that the Palestinians are being stripped of any possibility of having any kind of go at all. They are being slaughtered, and what does not outrage the politicians and the Murdoch media outrages them. Their hearts are in the right place, and their heads are screwed on the right way, unlike their critics and the open shills for Israel.
Hundreds of thousands of Australians have been demonstrating against the genocide in the past two years. Irrespective of religious or ethnic background, of age or any other difference, all of them have merged as one in their outrage at this slaughter. This surely should be a celebration of Australia’s multiculturalism, instead of it being attacked on the right as the degeneration of Australia’s culture and values.
It is the politicians and the media who are betraying the best of ‘what it is to be Australian.’ Furthermore, it is bizarre that a government full of apologies for the genocide of Australia’s indigenous people is now enabling, in various ways, the genocide of the Palestinians and falling into line with the attempts of Israel’s lobbyists to depict anti-genocide protests as antisemitic.
In the Bible ‘history’, semitism is derived from one of the sons of Noah, Shem, the father of Abraham, and thus the progenitor of numerous ancient ‘racial,’ religious, and linguistic groups, including Akkadians, Arabs, Canaanites, Moabites, and others listed as dwellers in the ‘land of the Book.’
The Palestinians, as Arabs, with a history reaching back millennia in recorded history (as described by Nur Masalha in Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History) are, by the old definition, semites: the Ashkenazi Jews who came to settle in Palestine from east Europe and Russia, are not.
The fact that the word could not honestly be applied to them may be one reason why the definition of semitic had to be limited to language. In usage, the phrase ‘antisemitic’ came to mean only ‘anti-Jewish’ and not those who fit the original meaning of ‘semitic,’ according to which the Israeli perpetrators of extreme violence against the Palestinians could be called ‘antisemitic.’
The abuse of anti-genocide demonstrations as ‘antisemitic’ has risen high in a shrill chorus since the Bondi massacre. What we learn from this is that it is okay for Israel to destroy Palestine but ‘antisemitic’ for Palestinians and their supporters to chant ‘death to Israel’; okay for the IDF to slaughter tens of thousands of Palestinians but ‘antisemitic’ for Palestinians and their supporters to chant ‘death to the IDF’; and okay for Israel to strangle freedom between the river and the sea, or call for one Jewish state between the two, but ‘antisemitic’ for Palestinians and their supporters to chant ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’
Neither have any of the politicians and media commentators who abuse the anti-genocide demonstrators uttered one word of condemnation of Israel for the murder of tens of thousands of children. Not one child, but tens of thousands of them, and not one word of horror have they uttered.
It is not as if what is happening ‘over there’ has nothing to do with Australia. Australia has been involved in Palestine from before the beginning, whether Balfour or 1948, when 19th-century English and Australian Christians supported the ‘return’ of Jews to an ancient homeland which they had never seen and with which they had no living or ethnic connection.
It was involved when H.V. Evatt chaired the UN General Assembly’s ad hoc committee on Palestine in September 1947, and was involved a few months later when it voted for partition in a vote rigged by the US.
It has been involved ever since 1947 through close political support for Israel, whatever the crimes it happened to be committing at the time. To see October 7, 2023, as some kind of starting point against the background of long-term Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing is nonsensical.
Israel lives in standing violation of international law and UN resolutions. It thumbs its nose at international law and treats the UN with contempt because it keeps reminding it of its obligations as a UN member. Its ambassador has even torn up the UN Charter on the podium of the General Assembly.
Within the past few days, even as it was killing more children in Gaza and the West Bank, and continuing its violations of the Gaza and Lebanese ceasefires, it announced the construction of 19 new settlements on the occupied West Bank, where close to one million settlers have now taken up residence.
They are there illegally. This land belongs to someone else. Every brick the settlers have laid has been laid illegally, and every road and wall constructed illegally, yet the most that politicians can muster even in the direst circumstances is that ‘settlement activities’ are ‘unhelpful’ to the ‘peace process.’
Of course, there is no peace process and Israel has never intended to build one aimed at reaching a genuine peace. It wants all of Palestine, and that is the true beginning and end of this story, if Israel can get away with it.
‘War is diplomacy by other means,’ so goes the expression. To turn the phrase around, diplomacy is war by other means, and in getting what it wants without having to resort to open military war, Israel has been very successful.
October 7, 2023 allowed it to shed the thin skin of ‘restraint’ – a word for the media only – and launch its most savage war since 1948 and even more destructive than that genocidal onslaught.
Albanese is on safe grounds when he commits to a Palestinian state that has no hope of coming into existence. Israel will not allow it and no one has either the capacity or the intention or the willpower to force it to do what it refuses to do. His ‘commitment’ is an empty gesture in the absence of punitive action to follow it up.
The point to be underlined here is that Israel has always been given the freedom by the collective ‘west’ to do whatever it wants. No crime is apparently so great that Israel cannot be allowed to commit it.
We live in a time when International law is being smashed to ribbons, not just over Palestine but over Ukraine-Russia and numerous other issues. It is as if Israel’s successful defiance of law has set an example others can follow, or instrumentalize to also get what they want.
In numerous countries, it is the people and not just governments who are under threat. The US is using masked vigilantes on its streets and has turned to piracy on the high seas, seizing tankers that could be invoked as a casus belli for open war if Russia or China chose. Individuals are being hunted down by the state, arrested, prosecuted, jailed, and thrown out of countries for daring to dissent.
Corporations and governments are closing ranks to harass, intimidate, close bank accounts, seize assets and deny travel for the ‘crime’ of opposing or disagreeing with government policies. Many of these repressive measures are directly connected with Palestine.
Digitalization, a fully surveilled internet system and AI are making the suppression of dissent immeasurably easier than just a few years ago. All the state has to do is press one button and the entire system responds.
The police state methods used with particular viciousness in Australia to suppress both protests and rational argumentation against use of the mRNA vaccines in 2020/21 paved the way for what is now unfolding before our eyes, the abandonment of enlightenment values and a return to the jungle, to what the international lawyer Philippe Sands already recognized years ago as regression to the “lawless world.”
Palestine is the litmus test for human rights and governments are failing horribly to live up to their responsibilities. They are governments that don’t deserve to be in government.
In Australia, “in consultation with the Jewish community” (i.e, Israeli lobby groups) and the anti-semitism “special envoy,” Jillian Segal, Anthony Albanese has just announced new laws to combat ‘hate crimes.’
Segal is a past president of the peak Australian Israeli lobby group, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ). She conflates anti-zionism and anti-semitism and at the height of the Gaza genocide, criticized Foreign Minister Penny Wong for asking – asking!- Israel to stop bombing Gaza’s hospitals.
With the backing of Albanese, she will be trying hard to conflate anti-genocide protests with ‘hate crimes’ and anti-semitism, but already there are signs that Australians will not allow themselves to be railroaded by these two and the powers behind them.
However, if these new ‘laws’ on the Palestine question can be made to work through intimidation and police suppression, they can readily be adapted to suppress other causes of dissent. This is the dark cloud forming over Australia and other countries in the wake of the Bondi massacre.
Finally, a question that cannot be ignored. Could the Bondi massacre have been a false flag, designed to take attention away from the genocide and incite anti-Muslim racism in Australia? Would Mossad be capable of setting up such a heinous event? Would it be done in such a way that we would never know it was a false flag?
‘Possibly’ is the answer to the first question and ‘yes’ is the answer to the other two. This is not to say the Bondi massacre was a false flag event, but the possibility cannot simply be tossed aside.
The coincidence (‘coincidence’?) between the timing of the attack, Israel’s global status as a pariah state and its pressing need to seize control of the narrative and push it away from the genocide is certainly striking. It would be naïve to leave any possibility out. After all, we live in a world not just of conspiracy theories, but real conspiracies and ‘coincidences’ that turn out to be not what they seem.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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