For years, the Israeli authorities have restricted food, fuel and essential supplies to the Palestinians in Gaza, turning the deliveries on and off at will. This contributed to the desperate Hamas outbreak on 7 October 2023. Since the beginning of this month, Israel has stopped almost all the deliveries.
Trucks stand in long lines at border crossings; ships are not allowed into ports; and the dock built by the US military collapsed before it could be of any use. Air drops into crowded Gaza have endangered those on the ground, and made the crowds a target for IDF attacks.
Long practiced in hasbara, the art of propaganda, Israeli ministers blame the victims, claiming that Hamas leaders – elected by Palestinians in Gaza in 2006 – use civilian citizens as human shields. The IDF publicises unauthenticated images of tunnels and weapons under schools and hospitals as justification for its bombing of places that can still shelter displaced Palestinians. Hundreds of journalists who challenge the IDF’s reports are targeted, together with their families. So are similar numbers of staff working for UNWRA and for non-governmental aid organisations.
Prime Minister Netanyahu boasts that there is ‘nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach’. The ultra-right members of his ministry – particularly Smotrich and Ben-Gvir – repeat their intention to rid Gaza of Palestinians, and are getting on with doing the same in the West Bank and southern Lebanon. All supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah, they claim, are terrorists, which makes them targets and justifies wiping them out.
Australia has not stated its support for the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court in their determinations on genocide, apartheid, and the human rights of Palestinians. Although Penny Wong supported UNGA resolutions in favour of Palestinian recognition and self-determination in September, she has since backed Australia away from majority world opinion. Instead, she has picked up Israel’s line, telling the UN ‘there can be no role for terrorists’.
In fact, there is a role for terrorists, but Wong should identify who is playing it. She should say which are perpetrating the greater terror: Hamas and Hezbollah with their targeted drones and rockets, or Israel with their bunker-busting American bombs, depleted uranium, and exploding pager phones.
The only positives our Foreign Minister offers Gaza are Australia’s humanitarian aid, delivered ‘every year since 1951’, our advocacy for resumed peace negotiations for a two-state solution (half of which Israel won’t accept), and our ‘unwavering’ support for the Palestinian people. Misleadingly, she claims Australia doesn’t supply weapons to Israel. And two years before the Hamas outbreak, on 18 October 2022, she stated that ‘Australia will always be a steadfast friend of Israel…This Government will not waver in its support of Israel and the Jewish community in Australia’.
Wong’s counterpart Anthony Blinken, whose background is Jewish, also performs this trick of unwavering support for both sides. The US, he says, will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself. So does Donald Trump. Kamala Harris promises that as president she will do the same, and says Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – assassinated by Israel – is ‘a terrorist with American blood on his hands’. None of them mentions the Palestinians’ right to self-defence, even while Blinken and President Biden call repeatedly for a ceasefire to allow aid for Gaza. Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin called on 13 October for increased supplies to reach the Palestinians in a month.
The White House has given Israel a 30-day notice that it needs to improve humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip or risk losing military aid. Given the dire lack of every form of support for human life in Gaza, allowing such a delay for Israel to comply seems inexplicable. Until you realise, as Australian commentator Caitlin Johnstone and others soon did, that it means nothing has to happen before the presidential election: Another Phony Biden PR Stunt About Humanitarian Aid In Gaza.
Cutting off the shipments of weapons for Israel is the only way to stop the genocide of Palestinians, and evidently neither the US nor its allies, to their eternal shame, intend to do so.