At last the crime of coercive control in marriages and partnerships has been recognised and criminalised in Australia. This is a crime that can remain invisible for years, concealed behind the image of a fine, friendly man whose wife has problems. Once exposed, the victim’s bruises — or worse — make us ashamed of our blindness. Did we prefer not to notice? Were we afraid to challenge that decent fellow whose menacing emotions we sensed?
There is a country in the news today that presents itself as a fine friendly nation, yet its decades-long control and coercion of a whole population is there in plain sight for those who care to see. The coercion is disguised behind the façade of virtuous democracy. Unlike individual coercion and control, it is difficult to scare and subdue a whole nation into submission; some victims would rather die than submit to systematic abuse. But resistance is always an excuse to mount stricter control and coercion.
The bullying and bruising Israel regularly inflicts on Gaza is no secret, yet much of the world not only forgives its crimes but provides it with coercive weapons — one billion US dollars worth in last week’s news. The perpetrator of the coercive control still presents itself as the moral authority on Middle East matters.
How is this achieved? Besides lying, the perpetrator’s major propaganda weapon is words, and our Australian media mostly cooperates with the labels Israel insists on. ‘Terrorist’ allows journalists to avoid asking difficult questions about the Hamas attack on Israeli forces last October. For instance:
- If Gaza is the ‘largest prison in the world’, as many journalists have attested, can those who broke out and attacked their jailers be dismissed as merely mad terrorists?
- Why did the Israeli military (IDF) need to fabricate hideous Hamas crimes? Research shows no Israeli babies deliberately killed; no Israeli bodies mutilated; no rapes verified (see BBC documentary on Utube).
- If Israel is a true democracy, why do its citizens not have free access to the facts about IDF control over Palestinian civilians throughout Gaza and the Occupied Territories?
- Are the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails not also hostages?
Israel controls the equivalent of keys to the Palestinians’ homes in the form of a very long impenetrable wall, dozens of check points and barriers that enable control over Palestinians’ movements and, in Gaza’s case, control over borders, over contact with the outside world and over supplies of food, water and fuel. Any self-assertion emanating from the Occupied Territories is labelled terrorism and met with violent attacks on people and possessions. In international law, the Palestinian Territories are illegally occupied, but journalists seldom say so.
I experienced the way journalists’ attention has been diverted from Israel’s coercive control. In 2007, my late husband Hal Wootten AC, QC, spent three month in Palestine and Israel. Having travelled widely and discussed conditions with many Israelis and Palestinians, on his return he was invited to speak about his experiences at a public gathering. As he began to describe conditions on the West Bank, a man from the Jewish Board of Deputies rudely interrupted, and repeatedly demanded that Hal respond to his assertions, objections and questions. Confronting a person with no respect for facts or for reasoned argument effectively dissuaded Hal from speaking publicly. Journalist John Lyons, in his 2021 book ‘Dateline Jerusalem, showed how Australian journalists were similarly bullied into avoiding reporting on the middle east by the ‘Israeli lobby’.
Israel’s ambition to incorporate all the Palestinian territories into Israel is now well-recognised. Will Australia at last see that Palestinians are not immoral, subhuman terrorists who aim to destroy the virtuous democratic Israel, but rather a people desperately trying to keep some control of their lives and their nation? Will we condemn Israeli military violence before all Gazans are killed, flee or lose all hope and accept coercive control as their lot?
For more on this topic, P&I recommends:
Gillian Cowlishaw FASSA, retired Professor of Anthropology, was born in rural New Zealand in 1934. She came to academia late, gaining a Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Sydney in 1979. On the basis of ethnographic field-work in Arnhem Land, Bourke, and Mt Druitt, she published numerous academic articles and press pieces as well as four self-authored books. Blackfellas, Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race (Blackwell 2004) won a NSW Premiers’ award. Having discovered writing late, she is still writing.
School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Sydney
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