In his emotional victory speech after winning the 3 May election, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese referred to Australian values such as kindness, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong described him as a man of compassion.

As Albanese was speaking, Al Jazeera news reported that Israel’s blockade of Gaza had starved 57 Palestinians to death and was preventing a humanitarian aid convoy from entering Gaza.

Kindness and compassion highlighted in the Labor Party celebrations could have included pleading for Israeli slaughter and famine to end. Nothing was said. In Australia’s dealings with Israel and Palestine, business as usual means nothing is likely to be said.

By contrast, over the past years, prominent contributors to Pearls and Irritations have expressed their outrage at death and destruction across Palestine, including the slaughter of 64,260 Palestinians (The Lancet’s estimates), the majority being women and children.

P&I articles expressing that outrage appear in a e-book, Israel: Palestine Pushed Beyond Endurance, and before the birth of that publication, hundreds of articles pleading for Palestinians rights and lives have been published. But to what effect?

The contributors include Margaret Reynolds, Ali Kazak, Paul Heywood-Smith, Helen McCue, Richard Hill, Alison Broinowski, Greg Barns and John Menadue. On an almost daily basis, their articles are informative, well-written and often inspiring, but with what consequences?

If these writers were political leaders, they would craft a humane policy, would demand Australian intervention to end (Richard Hill’s words) the gut-wrenching Israeli illegalities and cruelties. Instead, to condemn US/Israeli violence, expose media ignorance of Palestinian history and show politicians treating international law as of no consequence, they can only pick up their pens.

At least their impressive critiques of major issues can be recalled.

Helen McCue, who for 40 years had been a nurse in Palestine refugee camps, writes that with regard to unhindered violence towards Palestinians, “Israel has form and much of it brutal”. She refers to the Israeli responsibility for the 1982 Sabra Shatila massacre of 3000 old men, women and children, and to the slaughter of innocents which began immediately following the Hamas breakout and killings of October 2023. Regarding that slaughter, she asks the prime minister, “How can you sleep at night, Anthony?” “Can you hear the screams of mothers and babies trapped under the bombs from the America that you supported?” “Can you hear the cries of children as they are operated on with no anaesthetic?”

Response to Helen’s questions usually comes via the lamentable excuse “Israel has a right to defend itself”. With characteristically careful references to law, Paul Heywood -Smith puts that claim to bed. “Israel has no right to defend itself, no right to use overwhelming force against people under its occupation.”

Several authors damn the Australian Government’s failure to recognise the state of Palestine even though, seven years earlier, the Australian Labor party had voted in favour of recognition. In a P&I podcast with Senator Fatima Payman, Reynolds abhors the difficulties of “standing up for one’s principles within a party political system” and in another analysis she identifies how political leaders “play games with their responsibilities under international law”.

Several authors show that official attitudes towards the carnage in Palestine are full of mind-boggling inconsistencies. Broinowski writes that “Flags of Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, are banned at pro-Palestine demonstrations, but the flag of Israel is not restricted”. In May 2024, she wrote, “Australia has no hesitation in accepting that President [Vladimir] Putin is a war criminal, while our leaders can’t bring themselves to apply the same standards to Benjamin Netanyahu.”

A discerning public has been presented with Israeli spokespeople telling lies, while donning holier-than-thou face masks, an age-old deceit listed in powerful P&I indictments by Kazak. In his January 2025 Open Letter to Israelis, he wrote that “they speak of security and peace, but colonise Palestine, oppress its people, ethnically cleanse them, wage a war of genocide….They are addicted to the policy of denial, half truths and fact switching”.

In a typically gutsy challenge, he charges, “When Labor and Liberal politicians repeat deceptive Israeli propaganda without scrutiny and knowledge of the facts, they lose credibility and reveal their undignified ignorance and sycophantic subordination to Israel”.

Around the globe, millions of citizens have been frustrated by governments’ failure to intervene to stop Israel continuing to bomb, destroy, kill, impose famine and to do so with impunity. Australia’s outward indifference, its non-intervention response has been identified by Barns as a terrible moral failure. This month, he wrote that if he was attorney-general, there would be sanctions imposed on Israel and charges for committing war crimes brought against those Australian citizens fighting in Gaza with the IDF. Barns refers to the Rome Statute definition  of “crimes against humanity”. He reminds readers that Israel cannot be called free because “a million-plus Palestinians living in Israel live in an apartheid state”.

In interviews soon after October 2023, the mainstream media’s collusion with Israel was evident in demands that Palestinian interviewees should repeat their condemnation of Hamas before an interview could continue. Menadue has critiqued media ignorance and one-sidedness. In his recent article, Never again not only for Jews but for Palestinians and all humanity’, he writes, “While the Zionist lobbying machine intimidates almost all before it, we will have no justice and peace in Palestine and the Middle East.” He advises journalists, “This lobby must be exposed and countered.”

Menadue’s evaluation shows the media’s ignorance of history — decades of slaughter by Israeli terrorists receive no mention — and their fear of criticising Israeli barbarities. He writes, “This settler colonisation has been ongoing since 1948 and with it a hopeless media imbalance.  Media focus is on the hostages, but ignores 8000 Palestinians held in gruesome Israeli jails.” “Palestinians and Muslims are treated as much less human and less valuable than white Jews and white Christians. Our legacy media has decided that genocide of Palestinians is not newsworthy.”

As I extracted that last quote from Menadue, the Israeli Government announced its security cabinet had met to decide to continue the war in Gaza, its very language another feature of a policy to kill and deceive.

How can an organised slaughter be called a war?

All the above contributors to P&I have posed the same question, identified decades of savagery and hypocrisy, argued the legal case forbidding crimes against humanity and decried Western governments’ collusion with US/Israel genocidal violence.

Yet any evaluation of policies, of analyses and advocacy, must also respond to the question, “So what?”

Australians for Humanity have crafted their opposition to genocide, have for years given Australia some of the best human rights-based journalism and have built solidarity with others of like mind.

Should we merely continue to do the same for another year, another year?

An alternative is to push P&I towards being mainstream. In that way, a confident prime minister might feel obliged to display his much-vaunted Australian kindness to all the people of Palestine.

Israel’s claims that starving and killing Palestinian children is not only a means of defending their country, but also a defence of civilisation, should be condemned and ridiculed, never repeated by newsreaders and outlawed by all politicians.

Challenging  that way of thinking and acting has to address more than the current readership of Pearls and Irritations.

Palestinians, let alone humanity, can’t afford to have more of the same and should not experience another day when leading politicians and mainstream media behave as though Gaza never happened, as though Australia was not complicit, as though silence about Israeli depravity is the responsible way to respond. Never again.