It is time to take our indifference seriously. I remember having a heated discussion with classmates when I was in my first year of high school. We had just had a history lesson on the rise of Nazi Germany and the murder of over six millions Jews, intellectuals, and communists. We were arguing about how many Jewish people we could have “rescued” from the gas chambers and what we would have done if we had been alive then, how we would never have let that slaughter happen.

The old Irish nun who taught us overheard our bragging and suggested we, “pray to the Almighty we are never in a position to find out how brave or cowardly we would be in our own time".

Well, we are all finding out where we stand on the metrics of courage or cowardice because this is our time.

While it is hard to find accurate polling on Australians view of the genocide taking place in Palestine today, seven months ago, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, Australians strongly rejected the use of public protests to take sides in the widening conflict in the Middle East, with 59% of voters opposing the marches as thousands of protesters took to the streets ahead of the anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel. The survey, by research firm Resolve Strategic, showed 51% voters said Australia should not voice in-principle support for either Israel or Gaza.

In some ways, the recent federal election provided its own test on the sentiment of the nation. As argued by Bernard Keane recently, Labor’s dual strategies on Gaza — a little more pro-Palestinian and critical of Israel in international fora, and indifferent to the issue domestically — served it well in the recent election. It’s clearly deliberate, one such example being Anthony Albanese’s failure to mention Australia’s formal opposition to ethnic cleansing despite DFAT prepping lines for his team in February. With 94 seats in Parliament, this approach appears to be approved of by the electorate.

As rallies in support of Palestine and calls to boycott and sanction Israel grow in the thousands across Europe, the UK and the US, in Australia the same rallies struggle to hold the line on a few thousand.

But does this apparent indifference matter to Australia, does it change anything about the nation itself given our distance from the violence?

Setting aside, as if that is still possible, the horror of starving babies to death, bombing families as they huddle in tents and herding communities from one place to another only to bomb them on arrival, this indifference to the suffering of the people of Palestine is inflicting damage on Australia right now in three ways.

The first is the realpolitik of international law.

On 26 May, more than 800 lawyers, judges and legal academics wrote a letter to the prime minister Keir Starmer outlining the UK’s “fundamental international legal obligations”, in relation to both Israel and Gaza.

It says in part, “Serious violations of international law are being committed and are further threatened by Israel in the oPt (occupied Palestinian territories) .

“First, genocide is being perpetrated in Gaza or, at a minimum, there is a serious risk of genocide occurring… Second, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and serious violations of international humanitarian law are being committed in the oPt. Third, Israel has been found by the International Court of Justice in July 2024 to be violating peremptory norms of international law across the entire oPt in denying the Palestinian people their right to self-determination and unlawfully annexing territory acquired by force.”

The letter reminds the UK Prime Minister that “all States, including the UK, are legally obliged to take all reasonable steps within their power to prevent and punish genocide; to ensure respect for international humanitarian law; and to bring to an end violations of jus cogens norms of international law. The UK’s actions to date have failed to meet those standards”.

Australia has also failed to comply with our international treaty obligations. Which leads to the second cost for the nation. Moral injury.

Moral injury has been described as both a “disruption in an individual’s confidence and expectations about one’s own or others’ motivation or capacity to behave in a just and ethical manner” and “a deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, sense of morality, and relationship to society".

Watching a genocide take place nightly on television and doing nothing in the face of that abuse makes people feel bad, very bad. For individuals, moral injury can lead to serious distress, depression and suicidality. It debilitates people and can destroy a person’s capacity to trust others, impinging on both the family and larger community. Moral injury is damage done to the soul of the individual.

But moral injury can also affect a nation; just ask Germany or South Africa, two nations that have been through a process of reconciling themselves with the reality of profound moral injury and the need for restitution. Moral injury needs to be taken seriously because it leads to the third problem for Australia: loss of trust.

Over the last two decades, we Australians have watched us do some grubby deals with ourselves and each other. One of the most egregious is the way we have looked on as Labor and Coalition Governments imprisoned children, women and men for having the nerve to ask for our help. And now we are pretend there is nothing we can do as we watch the genocide of a people take place in front of our eyes.

There is no national pride in this behaviour. The Menzies Leadership Foundation has detailed a crisis of trust within Australia. It is not possible to engage in truly nation-building projects with a population that has little trust in either the government, or indeed each other.

Last week, Navanethem ‘Navi’ Pillay, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and eminent international jurist, received the Sydney Peace Prize. In her acceptance speech, she reflected on a time when, as a young, coloured woman living in apartheid South Africa, she watched on television as brave young Australians disrupted the Springbok rugby tour. They did this in support of a free South Africa. She spoke of how it gave her and her comrades heart to see others so far from her home take up their cause and act with such courage.

It reminded me that we don’t always know who the “audience” is when we stand for the dignity of others.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.