We live in tragically interesting times. The present time is eerily reminiscent of the troubled decades between the two World Wars of last century. Then, world affairs were increasingly disturbed by violations of international law. So is the present.

The razing and rape of the ancient port city of Gaza, at the historic Mediterranean cross roads of Europe, Asia and Africa, since 7 October 2023, over 18 months ago, is a disgusting war crime of overkill.

The concept of genocide, of ethnically focused mass murder, was coined in the wake of the Nazi war crimes of 1939-45, by a Jewish Polish lawyer, appalled at the fascist holocaust of European Jewry. Aware of the exasperated Nazi practice over much of the continent of punishing resistance by disproportionately slaughtering civilians in retribution for military losses due to guerrilla resistance attacks, he identified the war crime of excessive retaliation. The appalling events of 7 October, worse even than the historic Zionist King David Hotel atrocity, committed by the extremist Zionist Irgun militia commanded by the terrorist Menachim Begin, later prime m of Israel, have now seen grossly incommensurate retribution.

To the 60-odd thousand Gazans identified as confirmed dead, must be added the toll of the unknown civilians, including the elderly and children, male and female, buried under the rubble. These victims of pitiless bombardment are estimated by a recognised, tried and tested mathematical formula to be in the hundreds of thousands.

No wonder the International Criminal Court of Justice has issued arrest warrants for two Hamas leaders, one of whom is already dead, and the former defence minister of Israel and its bellicose premier, already suspected in his own country of fraud and corruption, not to mention designs on domestic free speech and the rule of law, so far as they subsist in that ethnocratic apartheid state. Some righteous Israelis have begun to demonstrate against the war on Gaza.

These points can be driven home by citation of historical precedents. In 1934, Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia after the dirty tricks manufacture of the Wal Wal casus belli. The unprovoked aggression featured the illegal deployment of the banned weapon poison gas. The League of Nations was unable to restrain the aggressor.

In 1937, six invading imperial Japanese armies concentrated on the Chinese southern capital, Nanking. The city was taken and its citizens gruesomely massacred. Christened “The Rape of Nanking”, the war crime shocked Australians, apprehensive of a Japanese invasion. These crimes, effected with impunity, violated international law and reduced the authority of the hamstrung League of Nations.

Within a few years, a general world war ensued. The Rape of Gaza, effected with impunity, undermines the United Nations that emerged from the war of 1939-45. As such, the Gaza genocide is liable to precede portentous fraught consequences to the global world order, if not speedily remedied, after nearly two years of impunity, not to say decades of internationally tacit endorsement of Zionist ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

It is not in the interest of any global rules-based system for Israeli war crimes to be further condoned. Since 1948, the partition of Palestine has constituted a world powder keg, liable to precipitate regional or global conflagration.

Australian symbolic recognition of the State of Palestine at the UN will be a substantial act of national statesmanship. It has been occasioned by government and popular horror at the sadistically sustained effusion of human blood documented on the nightly news, shed overwhelmingly by Palestinian civilian non-combatants.

It must be supplemented, however, if prospects of peace are to be belatedly maintained, by serious sanctions, able to materially discourage Israel from its wanton and irresponsible course of criminal action. First among these measures must be the suspension of the arms trade with Israel. Only forceful sanctions can stop this disgusting, wanton human slaughter. Our treaty obligations under international humanitarian law must be fulfilled forthwith, before it is too late and Israel is allowed to get away with its brazenly genocidal intent, at our expense as well as that of the Palestinian people.

The dishonourable equivocation of our Foreign Minister, Senator Wong, that the export of parts vital to lethal Israeli weaponry, such as the bomb door mechanisms integral to the fleet of F-35 fighter-bombers deployed over Gaza, must be succeeded by a new principled policy, capable of putting our past egregious economy with the truth behind the government.

Such double dealing has until now rendered the government and the nation complicit in genocide. It is our national duty, therefore, to now eschew that shameful complicity, in order to save the lives of the millennially ancient Palestinian people, still being eliminated with extreme Zionist prejudice, inherently “antisemitic” and racist. Justice and realpolitik demand nothing less, and promptly.

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