“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do,” Voltaire

The Australian mainstream media and their accompanying cats paws the political class have, as one would expect from a long-standing organised propaganda system, managed to adopt and repeat ad nauseam a wide range of homilies and talking points, the vast bulk of which are misleading at best and fraudulent at worst.

Nowhere has this propensity been more assiduously cultivated than in relation to the “whited sepulchre” of Israel. Over the last century, the Zionists who created Israel have worked with great commitment and success to ensure a Western narrative that meets their needs to prevent any criticism of Israel and its colonial actions in Palestine. Notably, the other 88% of humanity do not see that they have the same obligation.

The principal way in which this has been achieved is by using references that started out in late 19th century Europe by racist Caucasians in describing the alleged inferiority of the Semitic races to the Caucasian race. Of course, the Semitic peoples are recognised ethnographically as those who speak a Semitic language. The major Semitic languages are Arabic, Aramaic and a long abandoned and only recently revived Hebrew, along with some dead languages like ancient Akkadians, Arameans, and Canaanites. The Zionists, for political purposes, co-opted the word Semite to describe only Jews and thus their usage of the term antisemitic to create a unique “crime” of being anti-Jewish.

There is no doubt that anti-Jewishness has existed in Europe for centuries in a virulent and extraordinarily vicious form. It largely arose out of the dominance of the Christian religion in Europe and the role of enemy that many in that religious tradition have allocated to the Jews for their alleged treatment of Jesus. The depth of that centuries-long bigotry led to the horrors of pogroms and of the Holocaust.

Zionism, on the other hand, is not a religion, but a political philosophy which resembles in many ways the mid-last century fascism that arose in Germany. Indeed, the Zionists and the Nazis co-operated at that time to force unwilling Ashkenazi European Jews out of Germany and into Palestine. Like other fascisms, Zionism must sell messages that have not been welcomed by many decent and honourable Jews. So, like those other fascisms, narratives had to be constructed that would quench any requirements for evidence or to overcome legitimate and reasonable concerns about what they were doing rather than who they are. So the decision was to co-opt the Western guilt over the Holocaust to render criticism of the Zionist ideology or action against the Zionist state as another example of Western hatred of the Jews.

The charge is often used instrumentally to silence legitimate debate and shield the Israeli Government from accountability. The attempt, which is pretty successful if we look at the current major limitations on freedom of speech that the irresponsible use of the word has engendered in the West, has rendered Israel immune from any criticism of its blatant criminality and constant breaches of international law. This has created Israel as the only state on the planet that must not be criticised no matter what it does, as to do so they allege is antisemitic.

There are two major claims by Israel that are weaponised to deflect attention from the crimes that they are committing daily. The first is used on every even mildly critical interviewer to put them on the spot and deflect their attention from the issue at hand. They are repeatedly aggressively asked “do you support Israel’s right to exist?” Most cave in immediately and agree. That sets the context for the next question which is generally “do you agree that Israel has the right to defend itself?” Having agreed to the first, most interviewees meekly submit a “yes” to that. The problem with both is that the legal answer to both is the opposite.

International law provides no legal right for a country to exist. “International law is primarily concerned with the recognition of states as facts, not with granting them an inherent, perpetual ‘right to exist’." The dominant theory on this is the Declarative Theory of Statehood, set out in Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933). According to this convention, a state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications:

• a.) A permanent population
• b.) A defined territory
• c.) A government
• d.) The capacity to enter into relations with other states (sovereignty)

If an entity meets these factual criteria, it is a state under international law. Its “existence” is not a right bestowed by a higher authority but a legal status derived from these objective realities. Conversely, if a state loses these characteristics (e.g., its government collapses, its territory is fully annexed and absorbed), it may cease to exist as “a legal fact”. International law doesn’t say “you have a right to exist”, but it does say that other states have a duty not to use force to destroy you or violate your borders**.** The legal prohibition is on the action of others, not on the existence of the state itself. Thus Israel, like every other country on the planet, does not have “a right to exist".

When that lie is dismissed, then we can move on to the other furphy, that Israel has a right to defend itself. This is one where our own dear leaders, Albanese and Wong, both of whom would know the truth, have let us all down big time. The prevailing view on international law “consistently articulated by bodies like the International Court of Justice and the UN General Assembly, is that Israel, as the occupying power, cannot invoke the right of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter against a threat emanating from the territory it occupies".

The view of the ICJ is that the situation is governed by international humanitarian law (IHL, the law of armed conflict) and international human rights law, not by the jus ad bellum (the law on the use of force between states) encapsulated in Article 51 of the UN Charter. “The appropriate legal framework is the law of occupation, which allows an occupying power to take measures to maintain security and public order, but these are policing and security measures, not an act of self-defence against another state.

“The principle of self-defence is intended to be invoked by a state facing an armed attack from another state.”

Thus, using military force in Palestine is not a “cross-border” action in the traditional sense but an action within a territory already under belligerent occupation. Framing operations as “self-defence” under the UN Charter often carries a connotation of a wider, more permissive use of military force. Framing them as “security operations” under IHL imposes a much stricter set of rules focused on law enforcement and precise military targeting.”

The seriously concerning aspect of these two issues is that the journalism profession and the politicians dealing with it should know the law about the issues they are dealing with. In this case, the multiple statements of our prime minister and foreign minister over the last two years demonstrate either their lack of understanding of international law or their desire to comply with the demands of the powerful Jewish lobby and to continue to receive political funding from them.

Of course, there are other issues around our political complicity with Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity. “Even without a binding UNSC resolution, Australia is a party to international treaties like the Arms Trade Treaty. Under the ATT, states are required to assess whether arms exports could be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law or human rights law. This creates a potential independent legal obligation for Australia to carefully review any military or dual-use goods it exports to any conflict zone, including Israel.” The government knows that and has ignored its obligations under international law.

Australia’s primary legal obligation is to comply with binding UN Security Council resolutions, which do not currently exist, regarding a general trade embargo on Israel because of the US determination to protect Israel whatever criminality it engages in. That protection has been bought from the Orange Donald by a contribution of US$100 million to his campaign funds by the widow of an ardent billionaire Zionist American who made his fortune like the Orange Donald on owning and running casinos. Donald has publicly bragged about that. It is revealing of the political purchase of our foreign policy when we failed to impose sanctions on Israel for the crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity but have joined enthusiastically in a sanctions regime on Russia, whose breaking of international law has reached nowhere near the proportions of that of Israel.

All this is to say nothing about the failure of our political leadership, if that term can be appropriately applied to leaders without courage or a moral sense, who have utterly failed to prosecute Australian citizens who have carried out war crimes in the service of Israel but have taken action against others who have served other states or organisations and have had them jailed for doing so. The Australian Government’s prosecutorial efforts have been almost exclusively directed at individuals fighting for proscribed terrorist organisations, not for the official armed forces of other sovereign states.

Fighting for a foreign state’s army is not inherently illegal for an Australian, who is serving in the armed forces of that country, provided that country is not an enemy of Australia and the service doesn’t violate Australian law (e.g., serving in an army engaged in war crimes). In the case of Israel, it has been established beyond reasonable doubt that is precisely what Israel has been doing, not just since October 2023, but since prior to the establishment of the state on other people’s land in 1948. In the period prior to and just after the creation of the state of Israel, a number of subsequent prime ministers of Israel led proscribed terrorist organisations who were carrying out atrocities and crimes against humanity even then.

All of the foregoing suggests that the much-touted Western exemplar of moral superiority, that has been forced down the throats of the other 88% of humanity for hundreds of years, was, and is, a tissue of lies. Of course, that bulk of humanity have never believed our fantasies of moral superiority, but were forced to accept them under threat of invasion and subjugation. Not so anymore and frankly about time.

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