The politics of ignoring genocide
Nov 27, 2024
Jews in Germany, Bosnians in former Yugoslavia, Tutsis in Rwanda, and now Palestinians in Gaza. In a recent interview, Francesca Albanese posed a rhetorical question: What kind of monsters have we become to see the live-streamed genocide of Palestinians and not act?
When you look at Anthony Albanese, who founded the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine, and Penny Wong, and Richard Marles, do you see monsters? Perhaps not monsters but appalling moral cowards and rank hypocrites, who witness Israel’s blatant crimes against humanity and do nothing, breaching Australia’s legal obligations to prevent and stop the barbaric carnage.
Even genocide is not a red line for the Labor government and the Coalition.
Like other Western leaders, they do nothing because they put political expediency above morality, and in this they are terrifyingly normal. The platitudinous groupthink parroted by Keir Starmer, a QC who specialised in human rights, Biden and Harris, Albanese, Wong, and the others, is that Israel has a “right to defend itself” from terror. As Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer puts it, “The world tells us that nothing can justify October 7, and yet everything Israel has done can be justified by October 7.”
The extermination of Palestinians is being legitimised in the name of protecting Israeli Jews.
In response to the ICC’s issue of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, Wong expressed support of the ICC’s role in upholding international law. However, at the time of writing, the government had not committed to cooperating with the ICC’s arrest procedures as it is obliged to do as a member of the court.
The prevailing narrative of Parliamentarians bears no relation to the facts. It makes no mention of Israel’s rampant trashing of international humanitarian law, its egregious war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The word “genocide” is never uttered except to deny it, as David Lammy did recently. Lammy, Foreign Secretary in the UK Parliament and a lawyer, said that as millions of Palestinians had not been killed it was not genocide, as if the Genocide Convention requires a threshold number of dead.
Our politicians are well aware of the facts. Numerous reports of human rights experts and genocide historians have concluded that Israel is carrying out genocide. The most recent harrowing UN report, presented to the UN General Assembly on 19 November, found that Israel’s methods of war in Gaza were consistent with genocide, and that there was no room for ambiguity. The UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories referred to Israel’s “unchecked barbarity”, sounding “yet another urgent, resounding alarm about the apocalyptic situation for Palestinians.” It condemned Member States’ silence and inaction despite their legal obligations to stop Israel’s violations of international law and hold it accountable.
Journalist and political commentator, Owen Jones, has observed that in a rational world, standing with a state that is engaged in murderous mayhem including intentionally starving civilians, would have you driven from public life in disgrace. But rather, in a perverse inversion of reality, defending Israel is the mainstream, respectable political position of “tolerant democracies”, while dissenters are demonised as anti-Semites and extremists who are “disrupting social cohesion”. And so we have witnessed the government’s ostracising of Senator Fatima Payman, and its gaslighting of Senator Mehreen Faruqi, for telling the truth about the genocidal apartheid state of Israel.
With a few honourable exceptions, our cowardly politicians are more concerned with their own self-preservation than the preservation of Palestinian lives. Their cynical tactic of distracting from the genocide by focussing on “social cohesion” illustrates their moral vacuity and racial bias. Hannah Arendt observed that truth and politics were on rather bad terms with each other, and insisted on the necessity of facing the facts. Our politicians have refused to acknowledge the facts. They have failed to abide by their legal obligation to do what they can to stop Israel’s mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians, and its obliteration of everything needed to sustain life in Gaza.
What use is humanitarian law when those with legal obligations to enforce it show they have no humanity when it comes to Palestinians?
Misery is asymmetrically compelling. Because the victims of some of the worst crimes of this century hold no economic or geopolitical power and have the wrong skin colour, they are disposable. This is nothing new for Palestinians, who have long been paying the price for simply existing on their land.
Western governments’ failure to hold Israel to account for its flagrant violations of international law over many decades laid the foundations for genocide. It is now getting away with the worst crimes imaginable. No-one is stopping it. Israel’s long-held plan of taking over all the land “from the river to the sea” is beginning to be implemented, with the building of infrastructure to annex the West Bank and settle Gaza. Is this the outcome that Western governments are hoping for? Perhaps according to their perverted political reasoning, ethnically cleansing Palestinians from all of historical Palestine would solve “the Palestinian problem”.
Israel’s scorched-earth tactics have reduced Gaza to an apocalyptic waste land unfit for human life. A toxic, polluted land of rubble, sewage, and decomposing bodies. Children, mostly between the ages of five and nine, have been bombed, burnt, maimed, snipered, starved and orphaned. The entire population of northern Gaza is at risk of dying. Politicians are well aware of these gross atrocities and numerous others committed by Israel’s so-called Defence Force.
The Labor government was elected on a platform of integrity. Instead we witness its moral corruption as it abandons Palestinians to their horrific fate at the hands of a genocidal state, enabled by the supine legacy media with its superficial, sanitised reports, and regurgitation of Israel’s lies and propaganda.
It remains to be seen whether the issue of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant will prompt a move away from Australia’s exceptionalist treatment of Israel, and its tail-wagging of the US, steadfast supporter of its rabid, murderous ally.
Angela Smith
Angela Smith is a former lawyer with broad legal experience including in refugee law and the university sector. Her writing has been published widely and can be found in such places as The Guardian (online), Griffith Review, Meanjin, New Philosopher and Overland.
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