What is really going on in Palestine
Oct 12, 2024
Foreign Minister Penny Wong was keen to remind Guardian readers that “Australia has not supplied any weapons or ammunition to Israel for at least the past five years”. Only, as the Albanese government was forced to clarify, that excludes components for the US F-35 combat aircraft that is used to bomb Gaza. Australia has made over four billion dollars to date from contributing to the global supply chain: a trade that has continued uninterrupted throughout the past year.
Then there’s signals intelligence from the US listening station – oops, sorry, ‘Joint Facility’ – at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. Part of a globe-spanning operation that is entirely at Israel’s disposal, as a US ally. The Nautilus Institute awaits a substantive reply from the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security to its demand for confirmation of Australia’s role in supplying it and whether any conditions are set down: “If not for a plausible and urgent claim of genocide, subject to a case before the world’s highest court that raises the possibility of Australian complicity, then for what would Australia ever exercise its sovereign right to veto what happens on Australian soil?”
As long as we are embroiled in these US global systems, we will indeed be complicit in any and every military operation carried out with support from Washington: the capital responsible for more arms spending than the next ten combined. And no president has ever given more help to Israel than Joe Biden, as he himself boasted to a White House news conference last week.
How come? “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region”.
The future Commander-in-Chief, speaking while still a Senator in 1986. The sentiment was shared across the aisle. Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defence in the Reagan Administration, put it still more bluntly: “Israel is America’s unsinkable battleship in the Middle East”.
The grievances of Palestinians as a dispossessed and colonised people, and the historical trauma of European Jewry on which Theodor Herzl drew to project his vision of state-based Zionism are, in this sense, incidental. It is not, essentially, ‘about’ them.
What is really going on in Palestine is a demonstration to the world that might is right.
Have you noticed that, whenever Israel’s actions are assessed by competent authorities in a framework of international law, or international humanitarian law, they are found to be in breach? Finally the International Court of Justice confirmed what Palestinians always said: the occupation of their land is a war crime. The landslide UN General Assembly vote demanded it be ended forthwith.
For Washington to extend the shelter of its Security Council veto, while continuing the unconditional supply of weapons, is a proclamation that such verdicts do not matter; that force will always trump law. The strongest will always hold sway, regardless of majority wishes. And as long as Australia remains a US ally, we are committed to the same doctrine.
Many hopes were invested over many years in a ‘peace process’ to provide security for both Israelis and Palestinians: the apocryphal ‘two-state solution’. It would depend on mutual acknowledgement of need by the peoples themselves and honest brokerage from outside, led by Washington with support from a ‘quartet’, also involving Russia, the UN itself and even the European Union.
Such would be the essential elements of conflict resolution. But these hopes, now in tatters, were always misguided. The existence of a ‘political track’ shielded Israel from justice by keeping the issues out of court. But even that is not the fundamental point. As long as the supply of weapons continued, a recourse to the use of force was always destined to derail any such ‘process’. Peace advocates in Israel had the rug pulled from under them.
So where will change come from? A single phrase that captures more of the truth about this tragedy than perhaps any other is the infamous ‘Progressive Except On Palestine’ (PEOP). I write from Gadi, or Sydney, where my representative in the NSW Parliament is Alex Greenwich. One of his slogans is “a progressive Sydney”. Good for him. Hit up a search engine and try to find references online to “Alex Greenwich” and Palestine.
The outrages of the past year have prompted more prominent figures, in more fields, to take a stand. But there’s still plenty of PEOPLE around. As Adelaide punk rockers Teenage Joans put it, in their single, Intifada: “My favourite singer hasn’t said a fucking thing”.
Which, curiously, brings us back to Penny Wong. How come she was so concerned to communicate through the august columns of Guardian Australia? Because she is well aware its core readers are on the point of deserting Labor for the Greens, who have consistently called out Canberra’s hypocrisy.
The mass slaughter of People of Colour causes no embarrassment to the Coalition. This is an issue for Labor, in our system the party with the job of responding to the structural strains of a capitalist society by adopting and enacting agendas of progressive reform.
What if such parties can no longer win elections? What if that is seen to be due to their support for genocide in Palestine, and for the principle of might-is-right, bedrock of the US military alliance?
Then those strains could begin to tilt another way. Kamala Harris has made it clear she would continue Biden’s policy. So maybe next year Albanese and Wong will face voters here while managing the alliance under a second Trump presidency, as supporters of Palestinian rights in swing states such as Michigan boycott November’s election.
Maybe the ALP will then be forced to negotiate a legislative agenda with the Greens, including a more independent line. When it becomes possible – indeed expected – to be progressive including on Palestine, in order to win, the pressure will begin to erode those global systems of violence and oppression.
The ‘answer’ to the ‘problem’ of Israel and Palestine is not conflict resolution. It could be called conflict transformation. It means that, in search of political opportunities for change, we must look far wider than the conflict arena itself, to the overarching structures that sustain injustice. Above all, we here in Australia must look to ourselves.