Those of us who uphold the UN charter and support the right of Israel, a sovereign UN member state, to exist within its internationally-recognised lawful boundaries and to defend that sovereignty are equally entitled to call out the actions of its government, the Netanyahu coalition, and its army, the IDF, for the barbarity and slaughter that Israel collectively has unleashed on the Palestinian Arab population in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
I use the term “collectively” not because there are not many people in Israel who personally condemn the actions of their own government and army, but because the state of Israel is a collective entity that asserts its democratic credentials, and its citizens are collectively responsible for what its democratic institutions do in their name and with their collective democratic mandate and authority.
I fully understand that Israel has faced very real existential and aggressive armed challenges and threats from Arab and Islamist ideologues who deny its right to exist. Israel is entitled to defend itself from such threats and challenges – whether they emanate from Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas, the Houthis, other states or from people whose parents were forcibly displaced and expelled from its internationally-recognised sovereign territory as established in 1948.
Israel, as a matter of international law and under the UN charter, was and is entitled to use military force, reasonably and proportionately, to pre-empt, counter and defeat those challenges and threats in the exercise of its right of self-defence.
But – and there must be a “but” – Israel is not entitled to seek to expand its territory by force to include what its government calls “the lands of Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank) or the Gaza Strip.
De-facto annexation through settlement of the remaining lands occupied by Palestinian Arabs since 1948 is a breach of international law. Full stop. And its violent maintenance by military means, including a policy of encroachments and expulsions as practised by the state of Israel and its army, amounts to war crime. Full stop.
What the Israeli government and its army have done to the civilian population in Gaza and in many parts of the West Bank since the Hamas atrocities of October 2023 amounts to war crime.
It is all the more unforgivable in that it was entirely foreseeable and foreseen. I was not alone writing here and speaking in the Seanad in October 2023 warning about the likely sequence of awful events that have since unfolded.
You did not need to be a clairvoyant to see what Binyamin Netanyahu would do – rolling destruction of the Gaza Strip, herding its population from one ruinous place to another, killing more than 61,000 people, nearly all civilians, and injuring, maiming and inflicting tens of thousands of others, causing irreversible psychological trauma to hundreds of thousands of others, and mass detentions of semi-naked male civilians to be subject to routine torture in Israeli detention centres.
I did not then foresee the brutal Israeli deployment of starvation and famine to compound those barbarities. But I did know that Hamas – which had, with Israeli encouragement, turned into a brutal, terrorist-dominated administration of the entire Gaza Strip – could not be destroyed by a precision military operation to decapitate the movement.
Netanyahu has brought about a growing international consensus, which excludes the US but includes Canada, Australia, all of Europe and the great majority of UN member states, that there must be a just peace based on a viable two-state solution.
The 20 to 30 surviving hostages are most unlikely to survive a further IDF occupation of the Gaza Strip or the total annihilation of their brutal Hamas captors. We cannot forget what tragically happened to three escaping hostage Israelis who stripped themselves and emerged from captivity, speaking in Hebrew under a white flag only to be mown down by trigger-happy members of the IDF who assumed they were terrorists.
Relatives of the surviving hostages are right in resisting Netanyahu’s plans to intensify war on Gaza. Sadly, the hostages do not feature in the political calculus of some Israeli ministers. Netanyahu and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich are pursuing a very different expansionist agenda that is turning Israel into an international pariah state. They have brought about a tipping point that increasingly leaves the Trump administration as their only remaining ally.
The huge protest march across the Sydney Bridge was not composed of anti-Semites, as Netanyahu would have us believe. Nor was the protest against the proscription of Palestine Action, which resulted in the ludicrous mass arrest of hundreds of decent Londoners.
Trump may still dream of a Palestinian-free riviera in Gaza. But he will wake up in the real world where his policies are causing nightmares.
Whack-a-mole repression of international protest and opinion – whether in US college campuses or across the globe – is futile and doomed.
