By Alison Broinowski, Pearls and Irritations, July 22, 2024
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, Australia is a signatory of the Rome Statute. It has no option but to comply with the latest ICJ decision on 19 July that the UN Security Council, the General Assembly and all states have an obligation not to recognise Israel’s occupation as legal and not to give aid or support toward maintaining it, writes Alison Broinowski.
Who calls which shots?
In the space of only a week, predictably, there are disputes about how Trump got shot in the ear, facing a lone gunman, who was allowed to erect a ladder and climb up a gently-sloping roof before himself being shot by Secret Service agents. It’s like JFK, RFK, MLK and 9/11 all over again. The many official reports about them have never dispelled public suspicions, and more about the Trump shooting won’t either.
Without enough evidence, but sure they’ve been lied to before, Americans are left to speculate. An immediate question is: if the Bush administration was so sure, so promptly, that the World Trade Center and Washington attacks were the work of 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists as to declare war on terror, why could the Biden administration not announce an inquiry into whether Thomas Matthew Crooks was a terrorist?
Why, for that matter, did the Howard government not consider Martin Bryant a possible terrorist? The Christchurch killer called himself an ‘eco-fascist’, and recorded his admiration of far-right terrorists, and the Ardern government deplored Brenton Tarrant’s massacre of 51 Muslims, but didn’t call it terrorism.
Is the difference that they were/are not Muslims? In recent decades, people in western countries have been conditioned to think of all terrorists as Muslims. No thinking person accepts that all Muslims are terrorists, but for two decades in the mainstream popular narrative ‘Islamist’ and ‘terrorism’ have been linked together, displacing memories of the IRA, the Tamil Tigers, the Chechens, and their many predecessors.
What terrorists of any religious or political persuasion do is inflict sudden vengeance on those who have killed their comrades or fellow believers, in order to promote political or social change in their own or other countries. This is a distillation of many interpretations of ‘terrorism’, about which – because no universal definition exists – every country can decide for itself. That leaves the field open for any state to declare its enemies ‘terrorists’ or ‘freedom-fighters’, as China and the US selectively do about the Uighurs, for example, or Ukraine and Russia do about Russian-speakers in Donbas. If the ‘terrorist’ shooting down of MH17 over Ukraine was terrorism, the west has accepted that Russia was responsible, while Russia accuses Ukraine.
In the ‘my freedom fighter, your terrorist’ stand-off, the ‘forever war’ on terror has been the justification for US and allied attacks on Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Yemen. The Biden administration in its dying months actually invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter on the right to self-defence for US attacks on Yemen since January, where the Houthi have now extended their offensive from western ships in the Red Sea to attacks on Israel itself.
The same right of self-defence against terrorism, claimed by the US and Israel in the Gaza conflict, has now been definitively dismissed by the International Court of Justice – whose jurisdiction neither country recognises, for obvious reasons. ‘Terrorism’ has been grossly distorted throughout the Israel/Palestinian conflict. What the Israel Defence Force does is ‘self-defence’ but what Hamas (since 2006 the elected authority in Gaza) does is terrorism. The same is applied to Islamic Jihad in Gaza and to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
With its massively superior capacity, Israel is able daily to inflict terror on Palestinians in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank, and with conservatively counted deaths approaching 40 000, does so every day with impunity. The purpose is terrorism, as above: to inflict sudden vengeance on those who have killed their comrades or fellow believers, in order to promote political or social change in their own or other countries.
But the technique of genocidal terrorism persists: deprive, displace, destroy, repeat. What Netanyahu and his ultra-right colleagues seek degenerates to genocide: the intention to ethnically cleanse first Gaza and then the West Bank, and extend Eretz Israel beyond into Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Yet rockets fired from Gaza or Lebanon are evidence of terrorism, says Netanyahu, while bombs on Palestinians schools, hospitals, and refugee camps are ‘targeted’ to kill terrorists, and hence justified.
Australia is complicit in this horror because, as in most other aspects of our foreign policy, we usually do whatever the US wants. Australia has imposed hundreds of sanctions on Syria and Iran and none on Israel, with which the government now – after months of denial – admits it continues to allow trade in weapons and components. We have followed the US and UK in declaring Hezbollah and Hamas ‘terrorist’ organisations, without community consultation.
At least, Australia has joined the majority in the UN General Assembly in supporting full membership of Palestine. Unlike the US and Israel, Australia is a signatory of the Rome Statute, and should comply with the latest ICJ decision on 19 July that the UN Security Council, the General Assembly and all states have an obligation not to recognise Israel’s occupation as legal and not to give aid or support toward maintaining it.
The Albanese government faces a choice between this obligation from the international law-based system – admirably endorsed by Professor Hilary Charlesworth of the ICJ – and its ‘international rules-based’ alternative created by the US. This, like the choice between buying useless offensive submarines and supporting our trade with China, boils down to a crucial decision: do we need an alliance that endangers us and implicates us in illegal wars?
