By Alison Broinowski, Pearls and Irritations, September 14, 2024
The talented comic song-writer Tom Lehrer, from a family of secular Jewish New Yorkers, complained during the Vietnam war that nothing was funny any more. He would agree now about the war in Gaza.
In ‘National Brotherhood Week’ he sang:
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews. (Lehrer, 1965)
Six decades later, we may be more faith-tolerant and gender-inclusive, but the fuse of reciprocal hatred between Palestinians and Jews, laid decades ago, has never been extinguished. It was explosively reignited in October 2023.
Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza now number more than 41 000, together with some 700 in the West Bank, in return for the 1139 citizens of Israel killed by Hamas fighters in their outbreak on 7 October 2023. Some 10,000 Palestinians are imprisoned in shocking conditions in Israel, while Hamas holds about 100 surviving Israeli hostages out of 250 taken in October.
The gross disproportion of Israel’s revenge is endorsed by far-right Likud Party leaders. Street protesters in Tel Aviv target Benjamin Netanyahu for failing to bring the hostages home, but not his government’s progressive genocide in Gaza. When Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We will kill everyone we fight”, he meant all Palestinians, not just Hamas. Gaza, a former IDF general expected, would become “a place where no human being can exist” and severe epidemics would “bring victory closer”, meaning extinction of Palestinians.
That raises a conundrum about the current polio vaccination campaign in Gaza. If Israel’s leaders want all Palestinians dead, why have a ceasefire to vaccinate all children, when only those born since October 2023 have not already received anti-polio medication? Why only polio? Why not get a lot of parents and children to gather for other vaccinations and then bomb them? That may happen, as it has following other re-location orders. Yet the selective polio vaccinations make Israel seem blameless.
Instead, Hamas is always blamed. President Isaac Hertzog has pointed to “an entire nation out there that is responsible”, meaning not only Hamas, but all Palestinians. An Israeli settler in the West Bank admitted that what was happening was inhuman, but said it followed from the “fact” that God promised this land “to the Jews, and only to them”. A Pew Research poll says 70% of Jewish Israelis think expressions of sympathy on social media for civilians in Gaza should be banned.
Independent news sources are drying up. Tel Aviv is successfully controlling and censoring information on Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok, using Cyberwell, an NGO linked to Israeli intelligence. But supporters of Palestinians use Telegram to expose Israeli war crimes, while highlighting the resistance efforts of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. In late August, Telegram’s Russian founder was arrested by French authorities in Paris on 12 charges of cyber-crime.
It appears that Israeli intelligence-connected entities played a significant role in Meta’s decision to ban The Cradle, an anti-Zionist news site whose rare reports from inside the region often challenge mainstream Western accounts. Sharmine Narwani, who founded the site three years ago, is now accused of “praising terrorist organisations” and engaging in “incitement to violence”. On the first day of the Democrat National Convention, Meta permanently banned The Cradle from Facebook and Instagram, the holding company’s most trafficked social media outlets.
In The Cradle Narwani uses information from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah, which many Western governments list as terror organisations. As Stuart Rees has recalled, lsrael’s politicians have for years labelled imprisoned Palestinian leaders as terrorists, then claiming there is no-one with whom to make peace. Israel also classifies Iran as “a terrorist regime”, thus justifying the murder in Tehran on 31 July of Ismail Haniyeh, chief Palestinian negotiator for a ceasefire and hostage return.
As I have suggested before, anyone can be called a terrorist, and that makes them both an enemy and a target. On the basis of intelligence advice, probably America’s, Australia and the other Five Eyes countries have successively declared Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis to be terrorist organisations. Australians who disagree can be accused of “supporting the terrorists”, as Senator Fatima Payman and student protesters here and elsewhere have been recently.
We are still fighting the 2001 War on Terror, yet terrorism is what Israel’s military is inflicting on the Palestinians. Academics are being silenced, while Jewish students still complain of feeling “unsafe”. Australians representing Jewish groups accused former SBS news presenter Mary Kostakidis in August of anti-Semitism for re-tweeting comments on Israel’s war. In the UK at least five critics of IDF atrocities in Gaza have been targeted by police under the British Terrorism Act for allegedly expressing support for listed groups.
Among terrorism designations, the majority are Islamic organisations, listed by Western nations since 2001. Australia has designated 37. That’s fewer than the US, UK, Canada and surprisingly, New Zealand. Most terrorist designations by the US and Israel match, but Israel lists many more neighbouring groups. Some “terrorists”, like China’s Uighurs and Iran’s MEK, have been listed or delisted by the US as circumstances have changed. Australia and the UK are alone in listing the People’s Defence Forces (the armed wing of the National Unity Government in Myanmar formed in 2021), and the Sonnenkreig Division (an alt-right Neo-Nazi group founded in 2015). Not surprisingly, the South Asian states mutually list each other’s hostile organisations.
Israel and the US use “terrorism” to justify self-defence, aggression, and censorship. Their claims against the Palestinians have been dismissed by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. What Hamas, the 2006 elected authority in Gaza, is engaged in, against great odds, is not terrorism, but a fight for survival. Even as fear of terrorism in most Western countries is declining, governments still deploy “terrorism” to silence dissent and target their political enemies.
