The Palestine elephant remains in the room. It’s putrid, stinking of death while our government holds its nose and looks away, ignoring the war crimes, writes Michael Pascoe.
Yesterday, The Guardian reported another 140 people killed in Gaza, while Israel continues its blockade of all aid from coming in, now entering its 11th week.
Let’s keep this very simple: Is depriving the civilian population of food, water and medicine a war crime? Yes, it is.
So, what is the penalty for this crime? The Australian Government says there is none. You can blockade a couple of million people, use starvation as a weapon of war, and Australia will look the other way.
The old “the standard you walk past is the standard you accept” line means we effectively condone this crime. That we have willingly imposed sanctions for lesser crimes makes us arch hypocrites by ignoring this crime against humanity.
We are made fools when we have given more than $100 million in humanitarian aid to Gaza, but such aid is now blocked without meaningful protest.
We are made jokes of by having imposed sanctions on seven Israeli individuals over settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, but dare not mention
even thinking of action over starving and killing tens of thousands of children.
“We call on Israel to hold perpetrators of settler violence to account and to cease its ongoing settlement activity,” Foreign Minister Wong said last year while announcing sanctions on the token individuals.
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All words and no action
“The Albanese Government has been firm and consistent that Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are illegal under international law and a significant obstacle to peace,” Penny Wong said, but the Albanese Government is game to do nothing more than to mouth those words.
Apply financial and travel sanctions against all Israeli West Bank settlers – a reasonable course of action against those breaching international law – and I might begin to believe the government means it.
But the colonisation of the West Bank pales in comparison with the Gaza blockade.
We know exactly who is responsible, who is committing this catastrophic crime: Benjamin Netanyahu and his Cabinet. And we do nothing.
Australia actively maintains sanctions against a long list of individuals and organisations. You can read all their names, date and place of birth and last known address on what DFAT calls the Consolidated List.
They range from targeted financial sanctions and travel bans on members of the Myanmar military and companies and banks that deal with them to the three individuals held directly responsible for shooting down MH17 over Ukraine, but there’s not even a wrist slap for those ordering malnutrition, disease and death for Palestinians in Gaza.
Double standards
In mitigation for the Russian and Ukrainian MH17 killers, it is possible they did not realise they were destroying a civilian aircraft. On the other hand, there is no lack of knowledge about what Israel is doing to Gaza, no doubt about the murder of aid workers, about the hunger and the denial of medical supplies.
The Jewish Council of Australia has called out genocide, has underlined the International Court of Justice orders, and has repeatedly called on our government to impose sanctions. The government has ignored it.
The grubby politicisation of the Gaza war in the lead up to the federal election, the dog whistling, has run its course. It ended up doing little more than increasing antisemitism and Islamophobia.
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Now Albanese has a government so secure it can afford to burn senior Cabinet ministers. Now it has the political capital to stand on principle or continue to effectively condone war crimes.
There are two simple questions to be asked of every government member, and especially the Prime Minister.
The first is the one this started with: Is depriving the civilian population of food, water and medical supplies a war crime?
The second: What are you going to do about it?
Michael Pascoe is an independent journalist and commentator with five decades of experience here and abroad in print, broadcast and online journalism. His book, The Summertime of Our Dreams, is published by Ultimo Press.