Netanyahu is shifting the paradigm in Gaza

The disproportionate Israeli response in Gaza to terror attacks on October 7 threatens to challenge the notion of proportionality, challenging the Albanese government to change a long held position.

The devastating impact on civilians in Gaza, particularly children, has been seen by horrified global audiences. (Source: @vijayprashad/X))

The Albanese government’s position on the ongoing crisis in Gaza puts the Labor party into new territory that could have a profound impact on how it is seen at home and abroad. This departs from a long-held position of neutrality via the internationally recognised position of a two-state solution and a need for a viable homeland for the Palestinian people. The blue and white illumination of the Sydney Opera House and the Israeli flags flapping along Flinders Street contrast against the biggest anti-war demonstrations since the Iraq war, further highlighting a sudden shift in the narrative around the issue, upstairs in Canberra, in the state capitals, and across newsrooms, including at the national broadcaster.

Israel’s response to the terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7 has shocked the world. In the first six days of its assault on Gaza, the Israel Defence Force unleashed the equivalent ordinance on Gaza to what the United States was dropping on Afghanistan over a year. Horrific scenes of civilian death, many of it showing children, more UN worker deaths than any conflict of the same duration, more killing of journalists in decades, and more innocent men, women and children killed than the annual total killed in global conflicts since 2019.

While the JDAM 2000lb bombs started striking the most densely populated area in the Middle East, Anthony Albanese flew to meet with Joe Biden for a state dinner. As he pledged unending support for the US war machine via its proxy in Israel under the pretext of the “rules based international order”, the rock band B52s pulled out of his big night in Washington citing the developing crisis in Gaza, and rusted-on voters started turning against a Labor party that has traditionally been able to count on their vote.

For astounded and horrified global audiences, the bombing at Al-Ahli Hospital was where the reality of the nightmare set in, with over five hundred killed in one stroke. Another hospital, so many hospitals, a refugee camp, the same refugee camp again, a school, a children’s hospital, and entire blocks of apartments were amongst the randomly sown chaos that was seeded by military aircraft high in the sky, away from the thousands upon thousands of dead children and families littered through the rubble below. Ambulances were being bombed alongside water trucks and bakeries, universities and the homes of the innocent, trembling children and broken families covered in dust that plumed through the air in endless minutes of carnage captured on video by the trapped citizens of Gaza.

A senior Al Jazeera Journalist, Wael Al-Dahdouh, was broadcasting live on television about the attacks unfolding in Gaza when he was informed that his son, daughter, wife and several grandchildren were killed by an Israeli airstrike only hours after the US State Department warned Al Jazeera to tone down its coverage of the atrocities. The footage of the veteran journalist breaking in real time reverberated around the globe. Stories started emerging of entire families being wiped out. Nineteen, twenty-five, forty-two people that shared a bloodline, dozens of families, removed from this earth by a military action that is being meted out on an impoverished civilian population. Photos emerged of limbs missing, of broken elderly and dead children, reports came in that there was no longer any potable drinking water, that incubators were no longer powered, that hospitals were discharging severely wounded people before being targeted. And a turning world full of shocked humans have been having a bit of trouble with it since.   

The paradigmatic shift that Netanyahu’s government is trying to impose on the globe is a test of baseline humanity. The expression of such brutality in such a condensed period, while in breach of international law, also goes against the nature of an interconnected modern world and basic human survivability. Can governments around the world choose to allow this human devastation to unfold, permit such a devastating regard for human life, or proudly stand by the nation who unnecessarily chooses to do so against global public opinion?  To destroy a single Hamas commander by dropping a bomb in the middle of a refugee camp makes a mockery of proportionality. Forcing the evacuation of a children’s hospital by issuing an order to destroy it is something that defies international law. Depriving an entire race of food, water, power, internet and safe access while destroying them with indiscriminate bombing in a condensed open-air prison is, in the words of Raz Segal, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, a “text book case of genocide”.

Between Albanese’s government abstaining on a vote at the UN to enforce a ceasefire, and refusing to condemn the enveloping catastrophe being enacted by a US-backed hyper-militarised power in a state of unreasonable flux, the PM had a strange run of appearances at a gelato shop, a ginger beer factory and a lolly warehouse. One thousand children have been killed per week in Gaza since the retribution for the events of October 7, and for all the photo ops that the PM criticised his predecessor for, the sugary tranche of appearances felt sickly in contrast to his government’s tacit support for a nation run by an extreme far right government which appears set on ending the notion of a “two state solution” once and for all.

Tik Tok videos and memes are coming in of Israeli families mocking Palestinians trapped in Gaza. The IDF has a slick online operation that creates volumes of content, but it can’t compare to the volumes of user content generated around the globe that demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, and express concern at the worst display of innocent human death and destruction seen in the digital age.  Many are being exposed to the plight of the Palestinians online for the first time, adding to a broader understanding of a seventy-five-year conflict that sits prominent in the political sympathies of the majority of the world’s population as the embodiment of human struggle. The more media showing Israel’s overreach in Gaza people are exposed to, the harder this action becomes for Israel to sell to global audiences, and the more governments throw their lot in with their narrative, the more they risk distancing themselves from their constituents as the paradigms shift around them.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has called on fulfilling violent biblical passages, while a more extreme coalition MP was calling for the use of nuclear weapons in Gaza that the country still doesn’t acknowledge it possesses, and Washington is giving the green light for the massacres in Gaza to continue, buying into the paradigmatic shift that Netanyahu is imposing on them, setting into motion a series of events that may be as consequential for the ‘indispensable power’ as the Suez crisis was to empires before. The Australian military and foreign policy class, forever increasingly limited in its strategic and diplomatic options, is tethered to US interests, and the hyperextension into the vaguely defined, concerningly nebulous, and still contentious AUKUS arrangement means that bi-partisan governments will rather stand aside and support a genocide in Gaza rather than risk clashing with an ally who is starting to look like an overlord. 

Due to Israels importance as a US bulwark in the Middle East, even Netanyahu’s $3.3 billion dollar Israel is seen as too big to fail by Washington despite what is occurring, and to nations like Australia, that sit in the US security umbrella throughout the West, opinions seem limited. Much of the media in the west has favoured a pro-Zionist take on the disaster in Gaza, further entrenching the government position, reaching over the seventy-five-year reality of the struggle to deliver the exhausted line that “Israel has the right to defend itself”, as one day of terror has now been met unbelievably with four weeks of non-stop human carnage.  A new and dangerous era in Australian foreign policy has been set into motion by an inexperienced government, seeing it break with a considered neutral footing with a proud history standing adjacent to the interests of Palestine, to suddenly support the consequential interests of BiBi’s new paradigm, shifting the baseline position of the Australian political class while the voters of Australia look despondently for an alternative at the ballot box at the next election.