Playing devil's advocate in the living hell of Gaza

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is failing to maintain his genocidal narrative, and an audience, as he turns his country and himself into a notorious global pariah.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on a damage control publicity campaign, personally engaging in a battle for hearts and minds on digital platforms and cable news programs. The Israeli PM’s publicity campaign has hit its low point when he joined Sharri Markson on Sky News Australia, in his arduous search for receptive media outlets in the media to air his ugly narrative.

For almost two years, Israel’s operation in Gaza, that most of the world agree is a genocide, has been beamed out via digital streams of visceral and unconscionable carnage in continuous bloodshed, exacted on the people of Gaza in response to a day of terrorism on October 7, 2023. A day that seems so long ago, covered in the uncounted corpses and indistinguishable rubble of Gaza.

In the light of the horrific human outcomes, and due to its scale, Israel’s global reputation has plummeted. Within Israel itself, hundreds of thousands of people are protesting on the streets against the Netanyahu government for refusing to negotiate a deal to return hostages remaining in the strip, as his coalition government draws up parliamentary approved battle plans to annex Gaza with 60,000 reservists. The Israeli economy has ground to a halt, tens of thousands flee the country potentially never to return, and the health of the economy and the viability of the society wanes under the pressure of a seemingly endless genocidal push in Gaza under the guise of a constantly expanding military campaign in the region.

Apart from displacing 2.1 million, Palestinians, in Gaza, sending his army into Gaza quoting biblical references to destroy everything in sight, attacking sovereign nations, and extra-judicially killing negotiation partners, Israel has paid a price for its callous approach to the cadence of its rolling genocide. It has lost the Red Sea port of Eilat to bankruptcy due to Houthi blockades on Israeli shipping, 46,000 businesses have gone bankrupt, and the public service is on the verge of collapse, with the biggest toll being the loss of its international standing and its global perception as a pariah state.

This global viewpoint has reflected on Netanyahu, who along with his ragtag coalition of settlers and right-wing ethno-nationalists, is finding it increasingly difficult to prosecute its narrative in a world that now refuses to listen – and with the increasing unacceptability of Netanyahu’s massacre in Gaza – comes the increasing hostility towards his message. Israel’s beleaguered Prime Minister has bent over backwards recently to make some podcast appearances, with the aim of trying to limit the haemorrhaging support for Israel amongst global youth. But his appearances haven’t been on premium platforms like ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’, the ‘Ezra Klein Show’, or Wolf Blitzer, but on the frat-shenanigan bros known as the ‘NELK bois’, the fervently pro-Israel hosts of the UK based ‘Triggernometry Podcast’ and our very own Sharri Markson on Sky News Australia’s ‘After Dark’.

Israel has dropped more ordinance in Gaza than the entire urban bombing campaigns of the Second World War. And then some. It has killed more journalists than every single major war combined since the US Civil War. The death of aid workers, health workers, school teachers and academics is measurable and harrowing, and the mass murder and deliberate targeting of children and innocents inflicts a wound on humanity’s conscience that will endure for generations. The tide of global opposition is growing exponentially against Israels actions, and no glass-half-full media interview is going to change that.

Within Gaza itself, visibly and structurally unrecognisable, the people have been reduced to total desperation. Squeezed into under 20% of the territory they once inhabited, Israel has industrialised its system of genocide or control over Palestinians, who now clamour in tent villages that remain valid targets for 500lb bombs dropped from F-35’s built with global supply chains from the collective west, equipped with well-made Australian bomb-bay doors with great functionality and low failure rates. Between the kinetic horror of drone attacks and tent bombings, the mass surveillance scans between the killing, as thousands of unarmed malnourished civilians stream down Squid Game corridors, called ‘killing fields’ by the soldiers posted to them, where there are randomly shot whilst clamouring for opioid laced flour which they carry home on their shoulders next to people returning with dead relatives instead.

Images of mass starved children with translucent, skin and visible organs, dying every day from avoidable malnutrition, flood the screens in legacy media settings that themselves struggle to deny the reality that starving children to death cannot be linked to a noble battle against Hamas. People on both sides of the political spectrum in a modern world, in lieu of their leaders, put away their binary differences to agree together that forced child starvation, only considered and adopted by the most notoriously evil within our history books, is a step too far for anyone. And this bloke thinks he can waltz on Australian television, after ripping into us for two years straight for not supporting his child killing, and start telling us how it is?

The carnage has been continuous and ever-present. It’s ballooned from one unbelievable level of depravity to another, that many thought could not be conceived – with a world aghast watching a tiny nation with a pathologically broken set of realities ramping up a crescendo of mass death, driven by enmity, envy, biblical entitlement and desperation. There is a biological revulsion that the human race is displaying towards the mass killing of our own species in Gaza. Without all the inter-generational hate, the messianic tinged entitlement, and the supremacist, blinkered and cloistered nexus of Zionist ideology, Israel’s rose-coloured genocide is largely incompatible for the rest of the world. It’s largely considered evil.

So, after doing any gig he could be offered on the minor-league circuit of the few remaining openly Zionist podcasts, and after spending an entire week trolling our government and calling Prime Minister Anthony Albanese a weak man for finally recognising Palestine after two years of dithering, it was almost surreal to see the Israeli Prime Minister framed in the tacky decals of Sky News Australia being questioned by the discordant voice of a proudly Zionist Jewish host. Sharri Markson, one of the few Israel ultras that remain so openly supportive, continued to use every inch of her platforms Australian media licence to give Netanhyahu a leg to stand on, at the further expense of her damaged reputation, to the added detriment of the media empire she represents that chose to casually shoehorn a brutal genocidal maniac into an evening of Australian television. Shame on everyone involved.

“It’s as if Slobodan Milošević had rung in to Alan Jones to whinge about Gareth Evans during the siege of Sarajevo” – Bernard Keane, Crikey.

The most hated man this millennium, responsible for the worst human catastrophe of the century, the person responsible for an endless train human eradication operation in Gaza, had the gall to tell a gushing Sharri Markson that Albanese’s “record is forever tarnished by weakness in the face of Hamas.” The interview smacked of desperation, from the host and the beleaguered guest. Netanyahu’s recent appearances seem fatigued, his bulletproof smirk unable to mask the bellowing disappointment of his predicament: that he is left preaching to a rapidly shrinking choir, while performing to a rapidly growing audience that will no longer listen.