Israel finally gets some plain speaking

As this grim marker approached, a reader took me to task for having described the October 7 massacre as "obscene" in these pages, arguing forcefully no such outrage gets expressed against Israel.

The well-written letter ran counter to most feedback I receive in which the opposite complaint predominates - that my characterisation of Israel's war against civilian Palestinians ignores the horrors of that terrible day and thus justifies Hamas's terrorism.

Of course, such a binary is sub-intellectual and morally bankrupt, anyway. For the record, I do not resile from the use of "obscene" and any other harsh adjectives I can find to condemn Hamas's killing spree.

How else to fairly describe a hyper-violent scourge which glorifies murder for its poisonous ends? Ends which, by-the-way, abhor democracy, liberalism, feminism, secularism and universal human rights? The murder of innocents is wrong. Always.

Which is why I also share the frustration felt by my correspondent and others when they hear Tel Aviv's quisling allies dissembling their way around an ensuing and patent annihilation of Gazans.

"Israel has a right to defend itself," these exceptionalists insist too frequently and too forcefully in answer to a question that has not been asked.

Last week, though, things changed.

Suddenly it wasn't just Palestinian kids being starved, or Gazan families being crushed in pancaking apartment blocks, hospitals and UNRWA compounds.

Last week it was white Westerners - Britons, Americans, and an Australian. Citizens of the very countries supporting Israel most strongly, defending its war, supplying its weaponry and reinforcing its moral cover.

You could feel history shift. Aid workers. Unarmed non-combatants endangering their own lives to save others, deliberately targeted and killed. The rocket attack which killed Zomi Frankcom and fellow humanitarian aid workers was coldly, relentlessly thorough.

The efficiency of these murders offered a glimpse into the Palestinian experience. These were utterly vulnerable human beings in a non-conflicted area, their names and passports and prominently identified vehicles having been registered with the IDF, their specific aid mission and route notified.

And yet this life-giving convoy was treated with extreme prejudice, their assassination coming from the sky with terrible purpose.

Despite commendable joint statements with New Zealand and Canadian counterparts calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, Anthony Albanese has for the most part struggled to impart a sense Australia's loyalty to Israel knows practical limits.

He has emphasised Israel's "right to defend itself" carries the addendum, "but how it defends itself, matters".

Yet such words ring ever more hollow with each attack on hospitals, refugee shelters and other civilian structures. Ditto the deaths of journalists, UN officials, doctors and ambulance drivers.

And they fail to explain the defiance of a preliminary finding by the International Court of Justice of a plausible risk of genocide and an order on Israel to cease its military operation.

These findings have been ignored by Tel Aviv and, functionally, by its backers - all of us signatories to the ICJ and the 1949 Genocide Convention.

Still aid access to Palestinians was severely restricted. The Americans, whose bombs rain down daily on civilian structures, were reduced to dangerous and ineffective air-drops of food along the Gazan coast, causing injuries and drownings and stoking criminal behaviour.

Gazan health authorities have reported more than 33,000 lives have been lost since that October attack. The IDF disputes Hamas's numbers, but admits it has no idea, so indiscriminate has been its aerial attack.

In Australia, with the exception of Foreign Minister Penny Wong, it has been left mainly to a series of Western Sydney ministers with large Arab and Muslim populations to make the clearest calls against Tel Aviv's inhumanity.

Both Ed Husic, Australia's first Muslim cabinet minister, and Tony Burke have spoken up forcefully in the past for Palestinian lives and for the equal value of their lives.

Now a third, Education Minister Jason Clare, has joined them, telling a breakfast audience on Seven on Friday: "It's obvious that Israel is not doing enough to protect the lives of innocent people ... it's not good enough just to say 'shit happens', that 'this is war', and that 'people are going to die in a war zone'."

Israel, a nation whose feelings have been indulged to deadly fault, is now hearing some of the honesty it deserved from the start.

It has taken six months. Remember Biden's earliest warning after October 7 - don't do what we did after September 11? America then stressed it was fully behind Israel no matter what. Arms aid continued uninterrupted.

Eventually, though, Netanyahu's excess became too much even for Biden who in a phone call laid down "the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering and the safety of aid workers".

"US policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel's immediate action on these steps," the White House statement said.

We shall see, but it is hard to escape the feeling it was only when our own citizens were killed by the IDF that we started drawing any real lines.