By Jeremy Salt

It took the abomination of Gaza for many and perhaps most people around the world to conclude that there is no peace to be had with Israel. No one-state solution, no two-state solution, no peaceful solution at all. This is grim but it is the reality.

The Middle East cannot live with Israel and Israel is set on making sure that the Middle East cannot live without it. It’s either Israel’s way, or no way. What else can this mindset have but catastrophic consequences for everyone?

The collective ‘west’ is actively enabling the piecemeal destruction of Gaza and its people. We should not be surprised, given its own long record of genocide. It seems to have lost all sense of the civilization it is supposed to represent. Other governments far from the scene but anxious to show their dedication to the ‘west’ chip in, ignoring the latest shocking news from Gaza in favor of pleasing Zionist lobby groups.

Ignoring the Lancet medical journal report, that the real death toll from all war-linked causes in Gaza could be 186,000 so far, ignoring Israel’s bombing of schools, hospitals and UN buildings and the slaughter of scores of Palestinian men, women and children taking refuge there, Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, is giving precedence to the rise of anti-semitism in Australia.

In fact, a reported rise because most of the complaints come from Zionist lobby groups that have a vested interest in steering the public eye away from the genocide being committed in Gaza. Every one of these complaints would have to be checked out by neutral observers to decide how many are genuinely ‘anti-semitic’ and how many expressions of opposition to Israel’s genocide.

Once a supporter of the Palestinians, Albanese is now a supporter of their persecutors. In Parliament he described the events of October 7 as “mass murder on a horrific scale” but since then has had not uttered a word of condemnation of the vastly greater mass murder by the Israeli military. He called for “moral clarity” in standing against Hamas, without showing a trace of it when it comes to standing against the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel. His position is defined by moral weakness, not moral clarity.

Albanese’s most recent distraction has been the appointment of a “special envoy to combat anti-semitism,” Jillian Segal, a former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), whose real purpose seems to be defense of the Zionist state, which an increasing number of Jews around the world regard as a threat to their faith. ECAJ certainly has no right to speak for all Australian Jews.

No worse person except another Zionist could have been chosen for the role now given to Jillian Segal. Despite her relatively prominent role in Australian public affairs, her vested interest in defending Israel should have disqualified her in the first place. Albanese might be in for an unpleasant surprise as Australians know what is going on in Gaza and might even feel insulted by this appointment.

Despite the complete lack of evidence of a Hamas presence, Ms Segal has described Israel’s bombing of Al Shifa and other hospitals as a blood libel intended to demonize Israel. At a rally on October 12, she repeated all the lies already pouring in full flood out of the Israeli propaganda machine. If she later found out they were lies, she has not said so. Furthermore, it has since been shown without any doubt that many if not most of the Israelis were killed by other Israelis, just as it was other Israelis who destroyed their homes and their cars with tank and missile fire.

In her words, “the butchery and savagery that has unfolded in Israel (on October 7) beggars description.” The incomparably greater butchery and savagery that has “unfolded” since at the hands of the Israeli government and military surely “beggars description” yet has not rated even one word of condemnation from Ms Segal.

Describing October 7 as “the barbarians breaching the gates,’’ Ms Segal is unable to see that it is the Zionists who are the barbarians. They are not just inside the gates. They built them. First the closed military zones and then one by one, the fences along the borders/armistice lines with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, where a five-metre high galvanised steel and razor mesh ‘separation barrier’ runs for 266 kms through the Sinai desert adjoining Israel and Gaza.

Then there’s the ‘separation wall’ cutting Palestinians off from their land on the West Bank, along with the multitude of barriers cutting off towns and villages from each other. Last but hardly least, there is the fence around Gaza, cutting the region off from the rest of Palestine as well as Egypt. Wherever the eye turns, the Palestinians have been deliberately trapped in ghettos.

The 19th-century Russian ‘pale of settlement’ and the ghettos of Eastern Europe have been replicated at the heart of the Middle East. The minds capable of building for other vulnerable people what they themselves escaped from will engage historians, sociologists and psychologists for a long time to come.

The Zionist barbarians have been inside the gates since Balfour purported to give them Palestine in 1917. They have lost no opportunity ever since to demonstrate that they are tribal, extremely violent barbarians: techno-barbarians, given their skill in electronics and the manufacture of advanced weapons of war. They are filled with hate and suspicion of those who are not from their tribe. They are living on stolen land and will kill/have killed anyone who gets in their way.

As barbarians, Gaza is the Zionists’ greatest, most brutal accomplishment since 1948. Unless they are stopped, because they are not going to stop voluntarily, no doubt there is much worse to come.

Please try to educate yourself, Ms Segal. Do some serious reading, which means the books of Palestinian and other historians who have long since exposed the fraudulent nature of Zionist history. There are many of these books. You can begin with Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. If you cannot credibly deny the truth of what he writes, then let it set you free. You cannot simultaneously be a good Jew and a good Zionist. Which one is it to be?

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.