By Jeremy Salt

These governments are standing by Israel even as it strips them naked of their moral pretensions and destroys the laws they profess to live by. 

In the latest exercise of its power the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) is trying to silence Mary Kostakidis. She stands with many thousands of other Australians against the Gaza genocide. The ZFA stands with the state committing this genocide. 

This one issue brings to the surface the perversion of justice and morality in Australia through government and media support for the state of Israel.

It is the state of Israel that should be sanctioned at all levels. Instead, as is the case in the United Kingdom and the United States, it is the opponents of this state who are being tracked down and punished for daring to speak out. 

The South African apartheid regime was turfed out of the United Nations and subjected to international trade and political isolation for its crimes. Israel’s crimes over eight decades are far worse yet it remains protected. 

Palestine remains what it was since 1948, the stolen individual and collective property of the Palestinian people. The framework of a state imposed on them does not change the basic facts of who actually owned the land and built the villages, towns and cities, including Jerusalem. 

Palestinian Muslims and Christians were their architects and builders, not Jews and certainly not the Zionists. What they have is what they stole except for the small percentage of land (5-6 percent) they actually bought. 

Israel is a usurper state yet it is the usurper state the Australian government and media support, its victims who are the ‘terrorists’ and Hamas that has to be banned and not the regime that has maintained its hold on Palestine through brute force and terror ever since 1948. 

It is Mary Kostakidis who has to be put out of business and not the Australian supporters of a state now widely regarded as committing genocide in Gaza. The pretext seized upon by the ZFA was the reference in a social media message by Ms. Kostakidis to a statement by Hassan Nasrallah, addressing Jewish Israelis, that “here you don’t have a future, from the river to the sea the land of Palestine is for the Palestinian people and the Palestinian people only.” 

As Palestine was stolen there is no reason why any Palestinian would not share Nasrallah’s view. Furthermore, the Israeli pot is only calling the kettle black, as Israel says there can be no Palestinian state between the river and the sea and Israel (not the Palestinians) is not willing to share the land. 

Since October 7, demands in Israel to remove the Palestinian people altogether from Gaza and even the West Bank have only grown stronger. Quid pro quo on both sides: you don’t want us and we don’t want you. 

That makes sense but the ZFA saw an opportunity to pull down a well-known and deeply respected supporter of Palestinian rights by complaining to the Human Rights Commission that Mary Kostakidis had committed an offence under the Racial Discrimination Act. 

Her chief accuser is a dual Australian-Israeli, Alon Cassuto, who told the Australian Jewish News on March 28 this year – six months into the Gaza genocide – that Zionism is “one of the most beautiful and profoundly impactful movements of self-determination the world has ever known.” 

Crushing Resistance

The survival of the Israeli colonial-settler state has always depended not on the application of law and the precepts of morality and justice but its ability to crush the Palestinians and resistance coming from any of the states surrounding Palestine, including Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. 

The violence has been nonstop for almost 80 years. Not weekly or monthly but daily. It is the violence not just of Israel but of the US and the governments that imposed Israel on Palestine in the first place and have weaponized the Gazan genocide. In the 1960s the US took over from Britain and France as Israel’s principal armorer while asking few questions about how these weapons are used. 

If Israel wants to ‘mow the lawn’ now and again in Gaza that’s apparently Israel’s business. The US also turned an official blind eye to Israel’s development of nuclear weapons in the late 1960s when it could have used its bargaining power – the tanks and aircraft Israel wanted – to stop it. 

Apart from the weaponry, all of these governments provide the political support necessary to protect Israel from being punished for the consequences of its actions. This is not just the Gaza genocide but the way it has been for all those 80 years. Israel is never punished. No wonder it thinks it can get away with anything, now a genocide flaunted before the eyes of the world.

There is no reason why any occupied people would not fight this as long as they have breath in their bodies. This is what an occupied people always do and what the Palestinians have done for a century. Their resistance should not be hard to understand yet it is only Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ that the media and the vast bulk of Australia’s politicians choose to understand: it is apparently the Palestinians who are the problem, and not their Israeli overlords. 

It would be hard to overstate the ignorance, abuse, cowardice, racism and deep immorality that characterize the Australian political and media response to the Gaza genocide. 

Scott Morrison, the former prime minister, returned to the headlines by accusing the UN of antisemitism – a standard Israeli accusation – and claiming that Hamas is more interested in building rockets than hospitals. 

These abusive claims have no basis in fact. They could have come directly from the Israeli government’s media office. Yet even a man as bumptious, smug, and ignorant as Scott Morrison can presumably separate fact from fiction and right from wrong. As a Pentacostalist Christian, that is certainly the impression he gives, so how is it morally possible for him not to condemn Israel’s destruction of scores of hospitals and its murder of patients and medical staff, doctors, nurses and paramedics, along with its massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children? 

It is not just Morrison. Very few Australian politicians have had the courage to speak out in support of the Palestinians. Of course, this is a choice dictated not by morality but by professional and party interests. The politicians have the same access to the media as the rest of us and they know what is going on or they can easily find out.

In privacy, as moral human beings, they cannot possibly support what Israel is doing, yet openly they don’t dare speak out. They continue to run shamelessly with the pack, losing no opportunity to express their support for Israel despite the daily evidence of the gross crimes it is committing. 

The level of Israeli violence rises and falls but extreme violence is normative behavior by the state, not an aberration. The racism embodied in Zionism as an ideology is on show not just in the atrocious deeds of the Israeli state but in the permissive language of the perpetrators. No one who regards the Palestinians as equally deserving of life could speak about them as Zionist politicians, rabbis and generals have done over the decades, as insects or human animals, to be caged, controlled or destroyed. 

Since October 7 this hatred, contempt and mockery of the Palestinians – and a deeply rooted fear of them – has burst through the seams of Israeli society, as if there is no longer any need to conceal what a sizeable percentage of the people – perhaps the majority – possibly want. Which is what the Zionist movement has wanted from the beginning: a Palestine without Palestinians. 

The Zionists now feel confident of being close to the end of the road. They are almost there. They have all of Palestine in their grip. Their Palestinian enemies are no match for their armed forces and if their distant enemies dare to attack, they have the US on their side. Far from stopping them from committing genocide, ‘western’ governments are enabling it through arms shipments and political protection. 

Gaza has largely been destroyed, its people scattered many times over into pieces of land incapable of supporting human life. Many have been killed, many will be killed and many will die as the direct ancillary effects of what their tormentors are doing. 

The Israeli foreign minister is now calling for the “temporary” evacuation of the West Bank. There is only one direction in which they could be ‘evacuated,’ into Jordan, joining the Palestinian 70 percent of the Jordanian population already long since ‘evacuated.’ Since October 7 hundreds of West Bank Palestinians have already been murdered by soldiers and settlers, now amplified by a large-scale land and air offensive directed against Jenin and other centers of Palestinian resistance. 

Despite all of this, fewer people across the western world are buying the Zionist fabrications of past and current history than ever. As an age group, polls show that far more young people support the Palestinians than they do the state of Israel. This is bad news for Israel that is only going to get worse. 

If the targeting of Mary Kostakidis has one positive effect it is the way that the ZFA has outed itself as an organization promoting a toxic ideology and defending a government regarded as plausibly guilty of genocide by international jurists, a government whose Prime Minister and Defence Minister face prosecution in the International Criminal Court (ICC) for committing war crimes. 

By attempting to turn the Racial Discrimination Act against Mary Kostakidis, the ZFA raises the question of how it is that other racist ideologies are proscribed in Australia but not Zionism. 

The parallel is not just between Zionism and apartheid South Africa. The historical kinship with Nazism has been demonstrated in the research of Francis Nicosia, Lenni Brenner, and others. While the Ha’avara (Crossing) agreement between Nazis and Zionists in the 1930s was beneficial to both sides, as it rid Germany of Jews and sent Jews to where the Zionists wanted them to go, Palestine, there was also an element of mutual admiration between them. 

Visiting Palestine, Adolf Eichmann praised the Zionist colonists while on the Zionist side, approaches by the Stern Gang to the Nazis were based on a perceived identity of interests between two dynamic national movements. 

In Italy, Benito Mussolini, speaking to the Zionists, regarded Vladimir Jabotinsky as “your” fascist. These episodes cannot be dismissed as incidental as they form a chain linking past to the present: the Stern Gang, Irgun, Jabotinsky and ‘revisionism’ to the fascistic Herut party, Menahim Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and the Netanyahus, father and son. 

At the same time, Nazism and Zionism – whatever the internal differences between Zionist factions – had the same basic aim, a racially purified land for the Nazis and a religiously purified one for the Zionists. 

Just as only Aryans could be the authentic citizens of Hitler’s Germany, so only Jewish people could be full citizens in the state the Zionists intended to construct in Palestine. Whether they were ‘cultural’ Jews or pious Jews did not matter as long as they were Jews by birth.

These objectives would be achieved by the same means, ‘laws’ privileging the Aryans/Zionists and depriving all others of equivalent or natural rights and brute force when necessary, which was always the case. 

Ideologies discriminating between people on the basis of skin color, ethnicity or religion have no place in a world called civilized but somehow Zionism has been given a free pass, as if the ‘liberation’ of the ‘Jewish people’ could be authentically built on the oppression of the Palestinians. 

Thus, of course, it is Mary Kostakidis who has to be punished for opposing barbarism and the techno-barbaric state that is excused for only defending itself when it tears the bodies of young children apart, destroys hospitals, shells aid convoys and commits war crimes without end and without remorse. 

The perversity in this situation is reinforced many times over by the contrast between the clamor against allowing ‘Hamas supporters’ – refugees from Gaza – into Australia while allowing Israelis to come and go and Australian Jews to go overseas to kill Palestinians in territories regarded as occupied even by the Australian government. 

Australia’s Zionist lobbies are part of a global network seeking to dominate government policy on the Middle East and silence dissent. ‘Standing by Israel’ on the basis of bogus ‘shared values’ has long been axiomatic for Australian and other ‘western’ governments. 

This has now reached the stage of civilizational self-immolation. These governments are standing by Israel even as it strips them naked of their moral pretensions and destroys the laws they profess to live by.