With the ICJ ordering a cessation of Rafah hostilities there is now close to a certainty Netanyahu and defence minister Gallant will be charged with a war crime. At the heart of the ICJ’s decision is that Israel all but ignored its previous order and fell far short of “all necessary and effective measures” to Continue reading »
Israel / Palestine
“For 57 years, Israel has been maintaining a regime of wrongdoing and evil, and now, at last, the world is waking up and starting to act against it. Will it also be able to wake up at least some Israelis from their heedless, twisted sense of justice?” writes senior Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy. Watch the Continue reading »
Let me introduce myself. I am a child of Holocaust survivors. My mother survived Auschwitz and my father fought the Nazi war machine as a partisan during the Second World War. Ninety-eight percent of my extended family perished during the Holocaust. From a very early age, beginning perhaps when I was four, I became acutely Continue reading »
James Crawford has been described as “Probably Australia’s greatest international lawyer of all time” (SMH, 16 June 2021). James Crawford died on 31 May 2021. But perhaps he still has something to contribute to the major controversy facing today’s world: Palestine. Why should I be aware of someone by the name of James Crawford, you Continue reading »
What a twenty-five-year-old memo by Daniel Ellsberg says about the past failures of Lyndon Johnson and the current horrors of Benjamin Netanyahu. The conversion of my friend Ellsberg, who died last June of cancer, from avid supporter of and adviser on the Vietnam War to perhaps its most important critic is well known. One of Continue reading »
“The Australian government and its most senior officials have both failed to prevent or respond to the genocide committed by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza and been complicit in the carrying out of this genocide in a manner which falls squarely within Article 25 (3)(c) and/or (d) of the Rome Statute of the ICC,” state Continue reading »
Newly declassified documents reveal how early and how much Australia knew of Israel’s genocide in Gaza after 7 October – and how it is failing to uphold its international obligations. Australia has a duty, under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, to “undertake to prevent and punish” the crime of genocide, and to “employ all Continue reading »
“It’s not the word I would use”… As Western Australian Senator Fatima Payman breaks party ranks to condemn the Gazan genocide, Defence Minister Richard Marles, in defiance of the International Court of Justice and United Nations, is attempting to shield Israel and deter MPs from using the term ‘genocide’ . Last week Federal Parliament was Continue reading »
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu In Gaza, the echoes of violence have reverberated every single day for months. We are witnessing the erasure of an entire society in real-time, television cameras rolling, live-streamed, into living rooms across the planet, as children Continue reading »
After more than six months, it appears to many that Israel is losing its war in Gaza. At the same time, Israel is fighting Hezbollah on its northern border, relations between Jerusalem and Washington are strained, and the International Court of Justice has ruled that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing Continue reading »