Israel’s allies aren’t just turning a blind eye to Gaza’s killing fields. They have cheered on the bloodshed, provided diplomatic cover and supplied the arms. Israel is urging western states to rally to its side as the International Court of Justice prepares to hear this week South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The Continue reading »
politics
In a speech he made in Sydney in 2011, defending Julian Assange, John Pilger recalled how it was always impressed upon him when he was young that Australia was a brave country: that we stood up to authority, and we stood up for justice. Such national myths were at best half-truths, Pilger said, but in Continue reading »
Since April 2023, in a civil war in Sudan, an estimated 10,000 people have been killed, six million internally displaced, over one million are refugees in neighbouring countries, 18 million people are reported by the UN to be ‘food insecure’; and where fighting has reached the borders of neighbouring countries, food aid has been suspended. Continue reading »
The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organisation of some note, recently released a list of companies profiting from Israel’s current campaign in Gaza, including its operations in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria between October and December 2023. The list of nasty participants is impressive and familiar. There is, for instance, the UK company Continue reading »
The Search for the Palace Letters is a remarkable documentary that follows the story of Professor Jenny Hocking, the historian who took on an epic legal battle against the Australian Government and HM Queen Elizabeth II in a landmark legal battle – and won. Aired on ABC earlier this week, you can view the documentary Continue reading »
Australian governments talk a lot about our commitment to the rule of law and human rights. However Australia’s response – at glacial speed with grossly inadequate measures – to the unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza following Hamas’s brutal October 7 attacks, are putting that commitment to the test. As a nation that has provided political Continue reading »
For the foreseeable future Israel will not commit itself to allowing Palestinian statehood. It will remain in occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. And so long as the occupation continues, there will be no peace to keep. The carnage in Gaza and reactions to it have implications and risks for most countries. Australia is Continue reading »
In one of our most macabre and diabolical acts, humans are unburying and reactivating the Earth’s teeming dead from ages long gone by, in a wild act that is sure to haunt every one of us for the remainder of our days. Trillions of organisms that perished over hundreds of millions of years and whose Continue reading »
Our foreign minister’s first and hardest overseas task in 2024 is likely to be her visit to Israel. Penny Wong and other foreigners, apart from aid workers, cannot enter Gaza. This will circumscribe what she sees, whom she meets, and what she achieves. If Anthony Albanese follows her visit to Israel, the Coalition and the Continue reading »
Just when will the horror that is Gaza today prompt the Albanese Government to acknowledge publicly that the war in the territory is now consumed by Israel’s blood-lust revenge and a hunger for ethnic reconfiguration? Is it too much to hope that the government can find a conscience of its own rather than mimicking the Continue reading »