The Albanese government’s failure to publicly condemn Donald Trump’s plan to seize Gaza, forcibly displace its Palestinian population, and transform the territory into a US -controlled colonial outpost is not just a failure of diplomacy—it’s morally bankrupt and politically disgraceful.
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: The IDF is the world’s most moral army! It’s a war of defense! They’re taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian lives!
Israel apologists in 2025: Well obviously Gaza’s an uninhabitable wasteland that’s been carpet bombed to oblivion, duh.
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel would never deliberately target civilian infrastructure!
Israel apologists in 2025: We need to move the entire population of Gaza to Egypt and Jordan because all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has been completely destroyed.
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: How dare you suggest that Israel is deliberately destroying healthcare facilities, you blood libeling antisemite!
Israel apologists in 2025: You can’t expect people to keep living in Gaza! Don’t you know there’s no healthcare there?
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel is only targeting Hamas! The only locations with civilians in them that have been bombed are the ones where they’re being used as human shields!
Israel apologists in 2025: These poor Gazans need to be evacuated immediately! The entire strip is a demolition site with hardly any buildings left standing!
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel is taking the utmost care with its airstrikes to only target terrorists with the most pinpoint precision.
Israel apologists in 2025: Gaza’s not safe for civilians, the whole place is covered with thousands upon thousands of undetonated ordinances!
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: This will all be over as soon as Hamas releases the hostages.
Israel apologists in 2025: Now that we’ve got our hostages back it’s time to end the existence of Gaza as a Palestinian territory and fill it with Jewish settlements.
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Blame Hamas! Hamas caused this with their unprovoked attack on October 7!
Israel apologists in 2025: The only possible solution to all the death and devastation that’s been inflicted on Gaza is to advance an ethnic cleansing agenda that we’ve been chasing for generations.
"Australians must reject the notion that its foreign policy should be dictated by American interests" - which if we continue with the insanity of AUKUS, it most certainly will. Whilst we only have one or the other in reality to vote for, the insanity will continue. The best we can hope for in our forthcoming Federal election is minority government with input from the Greens and the Independents. Albanese could have dumped AUKUS when he won the election, but he didn't. Why not? This stale old two party system just doesn't suit this country anymore. We are too diverse. Excellent post George. But my apologies - your post was about Gaza and rightly so - the simply appalling Trump proposal etc etc.....
Thank you for stating the truth so clearly and strongly.
The ALP term in office - whilst still offering substantially fairer and more rational policies that benefit a greater proportion of the population than anything of the previous decade of LNP government - has fulfilled neither its promise nor its ideological roots.
It occurs to me that Australians are now in a similar situation to that of the USA voters in their presidential election. That is, essentially only one of two parties can take government and only one of two parties will provide the prime-minister. Yet, our choice is the equivalent of that which faced the USA voters, i.e. a choice between the lesser of two evils. - A Dutton government will be even worse than that of Abbott, Howard or the conniving illegality of Fraser, yet some will vote that way out of disgust at the ALP's weakness in this issue or because one or another promises has been broken. This is, of course, not a rational response but an emotional one and one that is relatively easy to encourage, as Trump showed.
The reality is that neither of Australia's two major parties is going to rebuff the USA to any extent. If there is difference it will only be in the smallest degree. I can imagine the difficult path that Penny Wong has been forced to follow and how difficult this must have been for her conscience for, although of course I can't 'know', I feel sure that were it up to her, with no party restriction of agenda, she would have been much firmer in her condemnation of the USA funded genocide of Netanyahu and the support for the Zionist regime which has committed one of the greatest crimes against a population since the Holocaust.
The hypocrisy surrounding the perfidy of Israel and its crimes which has taken place and continues to do so is frightening because it shows the lack of moral character of so many of our politicians and particularly those who lead the two major parties.
However, it is also immensely disappointing to see the general failure of mainstream media to present this appalling tragedy in clear and definitive terms. Instead, predominantly there has been an avoidance of clear delineation and showing of the damage to civilians in Gaza and the West Bank or to explaining the extent of the historical persecution of the Palestinians by successive Israeli Zionist governments.
Even the current hysteria regarding antisemitism and the kowtowiing of Albanese to Dutton's insistence on mandatory sentencing for writing hateful graffiti is a misrepresentation of the truth. Yes, there have always been and perhaps always will be those who hate Jews, just as there are those who hate Muslims or Christians or whatever. However, it seems very clear to me that it is no coincidence that the recent surge in antisemitic activity is, at the least to a large extent, promoted by horror and disgust at Israeli's genocide in Gaza. I don't condone it and consider it misguided in the extreme because far from creating sympathy for the Palestinians it simply increases sympathy for Israel because of its supposed status as a 'Jewish State'. It may well have a majority of Jews within its population but it is not a 'Jewish State' it is a Zionist State built on the land of the very people it has persecuted ever since and which was given to it by foreigners without any consultation with the Palestinians and with the false claim that there was only a small percentage of Arabs in the population. In fact, Arabs were over 90% of the population.
This whole sordid and horrific attack on a civilian population and virtually total destruction of its homeland has been misrepresented or not represented accurately to the Australian people. That is a disgrace.
Neither Albanese nor Dutton deserve to be our Prime Minister any more than Trump is fit to be the President of the USA.
Where we go from here, I don't know. What I do know is that the future looks as bleak as it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis yet is more amorphous so not so startling to most. It is long past time that the media had programs or articles with titles of the ilk:
"What would you do if this happened to your country, your state, your town, your suburb, your home and those of all around you?" - Accompanied by unsanitised images of the monstrous and brutal assault that the IDF has committed on the Palestinian people.
Very pertinent comments. Albanese is a great disappointment, a weak man beholden to USinterests and the Israel lobby.
Dutton as you say is much much worse, an ex Queensland police cop who doesn't understand justice or the rule of law.
Both men, with their failure to condemn Israel's genocide in Gaza, are complicit in this genocide, in a stark contravention of the principles of the Geneva convention which Australia was a signatory to after the second World war.
What shameful and disgraceful behaviour this is. Neither men are fit to hold the office of prime minister of Australia.
It is woefully disingenuous to cry "antisemitism" when people protest against war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Most protesters, of course, are anti-Zionist for good reason, but a minority, will be antisemitic, mainly through ignorance, with a smaller minority actual antisemites. It's not as if we in the UK don't have swathes of Islamophobes and/or people who hate Arabs (is there a word for that?) but these people get off very lightly compared with pro-Palestine protesters, which include Jews, of course. While you in Oz have Alabanese and Dutton, we in the "UK" have Starmer and Badenoch, who will compete with each other to be the Zionists' greatest ally. I don't know about Australia, but living standards are plummeting for the majority here while the odious and pathetic Starmer runs around obeying his orders, endangering as well as impoverishing the country.
There is at best a performative difference between the ALP and LNP. They are two wings of the same party. They have fake differences to maintain the facade of political choice, but substantively nothing ever changes no matter who gets in power. Labor is no less slavishly devoted to our vassalage to the US than the Liberals are, they just occasionally talk like they aren't. Even this they don't often do anymore.
Just look at Paul Keating for a demonstration of the old ALP view on this. Peace and trade with the US, but not slavish devotion and vassalage. He looks like an extremist in today's ALP. Doesn't fit in at all.
We are willingly going to become the United States' Ukraine 2.0 for the Chinese theater. Both parties will 100% send us to die for US hegemony. Our democracy is a complete sham. Refuse to vote in the upcoming election.
100 percent JC and the point I make to all is that the decline in Australian politics began with the election of Howard in 96. Keating was a master politician but he was no lackie to the Yanks. What we have now is severe subservience to an entity that is evil beyond all belief. Humanity no lo ger resides in US politics, it died with the assassination of JFK. America has been in a spiral decline ever since. The past four years has seen it rocketing towards political oblivion. The empire is on its last legs and Australia is politically well on the way.
Imagine being so subservient you'd deliberately pick a fight with the country that represents 41% of your total exports to further the interests of a country which represents 4.3%.
We don't have to become a slave to China. We should be an independent nation, something we have unfortunately never been. Leave the entangling alliances, refuse to go along with US regime change wars and sanctions.
I agree that Howard was where things really started to go badly wrong. Particularly with regard to subservience to the US, and decline in freedoms/liberties. Howard wasn't the start of this, but he sure finished it off.
As regards the USA, I would point to the abandonment of the Articles of Confederation as when they started going downhill. Certainly far before JFK. Some other milestones include Woodrow Wilson, William McKinley, and more controversially Teddy Roosevelt. The decline of the US has not been sudden, but gradual, and almost from the get-go.
Also, nobody mentions the millions of Chinese who are Australian citizens. They had to give up their Chinese citizenship because China doesn't recognise dual citizenship. If they started a war with China, what will become of all these people? They can't be deported. So what are they thinking? Concentration camps? Mass executions? What exactly?
Our Enlightenment has turned into one gigantic scam run by psychos threatening to blow everything up...😕
In war lots of things become permissible, necessary even. That's the evil of war.
Mass executions wouldn't occur, but remember those (ironically Maoist sounding) Centres for National Resilience we created to intern COVID dissidents? They're still there. They and more like them would likely receive internees, similar to the internment of people of Japanese ancestry under FDR.
A war with China would be unlikely to last long. Wargames universally indicate that Western success relies on quickly blockading the Chinese mainland. The Chinese have masses of surface-to-ship missiles along their coast, which would hit the American fleet. At that point both sides have a choice: acquiesce or go nuclear.
From there the time flight from rural China to Washington/London/Sydney/Paris and vice versa is 24 minutes for an ICBM. Less for the inevitable SLBMs parked off our coasts.
Not enough time to escape the blast radius by car, certainly not when everyone's trying to at the same time. Here's hoping that from the ashes a better world can be born, but given the elites are the only ones who have prepared for this with bunkers and food stocks I doubt it.
As George Carlin said: "the planet is fine, the people are fucked!"
It is like Israel bombed all the structures in Gaza, and America first president will rebuild it? The standards of living of Israelis is better than the falling apart cities in America. Not to mention how rich the Israelis supporters in the West.
Trump is pushing the rich golf states to pay for his reconstruction? So, America sent its weapons to Israel to destroy the homes of 2 million people? And there is no call for Israel to rebuild what they have dedtroyed.
<< But while Labor’s inaction is shameful, the alternative—an elected Peter Dutton government—would be even worse. >>
That is PRECISELY what I screamed in the run-up to the 2024 election in the USA. Of course, I realize that "Genocide Joe" Biden and (by association) Harris were enabling the genocide. However, I pointed out how much WORSE things would be under a Trump dictatorship.
We see the plan unfolding. US taxpayers will pay for the construction as Trump "develops" the oceanfront hotels/resorts -- and, of course, takes ownership of them as well.
Meanwhile, I remind people that the Nuremberg trials established that the forced evacuation of a civilian population across internationally recognized borders (e.g., Israel-Jordan and Israel-Egypt) is a war crime. No wonder Trump bailed from the ICC!
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: The IDF is the world’s most moral army! It’s a war of defense! They’re taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian lives!
Israel apologists in 2025: Well obviously Gaza’s an uninhabitable wasteland that’s been carpet bombed to oblivion, duh.
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel would never deliberately target civilian infrastructure!
Israel apologists in 2025: We need to move the entire population of Gaza to Egypt and Jordan because all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has been completely destroyed.
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: How dare you suggest that Israel is deliberately destroying healthcare facilities, you blood libeling antisemite!
Israel apologists in 2025: You can’t expect people to keep living in Gaza! Don’t you know there’s no healthcare there?
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel is only targeting Hamas! The only locations with civilians in them that have been bombed are the ones where they’re being used as human shields!
Israel apologists in 2025: These poor Gazans need to be evacuated immediately! The entire strip is a demolition site with hardly any buildings left standing!
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel is taking the utmost care with its airstrikes to only target terrorists with the most pinpoint precision.
Israel apologists in 2025: Gaza’s not safe for civilians, the whole place is covered with thousands upon thousands of undetonated ordinances!
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: This will all be over as soon as Hamas releases the hostages.
Israel apologists in 2025: Now that we’ve got our hostages back it’s time to end the existence of Gaza as a Palestinian territory and fill it with Jewish settlements.
Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Blame Hamas! Hamas caused this with their unprovoked attack on October 7!
Israel apologists in 2025: The only possible solution to all the death and devastation that’s been inflicted on Gaza is to advance an ethnic cleansing agenda that we’ve been chasing for generations.
Caitlin Johnstone.
"Australians must reject the notion that its foreign policy should be dictated by American interests" - which if we continue with the insanity of AUKUS, it most certainly will. Whilst we only have one or the other in reality to vote for, the insanity will continue. The best we can hope for in our forthcoming Federal election is minority government with input from the Greens and the Independents. Albanese could have dumped AUKUS when he won the election, but he didn't. Why not? This stale old two party system just doesn't suit this country anymore. We are too diverse. Excellent post George. But my apologies - your post was about Gaza and rightly so - the simply appalling Trump proposal etc etc.....
Thank you for stating the truth so clearly and strongly.
The ALP term in office - whilst still offering substantially fairer and more rational policies that benefit a greater proportion of the population than anything of the previous decade of LNP government - has fulfilled neither its promise nor its ideological roots.
It occurs to me that Australians are now in a similar situation to that of the USA voters in their presidential election. That is, essentially only one of two parties can take government and only one of two parties will provide the prime-minister. Yet, our choice is the equivalent of that which faced the USA voters, i.e. a choice between the lesser of two evils. - A Dutton government will be even worse than that of Abbott, Howard or the conniving illegality of Fraser, yet some will vote that way out of disgust at the ALP's weakness in this issue or because one or another promises has been broken. This is, of course, not a rational response but an emotional one and one that is relatively easy to encourage, as Trump showed.
The reality is that neither of Australia's two major parties is going to rebuff the USA to any extent. If there is difference it will only be in the smallest degree. I can imagine the difficult path that Penny Wong has been forced to follow and how difficult this must have been for her conscience for, although of course I can't 'know', I feel sure that were it up to her, with no party restriction of agenda, she would have been much firmer in her condemnation of the USA funded genocide of Netanyahu and the support for the Zionist regime which has committed one of the greatest crimes against a population since the Holocaust.
The hypocrisy surrounding the perfidy of Israel and its crimes which has taken place and continues to do so is frightening because it shows the lack of moral character of so many of our politicians and particularly those who lead the two major parties.
However, it is also immensely disappointing to see the general failure of mainstream media to present this appalling tragedy in clear and definitive terms. Instead, predominantly there has been an avoidance of clear delineation and showing of the damage to civilians in Gaza and the West Bank or to explaining the extent of the historical persecution of the Palestinians by successive Israeli Zionist governments.
Even the current hysteria regarding antisemitism and the kowtowiing of Albanese to Dutton's insistence on mandatory sentencing for writing hateful graffiti is a misrepresentation of the truth. Yes, there have always been and perhaps always will be those who hate Jews, just as there are those who hate Muslims or Christians or whatever. However, it seems very clear to me that it is no coincidence that the recent surge in antisemitic activity is, at the least to a large extent, promoted by horror and disgust at Israeli's genocide in Gaza. I don't condone it and consider it misguided in the extreme because far from creating sympathy for the Palestinians it simply increases sympathy for Israel because of its supposed status as a 'Jewish State'. It may well have a majority of Jews within its population but it is not a 'Jewish State' it is a Zionist State built on the land of the very people it has persecuted ever since and which was given to it by foreigners without any consultation with the Palestinians and with the false claim that there was only a small percentage of Arabs in the population. In fact, Arabs were over 90% of the population.
This whole sordid and horrific attack on a civilian population and virtually total destruction of its homeland has been misrepresented or not represented accurately to the Australian people. That is a disgrace.
Neither Albanese nor Dutton deserve to be our Prime Minister any more than Trump is fit to be the President of the USA.
Where we go from here, I don't know. What I do know is that the future looks as bleak as it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis yet is more amorphous so not so startling to most. It is long past time that the media had programs or articles with titles of the ilk:
"What would you do if this happened to your country, your state, your town, your suburb, your home and those of all around you?" - Accompanied by unsanitised images of the monstrous and brutal assault that the IDF has committed on the Palestinian people.
Very pertinent comments. Albanese is a great disappointment, a weak man beholden to USinterests and the Israel lobby.
Dutton as you say is much much worse, an ex Queensland police cop who doesn't understand justice or the rule of law.
Both men, with their failure to condemn Israel's genocide in Gaza, are complicit in this genocide, in a stark contravention of the principles of the Geneva convention which Australia was a signatory to after the second World war.
What shameful and disgraceful behaviour this is. Neither men are fit to hold the office of prime minister of Australia.
The similarities between the "choices" in Australia and the USA are striking (and disgusting).
Australia is a mini version of the US
It is woefully disingenuous to cry "antisemitism" when people protest against war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Most protesters, of course, are anti-Zionist for good reason, but a minority, will be antisemitic, mainly through ignorance, with a smaller minority actual antisemites. It's not as if we in the UK don't have swathes of Islamophobes and/or people who hate Arabs (is there a word for that?) but these people get off very lightly compared with pro-Palestine protesters, which include Jews, of course. While you in Oz have Alabanese and Dutton, we in the "UK" have Starmer and Badenoch, who will compete with each other to be the Zionists' greatest ally. I don't know about Australia, but living standards are plummeting for the majority here while the odious and pathetic Starmer runs around obeying his orders, endangering as well as impoverishing the country.
Australian here.
There is at best a performative difference between the ALP and LNP. They are two wings of the same party. They have fake differences to maintain the facade of political choice, but substantively nothing ever changes no matter who gets in power. Labor is no less slavishly devoted to our vassalage to the US than the Liberals are, they just occasionally talk like they aren't. Even this they don't often do anymore.
Just look at Paul Keating for a demonstration of the old ALP view on this. Peace and trade with the US, but not slavish devotion and vassalage. He looks like an extremist in today's ALP. Doesn't fit in at all.
We are willingly going to become the United States' Ukraine 2.0 for the Chinese theater. Both parties will 100% send us to die for US hegemony. Our democracy is a complete sham. Refuse to vote in the upcoming election.
100 percent JC and the point I make to all is that the decline in Australian politics began with the election of Howard in 96. Keating was a master politician but he was no lackie to the Yanks. What we have now is severe subservience to an entity that is evil beyond all belief. Humanity no lo ger resides in US politics, it died with the assassination of JFK. America has been in a spiral decline ever since. The past four years has seen it rocketing towards political oblivion. The empire is on its last legs and Australia is politically well on the way.
Imagine being so subservient you'd deliberately pick a fight with the country that represents 41% of your total exports to further the interests of a country which represents 4.3%.
We don't have to become a slave to China. We should be an independent nation, something we have unfortunately never been. Leave the entangling alliances, refuse to go along with US regime change wars and sanctions.
I agree that Howard was where things really started to go badly wrong. Particularly with regard to subservience to the US, and decline in freedoms/liberties. Howard wasn't the start of this, but he sure finished it off.
As regards the USA, I would point to the abandonment of the Articles of Confederation as when they started going downhill. Certainly far before JFK. Some other milestones include Woodrow Wilson, William McKinley, and more controversially Teddy Roosevelt. The decline of the US has not been sudden, but gradual, and almost from the get-go.
Also, nobody mentions the millions of Chinese who are Australian citizens. They had to give up their Chinese citizenship because China doesn't recognise dual citizenship. If they started a war with China, what will become of all these people? They can't be deported. So what are they thinking? Concentration camps? Mass executions? What exactly?
Our Enlightenment has turned into one gigantic scam run by psychos threatening to blow everything up...😕
In war lots of things become permissible, necessary even. That's the evil of war.
Mass executions wouldn't occur, but remember those (ironically Maoist sounding) Centres for National Resilience we created to intern COVID dissidents? They're still there. They and more like them would likely receive internees, similar to the internment of people of Japanese ancestry under FDR.
A war with China would be unlikely to last long. Wargames universally indicate that Western success relies on quickly blockading the Chinese mainland. The Chinese have masses of surface-to-ship missiles along their coast, which would hit the American fleet. At that point both sides have a choice: acquiesce or go nuclear.
From there the time flight from rural China to Washington/London/Sydney/Paris and vice versa is 24 minutes for an ICBM. Less for the inevitable SLBMs parked off our coasts.
Not enough time to escape the blast radius by car, certainly not when everyone's trying to at the same time. Here's hoping that from the ashes a better world can be born, but given the elites are the only ones who have prepared for this with bunkers and food stocks I doubt it.
As George Carlin said: "the planet is fine, the people are fucked!"
Thank you Judy.
It is like Israel bombed all the structures in Gaza, and America first president will rebuild it? The standards of living of Israelis is better than the falling apart cities in America. Not to mention how rich the Israelis supporters in the West.
Trump is pushing the rich golf states to pay for his reconstruction? So, America sent its weapons to Israel to destroy the homes of 2 million people? And there is no call for Israel to rebuild what they have dedtroyed.
<< But while Labor’s inaction is shameful, the alternative—an elected Peter Dutton government—would be even worse. >>
That is PRECISELY what I screamed in the run-up to the 2024 election in the USA. Of course, I realize that "Genocide Joe" Biden and (by association) Harris were enabling the genocide. However, I pointed out how much WORSE things would be under a Trump dictatorship.
We see the plan unfolding. US taxpayers will pay for the construction as Trump "develops" the oceanfront hotels/resorts -- and, of course, takes ownership of them as well.
Meanwhile, I remind people that the Nuremberg trials established that the forced evacuation of a civilian population across internationally recognized borders (e.g., Israel-Jordan and Israel-Egypt) is a war crime. No wonder Trump bailed from the ICC!