By Dr Anthony Bergin, Senior Fellow @ Strategic Analysis Australia, Expert Associate @ National Security College and Prof Gregory Rose, Senior Fellow @ thinc., Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security, University of Wollongong Australia
As small children growing up in Melbourne, we remember lining up outside the huge display windows of the Myers department store at Christmas, wide-eyed in wonder at the snowy dioramas.
This year anti-Israel agitators announced their intent to disrupt the Christmas windows launch scheduled for Sunday 17 November. The event was cancelled due to concern for the safety of staff and customers. The victims of this disruption were the children, parents and relatives targeted for wanting to be at this annual Christmas event.
Australia’s Foreign Minister encouraged further anti-Israel agitation and civil disruption when she successfully changed Australian policy, voting against Israel in the UN General Assembly’s Second Committee. A Christmas cancelation is just collateral damage in the federal government’s campaign against the Jews who “occupy” Israel’s disputed territories.
One vote in the UN General Assembly on which Australia shifted its position on was to support a declaration of permanent Palestinian sovereignty over natural resources. Labor frontbencher Jason Clare said on Friday 15 November that backing Palestinian sovereignty was about “building momentum for a two-state solution”. Well, no. Australia had voted no or had abstained on this resolution for more than 20 years. Australia’s recent reversals on UN voting to rally against Israel simply attempt to block progress towards a negotiated future on the sovereignty issue.
The head of the General Delegation of Palestine to Australia, Izzat Abdulhadi, welcomed the government’s change of heart. The new position “aligns with international law and the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, which has been recently published”, he said.
But the ICJ’s advisory opinion on Israel and the Palestinian situation demonstrates once again that when it comes to Israel, politics makes bad law. There was no proper legal analysis by the court of the status of the Palestinian territories. The court didn’t bother to analyse the existential security issues faced by Israel since its creation as a state. As the court’s vice-president, Julia Sebutinde, made clear in her dissenting opinion, the advisory opinion completely airbrushed out the agency, by war and terror, of Israel’s neighbours and Palestinian leadership over decades that has been at the heart of the threat to Israel’s security and the absence of a Palestinian state. The ICJ made it appear that the prolonged Israeli presence in the Palestinian territories was solely due to Israel’s obstinance.
The other UN resolution that Australia voted for blamed Israel for an oil slick that leaked from a Lebanese power station struck by Israel twenty years ago. That resolution failed even to mention that the slick happened during a war launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon during 2006. The UN resolution greenwashed a war against the sole Jewish state.
Compare another slick three years ago, in February 2021, when crude oil began washing upon the entire Israeli Mediterranean shore. The massive pollution began at the north end of Gaza and ran 195 km up to Lebanon at the north end. Over 1,200 tons of tar balls were collected from the Israeli coast by volunteers, a volume of 1,000 m3, requiring additional cleanup costs of $50 million.
The 2021 pollution was a discharge from an Iranian-owned vessel, carrying Iranian oil to a Syrian refinery, travelling without radio identification and in breach of international sanctions. Its oil discharge was apparently deliberate. However, there was no international concern or condemnation.
That act of environmental terrorism followed a long campaign of arson against hundreds of thousands of hectares of Israeli forests, committed mostly by Arabs from the West Bank. The 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war burned down 500,000 trees in Israel through indiscriminate rocket attacks, as is happening again in 2024. How dare the Zionists make the desert green? Another proud moment for the Australian Labour Party in its competition for votes currently held by the Australian Greens, which is quite the irony.
Terrorism, even environmental terrorism, is tacitly supported by an overwhelming majority of the UN community when directed against the Jewish state. Israel was the only country singled out for condemnation by resolution under the UN Sustainable Development agenda.
In this context, we should note the general deterioration of other UN bodies. The Human Rights Council has become a shield for legitimising autocracies and criminals. The International Criminal Court has just announced an external investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct against its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. In May, Khan said there were reasonable grounds to believe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then defence minister Yoav Gallant were responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity from the day of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 onwards.
The only course of action to resolve the longstanding Israel-Palestine dilemma is getting the key stakeholders back to the negotiating table, a goal not even mentioned in UN resolutions that in effect reward aggression. It is death by a thousand cuts when it comes to what was Australian political parties’ bipartisan support for Israel.
The current Australian government should reverse its vote when the sovereignty resolution comes up before the General Assembly next month. Unfortunately, it’s already too late to reverse the cancellation of Melbourne’s annual Christmas windows launch.
A shorter version of this article first appeared in The Australian national newspaper on Monday, 18 November 2024.
