Australia has been confronted with two major human rights disasters in the past year.
One was the disastrous defeat of the Referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
The other was the vocal support given by the Labor government to the extremist Netanyahu regime in its genocidal campaign in Gaza.
Canada, the USA, the UK and Australia have all kow-towed to Israel and the Zionist lobby.
Ireland and South Africa have not.
The Zionist project in Palestine and the inability of Australia to Close the Gap have similar roots.
Entitlement
British colonists saw themselves as the children of a superior race and culture, an attitude which still prevails.
They saw only lands inhabited by barbarous people or non-people as in Terra Nullius Australia.
Francis Galton with his ‘scientific racism’ found British gentlemen in the highest ranks of humanity while Australian Aborigines were portrayed as the lowest.
The Zionist movement both evangelical Christian and secular Jewish, saw Palestine as a land which belonged to no-one.
The Christians saw return of the Jews to Palestine as a trigger for the resurrection of the dead and the end of times, while Jewish Zionists saw the land as their traditional possession, whether they believed in the Torah or not.
Imperial Need
The British Empire needed a restaurant port on the new route to China, for whalers and the route to the furs of Nootka Sound in Canada, so Sydney was set up with convict labour.
From the beginning the indigenous population was seen as a problem, to be dealt with as the situation demanded.
British industry needed wool so the colony developed pastoralism.
Apart from religious Zionism, Palestine offered a base for the empire, especially important once Britain took control of the Suez Canal, the route to the rich colony of India and possessions to the east.
At the Fourth Zionist Congress 1900 London, Herzl suggested that the Jewish state would serve the interests of the British Empire and the whole western world
Dehumanisation
Settler colonialism always used dehumanisation of the indigenous population as justification for their dispossession.
British settlers in Australia, particularly squatter pastoralists, saw the local people as devoid of history culture and religion.
They went on shooting parties, likening black hunting to kangaroo hunting.
They issued starving tribesman with arsenic laced flour for damper, killing whole tribes.
Those who resisted, taking sheep or attacking shepherds, were met with Native Police who shot first.
Ian Grant’s Scars in the Landscape documents the dozens of atrocities in just southwestern Victoria, a key pastoral area.
The Zionists in Palestine quickly developed this settler arrogance.
In The Jewish State Herzl wrote that the Zionist project, “…shall be a sector of the wall of Europe against Asia, we shall serve as the outpost of civilization against barbarism.”
Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery wrote “[Herzl’s] sentence could easily be written today. American thinkers propound the ‘clash of civilisations’, with Western ‘Judeo-Christian’ culture battling ‘Islamic barbarism’.
American leaders declare that Israel is the outpost of Western civilization in the fight against Arab-Muslim ‘international terrorism’.”
Members of the Netanyahu regime have described Palestinians as animals.
Genocide
The culmination of settler colonialism is typically genocide, both cultural and physical.
In Australia the Native Police, with tracking skills and no sense of responsibility to foreign indigenous nations, were used to terrible effect across the continent.
David Marr’s harrowing Killing for Country gives a detailed account of their role in Queensland.
The Mission Stations set up across the nation for survivors, were centres pf cultural genocide.
Native language was forbidden, cultural s ceremonies were abolished and language groups forced together.
In Palestine, commencing in Gaza and now spreading to the West Bank, mass killings are proceeding before the world.
The Nazis tried to keep the Einsatzgruppen and gas chambers secret but the Israelis are publicising their atrocities.
West Bank Israeli colonists are already using poison, only against Palestinian livestock at present.
Francesca Albanese of the UNHRC has already stated that Israel is engaged in genocide and the world waits for the ICJ decision on the case brought by South Africa.
A leading American Islamic scholar, Omar Suleiman, summarised the situation in Gaza:
“This time, the Nakba is being televised, and it has a stench of finality to it. What is happening in Palestine can no longer be described as genocide or even ethnic cleansing. It is beyond mass extermination – it is total erasure.” [Al Jazeera, 19 October 2023 ]
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