In 1967, as a first-year University of Queensland student, I was stopped after a campus social by a person urging me to buy the book, Pawns in the Game, promoting Jewish conspiracies. I was appalled. “You should be ashamed,” I told him, “to accuse Jews after the horrors they suffered under Nazi Germany.”
However, after 9/11 2001, I obtained Pawns in the Game, written in 1954 by a Canadian naval intelligence officer, which mentions a Zionist plan for WW3 against the Muslim World.
I woke up. Indeed, evidence suggests Israeli Mossad were likely responsible for the laying of explosives that brought down three New York towers (Alan Sabrosky, former Director, US Army Strategic Studies Institute).
That 1967 exchange summed up the moral instinct many Australians shared — readiness to stand with the persecuted, to give the underdog a fair go.
It was the same impulse that shaped Australia’s role when Labor’s Dr “Doc” Evatt helped steer the UN vote that created Israel. Evatt saw the new state as a refuge for the oppressed.
But the moral landscape has changed. The oppressed of yesterday became the oppressors of today. Israel now stands as a nuclear-armed Goliath that for decades has dispossessed, besieged and massacred native Palestinians.
To continue supporting Israel today is a betrayal of everything Australians hold dear.
Australia’s official “values” are articulated by the Department of Home Affairs in its Australian Values Statement: commitment to the rule of law, “a fair go,” and compassion.
These express our collective conscience. They demand we judge both our domestic and international positions by the same moral yardstick.
By that standard, Israel’s conduct stands condemned.
Over the past two years, Israel’s assault on Gaza has become the world’s first live-streamed genocide.
The numbers defy comprehension: estimated 186,000 killed, mostly women and children; 1.9 million displaced; 92 per cent of homes destroyed; 835 mosques and three churches obliterated.
Gaza’s hospitals lie in ruins, and deliberate starvation claimed hundreds more.
Even the Israeli Haaretz newspaper documented 82% of Israeli Jews support expelling Palestinians, and nearly half agree the army could annihilate entire populations as in biblical Jericho.
When Israel’s leaders publicly declare “No Arab will remain in Gaza” and “Raze Gaza to the ground,” the intent is unmistakable. These are not defensive actions.
The International Court of Justice and the UN found Israel’s actions genocidal.
Continuing to defend such atrocities is an affront to rule of law, a stain on compassion, and insult to the Australian spirit of fairness.
The October 7, 2023 Hamas attack — which Israeli propagandists incorrectly present as the war’s origin — did not occur in a vacuum.
It was an act after 17 years of siege, 75 years of occupation, and more than a century of worsening genocidal actions by Zionists.
As Halim Rane observed, it was “militant resistance in response to decades of injustice and the utter failure of the international community to hold Israel accountable.”
Major incitement for Hamas’s action was the increasing harassment of peaceful worshippers by Israeli forces invading Al-Aqsa Mosque, third holiest sanctuary in Islam.
Across Australia, ordinary citizens have taken to the streets in unprecedented numbers, demanding an end to Israel’s genocide.
These peaceful rallies are not expressions of hate — they are demonstrations of conscience.
They are aligned with Australian values: compassion for the suffering, fairness for the oppressed, and moral courage in the face of political pressure.
The true source of social tension is not peaceful pro-Palestinian marches; it is the attempt by pro-Israel lobbies to brand these protests as antisemitic.
Such slander cuts against the very values Australians cherish, and destroys social harmony.
The moral choice facing Australia could not be clearer. In 1948, Australians supported Israel out of compassion for a people emerging from genocide.
In 2025, to support Israel is to become complicit in genocide.
A national poll by ActionAid found 82% of Australians reject Israel’s deliberate blocking of humanitarian aid to Gaza. The national conscience remains sound.
It is our leadership that has lost its moral compass.
PM Albanese should listen to his citizens and to dictates of justice.
Australia must condemn Israel’s atrocities, impose sanctions, and prosecute Australian citizens who joined Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
Agencies funding or promoting a genocidal state must be prosecuted.
Supporting Israel today is not an expression of friendship or moral solidarity. It is complicity in one of the gravest crimes of our age.
True Australian values demand we stand, unequivocally, with the Palestinian victims of oppression.
To do otherwise would be to betray the very soul of this nation.
Wake up, look at the countries surrounding Israel and North Africa, all Backwards. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. It’s called observational evidence any educated person can clearly see. What is un-Australian. Open your eyes and think for a while or It’s all someone else’s fault. Bunch of Cry Babies. A standard debate on the lack of progress for all those who bow to allah. Why do all you whingers live here.