entering the colonial fog
It seems I’ll have to eat my words a little bit.
In my last post I wrote about the unchanging cycle of discourse, only to find over the course of the last 24 hours, that it has in fact changed—or at least, become even worse, a more virulent strain of the norm.
We have a state and Federal Labor government and despite their nominal status as “left-wing”, I’ve never seen Australian politicians respond this way to the ongoing conflict in apartheid Israel and Occupied Palestine. I’m calling Israel an apartheid state because the world’s leading human rights organisations, and leading Israeli human rights organisations, all identify it as such. It is irrefutable that Israel is an explicitly Jewish state with separate laws for Jewish citizens and non-Jewish citizens.
Prime Minister Albanese urged people not to attend a pro-Palestine protest, and remarked that it should be cancelled—an extraordinary action given that over the past few years, numerous literal Nazi rallies have been held which did not provoke this kind of commentary. NSW Premier Chris Minns echoed the PM’s rhetoric, and defended the decision to drape the Sydney Opera House—which is currently showing the Indigenous production The Visitors, a play about First Contact, and exhibiting a monumental installation by Qandamooka artist Megan Cope—in the colours of the Israeli flag, a colonial nation currently occupying and brutalising an Indigenous population. All this, in the same week the Labor government is exhorting people to vote in a referendum for an Indigenous Voice to parliament. There has surely never been a clearer sign that even if the referendum succeeds, there is zero chance in them actually listening to Indigenous people.
When I say I’ve never seen Australian politicians respond as they have, perhaps I should clarify that I mean I’ve never seen such nakedly transparent nonsense. Here the premier is equating solidarity with Ukrainians being invaded by Russia with solidarity for illegal Israeli occupiers who maintain a brutal blockade of Gaza and have done so for a decade while demolishing Palestinian villages, and ethnically cleansing Palestinian neighbourhoods. How can we make sense of this cognitive dissonance? I can only liken it to entering a colonial fog, a wilful attempt to obscure reality, to smother.
Here’s another astonishing exchange, this time from Penny Wong, Minister for Foreign Affairs:
This is one of the clearest and most shocking examples of double standards you’re likely to ever come across. When it's Palestinian violence, it's "abhorrent", "awful", "dreadful", and the loss of Israeli life is "devastating." When it's Israel bombing Gaza, cutting off food, water, and electricity to over 2 million people, suddenly "Well it's difficult to make judgments from over here." And, “We’ve said Israel has a right to defend itself.” As I said yesterday, and as proven here, this phrase has nothing to do with defence and is only ever used as permission for retaliation.
One Israeli minister called for a nuclear strike on Gaza today. Another referred to Palestinians as animals, and openly declared intent to cut off the power and water supply to Gaza, which they did, both of which are war crimes. Israeli PM Netanyahu shared footage of the bombing of civilian buildings, another war crime. Palestinian journalists have been murdered, multiple hospitals bombed, and ambulances targeted; more war crimes. Not the first, not the last. Does anyone care? Certainly not our Labor politicians.
Some quick facts, which I assure you these politicians already know: Gaza has a population of 2.2 million, of which 1.7 million are refugees who have been dispossessed of their homes, and forced into a cramped prison, making it one of the most densely populated and impoverished areas in the world. 50% of this refugee population are children; this is one of the youngest populations in the world. 53.5% of Palestinian children suffer from PTSD, and 90% have directly experienced trauma. Some 93,000 Palestinians are disabled, a large portion due to the Israeli policy of deliberately shooting kneecaps to disable protestors, 20% of whom are children. We are talking about one of the most vulnerable, traumatised populations in the world, who have known nothing but a brutal, illegal military occupation and blockade occasionally interrupted by carpet bombing. We are talking about a place where 97% of the water is not fit for human consumption, when the water is even on.
As I wrote yesterday, prior to Hamas’ attack on Israel, this was already the deadliest year for Palestinians since 2006, with over 200 killed, 47 kids murdered. Now, in addition to this horrific murder toll, in the past day Israel has murdered 700 more, including 140 children. And in response to this horror, to the blatant genocidal calls of Israeli politicians, the illegal genocidal actions of its military, our Foreign Affairs Minister could not bring herself to condemn it even remotely. She was all too capable of luridly condemning Hamas, but for Israel? It’s too hard to judge. This is beyond staggering, it’s an admission of complete failure as far as our international legal obligations and human rights obligations are concerned, or else a deliberate abrogation of our responsibilities as such; it’s a geopolitical embarrassment that calls into question the basic ability and humanity of our political leadership.
Minister Wong has previously issued statements but only when Israelis have been killed in attacks. She, and the Australian government, refuse to see or acknowledge when Palestinians are murdered. No buildings are lit for Palestine. No statements of solidarity for the Palestinian-Australian community. One can only assume that she too is lost in the colonial fog, and because of that, because of the Zionist blanketing seen in media over the past few days, we all are too. It’s beyond haunting, the impact is no less than a spiritual disfigurement. We are given no space whatsoever to grieve for the lost. No space whatsoever to grieve for the dead. No space whatsoever to be human. We are too busy trying to resist the onslaught of lies, the gaslighting doublespeak that pours out of the mouths of these cynical deadweights and a lazy, complacent media that is almost all spectacle, no decency. We are too busy trying to see through the colonial fog, to say look, we are begging you to see. Not that one side are angels and one side are devils, but that they are all in the hell of apartheid, and only Palestinians are trying to escape. There can never be peace in this system, it is an atrocity that can only produce atrocities, and mass graves.
My god, we can’t even protest for Palestine without being condemned. And it’s so much worse in the West, with its explicit colonial-imperial agenda; over the past two days, one of the sources of grace I’ve relied upon has been the courageous analysis of Israeli journalists and human-rights advocates who have clearly articulated the blame for the brutality we’ve seen lies solely within the brutal system of apartheid. As the editorial board of leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it:
It is profoundly disturbing that our media and elected officials are incapable of anything other than slavish devotion to a fascist Israeli government, profoundly disturbing that to get any kind of credible analysis we have to turn to foreign sources, unable or unwilling to produce our own. I don’t know what to do, truly. I’m not sure what else to say, except that every day my heart breaks, and I refuse to be silent or cowed into a lessened version of myself to suit the immoral, heart-rotted elite.
I leave you with this poem, from The Lost Arabs, and my profound hope in the mercy of God.
Salaam,
Omar