It’s hard to work out exactly what Benjamin Netanyahu’s position is on countries like Australia recognising the Palestinian state he has spent his political career seeking to thwart.
He insists, agreeing with Donald Trump, that recognition is “irrelevant”. But, confusingly, recognition also reduces him to froth-mouthed fury. Australia is neither in the Middle East, nor has any formal alliance or particularly strong relations or historical ties with Israel. Yet Netanyahu has tweeted personal abuse at Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, dispatched one of his abusive form letters to Australia (France received one as well), and gone on Sky News to lecture Australians.
Which is it, Bibi? Irrelevant or, as he insisted to Sky News, some sort of 1938 redux moment of appeasement? He hasn’t been able to contain himself since the government refused to allow an extremist Knesset MP into Australia to peddle hatred of Palestinians, a decision that reduced Netanyahu — who likes to portray himself as the strongman needed to protect Israel against existential threats — to a quivering, howling jelly of rage.
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It’s an almost comical overreaction. Religious fundamentalist Simcha Rothman was still free to deliver his speech virtually to the extreme right-wing Australian Jewish Association, just as other extremists banned from entering Australia have still got their message across. But Netanyahu — whom one would think had a country to run, a genocide to preside over and a campaign of ethnic cleansing to coordinate — has made it his number-one priority to personally attack Albanese and harangue Australia.
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It’s as if Slobodan Milošević had rung in to Alan Jones to whinge about Gareth Evans during the siege of Sarajevo.
Perhaps Tony Burke pointing out it wasn’t “strong” to bomb civilians or starve kids got under the seemingly very thin skin of the Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu is evidently relaxed overseeing the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, devising plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank and ordering the starvation of people in Gaza — but criticism from other countries produces a toddler-like tantrum.
It’s no surprise Netanyahu turned to News Corp to give him a platform. It is the RT of Australia: a foreign-owned propaganda outlet dedicated to pushing the interests of its foreign masters and the governments they favour. But one would have thought even Sky News had standards. Given it has previously apologised for platforming a neo-Nazi, Sky News surely should have thought twice before platforming a far-right leader who is not merely an accused war criminal on trial for serious corruption, but also one who actively aided and abetted Hamas, the terror group he now insists Australia is rewarding.
Is this the kind of guest Sky News now allows on, a man who encouraged payments to Hamas? A man who enabled Hamas to conduct its atrocities in October 2023? Is it now Sky News’ policy to platform people who not merely encourage but also enable the funding of monsters like Hamas? Truly Sky News is Australia’s own Genocide Network.
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Not that Israel’s equivalent of Trump covered himself in glory before a fawning News Corp employee. Pro-Palestine protesters in Western countries should be “counteracted”, he insisted, a strange choice of words, and an alarming one given the enthusiasm of the Israeli Defense Forces for shooting protesters.
If a Chinese leader had demanded Australia “counteract” protesters against China in our streets, you can imagine the febrile reaction from News Corp and the Sinophobes scattered across Australian media. And Netanyahu persisted in denying that Israel was responsible for any starvation in Gaza despite Israeli human rights groups and Israeli media arguing — in some cases for well over a year — that Israel has been starving Gazans deliberately.
But most of all, Netanyahu was keen to hammer the trope that Israel was the bleeding edge of Western civilisation facing savage hordes: “We’re actually fighting the war of Western civilisation against these barbarians.”
“Fighting the war” means starving children to death, turning the provision of food aid into a bloodsport for foreign mercenaries, using drone strikes to kill aid workers, killing journalists to prevent coverage of atrocities, bombing and sniping civilians sheltering in tent encampments, and ethnically cleansing regions to accommodate colonies.
As it turns out, that’s exactly what “Western civilisation” has meant for so many non-white peoples for so long. The thin-skinned man-child was, however inadvertently, pointing to a historic truth far more resonant than his laboured comparisons with 1938.