From The Australian, 11 October 2024, by Greg Sheridan:
…Israel gets much moralistic grief in Western media and the Muslim world for its actions against Hezbollah and Hamas.
Our own Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, keeps making speeches implying Israel is breaking international law. After condemning the Hamas terrorism against Israel on October 7 last year, Wong told the UN General Assembly that Israel had killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and “this must end”.
…There was a lot more anti-Israel stuff in this speech, which is part of the pattern of the Albanese government effectively reversing Australia’s longstanding, formerly bipartisan support for Israel.
…The implication in Wong’s words, and the words of so many Labor ministers, is that Israel is not waging a just war and is breaching the rules of war.
Is this true? Is the war Israel is involved in a just war at all, and is Israel prosecuting it within the rules of war?
No one in the ALP knows anywhere near as much about this as Mike Kelly. He was a career soldier for 20 years, becoming a colonel, then in the reserves. He was an army lawyer trained in the laws of war, in theory and practice. He served in difficult theatres including Iraq, Somalia, East Timor and Kenya, and completed a PhD examining the laws of war in military occupations. In 2007 he entered politics as Labor member for Eden-Monaro.
…Kelly told me: “There’s no doubt in my mind – Israel has not breached the rules of law in armed conflict. There’s no evidence they’ve done so.”
Kelly points to five factors in forming his judgment: the extreme difficulty of war in an urban environment; the way Hamas and Hezbollah have shaped the battlefield to maximise civilian casualties; the extensive efforts the Israeli military undertakes to avoid or minimise civilian casualties; Israel had to confront Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s total of 50,000 armed fighters in Gaza, a huge force; and the acute, urgent, existential threat Israel faces from the combined efforts of its enemies.
Major General Jim Molan, who was our most experienced modern general in warfare, was part of a 2015 inquiry into whether Israel, in its campaign in Gaza in 2014, acted within the rules of law. The inquiry found Israel’s actions “lawful” and “legitimate”. Molan said at the time the Israelis “held off for as long as they could in the face of provocation that represents war crimes, in my view”. Molan believed Israel compared well in its conduct with other Western militaries.
John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point in the US, recently offered this judgment: “Everything that the world has heard about Gaza has been counterfactual. It has been wrong. What Israel has done to protect civilians, and despite what Hamas has wanted, has been an amazing achievement that I didn’t even personally, as an urban warfare scholar, think was possible.”
Our former chief of the defence force, Mark Binskin, inquired into the tragic accidental killing of seven aid workers, including an Australian, in Gaza. He was given full co-operation by the Israelis and said their investigation, reporting and responding were overall timely, appropriate and sufficient. He said the Israel Defence Forces’s approach to targeting decisions “are the same as the Australian Defence Force would likely be concerned with in similar circumstances”. He also said the IDF quickly held its people to account for mistakes or wrongdoing.
…from the work of Kelly, Molan, Spencer and Binskin, and so many others, is …Israel as a democratic and ethical nation thrust permanently into a maddening and impossible environment of constant threat and relentless attack.
None of this is to diminish the tragic loss of innocent civilian life in Gaza and Lebanon. The moral responsibility for that rests entirely with Hamas, Hezbollah and their masters in Iran who designed the situation to produce civilian casualties as a way of mobilising global opinion against Israel.
…Western societies are inclined to place impossible demands and restrictions on soldiers that lead only to greater death and injustice. Bad actors fight as they like, good actors can’t effectively fight at all. Israel is the chief victim of this thinking.
Paradoxically, no one understands these dynamics better than Islamist enemies of the West and of Israel. The sheer performative sadism, grotesque tortures and ultra sexualised violence of the Hamas atrocities were a sign of the terrorists’ personal depravity, but they were also a deliberate act of strategic policy.
Hamas designed its torture theatre not only to harm and distress, but to force a strong Israeli response, inevitably at the expense of the Palestinian civilians whose welfare Hamas so obviously holds in contempt. It entirely subordinates their welfare to Hamas’s religious hatred of Israel and Jews.
The strategic pay-off, as Kelly tells me, lies in the fact Iran and its proxies are not only waging a physical and psychological war against Israel, but above all they’re waging an information war against Israel.
…Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah constantly break all the laws of warfare. They routinely attack civilians and proclaim their desire to wipe Israel off the map. Hamas could end Gazan suffering any time by releasing Israeli hostages. But with Hezbollah they intentionally create an environment that provides the greatest ethical and moral difficulties for Israel in conducting the just military actions necessary to its survival.
They routinely repress, coerce, intimidate, persecute and murder anyone in their own societies who opposes their aims, and ensure that war is conducted in the middle of their civilians. Israel’s choice is surrender to the death of a million atrocities or conduct war in operationally and morally messy environments.
This is where proportionality comes in. It’s not the least fatuous element of Wong’s recent speeches on Israel that she laments there has been no Palestinian state established even though the UN provided for it 77 years ago. The fraudulent implication is that Israel has prevented this.
But when territory was first divided into an Arab and a Jewish state, Israel accepted this. The surrounding Arab armies and the resident Palestinians rejected it and launched a war of annihilation against Israel. Had the Arab world accepted that state, it would have been much bigger than the West Bank and Gaza of today.
Three times since then Israel has offered a Palestinian state on generous terms, only to be met by rejection and murderous terrorism. Several times in its short existence Israel has had to fight conventional wars of national survival, as in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. And now Iran, five minutes away from possessing nuclear weapons, proclaims its sacred mission of wiping Israel off the map while organising terror and missile strikes from every point on Israel’s border.
So to measure the proportionality of Israel’s response, think not just of 1200 murdered brutally, or 250 hostages, but think of a credible, proximate, desperate threat of annihilation of the world’s only Jewish state.
That the Albanese government has not grasped any of this, shows no understanding of the history, has turned so foolishly and nastily against Israel, Australia’s close friend these many decades, and at a time when much of the world is turning against Jerusalem and Jews, and friends should count for something, underlines that as well as failing in strategic policy, and geopolitical coherence, the Labor government has failed, more than anything, morally.