Pearls and Irritations
John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal
By John Menadue
Feb 7, 2025
As expressed in the UN General Assembly, the vast majority of the world’s governments and peoples agree that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and now the West Bank. The main supporters of Israel — the US, Canada, Australia and NZ, the settler colonial states — have all expropriated their indigenous populations and find little disagreement with Israel doing the same.
Only the US veto in the Security Council prevents full disclosure of the barbarity of the IDF, supported by the people of Israel. We have been lied to time and time again that the IDF was only targeting Hamas and not civilians.
Since 2018, Netanyahu has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings in order to strengthen Hamas against the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas. Now we are told by Netanyahu that Hamas is the epitome of terrorist evil and must be destroyed.
Netanyahu has for decades opposed a two-state solution and our timid politicians prattle on about it, but do nothing to seriously advance it. The extremists in the Zionist lobby don’t want a two-state solution either. They want Israeli occupation of all of Palestine.
So much of our media in in thrall of the Zionist lobby and its propaganda. They deliberately manufacture consent for the genocide. Truth is discounted. Ignorance is widespread.
This is especially true of The Australian newspaper which is a part of the least trusted media group in Australia. The Murdoch media is also the most discredited media group in the English-speaking world. It lies to keep sweet with its readers and viewers. It is a rogue organisation.
They can’t get enough of attacks on synagogues, but show no interest in the daily harassment of Muslims. Even throwing eggs in Bondi is seized on by the media and the police as another case of antisemitism.
Islamophobia is a much more serious concern, but Muslims are not as well organised as the Zionist lobby and do not have the ear of politicians and the media. And they don’t have a powerful lobby that can call politicians and journalists to heel as and when necessary. A few years ago, Scott Morrison urged the shadow cabinet to capitalise on the electorate’s growing concerns about “Muslim immigration”, “Muslims in Australia” and the “inability” of Muslim migrants to integrate.
There is a campaign in the Western world by the Zionist lobby to assert that criticism of the Israeli Government’s genocide in Gaza is antisemitic. “Antisemitism” has become a cloak to hide the genocide, mass murder and displacement of Palestinian people.
We are told to heed the hurt feelings of Zionists, some on university campuses, who support genocide or have wilfully chosen to ignore it. What twisted logic this is.
The Palestinian scholar at Macquarie University, Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, put it eloquently and correctly. She said, “the feelings and fragility of Zionists are used as a rhetorical shield to deflect from engaging with the moral and material reality of genocide”.
She asked: “How can any individual support an apartheid settler colonial state carpet bomb, … starve … a population of over 2 million people, murder over 40,000 people…, and still make it about your sense of safety …?
“Since when do the victims of genocide have the responsibility to defer to, and protect, the feelings of those who enact, support, and enable their genocide?”
The historic victims of the Holocaust are now inflicting another Holocaust on the Palestinian people. This has been ongoing for a century, seizing Palestinian land, killing the people and destroying their communities We are expected to ignore it.
The genocidal intent of Israel is abundantly clear as numerous United Nations resolutions, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have made clear. The leader of Israel is an indicted war criminal. In the US, he gets support from a convicted felon when he should be arrested and extradited to The Hague for trial.
But the Zionist lobby is hell-bent on stopping criticism of the behaviour of Israel and its criminal leadership.
Under illegal Israeli occupation, Palestinians have a right to rebel. The Zionist strategy to label people who criticise Israel as antisemitic should be exposed as a cover for Israeli genocide.
The lives of Palestinians killed in the Gaza genocide are as valuable as the lives lost by Jews in the European Holocaust. “Never again” must apply not just to Jews, but to Palestinians and all humanity.
We must not allow the weaponisation of antisemitism to crush legitimate criticism of the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.
To criticise the Israel genocide is not antisemitic.
John Menadue
John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.
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