Poet and novelist Omar Sakr methodically dismantles Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s attempts to gaslight the Australian public about the Commonwealth’s complicity in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.Truth-telling about state violence and colonial complicity is necessary here and there.
Some months ago, an article published in The Lancet conservatively estimated that, based on the official number of dead in Gaza on June 30th—which only counted confirmed, direct kills—the true death toll was 186,000, which is roughly 7.9% of the population. They used a study of recent urban warfare which illustrated that “indirect” deaths in such conflicts outnumbered direct deaths by up to 15. The 186K statistic came from their self-described “conservative” multiplication of 4x the official direct count.
In September, Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University, estimated the death toll stood at 335,000. The killing has only increased since.
In Lebanon, for the past month, Israel has killed at least one child and injured 10 more every single day, according to the UN. The Lebanese Health Ministry reports 3,002 people have been killed and 13,492 injured by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon. Over 186 medics have been killed, continuing the two most evil trends of Israel’s genocidal assault on life: the mass killing of children and healthcare professionals.
It’s worth remembering that the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, has charged Israeli PM Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant with crimes against humanity and applied for arrest warrants of each, which are long overdue. Two weeks ago South Africa submitted a 750-page Memorial document of evidence supporting its charge of genocide against Israel, which includes 4,000 pages of additional material; and more recently, Forensic Architecture has released “A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza since October 2023”, an 827-page report analysing Israeli military actions providing methodical evidence of the genocide in place.
Some of the key findings of this report include:
- Destination areas (areas to which the Israeli military has ordered civilians to move, including the Israeli designated ‘humanitarian zone’) decreased significantly from October 2023 to August 2024, contracting from 228.2 sq km (62.5% of Gaza) to 47.4 sq km (13% of Gaza).
- The Israeli military continuously attacked all areas of Gaza: destination areas (including the ‘humanitarian zone’); Israeli designated ‘safe routes’; undefined areas (including civilian shelters); civilians from within evacuation areas.
- Destination areas have decreased in size, even as the displaced population has increased.
- Sites of medical infrastructure where healthcare services were either reestablished or newly introduced were subsequently targeted by the Israeli military.
- The timing of the Israeli military’s attacks on hospitals correlates with the presence of displaced civilians at those hospitals.
- Between 7 October 2023 and 1 August 2024:
- Hospitals out of service: 35 of 36 at least once.
- Directly targeted: 31 of 36 hospitals.
- Under siege: 11 hospitals, with 5 under siege twice.
- Invaded: 10 hospitals, with 4 invaded twice.
- Field hospitals: 4 evacuated and forced out of service.
- 1 hospital (Patient’s Friends Society Hospital) has been attacked and forced out of service twice, having rebuilt and reestablished operations.
- Between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024:
- Approximately 83% of all plant life in Gaza was destroyed.
- Approximately 70% of Gaza’s agricultural land, 104 sq km (out of 150 sq km) of fields and orchards, were destroyed.
- More than 3,700 greenhouse structures in Gaza, 45% of its total, were destroyed.
- More than 47% of groundwater wells and 65% of water tanks were destroyed or damaged. The status of 29% of the wells is unknown.
- None of the wastewater treatment facilities in Gaza have remained intact or functional.
Israel’s attacks on civilian infrastructure suggests an effort to destroy the ability to sustain civilian life.
As I write this, Kamala Harris is on track to lose the US election to convicted felon Donald Trump having a run a campaign of total contempt for Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians in particular.
Holocaust Harris lost. Good riddance to her and the rotten Democratic party that has so forcefully and fanatically enabled Israel’s perverted genocide. Americans deserve Trump; he reflects the empire’s hideous nature better than anyone.
In the lead-up to this loss, so many Democrat-voters were posting pseudo-threatening fantasies like “Trump is going to be so much worse to Gaza”, “Trump is going to rain death on Muslims” (verbatim, this was said to me on Twitter), as if Gaza still exists, as if 80% of it hasn’t been reduced to rubble, as if 85,000 tonnes of bombs haven’t already been dropped on this small besieged city—an utterly indiscriminate, deliberately evil scale of catastrophe that exceeds any in modern history—as if we haven’t watched the daily slaughter of Arab children of all faiths and none, along with their families, and now in the immediate aftermath of this election, those same people are lashing out at those of us whose communities are being killed, and who they would have you believe they cared about once.
Hudhayfah Ahmad, spokesperson for the Muslim Abandon Harris movement, said it best:
“To every person who fancied themselves righteous, to those who postured as morally superior, you have exposed yourselves. For 14 months, you saw the images-children beheaded, dismembered, orphaned -and did nothing. You saw videos of women torn apart by bombs, gunned down, mourning the erasure of entire bloodlines, and still, you did nothing. You saw men crushed to death by tanks, lined up and executed, raped in Israeli prisons-and nothing moved you.
Those of you with even a shred of self-awareness will come to realize you lost more than an election. You minimized and dismissed a genocide, funded by your tax dollars, your compliance, and your silence. You didn’t just lose the election; you lost your humanity. Spare us the patronizing responses of “Good luck under Trump.” Our efforts for justice have always relied on people of conscience, and this past year has made it clear you have none.
Instead of joining with the massive coalition of people who have been organising and protesting the genocide, a significant number of these pseudo-progressives tried to shout us down, to demand silence and acquiescence on the basis of “the other guy will do the same/do worse”. It is always a mistake to base your values or what you deem acceptable on the actions of other people, imagined or otherwise. To say “this is okay because someone else would do worse in my situation” is to continually rob the possibility of better in order to maintain the ugliness of the present. What makes this position particularly indefensible and heinous is the implicit resignation to the genocide of Palestinians, and more broadly, the mass murder of Arabs in their homelands. It is not inevitable or unstoppable. It is not something to be resigned to, it is something to be resisted until it ends. Period.
On the Australian side of the genocide, I’ve noticed an ongoing attempt by the status quo to reframe the narrative of our participation in the genocide to “there’s nothing we can do, and we aren’t involved anyway, you’re all upset over nothing”.
Here’s Penny Wong in full gaslight mode.
Headline: “Australians are traumatised by Middle East horrors. They deserve the facts.”
Poor dummies! We’re just too emotional to understand what’s going on, clearly. Indeed, we do deserve the facts, but the facts are nowhere to be found in Wong’s dreadful article. Let’s go through it, paragraph by miserable paragraph. Let’s start with the abstract, misleading headline: unattributed “Middle East horrors” are not what’s impacting us, we are in fact traumatised by the daily Israeli massacres of Palestinians and now Lebanese civilians as well. The opening of this appalling op-ed makes clear the deliberate conflation and obfuscation that’s at work in the headline:
“Every day we see more unbearable scenes. The terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023…”
I’ve had to re-read this numerous times and it never fails to stun. Every day we see more unbearable scenes… present tense, continual, evoking the nonstop gore of genocide and then, instead of articulating what those daily scenes are, we are yoked back to October 7th, and Israel’s justification of its genocide. Not only that, we are given the qualifying line “the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust” alongside another non-image, “almost 100 hostages still held.” We are not “seeing” any of this, it is entirely editorial, and deliberately tied to the emotional response generated by what we are seeing, which is the dismembered bodies of Arab children.
Now we get to “42,000 Palestinians killed – including more than 13,000 children. About 2 million facing starvation”, but only with the extra qualification of it as being “Israel’s response”. In essence, Penny’s saying, hey they started it. No editorial line about this systematic mass murder that utterly dwarfs in size, scale, and horror what occurred on Oct 7th, nothing about it being the worst loss of Palestinian life since the Zionist colonisation began—no. In fact, the death toll of 1139 people killed on Oct 7th is specifically elided, and the attack is rendered in this more abstract line of rhetoric tied to the Holocaust, a favoured Zionist tactic to stifle dissent with the grotesque implied justification that any atrocity is acceptable on the basis of the German genocide against Jews. This is a direct, disgusting inversion of the moral lesson “Never again”, turning it into “Always, for Palestinians; never again for us.”
This opening paragraph is deeply instructive and it’s worth lingering on, first for the way it constructs a clear hierarchy of life and death, grossly flattening the starvation of 2 million Palestinians and the mass murder of 43,000 (see above for the real death toll) as equivalent to October 7th, and secondly, for the construction of “every day we see horrors” with a specific, static date 14 months ago, as if it was literally or visually recurring. This echoes an earlier discursive tactic of releasing re-hashed reports often citing the same discredited information on Oct 7th, the sole point of which was to attempt to rewind the narrative, to reset the revenge engine, which I’ve commented on previously.
Penny Wong’s opening paragraph merely takes it to another level with its implication that October 7th occurs daily and so there is an equivalence between it and the 400 days of massacres and systemic starvation that Israel has unleashed on 2 million trapped people. It is difficult to encompass the scale of this immoral absurdity, but it is also not unprecedented: the path here was paved by September 11th and the “War on Terror”, a point I discussed earlier here, and which continues to hold true. Decades of daily devastation, with millions of people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and still, according to the West, the timeline of this imperial nightmare begins only with the attack on Western soil, and the scale of loss is always, always equal. An infinity of attacks, an infinity of Arab and Muslim deaths is permissible in the West; this was true prior to these new phases of imperial domination of the North African and Southwest Asian region, it has only been made explicitly clear now.
She continues:
This may seem a petty note, but what on earth is going on with these utterly dog-shit sentences? One doesn’t have to be a poet, but surely it’s not asking too much for the Foreign Affairs Minister, who is paid $438,081 annually, to be able to write in complete sentences in a newspaper article published to allegedly inform the public on an issue as important as this one? Perhaps it is in fact asking too much when, sentence structure aside, the words themselves fail to cohere in anything resembling sense or that has a relationship to reality. Take, “the Middle East’s contested history helps explain these divergent perspectives” for example. Once again, we have the entire region invoked as an obscuring stand-in for the specific issue of Occupied Palestine, but more importantly, the notion of a contested history explaining anything is about as valid a contribution to the conversation as a fart.
History is not being contested. Land is, violently; sovereignty is, violently; equal rights are, violently, all within a military occupation and apartheid State. “The Jewish people’s survival” is explicitly invoked here, more than a year into the Zionist slaughter of over 300,000 Palestinians—the survival of the Palestinian people is not mentioned—and what’s more, October 7 is once again explicitly and falsely linked to the “long shadow of anti-semitism”, the Holocaust, and even further, a “millennia of Jewish persecution”. At this point, let us recall Wong’s headline claim that we deserve the facts. Where are they? Here she offers nothing but Zionist feelings and Zionist rhetoric. The facts might mention that international law affirms the right to armed resistance in the context of military occupation, and that this is true regardless of how the occupying people might feel. Again, this comparison of feelings relating to the past entirely obscures the present, ongoing, daily massacres and mass starvation perpetrated by Israel; it obscures the findings of the ICJ and ICC relating to the perpetration of genocide, the crimes against humanity of extermination, the relentless war crimes in both Occupied Palestine and Lebanon, the forced ethnic cleansing and annexing of North Gaza.
It should come as no surprise that we have yet to get to the worst of this genocide-apologia, this outright disgrace of an article from Penny Wong.
Here, the Minister first mischaracterises the asks from people and then outright lies on the public record. The first tactic is beloved of conservatives, and politicians more generally, to exaggerate or misattribute a popular demand in order to cast the people demanding it as unreasonable or ridiculous. “People are calling for a ceasefire, well we asked for one already”—we aren’t asking for that, nor is anyone asking for Australia to stop bombing Lebanon. To be fair to Penny Wong, her office has not been answering phone calls for months nor responding to emails about this subject, so it makes sense that she has no idea what’s being asked, clearly we can’t expect a cabinet Minister to have situational awareness when they’ve been busy sticking their head in the sand. What we have been asking for, for months now, is for Australia to obey our obligations to international law by forbidding the sale of arms to Israel, to suspend any and all military relations with the rogue state, to expel the Israeli ambassador and to sanction Israel—in short, to make an actual, material effort to stop the genocide.
Let’s be clear about this: Penny Wong lied. Before I go into detail on how, it’s worth recalling previous government-lines about this subject include, “we don’t provide weapons to Israel, only equipment parts”, and “we only provide dual-use items”. In this article, Wong goes further by stating explicitly that we are not contributing to the war at all. Just yesterday, Greens Senator David Shoebridge revealed that of 65 arms export licenses Australia has with Israel, 59 were for “goods and technologies designed or adapted for use by armed forces or goods that are inherently lethal.” Only 6 permits were “dual-use goods”. Of the total 65 which were in use as of June 2024, the government has ordered no action taken on the majority of them and that Defence “lapse or amend” 16 of them.
Let’s be clear as well that even were we “only” providing equipment parts to Israel, it would still be in direct defiance of our obligations under international law, which requires the suspension of: “All transfer and trade agreements with Israel, including but not limited to equipment, weapons, munitions, parts, components, dual use items and technology.” It was Declassified Australia which revealed that we supply critical parts to the F-35 bombers unleashing hell on Gaza, and that we provide intelligence support to the IDF through the Pine Gap base.
Kellie Tranter at Declassified goes into further detail here about the numerous ways we are involved with Israel still, in criminal defiance of the law and humanity, including defence contracts with an Israel company co-owned by a close confidante of Netanyahu, including the $900m defence contract deal signed with Israeli arms manufacturer, Elbit, and the fact the Israeli Embassy in Canberra operates its own “Defence Office”:
So many lies and obfuscations occur in the next few paragraphs that I simply do not have the time to go through them all at length, and I seriously doubt anyone would stick around to read it if I did, but in sum, Penny goes on to pat herself on the back for “doubling funding to the UNRWA” while neglecting to mention she suspended this urgent life-saving funding for two months on the basis of entirely evidence-free claims from Israel that accused UNRWA staff of terrorism (they have now declared the entire UN department a terrorist organisation); she pats herself on the back for “condemning and sanctioning Hamas and Hezbollah” wholesale, both enormous national political organisations with civic and military wings that Australia has no relationship with or investments in, while claiming she can’t sanction Israel because no one else has. She then goes on to claim a two-state solution is bitterly opposed because “Hamas seeks to end the Jewish state” which is another direct lie. Hamas put out its new charter in 2017 which includes the following:
“Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”
Maybe it shouldn’t shock me that any document put forth by a politician claiming to present the facts would so assiduously avoid them, maybe it shouldn’t shock me that it would be an evidence-free shit show, and yet I confess, still, to this very day, it shocks and enrages me to find that these multi-millionaires hold us in such contempt that they confidently publish such easily disproven shlock. I have more to say but no time or energy with which to say it and so I’ll end on this note:
We deserve so much better than this.
We can and must organise ourselves to ensure these corrupt and cowardly political parties, all those who have enabled this genocide, are removed from public office and held accountable for their contribution to these historic crimes against humanity, this stain on our and all societies.
Omar Sakr is a queer Arab Muslim poet and novelist, born and raised in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish migrants, and a member of The Greens (see his Why I joined The Greens). Some of his published books are These Wild Houses (Cordite, 2017), The Lost Arabs (UQP, 2019), Son of Sin (Affirm Press, 2022).
An earlier version was published on Omar Sakr’s blog. You can support Omar’s writing by subscribing. Feature image by Natasha Chub-Afanasyeva (2015) CC BY 2.0.