Independent foreign policy for Australia urgent

The Australian Alert Service is the weekly publication of the Australian Citizens Party.

It will keep you updated on strategic events both in Australia, and worldwide, as well as the organising activities of the Citizens Party.

To subscribe to the Australian Alert Service, it's easy, and it's secure.

Lead Editorial

3 April 2024
Vol. 26 No. 14

“Israel has destroyed Gaza”, declared UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territory Francesca Albanese in her report, “Anatomy of a Genocide”, released 25 March.

After five months of Israeli military operations in Gaza, she wrote: “Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty per cent of the whole population has been forcibly displaced. … The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come.”

The report concludes that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. More broadly, they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signalling a tragedy foretold.” (Emphasis added.)

Furthermore, the report states that “Israel has strategically invoked the [international humanitarian law] framework as ‘humanitarian camouflage’ to legitimise its genocidal violence in Gaza.”

That camouflage has been perpetuated by Western states, including Australia—the same states that identify genocide anywhere and everywhere if the accused is China or Russia.

Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom was killed on 1 April along with six others who had just delivered food to hungry Gazans. The CEO of World Central Kitchen, Erin Gore, called the “targeted attack by the IDF”—against a well-marked humanitarian convoy flagged to both sides of the conflict—“unforgivable”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted the Melbourne-born woman was killed by an IDF air strike, saying, “This happens in wartime.”

When Israel dismisses this as the fog of war, we buy it.

Not so for the downing of MH17 in 2014 over Ukraine, whose authorship is still unknown but which was the very definition of the fog of war—a war sparked by an AngloAmerican “regime-change” operation in Kiev—yet we accused Putin of “murder”.

Nor when it comes to “genocide” in Xinjiang where the minority population of “victimised” Uyghurs is actually growing. In that case we expand the definition of genocide to fit our accusations. Because these are the West’s enemies of choice.

It is impossible to understand what is happening in the Middle East, or how to solve it, without knowing the history of the region presented in a dossier compiled by the Citizens Party last December, “The Made-in-London ‘Temple Mount’ Plot behind the Israel-Hamas War”. To make that complex picture more accessible, today we release a Citizens Insight interview with one of the authors of that dossier, Michele Steinberg. (See Media Release, p. 4.)

Steinberg makes clear that Israel is the plaything of an Anglo-American empire which uses it as an excuse to stay in the Middle East for strategic reasons. In modern form, the strategy still utilises the British imperial doctrine of “Divide and Conquer” geopolitics, to control crucial trade routes and territories, by playing off one “interest” against another. Doing so rests on the same manipulation of religious, political and nationalist sentiments that sparked World Wars I and II. In Israel this has seeded an exceedingly dangerous messianic fanaticism hard for most people to fathom; for this faction their complete takeover of Gaza is mandated by God himself.

Peace does not come into the aims of Anglo-American Mideast policy, and no matter how much Prime Minister Albanese may protest the killing of an Australian caught in the crossfire, neither does it figure in Australia’s foreign policy. That is because our foreign policy is Anglo-American imperial policy. If Albanese and Foreign Minister Wong want to put a stop to the bloodshed they must take the advice of party elder, former PM Paul Keating, and forge an independent foreign policy, specific to Australia’s interests.

In this issue:

• Join Cash Out Tuesday to tell bankers like Matt Comyn ‘hands off our cash!’
• Must watch! Interview with Michele Steinberg: “The made-in-London ‘Temple Mount plot’ behind Israel’s genocide in Gaza”
• National Security Committee kerfuffle puts the empire’s insecurity on show
• ASIS, the Brookes family, and the Murdoch media empire
• IMF digs in on failed TBTF ‘solution’
• Jeff Kennett’s privatisation rip-off
• Forget beer, towns have no cash!
• Texas hailstorm havoc makes case for nuclear over ‘renewables’

Click here to find out how to subscribe. For freely available AAS articles, click here.

Click here for the archive of previous issues of the Australian Alert Service