Australia / Israel Review

As this edition of the AIR went to press, Israel, and indeed the whole Middle East, remained on tenterhooks. There are fears that a large-scale war between Israel and Iran, and/or Israel and Hezbollah, could be about to erupt.

Israel’s July 30 elimination of Hezbollah military Chief of Staff Fuad Shukr, and the subsequent assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, reportedly via a hidden bomb in an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound in Teheran, has been widely described as an “escalation” that puts the Middle East on the brink of a regional war. 

However, this ignores the fact that both Iran and Hezbollah have been waging open war on Israel for ten months, since Iran’s Lebanese terror proxy began bombarding Israel on a daily basis following Hamas’ October 7 invasion and mass pogrom in southern Israel. 

As top Israeli intelligence expert Haim Tomer notes in this edition, “Hezbollah does not fire a bullet at Israel without Iranian approval,” with Iranian officers present in Hezbollah’s military control rooms. 

Plus, Iran is pushing its other proxies, in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, to also launch unprovoked attacks on Israel – and Iran itself launched a massive direct missile and drone attack on Israel in April. 

Under deadly fire from Hezbollah missiles, rockets, drones and anti-tank ordnance, Israel has had no choice but to evacuate towns, kibbutzim and villages within five kilometres of the northern border, in effect carving a depopulated security zone out of the country’s own territory. At least 60,000 Israelis can’t go back home, and many no longer have homes to go back to.

It’s difficult for us here in continental Australia to appreciate just how intolerable this situation is for tiny Israel. Imagine if the whole population of Cairns and the Cape York Peninsula had to be evacuated for ten months because of dozens of missile attacks launched daily by a neighbouring country. Moreover, a scant 35 kilometres separate Hezbollah’s forward-deployed rockets from Israel’s third-largest city, Haifa. 

It is often said, correctly, that no one wants escalation to all-out war – not Israel, not Hezbollah, not Iran – yet this misses a crucial distinction. Israel doesn’t want a larger war – but it expects hostilities to end. Iran and Hezbollah do not want a larger war – but they aim for daily limited attacks on Israel to continue for as long as possible. For Israel, if the choice is risking a larger war, or Iran and Hezbollah getting their preference of being able to fire at Israel daily, making a significant section of the already tiny country perhaps permanently uninhabitable, is it any surprise that Israel’s military and political leadership feel they have no choice but to take actions designed to try to change the current reality? Yet this is, absurdly, then labelled dangerous “escalation”.

As Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton told me while he was in Israel recently, and later wrote in the Herald Sun, “Israel has every right to respond militarily to the existential threats it faces,” yet there are, regrettably, leaders in Australia who “demand standards of Israel which they would never expect of other countries,” including our own. 

Such attitudes were certainly on display when Special Adviser Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin reported back on the tragic, accidental killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers after the IDF believed their convoy had been taken over by Hamas.

A rapid IDF investigation revealed that circumstantial evidence misled the IDF drone commanders to believe they were dealing with Hamas hijackers, but, in any case, open-fire regulations were violated. In a few days, the two senior officers directly responsible were summarily dismissed and three others were given formal reprimands, while the file remains open with the Military Prosecutor.

This wasn’t enough for the Albanese Government, which insultingly insisted on an Australian-led special investigation, unlike all other nations that lost citizens in the tragedy. Yet Binskin says he was given free access to probe the incident and his report confirmed the IDF’s account in almost every detail.

He even confirmed the convoy clearly had armed guards who shot in the air and behaved like hijackers, even though armed guards were against WCK policy.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s statements following the report, however, misrepresented and omitted the essence of Binskin’s findings, using it as just another opportunity to castigate Israel. She cited UN statistics of humanitarian aid workers killed during the war without providing any context, or placing any blame on Hamas for such deaths despite its proven use of hospitals, schools and humanitarian zones as key bases for military operations.

As the UN itself recently confirmed, some staff of one such humanitarian aid body – UNRWA (to which Australia was so quick to resume funding earlier this year despite these well-founded allegations) – are indeed members of Hamas and took part in the atrocities of October 7. Israeli intelligence says that the number is much, much higher than the UN has admitted. 

Meanwhile, we’ve also seen DFAT’s comparatively muted censure of Iran’s Ambassador to Australia Ahmad Sadeghi following his declaration that “wiping out” Israel by 2027 is a “heavenly and divine promise” and describing Israelis as a “Zionist plague”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rightly said there is “no place in Australia” for such sentiments. Yet the Government’s response missed the point that, in calling for the violent annihilation of the Jewish State, Sadeghi was accurately conveying the antisemitic and genocidal policy of the regime he represents. In recent months, Australian foreign policy has sometimes seemed to lack the ability to clearly differentiate between the actions of the Iranian axis of terror proxies against Israel, and Israel’s undeniable right to defend its people from this aggression.

Rather than simply criticising Sadeghi’s vile, racist threats and moving on – threats that echo the language of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – we need to internalise them. 

If we truly wish to avoid “escalation” in the Middle East – and indeed to de-escalate toward a region of greater stability and mutual security – we should, together with our allies, demand Iran’s proxy Hezbollah cease its unprovoked aggression against Israel, abide by UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and withdraw its forces north of the Litani River. Hezbollah’s patrons in Teheran must end their destabilising behaviour throughout the Middle East, and – let it not be forgotten – stop their ongoing nuclear violations without delay. And these demands must be backed up by coordinated, coercive measures to enforce them.