Australia / Israel Review

Trump change

There was intense speculation to what extent US President-elect Donald Trump’s policy towards Israel would differ from the outgoing Biden Administration.

ABC Global Affairs Editor John Lyons told ABC TV “News” (Nov. 6) “On the Middle East, he has said Israel should finish the job… whatever that means… Kamala Harris was prepared to stand up to Netanyahu… when he was here in Washington a few weeks ago. And I think Netanyahu and the sort of Likud in Israel [sic] were wanting Donald Trump to win.”

On ABC RN “Saturday Extra” (Nov. 7), Stephen Wertheim, historian of US foreign policy, agreed Trump has said he “want[s] to take the restrictions off Israel, but… he would like to see Israel, you know, end its war sooner rather than later.”

Wertheim speculated that there might be no difference with “the Biden Administration [which] also wanted Israel to end its war in Gaza many months ago. And the fact is, it was unable to or unwilling to use leverage, given all the US military aid it was giving Israel.”

The next day on ABC RN “Breakfast”, the Washington Institute’s Director of Research Dana Stroul said “President-elect Trump has said… he also wants to see a ceasefire and the hostages released. But he’s provided absolutely no details on how he might pursue that.”

Stroul noted that “What is really unique about the Middle East is that both Israel and the majority of the Arab governments of the region, I think, are breathing a sigh of relief that the next US administration will be President-elect Trump and not a Harris Administration.”

Having said that, Stroul believed the “pressure” to end the war in Gaza and Lebanon was “probably only going to get more in a Trump Administration. And so, [Israel’s] doing what they believe they need to do militarily now.”

 

Reading comprehension test failed

In an online article (Oct. 19), ABC Middle East correspondent Eric Tlozek claimed that “A letter published in July by the medical journal the Lancet, written by three public health researchers, said if a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death was applied, the true death toll at that time would have been 186,000.” Not true. 

The letter did not say there were 186,000 Palestinian deaths between October 2023 and June 2024, but that this could be the future total. 

The letter stated that “By June 19, 2024, 37,396 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip since the attack by Hamas and the Israeli invasion in October, 2023” but “even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years.”

The ABC Ombudsman rejected AIJAC’s complaint, which pointed out the report’s error as well as radio interviews where John Lyons (see AIR Nov. 2024) made similar claims.

Incredibly, the Ombudsman falsely insisted that Lyons and Tlozek had accurately reported the letter’s contents.

However, on ABC RN “Drive” (Oct. 21), while discussing revised death tolls in Gaza, Lyons did not repeat the false claim 186,000 Palestinians had died in the conflict.

 

ABC’s make up class

ABC NewsRadio (Nov. 3) misrepresented what World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tweeted about an explosion in northern Gaza that injured six people near a clinic dispensing polio vaccinations.

ABC newsreaders repeatedly and incorrectly claimed that the WHO had attributed the blast to an “Israeli airstrike”. Dr Ghebreyesus had only called it a “strike” and had not ascribed blame to Israel or Hamas.

While correctly reporting that the IDF had denied responsibility, ABC reports repeated an unsubstantiated Palestinian claim that a “helicopter” carried out the attack, which, given the context, could only refer to Israel.

In an online article (Nov. 5) the next day, the Palestinian allegation had morphed from an Israeli helicopter to a “drone strike”. 

Yet there was no acknowledgement in ABC reports that Palestinian sources had changed their story.

An IDF investigation later ascribed the explosion to an IED planted by Palestinian terrorists, but the ABC failed to update its reporting with this important point.

 

Banned Aid?

On Sky News’ website (Nov. 8), AIJAC’s Justin Amler explained why Israel passed laws banning UNRWA – the main UN aid agency for Palestinians – from operating inside Israel.

Amler wrote that the global community has ignored mountains of evidence that shows UNRWA is an organisation “complicit in terrorism” and “so corrupted that it is beyond redemption.” 

“Over the past 74 years, the UNHCR [UN High Commission for Refugees] has helped successfully resettle 50 million refugees for a brighter future. Over that same time period, UNRWA has not helped even one,” Amler wrote.

Meanwhile, on Sky News (Nov. 3), AIJAC’s Joel Burnie cleared up some myths about UNRWA and the ban.

Burnie said the ban would “not stop [UNWRA] activities inside Gaza and the West Bank.”

“The important part… is… that UNRWA is not the only provider of aid in Gaza or the West Bank and is not the largest contributor to aid. You have lots of other United Nations-based programs, such as the World Food Program, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, that are currently on the ground in big numbers in Gaza to ensure… humanitarian aid is getting to the people that need it,” he said.

 

Defending the indefensible

In a cross to ABC Radio National “Breakfast” (Oct. 29), Middle East correspondent Matt Doran said Israel insists “there are others who can step in and provide the services that UNRWA does in handing out food, in providing medical services, in teaching young Palestinians, although… no alternative agency has actually been named as the successor here.”

Audio was played of UNICEF’s James Elder saying “UNRWA is the backbone. They have thousands and thousands of workers, many hundreds of whom have been killed in the process of trying to deliver aid, but they are the organisation that is able to go north to south, east to west. UNRWA has the size and scope. No agency can replace that.”

Former UNRWA chief Chris Gunness told ABC NewsRadio (Oct. 29) that banning UNRWA risked “the humanitarian catastrophe facing 2.3 million people in Gaza… turn[ing] into a humanitarian apocalypse.” Gunness linked banning UNRWA with a threat to have Israel expelled from the United Nations. 

 

Fair warning?

On ABC TV “News” (Oct. 31), Middle East correspondent Matt Doran listed the warnings Israel gives to Lebanese civilians informing them to vacate ahead of military operations.

Doran said, “The warnings in Baalbek came thick and fast. Calls to mobile phones with pre-recorded messages from Israeli troops followed up by the local fire brigade driving up and down residential streets with loud hailers telling people to flee. This video from the IDF’s Arabic spokesman showing just how large the evacuation area is.”

Earlier (Oct. 21), John Lyons backhandedly acknowledged on ABC RN “Drive” that Israel’s advanced warnings do “sometimes” save lives. 

Lyons added, “If the Israelis believe there’s a Hezbollah person in a building, they will not give a warning… However, if they are targeting a supply of weapons, they believe Hezbollah has hidden some weapons in the basement of a building… they will sometimes give a warning because their view is ‘we want to destroy the weapons, not the people.’”

 

Questionable

In the Daily Telegraph (Oct. 23), AIJAC’s Jamie Hyams posed a series of questions regarding global criticism that is only levelled at Israel. 

This included asking “Why was it cause for celebration when the US kills terrorist leaders such as Al Qaeda and ISIS heads, but cause for concern when Israel kills their Hezbollah and Hamas equivalents Hassan Nasrallah and Ismail Haniyeh?”

Hyams concluded by stating that there’s only one question that explains them all: “Why is Israel subjected to different standards from every other country?”

 

After Sinwar

After Israel eliminated Hamas leader and October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar, the media discussion was dominated by its impact on the war in Gaza.

On ABC Radio “AM” (Oct. 18), John Lyons said, “It was impossible for Benjamin Netanyahu to go for a ceasefire while Yahya Sinwar was alive because if he’d come out the next day with a victory salute or something, it would have politically been untenable for the Israeli Government… But it’s also unclear what this means. Does the Israeli Government decide now is the time to try to pull off and get some sort of ceasefire or do they… decide now is the time to go in harder?”

Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy told ABC RN “Breakfast” (Oct. 18), “There are still fighting elements in the Gaza Strip… Hamas still has control, for instance, of the north of the Strip… they were hoping to re-establish their rule over the entire part of Gaza.”

On the ABC’s “News Daily” podcast (Oct. 22), international relations expert Rajan Menon, said, “so the plan now seems to be to create a zone in northern Gaza that is completely devoid of any Palestinians… and that will leave Hamas operatives behind, presumably, and then to essentially cut aid supply so they will be completely devoid of means of sustenance and will be forced to either surrender or… die or… leave.”

 

Future directions

In the Age and Sydney Morning Herald (Oct. 19), veteran New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said Sinwar’s death “creates the possibility for the biggest step toward a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians since Oslo, as well as normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia — which means pretty much the entire Muslim world.”

But, he wrote, that requires Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu agreeing to “the participation of a reformed West Bank Palestinian Authority in an international peacekeeping force that would take over Gaza in the place of the Sinwar-led Hamas.”

On ABC RN “Saturday Extra” (Oct. 19), Palestinian American senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib said Hamas will still want a role in running Gaza after the war ends but “that cannot be allowed to happen for the sake of the Palestinian people, for the safety of Israel and indeed for regional stability.”

 

Dousing Iran’s ring of fire

In the West Australian (Oct. 28), AIJAC’s Allon Lee wrote on the significance of Israel’s elimination of Hamas’ October 7 mastermind, Yahya Sinwar, in the context of Iran’s “Ring of Fire” strategy.

Lee said it is understandable the world wants Sinwar’s death to expedite a region-wide ceasefire, but from Israel’s perspective it cannot happen before Iran is sufficiently defanged.

Similarly, AIJAC’s Colin Rubenstein, in the Canberra Times (Nov. 6), said anyone who cares about regional stability, a negotiated two-state peace, or the welfare of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians, should want Israel’s increasingly successful war against the Iranian “Ring of Fire” to fully achieve its aims and not end prematurely.

 

Lies of the land

A report on SBS TV “World News” by Claudia Farhart (Nov. 1), about a long-running property dispute between a Palestinian family near Bethlehem and Israeli settlers, omitted key information.

The report noted the Qasiyeh family said they opened a restaurant in 2001 on land they inherited from their grandfather. 

Alice Qasiyeh said, “We have faced demolitions every time we rebuild the restaurant – 2012, ’13, ’15. And then 2019, we also faced demolition with the house.” 

Farhart said the demolitions are “usually ordered due to not having Israeli building permits, which the UN says are nearly always impossible to obtain for Palestinians.”

According to Farhart, a subsidiary of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) – “which buys and develops property” – claimed ownership of the land – and recently the family were evicted, while settlers established an outpost there.

Naomi Kahn from the Israeli NGO Regavim explained the JNF bought the land “decades ago” and said the Qasiyeh family and their supporters had pursued “‘lawfare’, which hadn’t succeeded.” 

According to Israeli media reports, omitted from the SBS story was that Alice’s father, Ramzi, ignored a stop work order in 2005 from the Israeli Civil Administration and built a home and a restaurant there. 

A legal case then slowly made its way through the Israeli courts. The judgement in May 2023 found that the only evidence the Qasiyehs had to show ownership was a document showing taxes were paid, while the JNF subsidiary provided proof it had registered ownership of the land in 1969.

 

Marr Mars Loewenstein’s claims

On Oct. 22, ABC RN “Late Night Live” host David Marr cast a critical eye over anti-Zionist activist and writer Antony Loewenstein’s farfetched statements about Israel. 

According to Loewenstein, Israel decided after its foundation in 1948 to make new friends and “the way they wanted to do that was to sell weapons, to test weapons, largely on Palestinians.” This activity only increased after Israel won control over the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, he said.

Loewenstein estimated that Israel has sold weapons to “at least” 140 countries, it uses this as an “insurance policy” and this is the reason “the world is mute when [Israel’s] committing mass slaughter.”

Marr retorted, “Antony, the munitions industry, the surveillance industry, they’re not nice guys. They’ll sell to anybody… Are you not drawing kind of very particular conclusions from the ordinary catch and grab of the munitions trade?”

Likewise, Loewenstein questioned what sort of democracy Israel is when it is “supporting a thug like [former Chilean dictator General] Pinochet, arming him, training his people, and by the way, not assisting the Jews of that country to leave, which Israel did not.”

Marr again interjected, “But the United States was supporting Pinochet as well.”

Loewenstein said that while the world immediately condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a war crime, different language was used in response to “Israeli actions” after October 7. 

But Marr pointed out, “They’re not the same. It’s a different war… It’s compelled by different reasons… I think that that’s intellectually dishonest for you to argue from commentary on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and to what’s going on in Israel.”

Marr also chided Lowenstein for claiming “how do you have a democracy” when “hundreds, if not thousands of Israeli troops on Tik Tok in Gaza [are] posting [videos] humiliating Palestinians.” 

Marr replied, “Democracy is about the way in which people are elected, and Netanyahu was elected.”

 

Media Watch blind to its own bias

In October, the ABC’s “Media Watch” program was blind to its own bias against Israel.

Most of the Oct. 7 episode focused on the accusation that Israel targets journalists in Gaza and Lebanon. The show left out vital context, such as two Palestinian journalists killed by the IDF in Gaza were in a car with a terrorist who was operating a drone. In Lebanon, journalists were accidentally killed because they were too close to the fighting or had ignored Israeli warnings to vacate or avoid specific areas.

The Oct. 7 episode also attacked the media for focusing on what it called the “trivial” issue of a “handful of protestors flying Hezbollah flags.” Hezbollah is a banned terror organisation. 

The Oct. 14 episode was more of the same, and instead of focusing on actual reports in the Australian media, chastised the media for not sufficiently covering the deaths of journalists in Gaza and Lebanon.

On Oct. 21, the show seemed to suggest that claims from the Hamas terrorists who govern Gaza should be accepted without reservation whereas democratic Israel should be distrusted. 

The Oct. 28 episode accused Israel of “deliberate[ly]” killing three journalists in Lebanon who worked for TV networks linked to Hezbollah or Iran. 

Host Paul Barry said, “Under Article 79 of the Geneva Convention journalists in war zones are protected, provided they play no part in hostilities. And there is no evidence those working from the media compound in south Lebanon were doing anything other than covering the war.” 

In other words, if reporters are hanging out in a compound where terrorists are based, Israel has no right to target that site.

 

---

In Parliament

Sophie Scamps (Ind., Mackellar) – November 7 – “Israel’s parliament voted to ban UNRWA from the country within 90 days… What is Australia doing to ensure that the people of Gaza do not die of starvation and preventable diseases such as polio?”

The following statements occurred in various Senate estimates hearings.

November 7

Greens Deputy Leader Senator Mehreen Faruqi (NSW) – “Why won’t you sanction Israel?… expel the Israeli ambassador?”

Senator Faruqi – “What is stopping you from doing anything real to hold Israel to account?… pressure from the US?… from the pro-Israeli lobby?”

Shadow Assistant Foreign Minister Senator Claire Chandler (Lib., Tas.) – “The government is obviously… aware that staff of UNRWA participated in… 7 October. What was the rationale for the… statement on the Israeli… legislation revoking privileges and immunities granted to UNRWA?”

Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong (ALP, SA) answering – “We don’t want innocent Palestinians to starve… the humanitarian situation in Gaza is unacceptable… Insufficient aid has been allowed… 1.95 million people are facing high levels of acute food insecurity… I don’t see it being contested that UNRWA is the backbone and really the only organisation that can actually facilitate delivery within Gaza.”

Senator Wong – “The General Assembly resolution which established… Israel also looked to the establishment of a state of Palestine… any future Palestinian state must not be in a position to threaten Israel’s security. There can be no role for terrorists and it will need a reformed Palestinian Authority.”

Senator Wong – “No Australian government has ever taken the approach we have taken at the UN.”

Senator David Shoebridge (Greens, NSW) – “Do you accept due to the gross disparity in power between… Israel and the occupied people of Palestine that… it is a betrayal of the Palestinian people to say… they must negotiate their outcome with Israel without assistance and indeed pressure from the international community?… we say that a just peace should include full consultation with the people of Palestine and the people of Israel. And we’re not imposing a two-state solution.”

Senator Wong – “We have engaged in a number of changes of Australian policy. We adopted… the name Occupied Palestinian Territories because that is what they are. We have affirmed that Israeli settlements… are illegal… We have sanctioned extremist Israeli settlers… We’ve doubled our funding to UNRWA because it does vital work. We have shifted our position on recognition, recognising that this is a matter of when, not if.” 

November 5

Senator Faruqi – “Several human rights organisations have called Israel’s… treatment of Palestinians apartheid. The ICJ has published an opinion calling it apartheid… [and] found that there is a plausible case of genocide. The ICC has accused the Israeli Prime Minister and Defence Minister of crimes against humanity and applied for their arrest warrants. This is not about impartiality. This is about ABC minimising Israel’s crimes because you are refusing to tell people the truth… Why are you… covering up a genocide?”

Shadow Education Minister Senator Sarah Henderson (Lib., Vic.) – “I want to ask about… SBS’s decision to remove and then refuse to run four interviews that presented Israel’s side of the war in Gaza.”

Senator Lidia Thorpe (Ind., Vic.) – “The UN Charter’s article 51, the IV Geneva Convention and the ICJ’s advisory opinion… all stated that an unlawful occupying power, Israel cannot claim a right to self-defence in Palestine.”

November 4 

Shadow Home Affairs Minister Senator James Paterson (Lib., Vic.) – “[An] organisation which received [Commonwealth Government] funding… say on their social media: ‘Nazism & Zionism: Two Sides of the Same Coin… Zionism is a continuation of Nazi ideology…’ Is that an appropriate statement for a government recipient?”