Fresh Air

The ABC’s blind spot

Towns and villages flattened as far as the eye can see.

Exhausted civilians desperately seeking an end to their misery but led by a pitiless leadership that refuses to surrender.

Not Gaza in 2025 – but Japan in the final months of World War II.

On August 5, the ABC published an online feature marking the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The article reported on survivors condemning Japan’s military rulers for refusing to surrender even when defeat was inevitable: “Many survivors… believe Japan should have surrendered sooner. If it had, much pain and anguish would have been spared.”

Survivor Kohsei Kyan remains haunted by the cruelty he witnessed: “You did not help them, you killed them!” Even after the atomic bombings, Japan’s war council was split on surrender, with the article noting, “The suffering of its own troops or civilian population was not part of the calculation.”

The ABC recognised where moral and actual responsibility for civilians suffering belonged – on a regime that turned its people into expendable assets in a losing war.

It is therefore frustrating that the ABC’s editorial line since Hamas’ massacre on October 7, 2023 has consistently framed Israel as the primary cause of Palestinian suffering, while treating Hamas almost as a passive force—rarely held to account for embedding fighters in civilian areas, refusing ceasefires, or vowing to repeat October 7 “again and again”.

If the ABC can acknowledge that Japan’s refusal to surrender prolonged civilian agony, why won’t it apply the same moral logic to Hamas?

No good alternatives

On ABC Radio National “Breakfast” (August 6), Nimrod Novik, a security adviser to former Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, argued that Israeli policy enabled Hamas by “feeding the beast” through Qatari aid.

“There was a government policy… even urging Qatar to fund Hamas… which proved wrong in a most terrifying way,” he said.

This critique assumes better options were available.

Some argue Netanyahu should have bolstered the Palestinian Authority. But given it lost the 2006 election and was violently expelled from Gaza by Hamas in Jun 2007, it’s doubtful this would have changed the reality on the ground.

The truth is, short of a full-scale military invasion – the kind that Israel was forced to undertake after October 7 – there were no good alternatives.

Ben’s assault on the facts

In the Age and Sydney Morning Herald (August 4), Australian academic and long-time Israel critic, Ben Saul, who is also UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism, demanded Australia immediately recognise a Palestinian state.

Leaving aside the legal arguments and the pros and cons of recognition, Saul’s potted history of why there is no Palestinian state lacked the kind of objectivity one should have the right to expect from a UN official.

According to Saul, “The Palestinians were first promised a state over a century ago. A 1947 UN proposal to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into two states did not go to plan. Israel unilaterally declared statehood in 1948 after an insurgency against the British, terrorism against civilians and even the assassination of UN officials. It established effective control and independence after a war with invading Arab countries.”

Nothing stopped an Arab state being established at the same time as Israel was created in 1948. Nothing except Palestinian and regional Arab leaders rejecting the Partition Plan! Instead, they pursued a needless war to prevent Israel’s creation, during which Jews and Arabs were displaced.

Saul also claimed that “Hamas was born to resist the occupation, as well as being antisemitic.”

Hamas’ charter and its 17-year rule over Gaza unequivocally reveals that it believes governments must run according to an extreme, Islamist agenda, where women, the LGBTQI+ community, and religious minorities are oppressed second-class citizens. It also leaves no doubt it is committed to fighting against Israel’s existence, not just its “occupation”.

Clearly, Saul, whose mandate is to defend human rights and counter terrorism, doesn’t seem to think these objectives apply when Hamas is involved.