How Australia’s leaders justify the unjustifiable while preaching democratic values
By Leonie Saunders
In my observations of Anthony Albanese before and after he was elected as leader of the ALP, then as Prime Minister, I have come to regard him to be a fair-minded, decent man, even though there have been numerous occasions that have caused me to question his motives and judgement. Knowing he is a strategic thinker, bearing the weight of leadership, more often than not I have given him the benefit of the doubt.
However, watching the footage coming out of Gaza for the past three years, as a woman of good conscience, I am but one among the many of my fellow Australians who see the truth in what is taking place in Palestine.
This, among other things, leads me to question the Prime Minister’s values, particularly concerning Labor’s reluctance to join with our international allies; France, Canada and the U.K. in their intention to recognise Palestinian statehood at the United Nations General Assembly.
While I have no way of knowing for sure, I can only surmise that perhaps from an economist’s view the Prime Minister is captive to realpolitik and overlooks the enormity of Israel’s vengeance as a matter of convenience. Or maybe it’s a case of Labor’s long-held pro-Israel stance that clouds his judgement. Then there is fear of upsetting Trump. Are tariffs and AUKUS behind the government’s repetitious justification of Israel’s crimes against humanity in the name of defence?
By any fair measure of judgment, when the Prime Minister appointed Jillian Segal – a right-wing zealot – as special envoy to the government to combat anti-Semitism, his judgement caused me concern. He must have known before hand that her recommendations would be subjective. Clearly, the contents of Segals submission are incompatible with Australia’s status as a secular, I repeat ‘secular’ democracy. I trust the PM hasn’t forgotten ALL citizens have a Constitutional right to freedom of political thought and expression?
The mere idea that the government would even consider introducing laws stifling dissent in order to protect the religious sensibilities of Jewish Australians is inflammatory.
However, it seems in the past week the Prime Minister has done an about-face. He no longer considers Israel actions as compatible with the right of self-defence as justified. The question is why? Why has it has taken so long for the Prime Minister to change his mind? After all, children have been starving in Gaza for justice long before Israel chose starvation as a means of extermination. Could it be the State of Israeli is slowly being discovered for what it is; a jingoistic theocracy disguised as democracy.
It is important that I make myself clear, for fear of being targeted/arrested for anti-Semitism. I am not anti-Semitic. Indeed, I consider Jewish people overall are well meaning. I understand their ambition to keep the enormity of Hitler’s heinous crimes against their people alive in the hearts and minds of we gentiles. However, it is wearing thin. In that respect I regard the Holocaust industry as a useful form of emotional blackmail eliciting exceptionalism.
It is telling that while Iran and Israel are both members of the United Nations, Israel is the only member state holding an arsenal of nuclear weapons. Why is that Israel prohibits access to the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from inspecting Israel’s nuclear installations? Israel is free to flout the rules of nonproliferation, but others are not. Isn’t this hypocrisy writ large?
Nevertheless, bless their cotton socks, all peoples of good conscience are bearing witness to the oppressed having turned into oppressors, persecuting identical crimes. It figures that the tides of public opinion are turning. People who are usually sympathetic to the plight of the Jews now see Israel’s zionist objective intent on genocide. At the same time, Netanyahu continues to dictate the moral high ground, claiming Israel’s right to self-defence. Sorry, Mr Prime Minister, that just doesn’t pass muster.
Which calls me to question the legitimacy of Australia’s ongoing alliance with the State of Israel predicated on liberal values. How does it sit with our nations responsibility as one of the original 51 nations that signed the United Nations Charter post WW II” Australia has been an active participant in UN assemblies for over 70 years, advocating for human rights.
As is my wont, whenever I seek insight into questions on the human condition I turn to the prescient wisdom of late, great, irreplaceable Albert Einstein. As always, Einstein speaking with cause said, “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them and do nothing.”
In that context, I ask the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defence and the public more broadly, if the end always justify the means, do the ends really justify the means or is it just a comforting moral fiction, a selfish retreat from responsibility? Do atrocities occur solely because of malevolent action. Or because of widespread inaction, often justified by the fear of moral compromise? From my perspective, a refusal to act, when action could prevent mass murder, is not neutrality. It is complicity.
The reality is that suffering exists with or without war. Wrongdoing is condemned as a sin without exception. But under the weight of real-world complexity moral absolutes collapse. Take theft for example: Yes, stealing is wrong. That is a moral principle embedded in virtually every legal and ethical system. But does that principle hold when one’s family is starving? To insist that stealing remains equally wrong in such a context is to elevate abstract moral purity above lived human suffering. If theft is the only option for survival, then condemning it becomes an act of ethical indifference, not virtue.
Murder too is rightly regarded as a sin, yet even this is not immune to context. Is it immoral to kill a person who intends to murder others, if doing so will save the lives of many? The question is not whether killing is wrong; of course it is. The question is whether allowing greater harm through inaction is less wrong. Choosing not to act in the name of moral integrity, while others pay the price with their lives, exposes the hollowness of absolutist ethics.
The utilitarian logic behind the defense of taking one innocent life to save many is indeed a grim, uncomfortable calculation. Nevertheless, it forces us to confront the wretched dimensions of moral choice. I am not in any way justifying the act of killing – all I am doing is acknowledging the profound ethical cost of inaction. To prioritize one’s own moral comfort over the lives of many is not virtue. It is vanity.
History offers sobering illustrations of this today. Take World War II for example. It was an incomprehensible catastrophe. Tens of millions dead, societies destroyed, atrocities committed. Not to mention adding further damage to the Earth’s atmosphere that protects and preserves the lives of all the planets inhabitants.
While intervention always comes at a cost, not to act can come at a much greater cost. The decision to go to war against Nazi Germany was not a celebration of violence, but a reluctant recognition that the alternative inaction in the face of fascist expansion and genocide was far worse. Had the world’s leaders remained passive, the world’s peoples might have sooner succumbed to even more monstrous regimes.
Speaking of monstrosities, in my assessment of what is tacking place in Gaza today – Netanyahu and Trump claim the right of self-defence to justify events taking place in Gaza – there are very good reasons to be suspicious. Why? Leaving aside the fact that real estate developer Trump was not joking when he posited making Gaza the Riviera of the Middle East, it is clear that the forces of Zion backing Netanyhu, as the Nazi’s did Hitler. Why is it that in the face of fascist expansion and genocide in Gaza, the world has watched and done nothing?
Why is it that since the formation of The United Nations, the body has not been reluctant to use their collective power to rein in other recalcitrant nation-states. Yet thus far the U.N has refused to act in any meaningful way. So why not Israel?
For years the Western world has been dogmatic in support of Israel’s contemptible activities. Western governments have long turned a blind eye to a long list of Israeli government policies that sanction Jewish citizens the right to trespass. Now don’t get me wrong, I do not condone Hamas’ actions. However, taking stock of Israel’s unconscionable behaviour over the past 70 years, why is it that the PLO and later Hamas were branded as terrorist organisations by the U.N. when Israel has committed many terrorist acts in Israel and elsewhere in the world?
It is salient in questioning the agenda of Western governments – whether they like it or not – that Hamas was democratically elected by the people of Gaza to represent their best interests. In that I ask, why is it that Hamas’ actions have never been considered by Western governments as an act of self-defence in response to Israel’s territorial incursions and illegal occupation of Gaza?
So let’s stop the bullshit about Israel acting in self-defence, and face up to the facts of war. First and foremost, war is terror on steroids, there is nothing virtuous in war. War is a man-made pissing contest. It is always territorial in which, to the victor goes the spoils. It is an endless cycle of vengeance driven by a winning-at-all-cost mentality. War and all human conflict is material to the contradictions bred in religious piety woven in the substrata of the modern political era.
The ethical question is not whether war is evil, it is. The question is whether the evil that results from war is greater or lesser than the evil it seeks to prevent. Given Israel’s agenda is clearly aimed at mass extermination – not to mention Trump’s vision of making Gaza the Riviera of the Middle East – they use self-defence as a rhetorical shield for self-interest. If one’s actions happen to benefit others, but the motivation is personal gain, it is not morality; it is opportunism disguised as virtue. The ends can never cleanse the means, but sometimes the failure to act is a moral failure of even greater magnitude.
In the end, moral virtues cannot be preserved in every situation. Life demands difficult choices. The ends do not automatically justify the means, but neither does the refusal to act absolve one of moral responsibility. Sometimes, inaction is the greater wrong.
Also by Leonie Saunders:
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WE MUST NOT FORGET THIS LEGACY
Australia must stop procrastinating and seriously sanction Israel otherwise there will be no Palestine left to recognise and the ’80 year old deep freeze’ two State solution will be dead in the water for good.
This is what Netanyahu’s Zionist genocidal regime has always been about, he has politically, socially, ethnically, economically engineered this and followed it through with his ocean trawling ball-wrecking military to destroy all signs of Palestinian life and sterilise the landscape for future colonisation!
All the while Australia and the world looked on for two years (and past 80 years) and did nothing of consequence to stop them – The USA facilitated this from start to finish and waged a war of attrition in latter days on the United Nations. The world will not forget this, we will not let it!
Never again, words we should never have been repeating.
Leonie, thank you for your enlightening discussion and critique of ethics and morality in the context of this vexing issue facing our world today, where clearly we are repeating once again our past mistakes. We rely on or draw too little from ethical philosophy, theory and culture (poetry too) – from romantic paternalism through to indifference and general ignorance. Our politicians, CEOs, leaders, and supposedly ‘best’ educated privileged members of our society, society and systems themselves pay so little attention to the considerations and discourse you elaborate.
Your tacit and unequivocal reference to the seminal work of Gilligan’s ethical and moral theory is well captured here, challenging if not illuminating the limitations of any one approach of those which predominate – utilitarianism, beneficence, deontology, consequentialism, human bioethics, judaic or christian rules and doctrines or any religious order, societal laws and norms, many of which are derived from classical antiquity and paternalism. Even Kohlberg’s theory and stages of moral development (informative rules based to conscience, intuitive or innate) were derived from limited research on ‘schoolboy’ behaviour to the exclusion of half the world’s population. Your discussion clearly articulates the importance of relational ethics, context and social capacity (the contribution of feminist thinking and experience), that unilateral and often absolute systems of belief, rules and virtue are generally blind to; including our judicial, legislative and executive systems, which too suffer from the common privilege and status of those who administer them, elected or not.
Personally, we don’t teach enough of this at school nor do we mandate it on those who govern us, indeed democracy itself is fickle and negligent in not insisting on it before allowing those in office to represent us. Worse the narcissism that is ultimately rewarded all the way through the corridors of power to the top compromising whole nations and their capacity to act justly and wisely, lead their people well or indeed at all. And there is our ultimate dilemma – they who lead us into conflict, war and famine, the bullies and despots, the monetarists, the right to rule, and those who to save their own skins or have little to offer, and do little or nothing to stop them.
To suffer the same fate and criticism I’ll say it any way, all should read this, especially those in authority, in whom we trust and those who care.
The UN has not fundamentally failed in its consideration of Israels behaviour. Israel is always protected by the US veto thus frustrating the majority intentions of the UN membership.
Every normal nation is having a conversation about Israel – Gaza and Netanyahu – Hamas, after generations of Israel being cut an awful lot of slack by the developed world; now blown any good will.
However, ALP government (dominated by NSW right) in my opinion is better off acting with others including EU nations, UK etc. to apply sanctions and try hold Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir et al to account.
Australia is not significant that end of the world, while the focus is on military export eg F35 parts & constraints, but this ignores imports from Israel?
Further, it’s not the only conflict of concern, there are others including Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine etc.; Hamas Octobr 7 operation was manna from heaven for Netanyahu, Putin and Trump.
What the appointment of Jillian Segal as special envoy to combat anti-Semitism did was hold a mirror up to a not-very-nice view of hard line zionists.
Jillian did not present anything to win Australians over to her militant views.
I don’t know if Albo did this deliberately, if so it was very effective in ensuring rejection of the Israel govenments actions in Gaza.
I found this a really interesting and informative article. Recently Albanese was reported to have said, or implied, that Australia didn’t have the gravitas or something to play a significant role in bringing Israel to account. I found it a pathetic, defeatist, pusillanimous response. Australia despite its previous blind support for Israel can be a significant player in world affairs as an honest broker, if we have political leadership with ambition tempered with humility. That is not the leadership we currently have. One yearns for someone like Curtin, Chifley, Hawke, Keating or even Gough (though his stance on East Timor was wrong). An unambitious hand-wringer is the last person we need as a leader.
the UN will never be able to do anything meaningful unless the veto powers of the major nations are removed.
Thanks Leonie Saunders, excellent article.
And fine & appropriate comments.
For those who are quick to scream “anti-semite” please pause and show me credible and authenticated evidence that on and since October 7th 2023:
1. Jewish babies were beheaded by Hamas.
2. Jewish babies were “baked” in microwaves by Hamas.
3. Jewish women and girls were sexually abused by Hamas.
4. IDF helicopter gunships did not fire on and kill numerous Israeli citizens fleeing the music festival adjacent to Gaza on October 7th.
I could go on however there is something else I will request of pro-Zionist apologists for the Netanyahu Government’s involvement in the Gaza conflict, and that is take the time to observe and analyse this interview with Professor Chassudovsky, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Ottawa.
Here is the link: https://rumble.com/v6wxq6a-secret-plan-to-commit-genocide-against-the-people-of-palestine-michel-choss.html
In particular take note of the date of the adoption of the “classified” document by Netanyahu’s Cabinet.
Any time after seeing this video I will gladly debate the causes of the moral abyss into which the Netanyahu and the Zionists have caste Israeli citizens.
I also remind todays Zionist apologists that Palestinians, Bedouins, Judeans, Canaanites, Sumerians, Christians, Muslims, ancient Jews, Druze, Alowites, Kurds, Maronites and other cultural/ethnic groups who have resided in this region are ALL anthropologically Semitic.
The problem facing recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state is all tied up with the UN and the procedures within that body.
The UN General Assembly can, and has, indicated its acceptance of Palestine but full membership is in accordance with Article 4 of the UN Charter which requires a decision of the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council for membership to be granted. With membership comes all the rights, responsibilities and protections that the UN can offer which, in the current circumstances, would include imposing sanctions on Israel. But the big problem has always been that if one of the permanent members of the Security Council (read the US) vetoes the recommendation, then it does not proceed.
UN Charter Article 4
Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.
The admission of any such state to membership in the United Nations will be effected by a decision of the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.
See also Articles 40,41 and 42 to illustrate the actions the UN Security Council could take BUT it still needs to avoid a veto by one of the permanent members (i.e. the US in this case)
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text
Australia is not failing in its duties and obligations or being defeatist and will probably join with the UK, Canada and France in the September sitting of the UN General Assembly but with the current belligerence being demonstrated by Israel and the unconditional support the US is giving Netanyahu you have to ask, to what effect ?
I am sure that we are all aware of what we are dealing with here and it was graphically demonstrated when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu (and others) for crimes against humanity, Trump immediately took retaliatory punitive action against judges of the ICC and their property.