Ignoring genocide. The bill for Australia’s silence has arrived

Before we can talk honestly about what is happening to us right now, there is a harsh truth that needs to be spoken. Andrew Brown The fourth in a series on Australia’s silent complicity in the US-Israeli illegal war against Iran.

Australia was silent when the bombs fell on Gaza.

Australia fell silent when hospitals were destroyed, aid was blocked, children were pulled from the rubble, and the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and humanitarian organizations that have been reliable in conflict zones for decades used words such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment.

Not equally. Not completely. There were protests in every major city that lasted for months, of a magnitude and severity this country has not seen since the Iraq War.

There were independent senators standing in Parliament and saying what needed to be said in plain language without taking any diplomatic risks. There were journalists, academics, former diplomats and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians who signed petitions, marched in the streets and wrote letters that went largely unanswered.

Palestinian-Australian, Muslim-Australian, Arab-Australian communities and many others with no personal connection to the conflict beyond a functioning conscience screamed into the political void and were essentially told to calm down.

Or we got arrested for wearing a t-shirt.

Police swarm to Bondi Beach and recapture man in ‘F… Israel’ t-shirt

The country as a political entity, its government, its major institutions, and its official voice to the world, were silent.

The price of silence

This silence had a price. This is not just a moral cost, but the moral cost is staggering and will take generations to fully account for. A strategic cost. The cost of allowing the logic of unchecked military impunity to become established as the operating principle of the US-Israel alliance. The logic that became normal in Gaza did not remain in Gaza.

Never happens.

More than 72,000 people have been killed so far. There are more than 171,000 injured. The entire civilian population of one of the world’s most densely populated places has been systematically starved, displaced and destroyed.

So many journalists have been killed that, frankly, it constitutes a deliberate campaign to eliminate witnesses. Medics were bombed. UN peacekeepers were shot. Aid workers at Australia’s own partner agencies have been killed in strikes too precise to be accidental.

Australia expressed concern.

A calibrated, diplomatically worded, operationally meaningless concern.

And then, when the same alliance, emboldened by eighteen months of zero meaningful results, turned its guns on a sovereign nation-state, Iran, on 28 February this year, Australia announced its support. He described it as constructive. He presented the American justification as sovereign Australian policy back to his own people.

Iran war and the price of Albanese’s complicity

Warnings ignored

Those who warned loudest about Gaza were not just warning about Palestinians. They were warning about a system. A system in which American military power and Israel’s strategic ambitions would expand, free from the constraints of international law and serious pushback from allies. I would find new goals. He would eventually come for the stability of every country that came into his orbit.

They were right. And for saying this, they were called anti-Semitic.

Iran came from nowhere. The attack on Iran is a direct and logical extension of the normalized impunity in Gaza. If you can destroy a civilian population without significant consequences, you can bomb a sovereign nation.

If the ICC arrest warrant means nothing to Netanyahu, international law also means nothing. And if international law means nothing, then the only operating principle is force. And the consequences of power are distributed not only to the warriors, but also to every country whose governments prefer compliance over principles.

Australia preferred the people of Gaza. He made his choice again over Iran. And now he discovers exactly what that choice costs in the cash register, in the cash register, and in the business bank account.

War has come home

That’s what makes this moment different from every protest march and every unanswered letter that came before.

Pain is no longer abstract.

When Gaza burned, the average Australian, enveloped in geographical distance, isolated by a media that kept the most striking images away from prime time, reassured by politicians who called it heartbreaking without doing anything, could maintain the fiction that this was someone else’s tragedy.

Absolutely terrible. Distance. It’s manageable. Something that happened to the people there during a conflict that has been going on forever and probably will continue forever

It has no particular impact on school fees, mortgages or quarterly business figures.

This fiction is now dead.

The increase in fuel prices is not limited to this. The disruption in the supply chain is not limited to this. Investment uncertainty manifests itself in retirement statements, business loans that are becoming harder to pay, and businesses that exist today and may not exist in three months. None of this is there.

War has come home. Not in body bags. Not in the private grief of a military family. Just as imperial adventurism always eventually reaches the countries that made it possible, this too has come home. Through economics. Through the slow, crushing, distributed punishment of a population that is never consulted, never warned, and never honestly told what their government’s choices will cost them.

Australia’s complicity

Australia participated in the destruction of Gaza. Not with guns. Not with soldiers. With silence. With diplomatic cover. It is only when the specific, substantive legitimacy that emanates from a liberal democracy begins to be formally challenged. And with the contiguity of the branches, the intelligence and security cooperation that flows through the Five Eyes has never been seriously challenged in the Australian public sphere.

Six Eyes: Australia’s covert support for Israel’s Gaza offensive via Pine Gap

Complicity is not passive.

If you have the power to intervene, to impose sanctions, to condemn, to withdraw diplomatic protection, and you choose not to do so, you will not stand by. You are a participant. And participants eventually share the results.

The Palestinian people alone could not voice their pain to Australia.

It’s not because Australians are cruel. They are not. But because the pain is taken away. The media has complicated this. Politicians have sensitized this. Lobby groups have made it professionally dangerous to say in plain language what is clearly going on.

The entire architecture of managed consent did its job with ruthless efficiency for eighteen months.

But a forty percent increase in the price of fuel wipes out managed consent, as does a wave of small business closures. And young Australians are being told to suffer the economic consequences of a war their government sanctioned without their knowledge or consent. This cuts everything.

The people who protested in Gaza, who were rejected, belittled, accused of anti-Semitism, and who said they were naive about geopolitical complexity, understood something that the political class was only beginning to grasp: that the world does not offer permanent non-interference. The wars you activate reach you. The impunity you excuse will come back in currencies you personally understand.

Fuel. Food. Works. Mortgages. Businesses. Futures.

This is the showdown. The genocide in Gaza did not wake up Australia, the bill that will ensure this will.

And when Australia wakes up fully and clearly to the focused anger of people who now fully understand what has been done to them, the politicians who call it constructive and the media who tell them to blame the Energy Minister will see that managed consent has a shelf life.

This shelf life has expired.

This is not journalism. Bowen beating and Iran war