Okay Ben Roberts-Smith but what of Australians fighting for the IDF?

A choice was made to try Ben Roberts-Smith and an Australian militant in Ukraine, but not to send back the IDF soldiers involved in the genocide. Andrew Brown reports.

This publication raised an uncomfortable question in February. It remained unanswered. This week the Australian government has made it very difficult to maintain this silence.

On 7 April, two Australians were arrested for their actions in foreign conflicts. Same day. Same country. Same federal police force.

Ben Roberts-Smith was taken off the plane at Sydney Airport by AFP officers and charged with five counts of war crime murder for allegedly killing unarmed Afghan civilians between 2009 and 2012. He is the most decorated soldier this country has produced.

He faces life imprisonment.

The charges are the product of a years-long Brereton investigation that deployed 54 investigators through the Special Investigations Bureau and consumed nearly two hundred million dollars of public money.

Two hundred million.

Going after one man and the broader culture of behavior he purportedly represents.

By evening the same day, a 25-year-old reserve officer named Vincent Tong-Vuong Tran, from Felixstow in Adelaide, was in the Adelaide Magistrates’ Court. His crime was to serve as a drone operator for Ukrainian forces without federal authorization from May 2025 until January of this year.

AFP officers had already raided his home, taken his phone and laptop and forensically examined the devices. The images on these devices allegedly brought him into a foreign conflict.

He was charged under section 115A of the Defense Act. The maximum sentence is twenty years. AFP proudly noted that this was the first time anyone had been charged under this provision.

ISIS vs IDF. Selective justice and the collapse of Australian law

To be clear about what happened this week. Australia has charged its most famous soldier with war crimes following one of the most expensive and comprehensive military investigations in the country’s history.

And on the same day, he charged a young man from suburban Adelaide with the crime of using a drone for a country struggling to survive against a Russian invasion that Australia has publicly condemned, for which Australia has provided $1.7 billion in aid.

Both men were arrested. Both were seen as threats to the rule of law. Both were processed quickly and meticulously.

Now ask yourself who is not being processed?

Where are the IDF’s accusations?

An estimated one thousand former and current soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces live in Australia. Some of them were in Gaza. The International Court of Justice found a reasonable risk of genocide in this operation.

Not doubt. This is not a claim coming from a protest group.

A formal legal determination accompanied by binding interim measures from the world’s highest court. The International Criminal Court investigates war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from the same conflict separately.

Vincent Tran’s phone was seized a few months after he returned to Australia. AFP examined it forensically. They found what they were looking for.

Has the phone of a single returning IDF soldier been examined?

Has anyone been summoned for questioning? Did the AFP issue a search warrant? Did the Attorney General make a single application?

Has anyone in the Albanian government commissioned a legal assessment of whether Section 268 of the Criminal Code, which covers genocide and war crimes and applies to Australian citizens regardless of what uniform they wear, has anything to do with this?

The answer to each of these questions is no.

In February, senior human rights lawyer Chris Sidoti publicly stated that Australians serving in Gaza could face criminal liability if found guilty of genocide or war crimes, and that you do not need to have pulled the trigger for liability to kick in.

Facilitation is sufficient. Knowing how to participate is enough.

The government did not object to the legal analysis. He just ignored it and moved on.

It was February. Then it was Roberts-Smith.

A choice about who matters

The Roberts-Smith case and Tran’s arrest on the same day make the government’s stance on the return of IDF soldiers not only incoherent but inconsistent.

You can’t spend two hundred million dollars investigating your own special forces, arrest a reservist for flying Ukrainian drones, and then claim before two international tribunals that you have no framework or obligation to question Australians serving on a military operation.

Frame available. Yesterday it proved that it works.

Anthony Albanese declined to comment on the Roberts-Smith matter, saying he would not discuss legal proceedings. He maintained the same silence about the thousand people who came home from a different conflict without any action.

There is a word for the application of law that works in one direction and stops at a certain limit. This is not justice. This is not complexity. This is not careful manipulation of alliance politics.

It is a choice about who is important and who is not.

This question should be asked directly to the government on record every day until it answers.

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