In war, there are no winners. Just dead civilians

Kate Maclaren writes: Antony Loewenstein skewers the debate perfectly (“The reckoning for decades of Israeli occupation is upon us“). Anti-Semitism is conflated with anti-settlement and thus the argument is reduced to black and white. Hamas is conflated with Palestine and so Israel’s long history of subjugation is “justified”.

Palestinians have a right to sovereignty, and nothing else will stop this biblical conflict. The blended state solution is probably now as dead as the thousands of civilians on both sides who have died in the past nearly three weeks.

Ute Mueller writes: I fail to understand why the Israeli government always manages to appear on the side of the angels. We all know about the dispossession of the Palestinian people for decades and about the Jewish settlements on their land, despite the warnings of the UN.

There have been Jewish massacres of Palestinian civilians on their own land every few years and the rest of the world has been watching. There are Australian politicians who call Israel a liberal democracy, despite big numbers of Jewish people protesting on the streets for about six months against the power grab of the current right-wing government, which wants to have the right to rescind court decisions if it doesn’t agree with them.

Of course no-one can condone the barbaric actions of Hamas against Israeli civilians. However, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: “We grieve for the loss of every innocent life, whether that be Israeli or Palestinian.” Despite that, his government supports the Israeli side massively over the Palestinian one.

Simone Lacar writes: You ask has Labor lost its way and its principles (“The ALP, Israel and the cost of platitudes”). I’m not sure how strong its principles were in the first place, but I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments in Patrick Marlborough’s article.

It is shameful and frustrating that our so-called leaders refuse to do the just and morally right thing, which is to defend the basic human rights of all people, not a select few.

Tim Stephens writes: Since being elected, Labor seems to have a more “nuanced” approach to its principles. Once a firm supporter of a two-state solution, and showing annoyance at Israel’s constant flouting of international law with regards to Palestinian land and people, now it seems to almost fully support Israel’s frequently illegal actions.

Labor is no longer acting as though climate change is real by approving new coalmines. I also remember that we were going to get a “new” return to a government-run Centrelink. Housing was supposed to be made more affordable by placing restrictions around negative gearing. That’s never going to happen while most politicians own numerous houses.

Labor is rapidly making itself as crap and dishonest as the Liberals. The shine has certainly worn off Anthony Albanese.

Adam Ford writes: Marlborough doesn’t mention the once-considered position to walk back the location of Australia’s embassy in Israel and the acknowledged status of the Palestinian territories as “occupied”, something for which Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong deserves a measure of credit and copped a lot of grief from the usual sectors.

It really is naïve to state that now is the time for pro-Palestinian ALP members to be pushing for recognition of statehood. Hamas has walked off the page of being in any way part of a Palestinian state, and indeed that (only ever notional) state now needs to be conceived of in a way that prevents an organisation like Hamas from ever governing it.

But let’s face it — this stuff is all part of a theatre anyway. Recognition of a Palestinian state was always an act in the political pantomime playing at two states being feasible, but Israel doesn’t want it, Hamas doesn’t want it, the international community will never sanction it, Western media will always frame it through the Zionist PR lens, and the PLO is as ineffective as ever in advocating for it.

It’s all just too depressing on too grand a scale. Really the only realistic outcome over the medium or even longer term is a permanent apartheid situation. The “two-state solution”, “recognition”, etc, is actually just a fig leaf for the pretence that our politicians aren’t actually advocating for a system every bit as bad for all the same reasons as apartheid South Africa. And that was such an easy thing for the ALP to rail against back in the day.

The silver lining is that in times past you’d never have seen 10,000 people in any Australian city at a pro-Palestine protest — as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter what rhetorical flummery gets passed at the next ALP national conference, the growing influence of the Arab diaspora is the only hope of moving the international political dial on the issue.

But you already get the sense that Murdoch/Sky media — aided and abetted by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and his ilk — has sniffed the wind and is already seeking to politically muzzle the valid expression of that voice. It all sounds so depressingly familiar.

Gideon Polya writes: At the National Press Club on October 25, Israeli ambassador to Australia Amir Maimon declared: “You do not measure … the adherence of a nation to the international law by the toll of casualties on the other side.” Holocaust-impacted people such as myself and other decent folk would think otherwise. 

As of October 25, the occupied Palestinian/occupier Israeli reprisals death ratio — 6,000 killed in Gaza and 1,500 fighters killed in Israel against 1,400 Israelis killed = 5.4, as compared with the occupied/occupier reprisals death ratio of 10 ordered by Hitler and carried out in the 1944 Ardeatine Massacre. The average Gaza conflict death ratio in the past 15 years has been 20.8, thus predicting 20.8 x 1,400 = 29,000 Palestinian deaths in the present Gaza massacre.

World, stop the killing.