The lie did what it was supposed to do

On January 30 I wrote the following about Israel’s accusations against UNRWA:

Turns out thinking it would take multiple weeks to debunk Israel’s allegations gave them too much credit. Earlier this week a Channel 4 News investigation combing through Israel’s six-page dossier found “no evidence to support [Israel’s] explosive new claim that UNRWA staff were involved in the terror attacks on Israel”. On Thursday Penny Wong admitted that she wasn’t “in full possession of the facts” when she decided to suspend Australia’s UNRWA funding.

It isn’t surprising that the UNRWA allegations are being pulled to pieces but from Israel’s perspective it also doesn’t matter. The lie did what it was supposed to do. It held up enough truckloads of aid to ensure that even more Gazans will die. It stripped 60% of funding from the biggest organisation trying to keep people in Gaza alive. It ensured that every aid truck crossing into Gaza now has to run a gauntlet of Israeli settlers trying to set it on fire.

The only way any of this would matter from Israel’s perspective is if there were consequences for the lie being exposed but we know from experience there won’t be. Israel is a member of the West and when it comes to killing Black and Brown people Western countries don’t need to provide evidence. Any excuse will do. It only needs to hold up long enough to get the killing done. When the lie falls apart someone like Penny Wong gets wheeled out to say “whoops” and it all keeps going as if nothing happened.

Remember when the International Court of Justice found that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza? That was two weeks ago and Australia has said almost nothing about it. We’re going to wait for the outcome of the full investigation, which will take years, and in the meantime we’ll only express “concerns”. By the time it’s over who knows how many Palestinians will be dead or if there’ll even be a Gaza left. We act instantly on the word of a country that lies pathologically in service of a genocide but we wait for an investigation while Palestinians hold up the remains of their kids in plastic bags.

For anyone sitting at home trying not to look at their phone because of all the dead kids in their feed it’s difficult to know what to do. We’re marching in the streets every week but according to Alex Ryvchin the Executive Council of Australian Jewry is speaking with Albanese and Wong’s offices “almost daily”.

The next election isn’t until next year, and in any case only a handful of lower house Labor MPs in seats with big left-wing or Muslim communities are at risk of losing their jobs. Even if they do lose they’ll just be given consolation-prize ambassadorships or fellowship positions at think tanks. Penny Wong’s in the Senate so she’s going nowhere unless some branch-stacking Labor Right loser manages to roll her, which is not out of the realms of possibility.

I’m not laying all this out to argue that things are hopeless and there’s nothing we can do. The opposite, in fact. By now it should be obvious that the legal, social and political systems we’re supposed to rely on to hold génocidaires and their enablers to account are useless, if not actively protecting them. When or if this is all over the thought of going back to ‘normal’ has lost all meaning. Normal is gone.

I don’t know about you but it really seems like people who enable the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people should actually be brought to justice? Is that a naive thing to think now? I have no idea how to go about even beginning the process of building something that actually does that job but given the size of the movement we’ve built and the horrors we’re being asked to accept in our names it feels like asking the government to stop supporting genocide please is not ambitious enough of a goal.

I can’t remember where I saw it but there’s a quote from an Algerian resistance fighter that I read somewhere once. The Algerian War of Independence had been going for seven years. The French from de Gaulle on down had sworn they would never leave Algérie française; that Algeria was as much a part of France as Brittany or the Vendée. They killed more than a million Algerians trying to keep that fiction alive. At times it must have seemed to the Algerians that they were fighting something that could not be beaten — an empire that spanned the world and a total lack of human conscience.

In 1962 the French finally capitulated and the pied-noirs, the French settlers in Algeria, fled to metropolitan France. It happened so quickly that, at least in the words of this Algerian fighter that I can remember, “the food was still warm on their tables”.

Things change. Sometimes not for a long time, and sometimes very fast. I think about that a lot.

Columnist Brain

I didn’t really feel like doing Columnist Brain this week but thankfully the Herald made it easy for me.

I haven’t actually read it but you can’t make me.

I met Toto once. It was at a party for someone I know who works for Labor (we don’t talk much now). Albo lived down the road and stopped by on his walk with Toto to wish this person happy birthday. The Young Labor chuds with identical chino/receding hairline combos started competing for Albo’s attention and Toto was straining at his leash trying to get away from the scrum.

I sat with him on the porch and talked to him for a bit and gave him a pat. He was thankful but he was having a terrible time and I felt bad for him. He had no way of knowing what he was a part of but he had a very sad and tired air about him, which you would if it was you, wouldn’t you.

What I’m looking at

• Michigan Muslims and Arabs are over Biden

• Coles is partnering with Palantir because we live in hell

• Barnaby Joyce lying flat on his back on Lonsdale Street on Wednesday night, calm and collected and totally sober. God bless the Daily Mail.