History is a wolf at the door

In 2020 the Washington Post ran a story about Benjamin Netanyahu that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The White House provides a free courtesy service for visiting dignitaries where they wash and iron your clothes, like a nice hotel. Most people only visit the White House for a night or two so the laundry is usually two button-up shirts and maybe some socks and underwear.

White House staff began noticing that every time Netanyahu visited on a diplomatic trip he and his wife Sara would bring an insane amount of dirty laundry with them. Not metaphorical dirty laundry but multiple suitcases filled with actual bedsheets and towels and stuff. The staff shrugged it off the first few times but it kept happening. It got so bad that multiple American government employees were eventually willing to leak to a newspaper about it.

The Netanyahus are worth about US$80 million. They could pay the laundry bills of everyone in Israel if they wanted. They act this way because they know the White House will let them.

I bring this up because I think it explains how Australia and other Western nations are acting in response to Israel’s new claims that UNRWA workers participated in October 7.

To take Israel’s claims at face value you have to deliberately forget a great deal about the last three months, as well as the last 75 years. Forget the 40 babies Hamas decapitated that turned out not to exist; the October 7 death toll attributed entirely to Hamas that ignores the IDF’s apparent invocation of the Hannibal Directive; the enormous Hamas command centre under Al-Shifa hospital that was never found; the harrowing New York Times story of a woman being raped by Hamas fighters on October 7 that has been disavowed by the victim’s family; the Hamas rocket that supposedly hit Al-Ahli hospital; the Hamas “weapons cache” found behind a working MRI machine; the the list of “terrorist names” that turned out to be a calendar; the pristine copies of Mein Kampf found in Palestinian children’s bedrooms.

Forget Israel’s long-stated intention to discredit the UNRWA and remove them from Gaza so they can more effectively deny Palestinian refugees their legal right of return. Forget the entire concept of hasbara, Israel’s decades-old policy of state-sponsored propaganda designed to shape public opinion of Israel around the world. And forget the fact that Shin Bet, which claims to have obtained its intel via interrogating Hamas fighters, routinely tortures Palestinians in Israeli detention.

None of this is a problem for Australia or the other colonial nations who have cut funding to the UNRWA because forgetting is what we do best. The act of forgetting is essential to the survival of the colonial project. Without a continuous and strenuous effort to forget our past and our present — to place all events in a void, without context or historical weight — the whole thing would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

Australia and other Western nations will never acknowledge the truth of Israel because to do so would be to acknowledge the truth of ourselves. We’re a liberal democracy where protests are increasingly being criminalised. We’re a nation deeply committed to human rights that suspends its own human rights laws to keep locking Aboriginal kids in adult jails. We have a free press that is firing journalists for reporting on an ongoing massacre. We will gladly wash Israel’s dirty laundry because it is our own.

The UNRWA claims are another deliberate act of forgetting. Less than a day after the International Court of Justice found plausible claims of genocide against Israel, that history-making decision of immense significance was rendered old news. Media outlets have already relegated it to a brief paragraph in the back half of stories otherwise devoted to the UNRWA allegations. Penny Wong has said a great deal about the UNRWA and almost nothing about the ICJ ruling.

If these are anything like the endless other allegations Israel has made since October 7, they will be quietly watered down or discarded in a couple of weeks or months. It won’t matter by then because they are not designed to be convincing, or even plausible. Their only function is to licence further violence.

In concocting ever more unbelievable fictions to keep the genocide going, Israel is continuing the richest tradition settler-colonial states possess. When the fictions are debunked or disproven we simply forget they existed, because by then they have served their purpose. Saddam has chemical weapons that can hit London in 45 minutes so we need to invade. North Vietnam just attacked one of our patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin so we need to invade. American medical students in communist Grenada are in danger so we need to invade. If the lie is questioned we come up with an even bigger lie and off we go again.

The obvious hole in this strategy is that the victims do not forget. Not just in Palestine but all over the world, those who remember are reaching out and finding each other. Chile and Mexico, two nations that have suffered atrociously from Western aggression, gave their weight to South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ. The nations of the Sahel have cut ties with France, the old colonial power, and have formed a confederation. In Yemen, Ansarallah is now targeting US ships carrying weapons. Iraq’s government is demanding the final withdrawal of US troops. The Invasion Day marches were a sea of Palestinian flags.

The spy novelist and former MI5 agent John Le Carre, who was born English but died an Irishman, put it best:

The Western nations providing cover for Netanyahu to hunt for the magic number of dead Palestinians that will save his political career cannot see the implications of what they are doing. This is not surprising. Constantly working to forget your own history means you cannot see history as it forms in front of you.

What I’m looking at

• Maybe it’s time we started talking about how terrible Zionism is for Jews, too

• Pro-Israel ‘surveillance’ group turning attention to Australia, leaked posts show

• ABC hires 'notoriously anti-worker' US law firm, Seyfarth Shaw, in Antoinette Lattouf unlawful dismissal case