Our investigation found we did nothing wrong

The murder of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom and five other Western aid workers in an Israeli air strike this week posed at least a mild inconvenience for Israel’s governmental backers. (The murder of their driver, Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, constituted no such inconvenience because he was Palestinian.)

It meant that our biggest media outlets would briefly resume coverage of the genocide, if only to express outrage that Israel treated a white Australian woman like one of the people we usually reserve our bombs for.

Thankfully, the response when an approved instrument of state violence kills someone inconvenient is well-established. Whether it’s the bombing of an aid worker in Gaza or the murder of an Aboriginal child by police, the official response is tried and tested, allowing everyone to go through the motions in double quick time and get on with the rest of their day.

First come the Expressions of Outrage — the phone call to the guilty party, the stern-faced media appearances, and heavy usage of phrases like “completely unacceptable”. They’re designed to generate headlines and thinkpieces from credulous Press Gallery journalists that give the impression that something is being done.

This is also the stage to start minimising, obfuscating and shifting blame by describing the wrongdoing as a “tragedy,” the murders as a “sacrifice,” and by refusing to mention the perpetrators by name.

(Expressions of Outrage are a step up from Expressions of Concern, which are all Palestinians get.)

Next comes the Outpouring of Grief. This stage is designed to show that the prime minister or whoever is responding (and is capable of responding) with the kinds of human emotions one would typically expect.

Penny Wong has proven especially gifted at this stage, crafting an expression of woe and weariness that looks great in official photos.

After the Outpouring of Grief, the Calls for Accountability and Transparency begin. This is the most important stage. It creates the impression that consequences, in some form, will be forthcoming, while locking in processes designed to ensure they never will.

A key part of this stage is the demand for some sort of vague, lengthy investigation to “determine what happened” or “establish the facts”. This is an excellent delaying tactic when the facts, as they are in this case, are obvious. No details of what the investigation entails — who leads or staffs it, which office it runs out of, how long it will take, who will be interviewed as part of it, whether evidence will be collected, whether it will name perpetrators, whether it will recommend prosecutions or other sanctions — are ever outlined.

Crucially, the investigation must be led by the accused themselves. Not only does this allow all parties to exonerate themselves of any blame, it re-establishes the perpetrators as more trustworthy and civilised than their victims.

Eventually — months or years later, usually — a report will be handed down. It may or may not be publicly released. More likely, some choice lines containing phrases like “disappointing,” “lapses of judgement” and “failure of process” will be fed to friendly media outlets and included in the press release. A flurry of breathless reporting will tell the public that justice has been done — the report was “embarrassing,” “excoriating” or even “shameful”.

Any and all people asking more questions about the crime will be referred to the report, if they can get a copy of it. If not, the fact that the report supposedly exists is enough.

Once you know the playbook you will see it everywhere. We have had nearly 25 years of investigations and reports into Australia’s offshore detention system that have held no one responsible for the deaths within it. We have a far longer history of investigations into Aboriginal deaths in custody that similarly find no guilty parties.

The key function of this system is to create the impression of justice for victims of state violence while withholding the substance of justice from them. The enormous, baroque theatre of outrage and grief and endless investigating that never turns up anything is what we have been conditioned to accept as justice rather than the real thing.

No matter how outrageous the crime or obvious the perpetrators, this system must be enforced. If someone is named and punished once, people will begin to expect that people be named and punished every time. This cannot be allowed to happen.

No official report or investigation will ever state the obvious: that Israel decided to bomb a convoy of aid workers to deter international aid organisations from delivering food and medicine to Gaza, thus preventing or delaying Israel’s plan to wipe out the two million-odd survivors of the genocide via a man-made famine. Nor will it note that Israel has been successful in this — shiploads of aid bound for Gaza are already turning back.

At some stage we will need to ask ourselves why we allow our leaders to make us complicit in this, and what might be necessary to stop them.

The Herald’s opinion pages have a good thing going lately: get some stringer to write a “humour” piece, slap a bonkers headline that reads serious on it, rile the punters up, harvest the clicks, rinse, repeat. If things get too hot, change the headline without telling anyone (they’ve done so on this article already) and complain that people only read headlines these days. Blame social media, smartphones, wokeness etc. etc.

The thing about that is headlines were clickbait before clickbait. Any journalist or editor who knows anything about their industry knows that most people read the headline and the headline only. If I choose to believe that the above article is a sincere call to take smartphones away from kids and give them their ciggies back, that’s between Bevan Shields and God.

What I’m looking at

• Anatomy of a Genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories

• The legal case for imposing embargoes on Israel

• In numbers: How UK right-wing media's pro-Israel Gaza war coverage dehumanises Palestinians