Click here for prior news from June 15 2024
Click here to look at earlier maps (and events) over 4000 years of history for "Israel - Deep inside the plucky country".
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The US had opened a consulate in Old Jerusalem back in 1844. But like diplomatic missions of nearly every other country, from 1966 (unofficially from May 1948 when the consul-general in Jerusalem was shot dead) until 2018 the actual US Embassy had been in Tel Aviv, a result of the ambiguous legal status surrounding Jerusalem for more than a century. Under the UN Partition Plan of November 1947, Jerusalem was to have been placed under international governance, which thus precluded it from being considered under the sovereignty of any State. But while this UN plan had been accepted by the Jews and the majority of UN countries, it had been rejected by the Arabs (and all of the surrounding Arab countries) who declared war.
The US Embassy opened at its Jerusalem location on May 14, 2018, the 70th anniversary of the creation of the modern State of Israel. On March 4, 2019, the US Consulate-General was formally integrated into the US Embassy in Jerusalem.
Australia Israel relations
In Australia in October 2018, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Australia was reviewing whether to move Australia's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. On Friday 14 December 2018, Morrison announced Australia's recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, though there were no immediate plans to move its embassy from Tel Aviv.
This recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was reversed by the ALP Federal Government on Tuesday 18 October 2022. Foreign Minister Penny Wong stressed that Australia remained a "steadfast friend" to Israel, however its embassy would remain in Tel Aviv.
Jerusalem's history over the past century
British forces captured the city from the Ottoman Turks during World War I and maintained control under a League of Nations mandate for 30 years. In November 1947, a United Nations plan terminated the British mandate for implementation at midnight May 14 1948, and partitioned Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem to become an international zone. While accepted by the Jews, the proposed plan never was implemented as civil war erupted. The British organized their withdrawal and intervened only on an occasional basis. When a cease-fire ended the fighting in 1949, Israeli forces held Jerusalem's western precincts while Jordan occupied the city's eastern districts, including the old city with its holy sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the al Aqsa Mosque and the Western Wall.
Click here for more details and to see a map of the UN's original proposal. The State of Israel increased their area by almost 60% of the area that had been allocated to the proposed Arab state. This included the Jaffa, Lydda and Ramle area, Galilee, some parts of the Negev, a wide strip along the Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem road, and some territories in the West Bank, placing them under military rule. With Jordan occupying the West Bank and the Egyptian military occupying Gaza, no state was created for the Palestinian Arabs.
Israel and Jordan soon annexed the portions of Jerusalem they held, with Israel in 1950 declaring the city as its capital, but this accordingly went unrecognized by other nations. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured East Jerusalem, along with the West Bank. Israel later annexed East Jerusalem and reunified the city, again an act that has gone unrecognized by the international community while Palestinian claims remain unresolved.
Six Day War June 1967
Click here for the whole article
Abraham Rabinovich
June 05, 2007
FORTY years after the Six Day War, the consequences of Israel's extraordinary victory are yet to be sorted out. Israel was a tiny Middle Eastern backwater in 1967, with a population of 2.6 million surrounded by a hostile Arab world of 80 million. This disparity seemed to defy the natural order of things and it was a virtual consensus in the Arab world that the Jewish state would fall, sooner rather than later. In Israel itself, the enthusiasm and energy that marked the founding of the state out of the ashes of the Holocaust had been dimmed by the petty problems of getting by in a country with a massive defence burden and a lame economy.
It was the Soviet Union, for reasons never adequately clarified, that lit the fuse that would transform the region. In mid-May 1967, it declared that Israel was massing troops in the north in preparation for an attack on Syria. Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol offered to personally tour the north with the Soviet ambassador to show it wasn't true. The ambassador declined.
There had been small-scale skirmishing between Israel and Syria over the headwaters of the Jordan and Israeli leaders had issued warnings, but there was no massing of troops. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leading figure in the Arab world, felt impelled to come to Syria's aid. He moved his divisions through the Sinai desert towards Israel, ordered the removal of UN troops who had been stationed there since 1956, and closed the Straits of Tiran (which separates the Gulf of Aqaba from the Red Sea) to Israeli shipping.
Back in 1956, Nasser had blocked Israeli shipping from passing through the Straits. A short war followed with Israel capturing the whole of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. After the US pressured Israel to withdraw, Israel declared that if Egyptian forces would again blockade the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba, it would consider this a "casus belli" - case of war. Israel mobilised its reserves.
Nothing happened for more than two weeks. But mobilisation had paralysed the Israeli economy and Jerusalem had to either stand down or strike. On the morning of June 5, Israeli planes, flying low to avoid radar, suddenly rose into the Egyptian skies. Within three hours, the Egyptian air force was destroyed. Soon after, the Jordanian, Syrian and part of the Iraqi air forces were gone, too.
On the third day of the war, the West Bank and Jordanian Jerusalem fell. Syria's Golan Heights followed. The Arab world was stunned, Israel euphoric. The war catapulted Israel into a new era. Brimful of self-confidence and renewed energy, it attracted Jewish immigrants from the West and more than a million from the Soviet Union. Since 1967, Israel's population has tripled to 7.1 million (of whom 1.4 million are Israeli Arabs), its gross national product has grown by 630 per cent and per capita income has almost tripled to $21,000.
A major result of the Six Day War was to persuade the Arab world that Israel was too strong to be defeated. Internalising that view, Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, became in 1970 the first Arab leader to declare readiness to make peace with Israel if it withdrew from all territory it had captured in the Six Day War. Israel insisted, however, on territorial changes.
It took the 1973 Yom Kippur War to persuade Israel to withdraw from all Egyptian territory and for Egypt to agree to peace without insisting on Israel's withdrawal on other fronts as well.
The Oslo accords in 1993, marking the beginning of a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians, also enabled Jordan to make peace with Israel without being accused of betraying the Palestinian cause.
In 2000, Syria announced its readiness for peace. Though negotiations with Damascus broke down, virtually the entire Arab world now accepted the legitimacy, or at least the existence, of the Jewish state in its midst.
But increasing radicalisation has brought to the Palestinian leadership a movement dedicated to Israel's destruction. If there is an answer for Israel, it lies, as in 1967, in bold and imaginative leadership — but this time on the political playing field.
West Bank Fence
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Extract: Article by Amos Harel, Haaretz.com
July 14, 2009
Seven years after construction work began on the West Bank separation fence, the project seems to have run aground. Work has slowed significantly since September 2007. With fierce opposition coming from the United States, Israel has halted work on the "fingers" — enclaves east of the Green Line that were to have included large settlement blocs such as Ariel, Kedumim, Karnei Shomron and Ma'aleh Adumim, within the fence. The military has, in practice, closed up the holes that were to have led to these "fingers". But giant gaps remain in the southern part of the fence, particularly in the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, in the Etzion bloc and in the Judean Desert.
Since the cabinet under former prime minister Ariel Sharon first approved construction of the fence, in June 2002, the route has undergone some dramatic changes. The original route, which was inspired by Sharon, was to have effectively annexed about 20 percent of the territory of the West Bank to Israel.
In February 2005, the cabinet amended the route to include just nine percent of the West Bank. In April 2006 an additional one percent was shaved off by the government of Ehud Olmert.
In practice, however, the route encompasses only 4½ percent of West Bank land. The four "fingers" in the last map (and which Israel presented at Annapolis in November 2007) were never built, not at Ariel and Kedumim (where a "fingernail" was built, a short stretch of fence east of the homes of Ariel) — not at Karnei Shomron and Immanuel — not at Beit Arieh, nor south of that, at Ma'aleh Adumim. Instead, with little publicity, fences were put up to close the gaps closer to the Green Line, at Alfei Menashe instead of at Kedumim, at Elkana instead of Ariel and in the Rantis area instead of at Beit Arieh.
About 50,000 people in these settlements remain beyond the fence. West of Ma'aleh Adumim the wall built along Highway 1 blocks the gap in the barrier and leaves the city's 35,000 residents outside of the barrier, forcing them to pass through a Border Police checkpoint in order to reach Jerusalem.
Large gaps remain in the southern West Bank. Between Gilo in south Jerusalem and Gush Etzion are tens of kilometres of barrier, work on which was suspended due to High Court petitions. As a result access to Jerusalem from the direction of Bethlehem (now a part of the Palestinian Territories) is relatively easy — for commuters and terrorists both.
Click here for some news in Sep 2014.
A second, 30-kilometre gap in the fence, stretches from Metzudat Yehuda (Yatir) in the west to the Dead Sea in the east. The state announced during a recent High Court deliberation of a petition submitted by area Bedouin that work on the barrier there was suspended.
Defence Minister Ehud Barak is "determined to complete the security fence, despite the delays", his office said in a statement. "The minister and the military establishment are working to solve the problems delaying its completion".
Defence Ministry officials pointed out that Barak was "among the first supporters of the fence and did much to advance its construction".
Security officials claim the rate of construction depends on finding a solution to the legal issues and point out proudly that there is an unbroken barrier from Tirat Zvi in the Beit She'an Valley (in Northern Israel, just west of the Jordan River) to the southern entrance to Jerusalem, and from southern Gush Etzion (south west of Jerusalem) to Metzudat Yehuda (south east of Hebron).
East of East Jerusalem — E1 and Ma'ale Adumim
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Click here for a recent article in 2023 on E1 and Ma'ale Adumim delayed but not abandoned
Unilateral Thinking (an article in April 2006)
Click here for the full article
Finally, after years in the planning prior to 2006, construction of an Israeli police station is under way in the now infamous E1 area, 12 square kilometers, a patch of empty West Bank land that stretches from the eastern municipal boundary of Jerusalem to the settlement-city of Ma'ale Adumim, which sits across the Jerusalem-Dead Sea highway some five kilometers (three miles) to the east.
Infamous, because every prime minister of Israel for the past decade has wanted to develop E1 in order to fill in the space between Ma'ale Adumim and Jerusalem, with the intention of securing Israel's hold over the settlement and its smaller satellite communities, which together constitute the Ma'ale Adumim settlement bloc. And every US administration up until now has nixed Israeli development here, on the grounds that it would seriously hamper Palestinian territorial contiguity between the north and south of the West Bank, as well as access from the West Bank to Jerusalem, thereby undermining the viability of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, the only realistic formula on the table for Israeli- Palestinian peace.
Ma'ale Adumim, a settlement of 33,000 residents, has for all intents and purposes become a suburb of Jerusalem, even the Palestinians have tacitly accepted the demographic reality. The Geneva Accord, the unofficial 2003 draft of an Israeli- Palestinian final-status agreement, envisaged the settlement remaining under Israeli control. The competition is over who controls the space in between. The Palestinians reject the notion of a permanent Israeli presence in E1, and consecutive US administrations have viewed this as the red line that Israel should not cross.
Building first started in Ma'ale Adumim itself in 1975, during Yitzhak Rabin's first term as prime minister. And it was Rabin, during his second term in office, in August 1994, who formally included E1 within Ma'ale Adumim's city limits, "or order to create territorial contiguity" between the fast-growing settlement and Jerusalem, according to Benny Kashriel, Ma'ale Adumim's mayor for the past 14 years. That Rabin term produced a general master plan for the area (the term E1 is short for East 1, as the parcel of land was marked on old Jerusalem area zoning maps). In 1997, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet commenced procedures to authorize the allocation of the land to built on, and the Housing Ministry started work on detailed plans. Netanyahu's successor, Ehud Barak, supported the project, according to Kashriel, and the bureaucratic process for the approval of the plans got underway.
Gaza Strip
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Israeli Gaza Strip Barrier
Wikipedia
The Israel and Egypt — Gaza Strip barrier is a separation barrier first constructed by Israel in 1994 between the Gaza Strip and Israel. An addition to the barrier was finished in 2005 to separate the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The fence runs along the entire land border of the Gaza Strip. It is made up of wire fencing with posts, sensors and buffer zones on lands bordering Israel, and concrete and steel walls on lands bordering Egypt.
Background: The Gaza Strip borders Egypt on the south-west and Israel on the south, east and north. It is about 41 kilometres long, and between 6 and 12 kilometres wide, with a population of about 2 million people. The shape of the territory was defined by the 1949 Armistice Agreement following the creation of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent war between the Israeli and Arab armies. Under the armistice agreement, Egypt administered the Strip for 19 years, to 1967, when it was occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
In 1993, Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation signed the Oslo Accords establishing the Palestinian Authority with limited administrative control of the Palestinian territories. Pursuant to the Accords, Israel has continued to maintain control of the Gaza Strip's airspace, land borders and territorial waters. Israel started construction of the first 60 kilometres long barrier between the Gaza Strip and Israel in 1994, after the signing of the Oslo Accords. In the 1994 Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it was agreed that "the security fence erected by Israel around the Gaza Strip shall remain in place and that the line demarcated by the fence, as shown on the map, shall be authoritative only for the purpose of the Agreement" (ie. the barrier does not constitute the border). The barrier was completed in 1996.
The barrier was largely torn down by Palestinians at the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000. The barrier was rebuilt between December 2000 and June 2001. A one-kilometre buffer zone was added, in addition to new high technology observation posts. Soldiers were also given new rules of engagement, which, according to Ha'aretz, allow soldiers to fire at anyone seen crawling there at night. Palestinians attempting to cross the barrier into Israel by stealth have been shot and killed.
Hamas, a US-designated terrorist organisation, came to power in Gaza through elections held in 2006. It has since imposed authoritarian rule over the territory, clashing with the more moderate Fatah party — which runs the Palestinian Authority that controls parts of the West Bank — and losing much of its popularity.
October 2023
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country was at war with Hamas after the militant group’s forces poured across the border from Gaza on Saturday October 7, killing over 1,000 residents and capturing over 200 hostages.
News since November 27 2024
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The Australian
Jacquelin Magnay and Noah Yim
Wednesday November 27 2024
A ceasefire deal between Israel and Lebanon has been accepted. US President Joe Biden has confirmed that Israel and Hezbollah have agreed a 60-day ceasefire, saying the truce heralds a “new start” for Lebanon.
Speaking after the Israeli cabinet voted the deal through 10-1, Mr Biden said: “This is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” Mr Biden said. He said Hezbollah – and what is left of the terrorist organisation – would “not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again”.
The ceasefire agreement – overseen by the US and France – would see Israel withdraw troops over the next 60 days. Mr Biden said Israel “retains the right to self-defence” if Hezbollah “or anyone else” breaks the agreement. “This deal supports Lebanon’s sovereignty,” Mr Biden said. “So it heralds a new start for Lebanon – a country that I’ve seen most of over the years, a country with a rich history and culture. If fully implemented, this deal can put Lebanon on a path toward a future that’s worthy of its significant past.”
In a joint statement, Mr Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron said their two countries would ensure the ceasefire, to take effect at 4am local time (1pm AEDT) was “fully implemented.” They added that it would secure Israel “from threat of Hezbollah”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday he was ready to implement a ceasefire deal with Lebanon and would respond forcefully to any violation by Hezbollah, declaring Israel would retain "complete military freedom of action."
Mr Biden repeated a call for a ceasefire in Gaza and for the remaining hostages to be released. “Just as Lebanese people deserve a future of security and prosperity, so do the people of Gaza. They too deserve an end to the fighting and displacement. People of Gaza have been through hell. Their world’s absolutely shattered. Far too many civilians in Gaza have suffered far too much. And Hamas has refused for months and months to negotiate a good faith ceasefire and a hostage deal. So now Hamas has a choice to make. Their only way out is to release the hostages including American citizens which they hold. In the process – bring an end to the fighting which would make possible a surge of humanitarian relief. Over the coming days, the US will make another push with Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Israel and others to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, for the hostages’ release, and the end of the war without Hamas in power.”
Mr Netanyahu thanked Mr Biden for US “involvement” in the Washington-led truce. Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati welcomed the ceasefire, describing it as a crucial step toward stability, the return of displaced people to their homes and regional calm.
Earlier, Mr Netanyahu insisted the agreement allowed Israel “full liberty” to attack again if Hezbollah launched missiles, expanded its tunnel network or prepared for any aggression in violation of the ceasefire. “The duration of the ceasefire depends on what happens in Lebanon,” Mr Netanyahu said. “If Hezbollah violates it, we will attack. I hear the claim that we cannot renew the war. I remind you – this is precisely what I was told during the ceasefire in Gaza, and we returned to fight, and in a big way.”
As the Israeli Defence Forces pounded Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut, he stressed that Israel had set Hezbollah back decades, with the terror group now not enjoying the same capabilities, leadership or command structure anymore. “Hezbollah is no longer the same. We set them back decades,” he said. “We have destroyed many missiles and rockets, we have killed many terrorists.”
Mr Netanyahu said there were three reasons this was the right time for Israel to engage in a ceasefire with Hezbollah, with the priority to focus on removing the nuclear threat posed by Iran. “The first is to focus on the Iranian threat, enough said. The second is to refresh our forces and rearm our troops. There have been big delays in the supply of arms and this delay is about to stop soon,” he said. “We will arm ourselves with sophisticated arms to protect our troops and give us greater force to complete our missions. The third is to isolate Hamas. Hamas was counting on Hezbollah and once Hezbollah is eliminated, Hamas is left alone. Our pressure on Hamas will grow stronger and help in the sacred mission to bring back our hostages.”
The deal is for both sides to cease attacks for 60 days and for Hezbollah to pull back its troops north of the Litani river, which is about 30km from the Israeli border. The Lebanese government is to send 5000 of its own forces into this zone. The Israeli military will also withdraw its troops from Lebanese territory over the coming weeks.
Much of the deal is similar to a UN Security Council Resolution 1701 agreed back in 2006 to end conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, but which was often breached. The pact allows for further negotiations and a longer peace deal to be worked out over the next 60 days, leading to what is expected to be the end of the 14 month conflict which has caused thousands of deaths and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the truce would help secure an end to the war in Gaza. “One of the things that Hamas has sought from day one is to get others in on the fight, to create multiple fronts … and as long as it thought that was possible, that’s one of the reasons it has held back from doing what is necessary to end the conflict,” Mr Blinken told reporters at the G7 in Italy. “If it sees that the cavalry is not on the way, that may incentivise it to do what it needs to do to end this conflict.”
On Tuesday, ahead of the agreement being signed off by the Israeli security cabinet, Israel launched a massive strike on southern Beirut suburbs, saying they were targeting Hezbollah’s naval missile unite and command headquarters.
The Israel army said 30 Hezbollah sites had been targeted in the past week and criticised the Iranian proxy group of operating from dense civilian areas to use the local population as human shields. The Tuesday strikes included 13 terror targets in the Dahieh area, taking out a Hezbollah aerial defence unit centre, an intelligence centre, command centre and weapons storage facilities. Seven other targets were components of Hezbollah’s financial system.
Footage shows in these final hours before the ceasefire Hezbollah had also fired a barrage of rockets into northern Israel.
An Israeli intelligence officer told NBC News that the ceasefire deal was intensely debated. “The strongest voices against this deal come from the leaders of the Israeli towns and villages along the north”, the official said. “All the leaders there are speaking with a very clear voice, in one voice, all of them say it is a terrible deal. That’s not what we expected. We are not going to urge our people to return to these dangerous places.”
British military analyst and former paratrooper Andrew Fox said the war has seen 60,000 Israelis displaced, over 17,500 rockets and drones launched at Israel, over 13,000 Hezbollah targets struck by Israel, over 2,100 Hezbollah operatives killed and over 14,500 wounded, with over 80 per cent of Hezbollah’s 130,000-150,000 missiles and rocket stores destroyed. He added: “The Israel Defence Force have cleared along the immediate border with Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah fighting locations and terror tunnels, which were found stocked with uniforms and weaponry to launch 7 October-style terror attacks into Israel itself.”
A five-country committee, chaired by the US is to ensure compliance with the ceasefire.
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AFP
Wednesday December 4 2024
Nine people were killed in Israeli strikes on villages in southern Lebanon on Monday, after Israel said it was taking aim at dozens of Hezbollah targets in retaliation for an attack claimed by the militant group amid a fragile ceasefire. Israel and Hezbollah faced accusations of breaching the truce, which took effect last Wednesday to end a war that has killed thousands of people in Lebanon and sparked mass displacements on both sides of the border.
The Israeli military said it “struck Hezbollah terrorists, dozens of launchers, and terrorist infrastructure throughout Lebanon”. “Israel demands that the relevant parties in Lebanon fulfil their responsibilities and prevent Hezbollah’s hostile activity,” the statement said. Earlier, Hezbollah said it had launched an attack targeting an Israeli position in a disputed part of the border area between Israel and Lebanon.
Israel’s military said Hezbollah had launched two projectiles towards one of its posts in the area of Har Dov, Israel’s term for the disputed Shebaa Farms. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hezbollah of a “serious violation” and vowed to “respond forcefully”. “We are determined to uphold the ceasefire and respond to any violation by Hezbollah, no matter how minor or serious,” he said. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz also vowed a “harsh response”. Shortly afterwards, the Israeli military said it was striking targets in Lebanon.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported strikes on areas of south Lebanon, where Hezbollah has long held sway, that are located around 20km from the border with Israel. Israel has carried out a near-daily series of strikes in southern Lebanon since the ceasefire was put in place, and earlier on Monday Beirut’s powerful parliament speaker Nabih Berri accused it of violating the truce. “The aggressive actions carried out by Israeli occupation forces... represent a flagrant violation of the terms of the ceasefire agreement,” said Mr Berri, who helped mediate the truce on behalf of ally Hezbollah.
Under the ceasefire deal, Hezbollah must withdraw its fighters from areas south of the Litani river, and dismantle its military infrastructure in the south. As part of the agreement, the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers will deploy in southern Lebanon as the Israeli army withdraws over a period of 60 days. A committee involving France, UN peacekeepers, Israel, Lebanon and chaired by the US is tasked with maintaining communication between the various parties and ensuring violations are identified and dealt with to avoid any escalation.
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The Australian front page
Cameron Stewart
Thursday December 12 2024
Anthony Albanese, it seems, finally gets it. His emotional and powerful press conference at Sydney’s Jewish Museum on Wednesday could, and should, have been given many, many months ago, long before the ugly spectre of anti-Semitism took root and spread its poison across this country. It took a car set alight in Sydney in an anti-Semitic attack for the second time in weeks and terrorist firebombing of a beloved synagogue in Melbourne’s Jewish heartland to shake an emotional Prime Minister into giving the sort of response that the country’s Jewish community and many non-Jewish Australian had been pleading for since Jews were targeted at the Opera House on October 9 last year.
By any measure, we are living through an ugly moment. We are seeing a scourge of anti-Semitism in this country on a scale that is unprecedented and is now creating global headlines.
So what has gone wrong until now? At one level, the answer is simple. Before the Prime Minister’s strong but belated response on Wednesday, the truth was that the fish had rotted from the head. This includes, but is not limited to, Albanese and Penny Wong who, through a mixture of naivety, weakness and expediency in failing to recognise and act on the problem early on, helped to set the permissive tone for what has followed. And now, it seems, the horse has bolted.
This was not their intention, but it is a reality and it amounts to a failure of political leadership.
When Wong’s increasingly hostile policies towards Israel see her criticising it on a near-daily basis, including by equating it this week with the dictatorships of Russia and China, it emboldens those misfits tempted by hate crimes.
No one is pretending that Albanese and Wong are not horrified by anti-Semitism, as all decent Australians are, and they are entirely within their rights politically to criticise Israel over its conduct in the Gaza war. But there are real-life consequences in Australia to the government’s policy backflip over Israel that should have been grappled with much earlier, before synagogues were burning. Language matters, actions matter, and until Wednesday, these have been too equivocal for too long.
As former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who has observed anti-Semitism all her life, told me this week, societies that lacked strong political leadership to stamp out anti-Semitism early are doomed to have it rear its ugly head later.
Yet those with partisan political axes to grind who choose only to blame the federal government are ignoring the broader failures of leadership that have also led Australia to this moment.
In Victoria, where almost half of the 905 national instances of anti-Semitism took place in the past year, the Victorian state Labor government of Jacinta Allan has been all but missing in action. Allan did nothing as school kids skipped school to call for the eradication of Israel and has done nothing to act on anti-Semitic chants or the carrying of anti-Semitic signs at the weekly protests through the middle of Melbourne. It has largely taken a “nothing to see here” approach to the problem.
On campuses, vice-chancellors could not muster the courage to call out and take action against the racist elements of the anti-Israel encampments until the damage had been done and Jewish students all but chased from campus.
Police chiefs have also given the appearance of being paralysed by the conflict, instructing their officers to watch rather than swoop to stamp on anti-Semitism whenever it appears at rallies and in protests that have even been allowed to take place outside synagogues.
Local councils around the country have been little short of disgraceful, spending endless hours debating meaningless resolutions on Israel, many of which have been anti-Semitic rather than political, rather than concentrating on collecting the bins.
There have been some honourable exceptions to these failures of leadership. Ever since the disgraceful protest outside the Opera House on October 9 last year, NSW Premier Chris Minns has been far more proactive than either the federal government or his Victorian counterpart in condemning and taking action against anti-Semitism.
Albanese is now moving to take the issue as seriously as it should have been taken many months ago, by setting up an Australian Federal Police special operation for anti-Semitism.
But anti-Semitism in Australia has been festering and growing since October 7 last year. It should never have taken so long for this taskforce to emerge. And now the anti-Semitism genie is fully out of the bottle, with copycat crimes being committed. We’ve seen the danger of copycat hate crimes in Australia before. The deadly spate of Islamic State-inspired attacks here from 2014 to 2018 were carried out mostly by youths who bore hate in their hearts. Thankfully no one has yet been killed by acts of anti-Semitism, and the government is finally, belatedly, taking strong steps to tackle it. But it should never have got to this.
This fish should never have rotted at all, much less from the head.
Copycat crimes and anti-social criminals have been around for years, for those who watched "Once upon a time in Hollywood" with Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie, click here for a more accurate timeline involving Charles Manson (1935-2017). Along with Tex Watson, who, though still locked up in jail since those events 55 years ago in July-August 1969, has become a Christian minister. Irony everywhere. Who can tell? 
Click here for recent news in Syria
Click here for recent news in Iran
Earlier News in Israel
- Yasser Arafat, Fatah, PLO, and Lebanese War 1959 - 2004
- Closure Lebanese war, August 14 2006
- PLO Interior Minister resigns in Gaza City, May 14 2007
- Annapolis Maryland Peace Conference, November 29 2007
- Iraq Iran truce in Tehran, June 14 2008
- Markets Spin in New York, October 1 2008
- Israel hammers Gaza, December 28 2008
- Fault lines in Netanyahu's fractious alliance, April 6 2009
- Washington jitters, July 29 2009
- Israel agrees to settlement moratorium, November 27 2009
- Israel 'wrecks' peace talks, March 12 2010
- Gaza naval raid, June 1 2010
- Peace or War on settlements, September 20 2010
- Arab "spring", January 29 2011
- Golan Heights confrontations, June 7 2011
- West Bank recognition at UN, September 17 2011
- Iran fires missile near Hormuz in Persian Gulf, January 2 2012
- Iran's nuclear facilities, February 28 2012
- Damascus bomb attack, July 19 2012
- Israel prepares for War with Iran, September 18 2012
- Hamas leader assassination, November 15 2012
- Netanyahu election victory, January 23 2013
- Syria's civil war, June 1 2013
- Western action in Syria, August 28 2013
- Bethlehem separation barrier, December 26 2013
- Gaza offensive, June 21 2014
- State land announced at Gush Etzion Bethlehem, September 2 2014
- Ehud Olmert jail sentence, May 26 2015
- Netanyahu announces Golan Heights is Israel's, April 19 2016
- Jordan thanks Trump (for tempering Temple Mount crisis), July 28 2017
- Israel strikes Syria, April 10 2018
- Israel election, April 7 2019
- Trump's Peace Plan, January 28 2020
- Israel election, March 23 2021
- East Jerusalem clashes, May 11 2021
- West Bank aid offer, February 9 2022
- Israel election, November 1 2022
- Protests in Israel and Backdown by Netanyahu, June 30 2023
- includes Attack by Gaza October 7 2023
- War in Gaza, January 10 2024
- War in Gaza, June 15 2024
** End of article