Why are Western Five Eye nations blind to Israeli occupation?

On what grounds does the West justify standing with Ukrainians against Russia’s aggression and occupation, giving them billions of dollars and sophisticated weapons on the one hand, then take a contradictory stand in their support of Israel’s decades of aggression against the Palestinians?

If the US, Australia, Britain and Western countries justify Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians because Israeli civilians have been killed, by the same principle shouldn’t they justify Palestinians’ killing of Israeli civilians because Israel has been killing Palestinian civilians for 75 years, occupying their country and denying them their human and national rights?

And if Hamas is regarded as a terrorist organisation because it has killed civilians, shouldn’t Israel be called a terrorist state because it has massacred and killed large numbers of Palestinian and Arab civilians?

Acts of desperation

Do we blame the Palestinians and other people around the world for their frustration and outrage at this hypocrisy and double standard of Western countries? Do we blame them for not giving a damn about what these Western countries, who have lost all credibility, now say and do?

Frustration leads to acts of desperation and those hypocritical regimes in the West are responsible for the bloodshed that results when Israel is left unaccountable to international law.

Why don’t these Western regimes say a single word about Israel’s apartheid and denial of the Palestinian people’s right to be free and exercise their self-determination in their own country? For years, they put tremendous pressure on the PLO to recognise Israel, the two-state solution and UN resolutions 242 and 338. Since the PLO did that in 1988, they have never demanded that Israel implement the UN resolutions and recognise the right of Palestine to exist. Why?

The Western world deals with Israel as if it were a natural state subject to Arab aggression. They forget it is a colonial state established on the destruction and ruins of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people because they are not Jews. They have been stripped of their human and national right to return to their homeland, to self-determination, to live as equal citizens, as Israel has expanded its borders through aggressive wars.

‘You are here by mistake’

Israel’s lobbyists deceitfully ask what Australia would do if Sydney was attacked by missiles. The question is really what would the Australian people do if they were occupied, besieged, ethnically cleansed and denied their inalienable rights?

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has denied the existence of a Palestinian people, called for the town of Huwara to be “erased”, and told the Palestinians: “You are here by mistake – because David Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and throw you out in 1948.” In an essay in 2017, he gave the Palestinians one of three choices: to accept second-class citizenship, to leave, and if they did neither, they would be branded terrorists and killed by the Israeli army.

These are just some examples of what the Palestinian people have been subjected to under Israel’s apartheid regime.

The Palestinians made two proposals to solve the Palestine question and achieve justice through peaceful means. In 1968, they proposed one democratic non-sectarian state where all share equally under the rule of law. In 1988, they offered a historic but painful compromise by accepting a two-state solution with the return of refugees to the cities and villages they were ethnically cleansed from.

Both were rejected by Israel, which has never proposed a peaceful solution. Instead, it continued with its expansion project of building Jewish-only colonies towards a greater Israel comprising all of historic Palestine plus parts of Arab neighbouring states.

This blind support of Israel is pushing the Western world to abandon the values it claims, destabilising global security, and endangering their own national security and interests. If Western countries are concerned for peace in the Middle East and sparing Palestinian and Jewish blood, all they have to do is to make Israel accountable, recognise the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to return to their homeland, to be equal with Jews and exercise their self-determination.

Israel will not be able to finish the Palestinian people. No power can finish a people. The Palestinians are here to stay and sooner or later, will achieve their legitimate rights whether it takes one year, 10 years or 200 years. The sooner the US, Britain, Australia and Western countries put an end to their complicity, hypocrisy and double standards, the better for peace, for Palestinians and Jews, and the world at large.

Ali Kazak is a former head of the Palestinian delegation to Australia and New Zealand, and author of Australia and the Arabs in Arabic. This article follows Tuesday’s piece from Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, setting out the Jewish perspective on the conflict in Gaza.