Lead Editorial

9 October 2024
Vol. 26 No. 41

This week has been dominated by the politics around the anniversary of the October 7 “Al-Aqsa Flood” Hamas attack in Israel. A year ago, the editorial of the 11 October 2023 issue of the AAS responded to the attack under the headline “The old way of war erupts against the new path of development and peace”:

“It is in this context that truly horrific hostilities have erupted in Israel and Gaza, with Hamas’s appalling massacres of hundreds of civilians, and Israel’s brutal bombing reprisals, also killing hundreds of civilians—so far—in a place where civilians already suffer oppressive, inhumane conditions, described as the world’s largest open-air prison”, the AAS observed. “If anything defines the ‘old’ way of war which characterises the Anglo-American order, it has been Israel-Palestine since 1948. At a time like this the news flooding out of the conflict is both infuriating, and familiarly depressing; it’s natural to despair, and question whether any solution to this intractable conflict is even possible. Of course it is, because Israelis and Palestinians are human beings, holding much more in common than divides them.”

Re-reading those words from a year ago, it’s shocking how much worse the situation is now. Israel, under Netanyahu and the actual terrorists in his government, has expanded the conflict into fighting wars on multiple fronts, which it can only sustain with American arms, not from its own collapsed economy. The confirmed death toll in Gaza is more than 41,000, of whom as many as 60 per cent are women and children, and the majority of the Gaza strip is flattened into rubble. Israel has now invaded Lebanon, where the death toll is also skyrocketing, and is on the verge of all-out war against Iran, which would draw America in and have the potential to escalate (ultimately) into a nuclear standoff with Russia and China.

The current, disastrous situation is the result of bad actors in the conflict seizing on October 7 as the pretext to escalate existing agendas. The Western press and Western politicians would have us believe the bad actor is Iran. However, as the Australian Citizens Party has documented since publishing in December 2023 “Plunging towards World War III: The Made-in-London ‘Temple Mount’ Plot behind the Israel-Hamas War”, the defining malign influence is more than a century of British, now Anglo-American, imperial scheming to establish and use Israel as a beachhead that justifies ongoing Anglo-American meddling in the Middle East. War is far more convenient to that agenda than peace, which is why peace isn’t being given a chance by Netanyahu and his government. The most recent manifestation of overt Anglo-American imperialists who have scarred the Middle East are the neoconservatives who ran George W. Bush’s White House and used 9/11 as the false pretext to invade Iraq, setting in train disaster after disaster which have turned the Middle East and North Africa into a hellscape. British neocon Michael Gove boasted that “neoconservatism is a philosophy … with deep roots in British state thinking and practice”, i.e. old-style imperialism. Netanyahu is one of their number, up to his neck in plots to reshape the Middle East going back to at least when as Israeli PM in the mid-1990s he sponsored the most extreme US neocons to formulate a policy orientation they called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”, which included removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and proxy wars against Syria and Iran. After 9/11 provided the pretext, Netanyahu testified to the US Congress in 2002 that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” With US support, he is using the present conflict to expand on this same disastrous imperial/neocon agenda.

Most countries know this truth. While Australia continues to be one of the few that ignore it, we are an obstacle to a just solution.

In this week’s issue: 

• Must watch: Australia has made itself a nuclear target in America’s wars
• Rex Patrick v Mark Dreyfus court battle a big win for political integrity
• Canberra throws vaccine-injured to the wolves
• Contrasting China with Chalmers and ‘one tool’ Bullock
• The coming digital Westphalia
• Intelligence veteran Crooke exposes apocalyptic mindset driving Mideast war
• Lessons from the Cuban missile crisis, 62 years later
• The MAD Bill is a bad bill, but will it be killed?
• Diplomacy, the art of empathy (and preventing wars)
• ALMANAC: Defeating Niemeyer and the ‘swindlers’ of high finance

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