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Across Australia and around the globe, millions of people are outraged by Israel’s slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank. Their outrage is now compounded by despair that Israel has been given a blank cheque to ignore international law.

People are asking, “How does this happen?”, “Why is the UN impotent?”, “Why are so-called civilised states frightened to act?”

An answer to the last question includes an international relations history of perceiving Israel as exceptional, as being above the law.

But faced with the Israeli abominations in Gaza, a few world powers have, at last, ceased treating Israel as exceptional.

Canada, France and Britain have threatened concrete actions against Israel, including sanctions, unless it halts military offensives and lifts aid restrictions in Gaza. These countries have called on Israel to stop its “egregious” expansion of operations in the strip.

In a campaign for life and justice for the Palestinians, it would be wise to anticipate the Israeli claims that criticising their policies serves to support their enemies.

Israel says its military policy only aims to destroy Hamas, never to harm civilians, hence the claim that countries who dare to oppose Israel are supporting terrorism.

Demystifying Hamas

To save Palestinian lives by intervening against the Israeli military, the argument that Hamas represents international terrorism has to be buried, or at least set alongside other evidence. For the past 70 years, in spite of Palestinians being murdered by Israeli terrorist gangs and the Israeli Defense Forces, an ill-informed, or perhaps indifferent, mainstream media has ignored these decades of Israeli violence and oppression.

In response to that ignorance, the late Stéphane Hessel, French diplomat and human rights activist, wrote that in relation to decades of cruelty to Palestinians: “If you are not outraged by injustice, you lose touch with your own humanity.”

Given that history depends somewhat on who tells the best stories, be prepared for Israeli and diaspora Zionist claims: “We are innocent. This is all about Hamas.”

No, it is about ethnic cleansing. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says Gaza is to be totally destroyed and the remaining population “concentrated” in a small area. In response to his insistence that Israel would “apply sovereignty” in the West Bank within the lifetime of the current government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has praised Smotrich for his plans to “conquer and cleanse”.

The nature of intervention

Respect for state sovereignty makes politicians and their media supporters nervous to even mention intervention, let alone in the affairs of a supposed ally.

Yet, at this moment, the moral grounds for intervention to save 14,000 Gaza babies, reported by the UN to be likely to die if aid does not reach them, should be glaringly obvious.

When faced with threats of death to innocent infants, even the most distant observers must feel slightly obliged to intervene.

Even the neglected “Responsibility to Protect principles” provide Australia with the grounds for condemning Israeli depravities and intervening against them. Passed by the UN General Assembly in 2005, it challenged governments to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, but meeting that challenge requires courage and a belief that protecting human life is more important than respect for state sovereignty.

If a government feels squeamish about intervention against Israeli slaughter, it could be reassured by the judgment of former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.

When explaining moral arguments for military intervention, he said that if such initiatives pursue the positive humanitarian goals of the UN Charter, they are more justifiable than inactivity in the face of gross injustice.

If moral arguments for intervention don’t make an impression, legal grounds are not difficult to find. The International Court of Justice ruling in July last year concluded that Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands is illegal and must end “as rapidly as possible”. It added that all states are obliged not to assist Israel to continue its presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; hence standing by, watching and doing nothing, amounts to complicity in Israeli illegalities.

In addition, the Genocide Convention reminds us that a country like Australia must “take all reasonable measures to ensure Israel allows aid into Gaza and to achieve an immediate ceasefire”.

What would intervention look like?

An Australians for Humanity statement hand delivered to the Prime Minister’s electoral office includes a proposal that a naval force from Western governments escort humanitarian aid boats to the shores of Gaza.

It calls on the UN Security Council to dispatch an international peace force to support the distribution of humanitarian aid and to prevent Israel’s annexation of Gaza and the West Bank. In common with the deliberations of Canadian, French and British governments, that proposal also calls on the Australian government to impose sanctions against Israel.

Imposing sanctions

Although Australia has ignored the Palestinian, non-violent, internationally widespread Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to realise a people’s rights to self-determination, on the basis of policy consistency, the case for sanctions against Israel must appear easy to justify.

Australia has a long record of using sanctions to deter countries from illegal, oppressive acts by, among other initiatives, imposing restrictions on the export and supply of weapons and ammunition. The record includes sanctions against Russia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, North Korea, South Sudan and Myanmar.

In the last case, Australia has claimed that sanctions were aimed at “promoting peace, stability, security and to promote respect for democracy and the rule of law”.

Those praiseworthy goals should be applied to Israel. Or, must that country stay beyond reproach, despite having committed what a group of more than 30 UN experts have called “one of the most ostentatious and merciless manifestations of the desecration of human life and dignity”?

Resume humanitarian aid

Australia has joined a coalition of 23 countries demanding the full resumption of humanitarian aid into Gaza, but it has not condemned Israeli brutalities, neither has it joined Canada, France and Britain in imposing sanctions and taking concrete action to prevent Netanyahu from taking full control of what is left of the Gaza Strip.

In defence of a common humanity, as a response to the outrage of millions of citizens, the Australian government must surely break its silence and act.

If the government finds that appeal insufficient, how about another: Please pity the children, save them and, for God’s sake, don’t be afraid!

[Stuart Rees AM is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney and a recipient of the Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize. This article was first published at .]