Letters – The Australian – 10.10.23

Global leaders including US President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron have denounced the recent attack on Israel carried out by Hamas terrorists. However, there is a noticeable divergence in language employed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in interviews, as well as by certain segments of the Australian media who have shied away from characterising the perpetrators as “terrorists”. Instead, labels such as “militants” or “fighters’’ have been used, which are euphemisms.

Deliberate targeting of civilian men, women, children and elderly is indeed terrorism and PM Albanese and the media should not recoil from using this term.

The unprovoked attack by Hamas prompts a question: how can Gaza, an exclave grappling with poverty and dire living conditions, manage to finance the launch of thousands of rockets? Regrettably, reports that the inept “UNIFIL peacekeeping forces” have been instructed to evacuate their posts on Israel’s northern border raises concerns that we may soon ask the same question of Lebanon. This financially distressed state harbours the terrorist organisation Hezbollah, which has amassed an arsenal of about 100,000 long-range rockets.

The answer to both questions is, of course, Iran, a country that finances worldwide terrorism and is going nuclear. Any lifting of sanctions assisting the despotic regime should now be reversed.

Hopefully, Biden’s order to send a US aircraft carrier to the region will discourage the mullahs in Tehran from escalating the conflict.

Ironically, 50 years ago, during the Yom Kippur War, Henry Kissinger warned that, like the Balkans in 1914, a regional conflict could turn into a global conflict.

John Kempler, Rose Bay, NSW

Damning reports of Iran’s direct involvement in Hamas’s raining down of terror upon innocent Israeli civilians (“Iran helped plot Israel attack over several weeks”, 9/10) has far-reaching implications that extend well beyond Iran’s regional ambition to scuttle a future rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The breaking up of this Israeli- Saudi nexus is not only crucial to Iran, but to its strong ties to both Russia and China that could see this latest escalation in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict seriously fracture the wider Middle East along Cold War lines.

Most notable is the US’s immediate decision to send a battle carrier group of warships to the eastern Mediterranean, together with aircraft fighter squadrons.

This strategic response cannot be simply directed at Iran, but at a nuclear-armed world in which this latest atrocity could be the Pearl Harbor of World War III.

Reverend Dr Vincent Zankin, Rivett, ACT

Australian Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni falsely stated on Sunday that “Israel hasn’t been defending itself.

It’s been waging war on Palestinians each and every day for decades”. Sadly, he completely ignores the fact Israel has agreed to a Palestinian state on several separate occasions, but the offers have always been rejected, often violently. Repeated Israeli attempts to forge a compromise, based on the now discredited “land for peace” formula, have always been ignored.

Also, what about the split and hatred between Hamas and Fatah, and the increasingly fragmented nature of Palestinian politics? In other words, who is going to lead and run this Palestinian state? What needs to change is the Palestinian political culture that perpetuates anti-Jewish terrorism and makes peace impossible.

The Palestinians want the whole of Israel as their state. This is what they have always been promised since birth.

Annette Gladwin, Bentleigh, Vic

For decades now, the mantra of the mob at pro-Palestinian rallies, both abroad and here, is “From the river to the seas Palestine will be free”, an aspiration meaning there is no place for a Jewish Israel to exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

In this context, a two-state solution has failed every time simply because one side wants peace, and the other wants Jews and Israelis dead or gone.

Benjamin Netanyahu got it right when he said that if the Arabs lay down their arms there would no more war, but if Israel lays down its weapons there would be no more Israel.

Alan Freedman, St Kilda East, Vic