Weak leaders are bringing the West to its knees

 Weak leaders are bringing the West to its knees PETA CREDLIN 

At the recent meeting of the G7, the only democratic leader present with an approval rating north of 40 per cent was its host, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. The best of the rest, at 37 per cent, was the United States’ Joe Biden (although this was before his debate disaster), followed by Canada’s Justin Trudeau at 30 per cent, Germany’s Olaf Schulz at 25 per cent, Britain’s Rishi Sunak also at 25 per cent, France’s Emmanuel Macron at 21 per cent, and Japan’s Fumo Kishida at just 13 per cent. Sunak is almost certain to be thrashed in the British elections on Thursday and a way-past-his prime Biden might well be dumped by his party even before November’s US election. Our own Anthony Albanese’s current 42 per cent approval (for a net approval rate of minus 11) looks almost glowing, yet his government will almost certainly go backwards at the next election. 

Not for almost a century has strong and confident democratic leadership been so needed yet almost never has the leadership of the main democracies been so lacklustre. And so, why? First, it’s because almost none of the current crop of leaders has addressed their societies’ underlying problems. Second, it’s because large percentages of the electorate in these main democracies feel politically homeless – indeed disenfranchised. And third, as suggested on this page earlier this week (“The West hasn’t figured out what’s going wrong. Voters are the problem”, 2/7), democratic electorates are, as yet, in no mood to welcome the leadership that’s needed. As the US commentator George Will said during an earlier dispiriting period (the late 1970s), “the cry goes up for leadership from millions of people who wouldn’t know it if they saw it, and would reject it if they did”. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the widespread perception that liberal market democracy was permanently ascendant, the main democracies have militarily, economically and even culturally disarmed. Yet it’s one thing to recognise the gathering storm; quite another to have a plan to deal with it. 

For all its residual strength, compared to China, the US is militarily much weaker than even five years back. Certainly, it’s a long time since the mere appearance of a US carrier strike force in the Taiwan Straits would be enough to deter any thoughts of aggression from Beijing. As the Ukraine war has shown, collectively, the main democracies’ preference for butter over guns means they’re woefully incapable of matching the armaments production, even of Russia, whose GDP in US dollar terms is scarcely a third more than Australia’s. And as the subsequent war in Gaza shows, not only are the main democracies scarcely capable of maintaining two democratic allies’ conflicts at once – let alone three, should China attack Taiwan – but large sections of their people and leadership can’t decide whose side they’re on: that of the Middle East’s only functioning democracy, or an apocalyptic death cult. 

Meanwhile, all the main democracies are engaged in economic self-harm in the name of climate change and other luxury beliefs. The latest example is our own parliament’s banning of the live sheep trade this week on the grounds of alleged cruelty to animals. And the main Anglosphere countries are full of doubt about their fundamental legitimacy and self-worth: America over slavery, Britain over colonialism, and Australia over the dispossession of the original inhabitants. Very few democratic leaders show unqualified pride in their countries or appreciation of how the Pax Americana has helped the wider world, until very recently, to be more free, more fair, more rich, prosperous, and more safe for more people than ever before in history; and that migrants to their countries have won the lottery of life and should be grateful. And almost none of them are prepared to say that in order to stay free, fair, and prosperous, the main democracies need to be less obsessive about reducing emissions and climate catastrophism, much readier to clamp down on out-of-control immigration, much more strict about morally relativist and culturally self-loathing education systems, and be willing to make at least some sacrifices in support of freedom. The partial exceptions are Meloni, who’s been better at railing against immigration in opposition than reducing it in government; and Donald Trump, although he never quite “built the wall”, didn’t even come close to “draining the swamp” and continues to pretend that there’s no cost to unilateral protectionism and no downside to America opting out of being the world’s policeman. 

Britain is about to get a greenleft Labour government with a super majority, not because the electorate has much enthusiasm for Sir Keir Starmer but because voters, especially strong conservative ones, are utterly disillusioned with a Tory party that (Brexit aside) hasn’t governed like one. France could be about to get a so-called “far right” National Assembly majority because the longestablished centre-right party comprehensively failed to respond to voters’ concerns about mass illegal migration that is impacting on living standards and social cohesion. That’s because when parties of the centre (left and right) consistently fail to address popular concerns, parties on the fringe that do so will eventually get traction. Both the Gaullists in France and the Conservatives in Britain have been part of the official “uniparty” consensus that immigration is always good and that renewable power is indisputably cheap, but that’s not the perception of people on “struggle street” which is why all the political establishments, left and right, are under pressure, either from fringe parties (such as Reform UK in Britain) or internal insurgents (such as Trump in the US). Yet almost no one contending for high office, establishment or insurgent, is prepared to tell voters the truth that there are few cost-free changes. Trump has nothing to say about America’s unsustainable deficits beyond “growth will fix it”. 

Looking at the creaking NHS, no British leader is prepared to say that patients simply cannot always get treatment that’s the best, immediate, and for free; so, one or more will often have to give. Here in Australia, it’s generally accepted that the NDIS, for instance, is a fiscal time bomb but no one will face up to the fact that eligibility and entitlements have to be curbed if the scheme is to be sustainable. Our officialdom recalls the fate of the 2014 budget, the last one that attempted difficult economic reform, and concludes that things might have to be much worse before most voters would willingly accept the need to wind some things back. In a democracy, there can’t be strong leadership without strong voters which is why countries ultimately get the leaders they deserve. And yet, some change-for-thebetter might be in the offing. By being upfront with voters that nuclear power is the only way to get to net zero and keep the lights on, and that the inescapable choice is between paying more for a reliable emissions-free system, or even more for an unreliable one, at least Peter Dutton has shown the political integrity we claim to expect of a leader. The question now is whether voters have sufficient collective character to recognise it.  

Crisis of entitlement

 Crisis of entitlement leaves West on the precipice of disaster. MATTHEW SYED 

“A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean,” historian William Durant wrote in The Story of Civilisation. “If war is forgotten in security and peace … then toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude.” They are words that are perhaps worth pondering as the Western world moves closer to the precipice while distracting itself with endless cat videos and online spats about whether plaiting hair amounts to cultural appropriation. The alarm bells are ringing everywhere. You can hear them in the travesty of an election taking place in the UK, the rightward turn about to hit France’s Fifth Republic and the parody of a debate in which a pathological liar and someone apparently suffering cognitive decline were put forward as prime candidates to become leader of the “greatest nation on Earth”. Yet even now I fear the West hasn’t figured out what is going wrong and why. 

While pundits examine exit polls and consult focus groups, they miss the rot buried so deep in our system that it has become all but invisible. And – if you’ll forgive me for being candid – it has nothing to do with hopeless leaders, Russian bots, high taxes, low taxes or being members of the wrong trading bloc. The problem is Western electorates. Us. Let’s briefly look at what most people agree are the symptoms of political decay. Debt is rising: approaching 100 per cent of GDP in the UK, 115 per cent in France and 120 per cent in the US. These are highs previously reached at the end of World War II, when we had just financed a conflict, after which levels rapidly fell. Today they are set to rise – and rise (partly because of changing demography). The US Congressional Budget Office projects that the share of GDP used to service the federal debt will be twice what is spent on national security by 2041. The Office for Budget Responsibility foresees UK debt reaching 300 per cent by 2070. 

France – well, who knows what will happen if Marine Le Pen gets the chance to enact her deluded version of populism? Let us rattle through the other problems too: we can no longer build, whether it is homes, roads, railways or power grids. Then there is the addiction to low-wage immigration and funny money (otherwise known as quantitative easing) and our abject failure – notably in Europe – to spend adequately (or wisely) on defence. I gration means paying workers more in the here and now, but it also means that we are not storing up vast fiscal liabilities and putting extra pressure on our physical infrastructure and (if these immigrants fail to integrate) cultural capital. Or take public borrowing to finance current spending. We have a choice: do we resist the temptation to use the credit card today – which implies we will have less of everything else? Or do we max out the Amex, enjoy extra consumption and borrow again next year, saddling future generations with could go on, but allow me to cut to the chase. 

Policy wonks tend to analyse these challenges in isolation and come up with what look like solutions. For example: we can cut public debt by abiding by fiscal rules. The problem is such rules are serially broken or subverted. The same happens to promises on infrastructure, immigration, monetary realism, you name it. And the reason is that the dysfunction is a symptom of a deeper – much deeper – problem. For when you look again, you notice a single and, in my view, unavoidable cause: an inability to make short-term sacrifices to secure a brighter future; to defer instant gratification for long-term success. We have become a civilisation that’s all about “now, now, now” and “me, me, me” – the antithesis of what the West once represented. Building railways, for example, represents a sacrifice in the here and now because the money to hire diggers and pay workers can’t be splurged on day-to-day consumption. But guess what: if we make this sacrifice, in a few years we will have extra connectivity to fuel growth. Similarly, weaning ourselves off low-wage immi crippling interest payments and structural weakness? The latter choice is easier, but also – over time – insidious, chipping away at the vitality of a civilisation. 

My point is that success for nations, as for individuals, requires tough choices. This is what we tell our children, isn’t it? Work hard. Practise. This might not be as much fun as playing another game on the iPad but it will confer blessings that last a lifetime. And we have words, do we not, for children who refuse to make such sacrifices? Spoiled. Entitled. The same, I suggest, applies to civilisations. When Rome was lean and driven, it built infrastructure, created a superb military and grew. A few centuries later, flabby and complacent, it wanted the blessings of success but not the costs. The empire had entered a fantasy land, where expenditure on ever more generous welfare payments and bread and circuses rose beyond the capacity of the state to afford it. So when the money ran out, the emperors debased it, reducing the silver content until the currency was worthless. The West is (I’d estimate) three centuries into its period of global supremacy, roughly the time between the beginning of the Roman principate and Diocletian’s splitting of the empire. And is it not reasonable to note a similar pattern, with China playing the role of the insurgent Vandals? 

Yet instead of confronting the disease, we look for scapegoats: immigrants, populists, wokesters, MAGA, remainers, leavers and so on. Anything to distract us from the more challenging truth that almost every section of Western society has drifted into a state of endemic entitlement. And this is why, if I were prime minister, I’d be saying to benefit claimants cheating the system: I’m coming for you. I’d be saying to the army of rent-seekers in the administrative state: your time is up. I’d be saying to the entitled old: I’m no longer allowing you to use your voting numbers to rig the system. I’d be saying to the mobile super-wealthy: I’m closing your tax loopholes. I’d be saying to cronyist regulators: I’m locking the revolving door. And (some readers might not like this) to the homeowners who enjoyed zero interest rates generated by funny money after the financial crash, and who laughably think they deserve their inflated gains, I’d be saying: I want to claw some of this cash back to make the investments we so desperately need. Yes, I’m coming for you, too. 

But the devastating, potentially terminal truth is that a critical mass of voters are not ready to hear this. They are too  comfortable in the delusion of their own entitlement, pretending the problem lies with everyone else (in this sense, polarisation is another symptom of the rot). And let’s not pretend the problem is short election cycles or hopeless politicians, because these retailers – Starmer, Sunak, Biden, Trump, Farage – are merely regurgitating different versions of the fantasy voters wish to hear, but never daring to tell the whole truth. In a seminal intervention recently the superb Paul Johnson, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, called the British election a “conspiracy of silence”, but I’d suggest the true conspiracy engulfs the whole Western world. Our only hope is to escape our delusion and embrace realism. For perhaps the killer point is this: as the audacity and brilliance of Western civilisation degenerates before our eyes, it is the world’s autocrats who are rubbing their hands with glee. 

The weakened West

 West is weak, divided and lacking in self-worth TONY ABBOTT 

The Western democracies are now feeble and divided, having militarily, industrially, and even culturally disarmed in the years since their seeming triumph in the Cold War against the old Soviet Union. Facing unprecedented challenges – including a militarist dictatorship in Moscow, an Islamist dictatorship in Tehran, and a communist dictatorship in Beijing – this is clearly a “civilisational moment” because others clearly don’t believe in us, as they were supposed to after the “end of history”; and we no longer quite believe in ourselves, despite all the objective evidence about the merits of the Western achievement. One of the reasons Russia is now slowly grinding down gallant Ukraine is because Ukraine’s friends in the West have helped it enough to avoid defeat, but not enough actually to win. Partly from fear of what a humiliated nuclear-armed tyrant might do. Partly through internal division over the extent to which other people’s wellbeing is our business too. And partly through resistance to the industrial mobilisation needed to match an economically declining but geopolitically driven dictatorship. After initially being the largest non-NATO contributor to  Ukraine’s defence, primarily through the delivery of some 100 Bushmaster armoured vehicles and by helping to train in Britain the Ukrainian infantry, Australian support has now almost dried up, with even a recent request for coal refused, presumably because that might add to the temperature in Kyiv. 

Likewise, one of the reasons Israel is bogged down in Gaza, hesitant to destroy the Hamas leadership, is because its friends can’t quite grasp the moral distinction between a liberal democracy prosecuting a just war against a terrorist statelet pledged to its destruction, and an apocalyptic death cult that uses civilians as human shields. Somehow, civilian deaths in Gaza are not the fault of the terrorists who put command centres and military stores underneath schools and hospitals but of the Israeli Defence Forces, even though the Israelis have been far more fastidious about avoiding civilian deaths than Bomber Command ever was. In a further perversity, global institutions, invoking bogus morality, have bid to arrest both Israel’s and Hamas’ leaders for war crimes; and to restrain the actions of Israel but not Hamas. This is the moral confusion arising from the left’s long march through the institutions, with a generation of students conditioned to see issues in terms of oppressors and oppressed, with Israel damned as a settler state with “white privilege”. And thanks to a generation of permissive immigration, there are now Islamist subcultures within Western countries for whom sectarian solidarity is what matters most. It’s this growing conviction of the democracies’ decadence that’s emboldening Beijing in its intimidation of practically independent Taiwan. They doubt our will to resist. 

 Partly because of the economic cost of decoupling from China. Partly because US commanders now question their ability to win an air-sea battle in the Taiwan Straits. And partly because societies that have had it so good for so long are simply unprepared for a potentially existential struggle, even on behalf of a country like Taiwan that testifies to the universal appeal of the Western way of life. It’s telling that for the first time since the ANZUS treaty in 1951, Australia has just refused a US request for military help, declining to send a freedom-of-navigation frigate to the Red Sea. Our government is using its commitment to AUKUS submarines a decade hence to mask cuts to our fighting capacity now. Rather than admit to an instinctive pacifism, it would prefer to tell our allies that we’d like to help, but lack the means to do so. This general decline of the West is the dispiriting background to our strategic disarray. People have never had more access to information, yet rarely been so ignorant; never been more materially rich, yet rarely more culturally and spiritually bereft. And whatever might distinguish today’s leaders – in business, the academe, the law, the military, and the church, no less than in politics – it’s rarely character, conviction and courage. Historically, at least in the Anglosphere, our most iconic institutions have worked for the protection of society against the state, and for the freedom of the individual against oppression. 

From centuries of trial and error, the king was under the parliament, the parliament was under the people, the people were under the law, and the law was under God – or at least some concept of the common good. At its zenith, there was an expectation of humility. Even for exalted people and institutions, our pride was supposed to vest in the things beyond ourselves; an attitude most wonderfully conveyed in the statement of our late queen on her 21st birthday that: “My whole life, be it long or short, shall be devoted to your service and that of the great imperial family to which we all belong.” Our strategic confusion is just another example of the myriad problems that arise when people are ignorant of their own story, fail to understand how their culture has evolved, and haven’t grasped how society is a trust between the  dead, the living, and the yet-to-beborn. It’s actually an abundance of respect for all cultures other than our own that’s now the mark of most Western countries. It’s very hard to mount a defence unless there’s something worth defending. Yet all the main Anglosphere countries are now angsting over their self-worth: America over slavery, Britain over the empire, and Australia over settlement and dispossession. 

What else can explain our present government’s insistence that no important announcement be made except in the presence of three flags: the national one, plus the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ones. These days entities that wouldn’t dream of toasting the king at a formal dinner, or beginning any official proceedings with a prayer, now routinely begin their activities with an acknowledgment of the traditional Indigenous owners, as if that’s the only cultural inheritance that matters; and even though Christianity, or “the coming of the light”, is almost certainly more important to more Indigenous people than ancestor worship. Until we have elected leaders brave enough to drop the pieties that imply that our country belongs to some of us more than to all of us; and to stop flying the flags of some of us co-equally with the flag of all of us, there’s really no hope of reversing the cultural decay that’s behind our strategic confusion. Are we collectively capable of recovering the historical memories and cultural self-confidence required to face this civilisational challenge? Sterner times could soon force us to rediscover our better selves. 

This is adapted from a speech this week to the Danube Institute in Budapest.

Hamas and Truth

 NONE SO BLIND TO HAMAS AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE

 GEMMA TOGNINI 

One of the most famous lines in recent cinematic history belongs to a (then) youthful Tom Cruise in the blockbuster flick A Few Good Men. Cruise plays a hot-shot young navy lawyer with thinly veiled daddy issues, and in the film’s most famous scene he has a perfectly wicked Jack Nicholson on the stand in a tense courtroom showdown. Nicholson plays a decorated US marine colonel who secretly has gone rogue, and Cruise is trying to goad him into confessing to murder. Nicholson is, of course, brilliant, channelling hints of Randle McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as he stares down Cruise’s impassioned demands for the truth. You can’t handle the truth, he bellows in return. And thus a legend was born. This was a work of fiction but we are living it today, this aversion to the truth. Australia collectively is incapable of facing up to so many of the things challenging who we are and the values we’ve built across generations, the values hewn from the blood, sweat and tears of Australians from all backgrounds, creeds and faiths. We may not be able to handle it, but believe me when I say Australia needs a headfirst encounter with the truth. 

There is no greater example than the war against Hamas, which I might point out is a war against terrorism that the global community is happy for Israel to fight alone. As this awful, necessary conflict continues, as the Israel Defence Forces edge closer to the goal of wiping out Hamas, there have been repeated calls for a ceasefire because of the start of Ramadan, which began this week. As the Muslim holy month began, Australians, both notable and beautifully including the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, wished our Muslim community Ramadan Mubarak. This represents the Australia we want to be part of, truly tolerant in the face of significant differences. However, the calls for a ceasefire because of Ramadan ignore important truths. Let me lay them out for you. Hamas broke the ceasefire and started this war on the Sabbath, the Jewish holy day. Not only was it the Sabbath but the violent orgy of murder, rape and mutilation was carried out on 

 Torah, a time of Jewish celebration to mark the completion, and the restart, of the annual cycle of reading the Torah. Another truth, courtesy of 1973: the Yom Kippur war was started on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Day in, day out, every month of every year since, rockets have been fired at Israel and its citizens on any and every single day, especially on the Sabbath. Israel’s enemies know many soldiers will be in synagogue. What I’ve just shared isn’t my opinion. It is the truth that Hamas started the war last year on Simchat Torah and the Sabbath. It is the truth that the Yom Kippur war was started on Israel’s holiest day. It is truth any ceasefire without surrender is simply an opportunity for Hamas to regroup and do what it says it will – repeat October 7, not only in Israel but in all Western countries. It has promised it; we best believe Hamas means it. This is the awful truth, and millions of Gazans are suffering because Hamas continues to knock back every ceasefire deal put on the table. This is the truth. So many Australians, especially in the progressive left, simply can’t handle it. They continue to deny the cancerous culture of anti-Semitism that has been laid bare in this country since October 7. They deny. They deflect. They gaslight anyone who dares call it out. They follow any conversation around the brutality of Hamas’s use of sexual violence with the word “but”. Ah, the truth is hard, the truth hurts. There’s a reason that’s a cliche and that’s because it’s true. 

Psychologists have studied a phenomenon called the backfire effect, a term to describe what happens when someone presented with irrefutable truths on a matter that should shift their thinking instead doubles down. Gregg Ten Elshof is a professor of philosophy at Biola University in the US. In 2009 he wrote a book called I Told Me So, in which he unpicks humanity’s seemingly unmatched capacity for self-deception. Ten Elshoff unravels, with excruciating accuracy, what happens when finding the truth becomes the secondary motivation for asking questions. It turns out humans are masters in the art of embracing denial when it suits us. So, in the Australian context, what is the primary goal? Is it electoral? Is it fear of being wrong, is it the pain of having to look at your ideology and accept it’s flawed? Beyond the war in Gaza, there are many examples of what I’m talking about, few as striking as the treatment of gender dysphoria in children. This past week in Britain, the National Health Service announced that puberty blockers would no longer be prescribed to anyone under 18. This follows the damning scandal and subsequent closure of that country’s Tavistock gender identity clinic and a growing bank of evidence on the danger of these treatments more broadly, which includes links between transgender hormone therapy and cancer. This is truth. Australia? Still stuck on the fence. Clinging to the idea that gender-affirming care is the only valid approach. The British decision is based on truth, based on science. Finally, the truth in this space is being accepted but here in Australia so many still hold that children who the law recognises are too young, too emotionally (and in all other ways) vulnerable to consent to sexual relationships, can decide to take life-altering medication from which there is no return. 

So many other issues. Our energy mix and reckless refusal to consider anything other than renewables. The plight of Indigenous Australians who live in places that are out of sight, hence out of mind. What will it take? This question runs laps around my mind and my heart daily and this is where I have landed. We need an encounter with the truth. Australia and Australians need a headfirst, deep-hearted, full-frontal collision with the truth. Not “my” truth, or his or her truth, the facile indulgence that allows people to construct and reconstruct various matters to suit their own narrative. But the truth. Most of us in this country do not understand existential threat. We have the luxury of not knowing what it’s like to have to defend our borders or go catch the bus wondering if you’ll be knifed or shot by a terrorist. So many times I’ve said to people, in relation to the Hamas war, what if it were your daughter who had been raped and desecrated? What if it were your son who had his eyes gouged out in front of his children while being forced to listen to the sexual brutalisation of his own wife? Would that be an encounter with truth enough? We don’t need any more facts. We have scant need for more information. But boy, do we need a collective come to Jesus moment on more than one front, and I pray this happens without a need for first-hand experience.

No two state solution

 

Can there be peace between Israel and Palestine?


History says probably not. At least four times, Israel’s generous peace offers have been turned down.
By GREG SHERIDAN

Can there ever be peace between Israel and the Palestinians?

If history is a guide, the answer is no. But we are right to believe in miracles.

The Israeli government has only weeks to finish, or at least change fundamentally, its operation to destroy the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza. International pressure on Israel is mounting drastically. The humanitarian cost in Gaza, though entirely the moral responsibility of Hamas, is unsustainably high.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be moved by the Albanese government signing a defective, one-sided UN resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire but not even mentioning Hamas by name, nor its October 7 atrocities.

It’s demoralising, of course, the defection, and confusion, of Australia, which was once at the centre of the Western alliance.

But much more important is the attitude of US President Joe Biden, who warns that Israel is losing international support. Biden himself is under immense pressure for solidly backing Israel.

The biggest operational problem for Israel remains the 500km of Hamas tunnels. Israel must destroy or disable these if it is to capture or kill top Hamas leaders and permanently disable Hamas militarily. The international pressure is immense. Israel will finish its operation by January or change its methods such that large-scale humanitarian aid can enter Gaza.

But it’s what happens the day after the operation ends that is where the biggest disagreement between Jerusalem and Washington (and Canberra, though Australia now has no influence at all with Jerusalem) comes in.

The Biden administration, like most international opinion, wants negotiations to resume towards a two-state solution, a Palestinian state living next door to Israel. Given that’s agonisingly distant, in the short term it wants the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank, to administer Gaza.

Netanyahu says no on both scores. He doesn’t want the PA in charge of Gaza and he now rejects the two-state solution. My guess is he’d compromise on having the PA back in Gaza. The two-state solution, however, extraordinarily complex and difficult, seems impossible operationally.

Nothing generates more ignorant cliches than the Israel-Palestine dispute. Much discussion of it just involves endless recycling of familiar cliches that mostly float clear of reality. The difficulty with the two-state solution is that Palestinians, and in the past their Arab neighbours, and now their Iranian sponsors, have rejected every single genuine offer of a Palestinian state.

Until recently, most Israelis wanted a two-state solution. As anyone who has visited Israel knows, it’s a successful modern democracy, with a vibrant society, ethnic diversity and great economic achievement. It yearns to live normally, in peace. But decades of relentless attack by regional enemies who don’t accept its right to exist has changed its attitude to the utility, and dangers, of peace negotiations.

Notwithstanding three regional wars aimed at Israel’s annihilation, and almost constant lesser attacks from a collection of enemies that would fill a fat phone book, Israel has on at least four separate occasions offered a full state to the Palestinians, who each time rejected it.

It starts in 1947. The last uncontested sovereign power over the land of Israel, before modern Israel was created, was the Ottoman Empire. Ditto for the West Bank and Gaza. After the Ottomans, Britain ruled under a mandate first from the League of Nations, then the UN.

In 1947 the UN decided to split the land between Jews and Palestinians, with Jerusalem belonging to neither state but administered internationally. The Palestinians could have had their independent state right then. Israel would have been much smaller. Instead the Palestinians, plus all their Arab neighbours, rejected the deal. In 1948, when Israel declared independence and was formally recognised by a vote at the UN, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan all attacked, planning to wipe the Jews out of existence.

There was terrible fighting. Several Jewish towns were massacred. Some 750,000 Palestinians left Israel. This had several causes. One is they expected Jewish soldiers to be as savage with them as Arab soldiers had been with Jewish residents. Another is they expected Arab nations to quickly overwhelm Israel. Then they would return. Some Arab leaders advised Arab residents to flee temporarily. Some Palestinians were certainly driven out by Jewish soldiers. Large numbers of Palestinians remained, and today 20 per cent of Israel’s population is Arab. About the same time, 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and North African countries where Jews had lived for millennia, although often as a persecuted minority.

Israel’s Arab neighbours were determined never to accept a Jewish state. In 1967 they were making troop movements preparatory to attacking Israel, and declaring they were about to attack. So Israel launched a pre-emptive strike and in the process took control of the West Bank, which had been in Jordan’s possession, and the Gaza Strip, which Egypt had controlled, and the Sinai Desert, which also belonged to Egypt. Neither Jordan nor Egypt had ever tried to set up an independent Palestinian state in these territories.

Following this war the Arab states declared their policy of “three noes”: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation.

In 1973 Egypt, under Anwar Sadat, and Syria, with a degree of help from some other Arab nations, launched a surprise military attack on Israel that became the Yom Kippur war. At terrible cost, Israel won that war.

Despite his anti-Semitic past, Sadat made a historic peace with Israel in 1979. Critically, Israel returned the vast Sinai desert to Egypt, giving up all the strategic depth it had afforded Israel, and all its mineral resources, in exchange for a durable peace treaty. Israel evicted Jewish settlers who had moved to Sinai. But in terms of the politics of a subsequent Palestinian state, here is the most powerful lesson of all. Egyptian Islamic Jihad, enraged at Sadat making peace with Israel, assassinated him in 1981

The Egyptian peace treaty demonstrated conclusively Israel would trade territory for peace, so long as it got real peace. The US underwrote the peace and it stands today. The Egypt-Israel treaty showed everyone peace was possible. Sadat’s assassination showed everyone it would always carry a high price.

The Oslo peace accords kicked off a process in the 1990s that led to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, under the sponsorship of Bill Clinton, offering a full Palestinian state to Yasser Arafat.

Barak offered 96 per cent of the West Bank, some compensating territory from Israel proper, all of Gaza and the Palestinian neighbourhoods of east Jerusalem. Israel would keep only the large Jewish settlement blocs near Jerusalem, a couple of per cent of West Bank territory, and give territory from Israel proper in compensation. Barak wanted a full guarantee of peace and an end to all other Palestinian claims on Israel.

Arafat refused the deal. He tried to tell Clinton that Jews really had no historic connection to Jerusalem. He couldn’t meet the requirement to end all claims. And he demanded that all four million of the descendants of the 750,000 Palestinians who left in 1948 be allowed to return and live permanently in Israel, not in the new Palestinian state but in Israel itself. This is the so-called “right of return” and it’s an absurdity.

Every other refugee population that goes to live elsewhere is permanently resettled. But, of the neighbouring Arab countries, only Jordan offered Palestinians citizenship. Generally, Palestinian refugees and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were kept as notional refugees so the UN would pay for them in perpetuity, and as a bargaining chip against Israel.

The Palestinians could have had an independent state from Clinton and Barak, flooded with international aid, sponsored by the US, the EU and the Arab world. But had Arafat taken this deal he would surely have been killed by his own extremists eventually, just like Sadat. It’s likely Arafat never remotely wanted a deal. Former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid once told me that Arafat had told him privately that it was his ambition “to throw all the Jews into the sea”.

Barak’s remarkably generous deal, which would have involved uprooting many Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, was improved and offered to Arafat again. But again the Palestinians rejected it, making the third clear time they refused to accept a state.

In his memoirs, Clinton makes it clear Arafat bears responsibility for the failure to achieve a Palestinian state. If we’re sceptical of Israeli sources, we can read the detail in numerous memoirs of US officials intimately involved in the negotiations.

The fourth clear offer from Israel of a Palestinian state came at the end of the prime ministership of Ehud Olmert, in 2008. A year later, Olmert gave me his first and most extensive interview on this peace plan. Everything he said to me was later confirmed in the memoirs of Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state at the time.

“From the end of 2006 until the end of 2008, I think I met Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas, then and now the Palestinian president) more often than any Israeli leader has met any Arab leader. I met him more than 35 times. They were intense, serious negotiations,” Olmert told me.

“On 16th September, 2008, I presented him (Abbas) with a comprehensive plan. There would be a territorial solution based on the 1967 borders with minor modifications on both sides. Israel will claim part of the West Bank where there have been demographic changes (by this Olmert meant the three biggest Jewish settlement blocs).

“In total it would be about 6.4 per cent (of the West Bank, with Jewish settlers outside those blocs forced to leave the West Bank). In return there would be a swap of land (to the Palestinians) from Israel as it existed before 1967. I showed how this would maintain the contiguity of the Palestinian state. I also proposed a safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza. It would have been a tunnel, fully controlled by the Palestinians but not under Palestinian sovereignty.

“Jerusalem was a very sensitive, very painful, soul-searching process. While I always believed that historically, and emotionally, Jerusalem was always the capital of the Jewish people, I was ready that the city should be shared.

“Jewish neighbourhoods would be under Jewish sovereignty, Arab neighbourhoods under Palestinian sovereignty, so it could be the capital of a Palestinian state.”

The area of the holiest sites, sites holy to Muslims, Jews and Christians, Olmert proposed, should be administered by five nations – Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian state, Israel and the US. On the right of return, Olmert offered a symbolic return of 1000 Palestinians a year for five years to Israel itself and an international fund to recognise Palestinian suffering.

By then the descendants of all the Palestinian refugees, living in many countries, numbered five million. It’s insane to imagine Israel would invite five million Muslim Arabs to come and live in the state of Israel itself. The only purpose of the right of return is to give Palestinian leaders an excuse to reject a state. There would also need to be some security guarantees, such as the Palestinian state not acquiring conventional military weapons.

Rice in her memoirs says she was thrilled by this offer. She found it breathtaking and incredibly generous, the most that could ever be imagined. There was no absolute guarantee Olmert could have delivered this deal, but if the Palestinians had said yes, and the Americans had backed it, it would have been unstoppable. Except, perhaps, by a new wave of Palestinian terrorism.

Olmert told me: “I said this is the offer. Sign it and we can immediately get support from America, Europe, all over the world. I told him (Abbas) he’d never get anything like this again from an Israeli leader for 50 years. I said to him, do you want to keep floating forever, like an astronaut in space, or do you want a state?”

Abbas said he would come back next day with experts and advisers. But his office rang and said he’d forgotten a pre-planned trip. He’d come back to Olmert the next week. But Abbas never responded to the offer at all.

That was a fourth clear chance for a Palestinian state, clearly rejected by the Palestinians.

Later, even Netanyahu for a time would commit himself to a two-state solution, which he now rejects, but for many months the Palestinians refused to negotiate with him. The offers from Barak and Olmert involved immense courage, huge concessions and rare social and political strength. They meant Israel would trust a Palestinian state not to launch terrorism or worse against it. One part of the West Bank looks directly down on Tel Aviv airport. The whole of Israel could be paralysed if a neighbouring Palestinian state launched any attacks.

But every time an agreement looked possible, Islamist extremists would launch terror attacks on Israel designed to derail the peace process. They want conflict. That was a key reason Hamas was set up. Even with security guarantees, it’s now all but impossible for Israelis to trust a Palestinian state.

So in the meantime there are serious efforts to make life better for Palestinians in the territories. Netanyahu allowed Qatari aid to flow to Gaza and hundreds of Gazans to work in Israel proper. The aid was misused for weapons and tunnels and some of the workers supplied Hamas terrorists with detailed information regarding Israeli targets for the October 7 atrocities. How can Israel now trust any Palestinian state?

Further, what evidence is there a generation of Palestinians, raised on hate-filled anti-Semitic indoctrination in their schools, would ever accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state next door? There would always be incentive for Islamist extremists such as Hamas to assassinate any Palestinian leader who made peace or declared an end of claims on Israel.

This is one of many reasons the Albanese government was so ill-advised in changing to calling the West Bank and Gaza “illegally occupied Palestinian territories”. If Israel’s occupation is illegal, it must withdraw. Who then does it hand the territories over to? Hamas?

All the while Iran funds and co-ordinates the extremists: Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, militias in Syria and Iraq. Under Biden, the US has lost influence in the Gulf, so it’s more difficult for everyone to resist Iranian money, guns, threats and influence.

Eventually, a two-state solution will have to come back, but eventually is a long time. The Israeli government, not unreasonably given everything, sees no prospect of it in the near future. No doubt Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong know better.

GREG SHERIDAN 

 FOREIGN EDITOR

Israel history

 Open letter an exercise in distorting history HENRY ERGAS 

Late last week, a “Letter from journalists to Australian media outlets” urged newsrooms to “adhere to truth” rather than “bothsidesism”, including by “providing historical context” in reporting on the Middle East. As a prime example of the “important contextual references” which “it is the media’s responsibility” to provide, the letter cited “the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their native lands in 1948 to make way for the state of Israel”. That now endlessly repeated claim clearly implies that the founders of the state of Israel deliberately provoked the refugee outflow. But far from accurately portraying the historical context, it grotesquely misrepresents, in a manner exemplary of the letter’s “one-sideism”, a complex reality. Thus, when a majority of the UN General Assembly endorsed a partition of the British mandatory territory of Palestine on November 29, 1947, the major Zionist forces reluctantly accepted the proposed plan, despite its draconian conditions. But the Arab states not only rejected the plan; they launched what the Arab League described as “a war of extermination” whose aim was to “erase (Palestine’s Jewish population) from the face of the earth”. Nor did the fighting give any reason to doubt that was the Arabs’ goal. At least until late May 1948, Jewish prisoners were invariably slaughtered. In one instance, 77 Jewish civilians were burned alive after a medical convey was captured; in another, soldiers who had surrendered were castrated before being shot; in yet another, death came by public decapitation. And even after the Arab armies declared that they would abide by the Geneva Convention, Jewish prisoners were regularly murdered on the spot. While those atrocities continued a long-standing pattern of barbarism, they also reflected the conviction that unrestrained terror would “push the Jews into the sea”, as Izzedin Shawa, who represented the Arab High Committee, put it. A crucial element of that strategy was to use civilian militias in the territory’s 450 Arab villages to ambush, encircle and destroy Jewish forces, as they did in the conflict’s first three months. It was to reduce that risk that the Haganah – the predecessor of the Israel Defence Force – adopted the “Dalet plan” in March 1948, which ordered the evacuation of those “hostile” Arab villages, notably in the surrounds of Jerusalem, that posed a direct threat of encirclement. The implementation of its criteria for clearing villages was inevitably imperfect, but the Dalet plan neither sought nor was the primary cause of the massive outflow of Arab refugees, which was well under way before it came into effect. Nor was the scale of the outflow much influenced by the massacres committed by Irgun and Lehi – small Jewish militias that had broken away from the Haganah – which did not loom large in a prolonged, extremely violent, conflict that also displaced a high proportion of the Jewish population. Rather, three factors were mainly involved. First, the Muslim authorities, led by the rector of Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque, instructed the faithful to “temporarily leave the territory, so that our warriors can freely undertake their task of extermination”. Second, believing that the war would be short-lived and that they could soon return without having to incur its risks, the Arab elites fled immediately, leaving the Arab population leaderless, disoriented and demoralised, especially once the Jewish forces gained the upper hand. Third and last, as Benny Morris, a harsh critic of Israel, stresses in his widely cited study of the Palestinian exodus, “knowing what the Arabs had done to the Jews, the Arabs were terrified the Jews would, once they could, do it to them”. Seen in that perspective, the exodus was little different from the fear-ridden flights of civilians that have always accompanied wars, including the vast population movements associated with the collapse of the Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires, the capitulation of Nazi Germany and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. And it pales compared to the suffering caused (at almost the same time as the war in Palestine) by the partition of British India – a blood-soaked catastrophe, displacing tens of millions of people, which the distinguished Indian judge and essayist G.D. Khosla recalled as “an event of unprecedented horror”. But while the mass outflow was not unusual, its sequel was. In the other major cases, refugees were ultimately absorbed into their country of refuge. By 1960, the 12 million ethnic Germans who, after centuries of settlement, fled or were forcibly deported at the end of World War II from central and eastern Europe had fully merged into West German society. Equally, the illiterate Hindus who flooded, entirely destitute, into East Punjab underpinned the Indian Punjab’s momentous transformation into the country’s breadbasket. And the 750,000 Jews – a number slightly greater than that of Palestinian refugees – brutally expelled (and comprehensively expropriated) during and after 1947 by the Arab states eventually became an integral part of Israeli society. Moreover, in none of those instances, or even of the vast population transfers between Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria, were there durable revanchist movements, much less any expectation of a “right of return”. Not so in respect of the Palestinian refugees, who became permanently homeless. That was, at least in part, the UN’s fault. As many studies have shown, a central element in the remarkable success of the Turkish- Greek population exchange of 1922-23 was the tying of all international resettlement assistance to the unfettered integration of refugees into the country of refuge. The Refugee Settlement Commission (1923-1930) was therefore explicitly based on the principle that help would never suffice unless refugees were “forced to prosper”. Operating under a strictly time-limited mandate, the RSC depended entirely on loans that could be repaid only if the refugees, rather than devoting their lives to terrorism, were productively employed. But instead of heeding that precedent, the UN established the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, a bloated, grant-funded bureaucracy whose survival depended on endlessly perpetuating the Palestinians’ “refugee” status, regardless of the fact that they and their parents were actually living in the land of their birth. Yet the UN was merely doing the bidding of the Arab states, which increasingly relied on the issue of Palestine to convert popular anger at their  abject failures into rage against Israel and the West. Terminally corrupt, manifestly incapable of economic and social development, the Arab kleptocracies elevated Jewhatred into the opium of the people – and empowered the Islamist fanaticism that has wreaked so much harm worldwide. Of course, none of that matters to the open letter’s signatories. Flaunting their keffiyehs, these armchair warriors, who are far removed from any risk of being butchered by terrorists, have convinced themselves that they are the guardians of the truth, and that anyone who calls out their grievous errors is in bad faith. To say they are one-eyed would be wrong; drenched in bias, ignorance and self-righteousness, they are no-eyed. The tragedy is that anyone would follow them in their blindness.

Moral Equivalence

 17/11/2023, 07:38 The Australian

Calling out Hamas evil demands moral clarity - HENRY ERGAS

Growing up in the shadow of the Second World War, I knew what an existential battle for survival meant. That war had been no ordinary contest. It was a struggle against an adversary so monstrous that the consequences of its final victory were literally beyond calculation. The laws of war required the suffering on the two sides to be constantly weighted – painfully, dreadfully, as the bombing of Dresden and the use of the atomic bomb brought home with stomach-wrenching force. But the enormity of the horrors that would have accompanied the Allies’ defeat ruled out easy judgments. There were no ready scales for comparing the harm a military decision could inflict on innocent civilians against the overbearing significance of freeing humanity from regimes that were the very embodiment of radical evil. When those regimes’ complete destruction finally wrenched a chance of peace out of the rubble of broken cities and the misery of broken lives, the world thought it had drawn the lessons. 

The United Nations, US president Harry Truman declared at the organisation’s founding conference, would “provide the machinery which will make future peace not only possible but certain”. And empowered by a newly established International Court of Justice, international law would be given the means to hold those who committed “crimes against the peace” accountable, removing the need for individual countries to wage punitive war. But the god of our dreams is also the god of our nightmares. From the slaughter fields of Ukraine to the charnel house that is Syria, those aspirations have gone up in flames. As the UN descends into irrelevance, the laws of war, which were intended to protect the innocent, are being used to shelter the terrorists who deliberately place them at risk. 

Hailed as a triumph of civilisation, they have become a tool facilitating barbarism’s relentless advance. That leaves the people of Israel once again facing the fearfulness, the sense of danger, the perception of the struggle’s ultimate character, which pervaded the memories in which I was raised. Like Hitler, Hamas has never hidden its genocidal intentions: the opening passage of its Covenant says “Israel will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”. And in one of his most authoritative texts, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, its recently deceased spiritual leader, wrote: “The latest punishment of the Jews was by Hitler; the next, with the help of Allah, will come from the Muslims.” Those goals have been there for all to see; what Hamas proved on October 7 was that for so long as its military capabilities remained intact, it would relentlessly pursue its interpretation of the Koran’s command to “plant terror in the heart of the enemies of Allah”, eroding, to the breaking point, the viability of Israelis’ daily lives. None of that implies the Palestinians have no grievances; but the Germans had their grievances too. It was, for example, undeniable that there were large German majorities in both the Sudetenland and Danzig, the crisis points of 1938 and 1939. When the Nazis demanded those territories, their claims were, much like Hamas’, couched – and this was the pretence – in the respectable language of self-determination. The London Times, in endorsing appeasement, had no difficulty in describing them as “justified by ethics and policy”. 

It was, however, a grotesque illusion to believe – as the appeasers did – that because no “government with the interests of its own people at heart would expose them to the horrors of war”, a territorial concession here, a bit more power there, would avoid “the ultimate evil of a general conflict”. For the Nazis’ goal was never a greater share of the pie; it was, exactly like the Islamists, to inaugurate, over the charred bodies of their adversaries, a new millennium. Moved not by want but by hate, they had no real interest in agreements, regarding them as mere tactics, all the better to subjugate the enemy. Hamas, which believes “Jews, who are by their nature liars, cannot keep a contract”, has felt free to breach every agreement it has ever entered into; the Nazis’ ethics, if one can call them that, were no better. Confronting them required moral clarity – the moral clarity to distinguish radical evil, which endangers everything that is decent in this world of ours, from ordinary enmity. Instead, the appeasers, by conjuring a moral equivalence between victims and executioners, sowed the confusion that  made the cataclysm all the more certain. 

Today, moral confusion yet again fills the air. And our government, far from correcting the confusion, compounds it – by repeatedly claiming, for example, that Israel, as a democracy, should be “held to a higher standard” than its adversaries. It is, however, surely obvious that the demands of morality do not depend on the nature of a regime: to believe the Holocaust was any less of a crime because it was committed by a dictatorship is so plainly contrary to moral principle and international law as to be absurd. But the “higher standard” claim was never intended to withstand intelligent scrutiny. A weapon disguised as a platitude, it smuggled in a double standard: one for Israel, another for Hamas. And by transforming the virtue of being a democracy into a vice, it served to justify the singleminded focus on Israel, which obscures, if it does not entirely occlude, the atrocities Hamas commits day after day, including by indiscriminately shelling Israeli homes, schools and hospitals. The babies in the hospitals of Gaza, who are the unintentional victims of a legitimate military operation, count; those in the hospitals of Israel, who are the intentional victims of terror attacks, don’t. No less egregious is the constant pairing of vicious anti-Semitism with the taunts some Muslim women have experienced for wearing hijabs. Those taunts are utterly despicable; but an abyss separates their severity from the menaces that have forced the Jewish community to guard creches, schools and synagogues from potentially deadly attack. To pretend otherwise is not merely foolish: by placing murderous rage on a par with ordinary stupidity, it trivialises – and hence excuses – the Jew-hating fury that disgraces our streets. 

The government argues that it is being even-handed, so as not to deepen current divisions. But its lack of clarity has the opposite effect: by relentlessly blurring the line between right and wrong, it gives Hamas’s supporters a legitimacy they do not deserve, fuelling the radicalisation that is tearing us apart. In the end, national unity demands moral direction, not moral equivocation. So too does our ability to face the future, for the unhinging of the nation’s moral compass doesn’t merely extinguish the courage to speak the truth: it erases the courage needed to see it. In a world that is far from being at peace, and where devastating cataclysms are not simply the painful memories of the old but looming threats to the young, that doesn’t just blind – it kills.

EV issues

 Subsidies for electric vehicles are a huge mistake. 

These cars are conceptually the same battery and motor as a fourth-grade science project—not a great innovation. And given high prices for EVs, subsidies are mainly a giveaway to the already welloff. If you add up carbon emissions from manufacturing, daily use and end of life, EVs have total life-cycle emissions 30% lower than gasoline-powered autos. In Silicon Valley, something is considered truly transformational if it’s 10 times better, not a third. And now there’s a glut of them. Ford is losing billions, and Honda and General Motors have scrapped plans to build affordable EVs. Instead of throwing taxpayer money at EVs, President Biden could have been a hero and helped bring autonomous vehicles to the market faster. Why? Start with the 42,795 traffic fatalities last year. Costbenefit analysis involves something called the Value of Statistical Life, and the Transportation Department uses $12.5 million per traffic death. Lowering annual crash fatalities to 10,000 would be worth $400 billion to the U.S. economy every year. Technology seriously reduces driver error, a cause of many accidents. Another reason? With fully autonomous vehicles, the U.S. would need only half of its Autonomous Cars Beat EVs nearly 300 million cars. Most sit around doing nothing. Transportation as a service would become reality—no need to own cars; simply click and a driverless one shows up when you need it. That would mean way less emissions and no parking hassle or road rage. So what’s the problem? Tesla’s Full Self-Driving capability, priced at up to $300 a month, still runs stop signs. The company uses simple CMOS image sensors, like those in an iPhone, instead of more-expensive Lidar pulsed lasers. Teslas get confused and sometimes run into emergency vehicles with flashing lights. I recently rode in a Model 3 in self-driving mode that botched a simple yield. It has been a bad few weeks for autonomous driving. Selfdriving taxis from Cruise and Waymo in San Francisco halt at unexpected construction barriers. Or at least they used to. GM’s Cruise cars had their California driverless permit revoked last month after a pedestrian hit by another car was pinned under a driverless Cruise. A rare case, but it did happen. But, even with their problems, a joint study (albeit a very early one) by Alphabetowned Waymo and the insurer Swiss Re showed 95% fewer injuries and 76% less property damage from autonomous driving vs. humans. That’s a preview of 10 times. Auto insurance may force an autonomous shift. Imagine $500 a year for autonomous-car insurance, but $2,000 if you want to drive. The Society of Automotive Engineers defines basic cruise control as Level 1 autonomous. Tesla’s FSD, which still requires human attention, is Level 2 autonomous. Last month, Mercedes announced Drive Pilot, which uses Lidar and is currently the only Level 3 “conditional driving automation” system approved in the U.S. and Europe. Drivers can take their hands off the wheel and eyes off the road, even surf the web, but only while driving less than 40 miles an hour and following another vehicle in dry conditions during the day. What’s needed for an economic transformation is Level 4: autonomous driving at all speeds in clear weather. Level 5 is self-driving even in rain, snow and fog. What can government do? Help the imaging systems in cars, which will never be totally accurate, by actively letting them know where things are. Stop signs could emit signals with their GPS locations. Traffic lights could digitally broadcast red, yellow and green. Digital signal transmitters in highway markings— dotted line, solid line, etc.— would digitally paint the road. Car sensors could see the real signs or paint and confirm them digitally. Ambulances and police cars could broadcast their locations and warn others to slow down and stay away. Construction barriers and traffic cones could broadcast their location and indicate how long they will be there to help cars update their maps. Cars could even negotiate who gets to go first at a four-way stop sign. Encrypted signals would prevent hacking. Don’t confuse this with smart cities or smart roads, the dreams of central planners. The Silicon Valley adage works here: Intelligence moves out to the edge of the network. Make cars smart, and roads dumb but digitally visible. Expensive? Back-of-the-envelope math: There are 4 million miles of road in the U.S., with perhaps 10 to 25 signs per mile. So we need to update 100 million metal signs and 300,000 traffic lights. I’ll assume the cost of sign transmitters is $100 and roadmarking transmitters to paint the lines digitally is $10 for every tenth of a mile. Even if I’m off by a factor of 10, the government could spend less than $400 billion to save 32,000 lives a year, reduce emissions, lower capital costs of transportation, and transform the U.S. economy. That sure beats subsidizing the EV purchases of climate-smug rich folks. The cost of EVs and batteries was going to fall anyway without handouts. It would have been better to spend that money making autonomous driving viable. What a waste. Write to kessler@wsj.com

Anti-Semitism

Irrational evil marks history of Jew hatred

GREG SHERIDAN

It’s the oldest hate of all, and the most terrible.

A few weeks ago, long before the Hamas atrocities and the inevitable Israeli response in Gaza, I attended a modest suburban function. I couldn’t believe the security, the twostage vehicular entry, the multiple guards. Even in peaceful, cheerful, law-abiding Australia, a Jewish community centre needs perpetual guarding.

Anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews, is deranged, but widespread.

It’s the most difficult hatred of all to understand, partly because it’s irrational, evil and nourished from wildly divergent sources.

Today, several main strands of anti-Semitism disfigure our world. It’s to be found in the conspiratorial swamp fevers of the far left and far right, casually among cowardly universities (what’s the collective noun for vice-chancellors? a “lack” of principles), inferentially and unconsciously in countless media reports. It has a strong identity in the Arab world and in Islamist movements.

But let me say straight away the biggest source of anti-Semitism throughout history is Christianity.

These are hard words to say. I’m someone who believes Christianity is true, and that it’s been overwhelmingly a force for good. But the inheritance of anti- Semitism is a blight on Christian history.

It comes from faulty theology surrounding the idea that the Jews killed Christ. Of course, Christ was executed under Roman authority. The New Testament has remarks critical of “the Jews”. Properly understood, these refer exclusively to the temple authorities in Jerusalem at the time. Today we might say the Russians decided to invade Ukraine. Moral culpability resides only with the Moscow government, not the whole Russian people, or Russians in perpetuity.

John Barton in his absorbing treatment of Bible translation, The Word, recounts a proposal to substitute “Judaeans” to make clear the New Testament references are to a specific group of individuals at a specific time. Most modern bibles refer to “the Jewish authorities” rather than to the Jews.

In any event, it’s all 2000 years too late. The overwhelming majority of anti-Semitism today is not Christian. But it draws on centuries of images, stereotypes and lies perpetrated against Jews by some Christians.

Many of these images were propaganda inventions and fevered fantasies. In medieval times there grew up the idea that Jews killed Christian children to mix their blood in ritual bread. This was an imagined mimicry of Christ’s suffering and death. It was obscene, completely untrue.

This “blood libel” was condemned as a lie by popes, but it held an evil grip on popular imagination.

Much anti-Semitism was Catholic, though many Catholics understood the Jewishness of their own religion and admired the Jewish tradition. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval theologians, drew on Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed.

The Reformation didn’t help Jews, and Protestants did their share of Jew hating. Martin Luther was a formidable theologian, but at a certain point he turned against Jews and authored some of the most savage anti-Semitic abuse. Over centuries, Jews were expelled from one European nation after another.

This, then, is religious anti- Semitism. It’s been denounced now by every Christian denomination.

Pope John Paul II apologised for Christian sins against Jews, saying: “We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood.”

There’s religious anti-Semitism in Islam as well. The Koran, like the Christian New Testament, contains disparaging passages about Jews. Islamist extremists conflate this with political disputes involving Israel.

Much popular Arab media discourse is now frankly anti-Semitic; so is a portion of school curriculums.

Each new iteration of anti- Semitism has drawn on earlier iterations, especially the negative imagery and stereotypes. This is how evil lives on. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Russian secret police concocted an epic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This purported to recount the proceedings of a group of Jewish elders plotting world domination, not least through finance power. Though everything about the Protocols was a lie, they are one of the most successful acts of black propaganda in history.

The Nazis combined the global domination lie of the Protocols with a racialised version of religious anti-Semitism. Because Jews had rejected Christ, they were seen as alien to Western culture.

The Nazis detested Christianity, as they detested all religion. But they knew they needed some kind of ersatz Nazi Christianity as part of their ideology.

Like some arms of Palestinian propaganda today, the Nazis thus decided Christ wasn’t really Jewish. They reserved special hatred for Paul, who with his universalism – “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, but you are all one in Christ Jesus” – had severed the link between blood and nationality, between ethnicity and citizenship.

The far right today continues with all the tropes of traditional anti-Semitism – Jewish global dominance, Jewish cultural otherness, and so on. If the Jews dominate the world, how did the Holocaust happen, you might ask. Just shows how fiendishly clever they are, is the demented right-wing conspiracy response.

Arab anti-Semitism always had its virulent side. The mufti of Jerusalem met Hitler in 1943 and the two were as one in their hatred of Jews. During the war, the mufti lent his support to Nazi SS recruitment campaigns.

The communist left always had a strong element of anti- Semitism. But popular left anti- Semitism really took off in the Cold War, during the alliance of Israel with the US. Leftist ideology grants no rights of indigenous identity to the Jews of the Middle East, casting them as a colonial, racist power acting on behalf of, or manipulating, the West.

Thus Jews are hated on the right because they are allegedly alien to Western culture, and they are hated on the left because they are allegedly exemplars of Western culture. The left’s antipathy to Israel, and its ignorant idealising of Islamist hatreds as “resistance”, have led to an irrational, hysterical hostility to Israel which is antiSemitism by another name.

All the different strands of anti-Semitism seem weirdly happy to link up and crossfertilise, to draw on the images and insults of their contradictory conspiracy theories and serially monstrous misunderstandings of the world.

In truth, the Jewish tradition is one of the most sublime, profound and beautiful the world has produced. Spend some time in the Old Testament if you don’t believe me. Read as your commentary the works of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

It’s also the case that the Jewish contribution to the arts, to science and to all branches of culture is magnificent. The world owes the sure knowledge of one God, the essence of monotheism, to Jewish experience and tradition.

The Old Testament in many ways is a continuous song of protest against the barbarities of ancient paganism.

Perhaps that’s the real cause of anti-Semitism. The Jews brought the Ten Commandments to the world. And the spirit of evil has never forgiven them.

The Voice Real Truth

 REAL TRUTHS THAT SHOULD BE TOLD GEOFFREY BLAINEY 

It must be hard for a prime minister to admit that he has been crushingly defeated in an electoral contest that he originally expected to win with ease. In one segment of his speech last Saturday night, Anthony Albanese praised himself as a bold man of conviction – as if he had actually won the referendum. 

Many viewers who at first sympathised with the Prime Minister on television regretted that he did not directly congratulate the two Aboriginal leaders who especially defeated him. Only one sentence was needed. He failed to speak that sentence. Yet in our long political history this probably was the most significant public victory yet achieved by Aboriginal campaigners. Moreover, they had fully digested and then condemned the controversial Uluru Statement from the Heart, but Albanese had not even digested it. 

As a political leader he has his merits, but command of crucial detail is not yet one of them. Alongside him on election night was Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney. She offered no congratulations to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the talented senator by whom she had been overshadowed and outgunned this year. In the past 60 years there were notable victories in achieving Aboriginal goals but they owed more to mainstream or white Australian political leaders The victories also owed as much to High Court judges. 

Here was a unique event – a national triumph for two true-blue Aboriginal leaders, Nyunggai Warren Mundine and Price. Crucial to the national debate is the health of Indigenous people. It is often proclaimed to be a matter of urgency, almost of shame, that they have a “life expectancy eight years shorter than non-Indigenous Australians”. But that fact, standing on its own, is misleading. The life expectancy of us all, Aboriginal people included, has improved dramatically since 1788. Nearly every country in Africa has a much lower life expectation than Indigenous Australia. Even the EU displays more than an eight-year gap between member nations. There is even a wide gap between north and south England. Today Aboriginal Australians have a life expectancy equal to that of Bulgaria and rural Romania. Their life expectancy is higher than that in Russia and Ukraine. It is about the same as the average citizen of the world. Indeed, it soon would be improved if those Aboriginal men aged 40 and older were not heavy smokers. 

Of course we in the Western world – my generation included – taught them to smoke. Ownership of land remains another divisive topic. Federal departments some years ago should have investigated what proved to be right or wrong, sensible or misguided, in the way vast areas of land were transferred to Indigenous people. Should these new possessors of the land be exempted from paying taxes on this new but erratic source of income? Moreover, should the families who lived on native title lands be able to build a house and own the land? Instead, most of such land is held collectively, almost in Soviet fashion. 

Here is one of the most remarkable ventures in Australia’s modern history, indeed in world history, but some of the key effects are blanketed in silence or dispute. In all, an area of land twice as large as Indonesia and eight times as large as France has been transferred to Aboriginal Australians since 1975. The supporters of this transfer tend to excuse it or apologise for it by asserting that it is largely desert or semi-desert, but in fact it embraces or borders one of the main mining regions in the world. It also contains mini-regions with high rainfall and a potential for tropical agriculture as well as large expanses that are reserved for environmental reasons. 

Gary Johns, a minister in the Keating government, later became an alert investigator into Aboriginal affairs. In The Burden of Culture he is brave enough to conclude that the introduction of native title has proved to be a dubious reform: “The benefits are few and fitful; the costs are high; the disputes are many; the system will need to be propped up forever on the pretence that native title holders can contribute to the ‘north’ of Australia, or indeed, the remainder of Australia.” In Johns’ opinion, these unique kinds of land tenure that now occupy a little more than half of the nation are based on the faith that all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a spiritual affinity with their tribal lands, to which their spirit or soul, on death, must return. But most Indigenous people even in the Outback no longer cling to the religious faith that underpins the concept of native title. 

The censuses of 2016 and 2021 make this clear. I believe most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are far, far better off today than if they were living in 1788. Price, after recently expressing a similar belief, was flayed by critics who had faint idea what daily life ashore was like before the coming of the First Fleet. Unfortunately, a minority of Aboriginal people still have to struggle with two different values and ways of life. This land is infinitely more fruitful than it was in 1788, and most Aboriginal people are now the gainers. The whole globe gains too. In some years Australia produces enough food to sustain probably 100 million people in the world as a whole. In the past decade it has produced for at least one billion people the minerals with which to build aircraft, railways, motorways, ships, cars, power stations, schools, stadiums and city apartments. 

Likewise, here in this continent arose a democratic society that, for all its imperfections, offers liberty in a world where liberty is not normal. The idea that Aboriginal people could have remained, even today, the only occupiers of this huge expanse of land is fanciful. How can the 1000 or more Aboriginal towns be helped? Have such tiny and remote towns a future? The question has to be asked again and again. It is an experiment rarely conducted in modern history – the creation of isolated towns that grow little of their own food, rely heavily on subsidies and social welfare, are mostly too small to attract a capable nurse, police officer or teacher, and provide few jobs for their poorly educated children. Most of these Aboriginal towns are too far apart to share amenities. They are also marred by family violence. The Uluru statement laments the high numbers of Aboriginal men in jail but does not mention that so many are there because they bash the women of their own race. This message Price has emphasised. Without saying so too loudly, she knows the so-called Stolen Generations were often Aboriginal children who had to be rescued for the sake of their own safety and welfare. 

Such remote and tiny towns can exist only in a nation that is wealthy enough to subsidise them on a generous scale. Yet many are eyesores, viewed by their few visitors as blots on the nation that allows them to exist. One argument in their favour is that the older people wish to retain their own culture and to oppose assimilation by an alien culture. On the other hand, the recent censuses reveal that Christian pastors – mostly Aboriginal – are more influential here than in most suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. A simple, short and accurate statement of the rival Yes and No cases is required for every referendum. This year, small but rival groups of federal parliamentarians had each summarised the arguments to be printed, side-by-side, in Your Official Referendum Booklet. The Australian government then printed millions of copies. Translated into many Indigenous and foreign languages, it reached more households than any bestselling novel in our history. At the front of the booklet, readers are assured they will find valuable information on where and how to vote if they turn to page 21. But the editors had forgotten to number the final pages. 

Even enthusiastic citizens must have been bored or even bamboozled, except for the occasional short quotations from lawyers speaking with some authority. Alas, the booklet did not even print the one-page Uluru Statement from the Heart. As this referendum involved more factors than any other in the past 100 years, a lucid source of information was vital. The booklet failed. In contrast, at the 1999 referendum on the proposed republic, a committee of four lawyers and historians – presided over by Ninian Stephen, the former High Court judge and governor-general – had issued a readable and careful assessment of the rival arguments. The present government seemed unwise to ignore such a precedent. Australia is one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world. Democracy is government by debate. The federation and the commonwealth were born only after long and extensive democratic debate extending from 1889 to 1900. In contrast, the present government has shunned or tried to minimise debate. 

We can now see that the debate conducted during the past year was indirectly a clash about two conflicting views of this nation’s history. Albanese’s view is of an Aboriginal Australia that was – for 60,000 or more years – a form of utopia. His vision owed much to historian Bruce Pascoe, an engaging speaker who by pretending to be Aboriginal tended to convince young people, and their teachers too, that he possessed an insider’s knowledge. Pascoe claimed the Aboriginal people invented democracy and that they lived in peace and prosperity until the Europeans invaded. The present government and its leader can hardly be attacked when the heads of the University of Melbourne, RMIT University and other universities actually promote a similar black-armband version of Australia’s history. Albanese was captivated by a heroic version of history even before he won the federal election last year. Persuaded that such a version had been deliberately hidden from us all, he announced that since 1788 our nation had provided largely a history of brutality – until the era of multiculturalism arrived. 

One day his project – though defeated in last Saturday’s referendum – may provoke or inspire a total rewriting of Australia’s history. Its official names will be Truth-telling and Makarrata, for they are embodied in the short Uluru statement: a document containing highly vulnerable accusations against mainstream Australia as well as several sobering statements about Aboriginal distress today. There are two different Australias. Admittedly, many Aboriginal Australians live in unsatisfactory and even appalling conditions. Also true is that a larger number in urban Australia have become important ingredients of our success as a modern nation. They are often overlooked. On election night we often gathered from commentators the idea that most Aboriginal Australians lived in the Northern Territory or in remote tropical outposts to the east and west. 

In fact, NSW, especially Sydney and its far western hinterland, is the nation’s stronghold of Aboriginal people. More live there than in any other state and territory; and an update from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the surprising advances they have made in the 10 years from 2011 to 2021. Their life expectations are higher than the referendum booklet dismally reported. Of their houses, the overwhelming numbers are not overcrowded. More than 40 per cent of these houses are owned outright or with a mortgage. The proportion of their students who pass year 12 or attend university and other tertiary institutions has soared. Successful Aboriginal leader Mundine, originally a tradie, was reared in one of these towns far west of Sydney. The Uluru statement, compiled by the leading large group of Indigenous activists, concludes that a revolutionary new era is beginning: “We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country.” But hosts of Aboriginal people have little need to leave their base camp in the big towns and cities and go trekking. They belong to the 21st century and share in its opportunities. 

Historian Geoffrey Blainey is the author of more than 40 books. His recent memoir is called Before I Forget (Penguin)

Bridging the Gap

 

Remote living won’t bridge gap in life expectancy

CLAIRE LEHMANN

For almost all of human history, life expectancy hovered around just 30 years. Of course, many people lived into old age. But because so many children died in infancy or early childhood, average life expectancy remained low. This persisted for millennia, until something remarkable happened.

During the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution that followed, increasing knowledge about disease combined with technological innovation, meant average life expectancy started to climb.

In 1900 it reached 42 years, and by the 1950s, it reached 62. Today, global life expectancy sits at 71 years, and in rich countries such as Australia it has reached 84.3.

This achievement of modernity is rarely acknowledged, let alone celebrated. This achievement did not occur by magic. It occurred because men and women created the intellectual tools to understand and treat disease, and successive governments invested in public health.

Recently, discussions about the upcoming voice referendum have highlighted a paradox. On the one hand, there is a widespread desire for governments to preserve traditional Aboriginal culture – which includes remote living – as much as possible. On the other, there’s a passionate drive to Close the Gap between the Indigenous and general population in life expectancy and other outcomes.

In an ideal world, these two goals could coexist harmoniously, but it would be dishonest to suggest they are not currently in tension.

And it is unlikely any real progress will be made until this tension is resolved.

At the heart of the Closing the Gap mandate is the significant life expectancy gap between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. From 2015-17, Indigenous males had a life expectancy of 71.6 years and females 75.6 years. Compared to the rest of the Australian population, an average gap persists of around eight years.

The life expectancy gap is often blamed on the effects of colonisation and institutional racism. Of course it is necessary to consider these factors. But they do not explain everything. For example, a gap in life expectancy exists between people who live in the regions, and those who live in our major cities – regardless of Indigeneity.

And Indigenous people who live in the city are arguably more likely to experience institutional racism. Yet on average, they live longer lives than those in remote communities.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has found that Indigenous people in remote areas are 4.3 times more likely to be hospitalised for preventable conditions than the Indigenous living in major cities.

The reasons there is a life expectancy gap between those in the cities and those in remote communities are not hard to comprehend.

In any emergency, geographic distance from a hospital will increase the likelihood of preventable death. Indigenous Australians also have a higher prevalence of chronic diseases.

Without regular monitoring – which is challenging in remote areas – such conditions worsen. A lack of specialist services coupled with inadequate infrastructure, such as clean water and sanitation, compounds the disadvantage.

“The consequences of past wrongs have transcended generations – they can still be felt today,”

Linda Burney told the parliament in 2020. “We can see it in the child who doesn’t have a safe roof to live under. I have visited remote communities where the town has literally run out of water – let alone clean water. I have seen dams empty and children given soft drink instead of water.”

There is no question that historical trauma can influence present circumstances. Yet living in remote areas presents deep challenges, regardless of historical context. The reality is that before industrialisation, all traditional cultures had poor life expectancies.

It didn’t matter if you were a rice farmer in China, or a tin miner in Cornwall. The evidence shows that right across the board life expectancy was low.

Historical records from the 18th century in Sweden show 40 per cent of children did not live past the age of 15. In Bavaria, 50 per cent of children were buried before they reached adulthood. In England and Wales in the 1850s, only 70 per cent of children reached their 10th birthday. Children died from smallpox, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, dysentery and pneumonia. When the British colonists settled in Australia, their life expectancy was half of what it is for Indigenous Australians today.

Many people who live in a modern society, furnished with hospitals and flushing toilets, romanticise traditional cultures and pre-modern ways of living. Such cultures are imagined to be tranquil and balanced with nature.

While some aspects of this mythology are true (traditional

huntergatherers eat a healthy diet, for example), the historical data shows us no traditional culture has ever had life expectancy outcomes that were not terrible.

The romanticisation of the premodern past is perhaps one reason why the Whitlam government encouraged Aboriginal Australians to leave towns to live on outstations in remote locations in the 1970s. This push has led to a variety of unintended consequences. One of these consequences is that preventable illnesses such as rheumatic heart disease are more common in Aboriginal children than they are for children in Sub- Saharan Africa.

When populations in China, Japan and various regions of Africa have modernised, large numbers of people have migrated from rural areas to cities. They leave some of their cultural traditions behind in the process. But what they get in return is better health, economic opportunities and a better future for their children.

Of course, the government cannot compel those living in our remote regions to move to the city.

To do so would be reminiscent of historical assimilationist policies that are now widely considered harsh and discriminatory. And it is also true that retaining traditional customs and heritage may have benefits far beyond what can be measured in health or in longevity statistics. To attempt to Close the Gap is itself a Western concept.

At the same time, however, governments shouldn’t financially support decisions that hinder the progress of a vulnerable population based on misguided nostalgia.

If they wish to get serious about making change, policymakers must decide what’s more important: preserving the remote lifestyle or closing the gap.

Claire Lehmann is founding editor of online magazine Quillette