A slew of recent articles declaring that we are living beyond our means, are addicted to government support and that tough times are coming raises the inevitable question. Do Australians have the mettle to weather a storm? Well, do we? For to prosper in our new world, we would need our old values: thrift, consideration for others, duty, responsibility, selflessness and tenacity. These values may have been forged by our Judeo-Christian culture, but they were fortified by tough times. Strengthened by deprivation. Reinforced by lessons about the courage and integrity of our historical heroes. Yet today it seems these values are not just dated but risible.
But while we may well mourn their loss, these values didn’t fall.
They were pushed. For when we reduced our family size, our children didn’t have to make do, didn’t need to learn thrift or learn the lessons of being one of many.
When we built bigger homes with separate bedrooms and multiple bathrooms, they didn’t learn the need for compromise, co-operation and consideration. When we swapped the grand backyard for a media room, they didn’t learn about teams, turns and negotiating, and could go for days without being inconvenienced, challenged, wrong or disliked. When we shielded them from hurt and sadness, showered them in empty praise and fought their battles, they didn’t learn strength and tenacity.
When we took on their responsibilities, they didn’t learn independence. When we stopped looking after our own elderly, they didn’t learn duty or selflessness.
And when the government stepped in with its ever-increasing list of benefits including, incredibly, paying us to care for our own, they learned dependence.
Elica Le Bon is bewildered by the West’s appetite to “sacrifice values on the altar of tolerance”. I think she’s being generous. I would suggest that we sacrificed our values on the altar of indulgence. We swapped restraint, duty and self-control for a world of self-love, instant gratification and cheap highs. Duty became old-fashioned. Shame, even after poor behaviour, was considered not just outdated but outrageous. Judgment was (ironically) condemned. We swapped fortitude, tenacity and responsibility for dependence. Restraint for licence. Christianity for crystals. Courtesy, respect and moderation gave way to uninhibited freedom and finally to permissiveness. There was no right or wrong. Everything was relative. Thus we were ripe to be asked to tolerate the intolerable. And we had no grounds to refuse. Because in a world of moral and cultural relativism we can’t declare any one behaviour or any one culture better or worse than another. But that’s simply not true.
US leads the way in reversing cultural decline of the West
KONSTANTIN KISIN
Since speaking at the last Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, it’s clear that the tide is turning and our American friends are leading the way.
Diversity, equity and inclusion, a system of anti-meritocratic discrimination, is being dismantled.
This is happening not just in the US government but, much more importantly, across the global corporate world. We can once again dream that our children will be judged on the content of their character and not the colour … of the square they post on Instagram.
Government profligacy and corruption is being exposed on an industrial scale. DOGE may not be perfect but according to one report, USAID gave $US3m ($4.7m) to a rapper in Gaza who makes anti-Semitic songs. Whatever your politics, we can all agree that is a waste of taxpayers’ money.
Kanye West would have done it for free!
Thanks to the end of censorship on X, we have the ability to express reasonable and widely held views. Because of this, other social media companies are wary of being so aggressive in their censorship too.
So that’s the positives, but there has been lots of bad too: if you want to understand how bad the crime problem has got, British people used to deal with crime by moving criminals to Australia.
Today, British people deal with crime by moving to Australia.
I know there’s a lot of frustration with the state of Britain and much of the Western world.
But let’s keep things in perspective: of all the things human beings have invented over the past two hundred years, our culture and its values are responsible for most of them. I’m not saying we have a monopoly on ingenuity. One of simplest things most people no longer understand is that we don’t lead the world on innovation because we are richer. We are richer because we lead the world on innovation.
But all of this is at risk because we are in danger of forgetting how we got here.
We need to understand that we’ve been lied to. For decades, people went on TV and told you that your history is all bad and your country is plagued by prejudice and intolerance. I have debated these people many times and I always ask them the same question: If you were a woman or an ethnic minority or someone who was spirit gender or whatever, where would you live rather than the West? None of them ever answer.
Because we all know the answer.
We are being accused of performing terribly on the very things we lead the world in.
A healthy sense of your own self-worth is not a conservative value or liberal value, it is the value of every successful group of people in history. Decline is a choice. And the good news is this: most people don’t want managed decline. Most people don’t want to be browbeaten and chastised for their history.
Most people don’t want their children to be poorer than them.
Recent election results around the world bear that out.
Like him or loathe him, the reason millions of people admire Elon Musk is not his charismatic speeches and ill-advised hand gestures.
They admire him because he builds big things and in doing so reminds us that we are meant to reach for the stars.
We are a civilisation that is waiting to be inspired. So let’s stop listening to the people who want us to fail. Let’s ignore the counsel of our enemies. But to do so we’re going to have to win the arguments.
On free speech, we’ve allowed ourselves to be backed into a corner.
The attack line against us is that we want to return to some cruel time when people could be mean and nasty. But the truth is, we don’t believe in free speech because we want to go back to the past. We need to speak freely in order to think freely and if we can’t think freely we won’t move forward.
Free speech is not a rightwing value or a left-wing value, it’s a Western value.
The second argument we must win is on identity politics and multiculturalism. For several decades now, our societies have attempted these two failed experiments. The result is tension, disunity and a toleration of the intolerable for the sake of “community cohesion”.
Multiethnic societies can work, multicultural societies cannot. We must be British and American and whatever else we are first, and white, black, male, female and all that other stuff a distant second.
And the final argument we must win is about whether human beings are good.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb in which he argued that human population growth was about to outstrip food supplies leading to mass starvation, societal collapse and the need for drastic measures to control population growth.
None of this happened. He was completely wrong. But his ideas live on, unaffected, in the minds of our political and media elites. At the core of the net zero agenda is a fundamental sense that human beings are a pestilence on the planet. That if only we could find a way to stop them reproducing and encourage them to die out peacefully, the planet would finally be safe. This has become so ingrained that many people now say they will not have children because of climate concerns.
We must never get used to this because what it represents is a grotesque moral inversion. The birth of a child is a universally celebrated thing. At a cultural level, any successful civilisation in history would see more of itself being created as an unalloyed good. What do you imagine happens to civilisations that don’t? So we must say, without apology, the solution to climate change can’t be poverty. Before the industrial revolution, nearly 40 per cent of children died before they hit puberty.
The promise of a better tomorrow is not just a nice thing to have: it’s the debt we owe to our children. We have to make energy cleaner, yes, but we also have to make it as cheap and abundant as possible. And once we in Europe win that argument, we will finally have the one thing that’s been missing: an economic vision that can inspire people to believe that the future will be better than the past.
Konstantin Kisin is a satirist, author and co-host of the popular podcast Triggernometry. This is an edited version of a speech he delivered at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.
The fall of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has revived a question that has intrigued me for years. Why are some of the most bloodthirsty tyrants also qualified doctors? Assad is by training an ophthalmologist.
Among the godfathers of Islamist terrorism, there has been a steady stream of doctors. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s henchman, was a surgeon who practised at Egyptian army clinics, a Saudi Arabian hospital and with the Red Crescent in Pakistan.
George Habash, who founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Fathi Shaqaqi, a founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, were doctors.
Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the Hamas leader behind the human bomb attacks against Israelis in the 1990s, studied pediatric medicine and taught parasitology and genetics.
Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who was found guilty of crimes against humanity in the Balkan wars, qualified as a doctor and psychiatrist.
Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the despot of Ivory Coast from the 1960s to the 1990s, started out as a doctor. His contemporary, Hastings Banda, who ruled Malawi in a reign of terror and fed opposition members to crocodiles, trained as a doctor in Tennessee and at Edinburgh University and practised medicine in England.
In Haiti in the 1960s, Francois Duvalier, a qualified doctor who won popularity through a campaign against tropical diseases, used his nickname Papa Doc to win trust and justify his repression.
The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore also wondered about this phenomenon. In an article in 2013, he noted that Assad chose to specialise in treating the eyes because this involved less contact with blood. Yet Assad is up to his own eyes in blood, having presided over the slaughter of some 600,000 people in Syria’s terrible civil war.
Despite their ruthless behaviour, however, such people usually don’t view themselves as killers.
Assad often used the language of medical healing and cleansing.
Such individuals may see themselves as fighting injustice or doing the work of God. Indeed, they often view killing as the highest form of sanctified duty. In 1998, Zawahiri and bin Laden signed a fatwa declaring: “The judgment to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military, is an obligation for every Muslim.”
Zawahiri’s brother, Muhammad, told CNN in 2012: “Before you call me and my brother terrorists, let’s define its meaning. If it means those who are bloodthirsty merciless killers, then this is not what we are about.”
This is because jihadi killers believe they are treating a diseased organism in the form of the non- Islamic world that must be purged of spiritual poison and made healthy by the application of Islam.
Maybe the reason so many tyrants and terrorists turn out to be doctors is because the idealistic impulse to treat sick people translates, under the pressure of ideology or perceived injustice, into a desire to remedy the apparent sickness of the body politic. That’s why the national conversation about Islamic human bomb terrorists is always conducted entirely at cross-purposes. The West believes that such terrorism can be motivated only by despair. On the contrary, the jihadi bomber believes he is achieving the highest possible ideal of holy work.
This radical disjunction has reportedly been understood by none other than the daughter of MI5’s director-general, Ken McCallum.
When he finally told his children the nature of his work, his daughter asked him: “Dad, the people that you work against, do they think they’re doing the right thing too?” As McCallum said, this was a good question. Indeed, his daughter had grasped an important point. It’s a fair bet that bad people don’t wake up in the morning and think “How many evil deeds can I perpetrate today?” They all justify to themselves the terrible things they do.
Assad claimed he was fighting the war to protect his country against religious fanatics. Russia’s President Putin claims that, by invading neighbouring countries, he is reuniting his dismembered motherland and righting a historic wrong. The Soviet Union thought it was creating the workers’ paradise.
Hitler thought he was ridding the human race of impurities. The 18th-century French revolutionaries thought that, by guillotining aristocrats during the Terror, they were saving France from a corrupted elite.
We may look at the bodies piled up and perceive, in the fanaticism that secured their fate, a monstrous abuse of power. To the perpetrators, however, the idealistic end always justifies the horrific means. Over the years, many philosophers have concluded that idealism is the road to hell. This is because ideals are a fantasy of perfection detached from reality.
They set up binary choices – oppressor versus oppressed, corruption versus purity or, as activists chant, “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere”.
But life is messy. People disagree profoundly about which ideals to pursue. The divisions are often blurred and the choices overlap.
It’s because utopia is unattainable that those pursuing ideals such as the eradication of want or prejudice end up browbeating, scapegoating or wiping out those seen to be standing in their way.
Monstrous individuals tell themselves the lie that they’re fighting the good fight. Assad told himself such a lie; those now fighting to replace him are undoubtedly men in the grip of similarly lethal illusions. Idealism can express noble emotions; but it is also a direct line to tyranny and worse.
The deadly backlash of ‘sit-down money’ALEX MCDERMOTTSince the defeat of the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum, Indigenous truth and justice commissions have continued to extend their reach throughout different Australian states. They are all based on the assumption the Uluru Dialogues articulated: the problems that plague Indigenous communities can be traced back to the original trauma of dispossession.Yet reality tells a very different story. Were 1788, and the train of colonial occupation that followed on from that, the primary cause, then you wouldn’t find such wide variation among Indigenous Australians.Indigenous Australians in urban areas and regional centres are hard to distinguish from the rest of the population in those places for levels of wealth, health, education and life outcomes.The human crisis that produces and reproduces the Gap is much more clearly locatable. It is in the remote outstations of homeland settlements, and around some towns in isolated parts of the Australian interior. It is where there is no economic life outside the government provision of welfare and social services, and no jobs other than those government creates.These places, where basic social order and safety have largely vanished, have been described by Noel Pearson as worse than Third World countries.Let’s face it: 1973 and 1974, not 1788, better explain this longscale traumatic hurt and human damage. Those are the years when the new policy of self-determination, and the remote homelands ideal, properly took hold.The idea that Indigenous peoples should themselves collectively decide the terms on which they would engage with Western life and settler society first emerged in the 1950s, thanks in no small part to the Australian Communist Party. As of 1931, communists argued that indigenous minorities in the advanced capitalist countries were oppressed colonial peoples. The glorious Soviet Socialist republics were “selfdetermining”, they declared – so should be indigenous minorities.In an age of decolonisation, the idea had obvious appeal. Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who believed separating indigenous from other Canadians was a retrogressive step, and an inherently undemocratic one at that, issued a white paper, An End to Separatism, against it.In Australia, Paul Hasluck, the commonwealth minister for states and territories, and thus the Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, shared Trudeau’s views.Under his stewardship in the 1950s and 1960s, government repudiated the policy of protection that dominated the first half of the 20th century.There is a solid argument advanced by Tim Rowse, an emeritus professor at Western Sydney University, that protection helped stabilise and rebuild the Indigenous population. But it undeniably treated Aborigines as inherently different, secondclass citizens, to be kept apart from the ordinary population. Hasluck instead sought a system “under which Aborigines were recognised as Australian citizens and were regarded as having the same status and rights as other Australian citizens”. Aborigines should be equals, treated equally.It was through Hasluck that Aborigines regained much of what they’d lost or been denied under protection: civil rights, and the right to vote federally, in 1962.But after Harold Holt’s drowning, Hasluck narrowly lost the partyroom vote to John Gorton and shortly after effectively left public life. With Hasluck gone no one else seriously pushed back against the new policy concept of self-determination.Conflated with the shame of the recently junked White Australia policy, assimilation and even integration became bogey words, freighted with the stigma of racism.Hasluck’s policy was condemned for violating the Indigenous right to decide for themselves.Like multiculturalism – another buzzy, yet originally nebulous word that became policy without public debate about what it meant – self-determination germinated under the Coalition, was supercharged under Gough Whitlam, and then became orthodoxy.Even to question it was to be tarred with hankering for the bad old days of assimilation. Yet self-determination produced failure on a vast, indeed cataclysmic scale.Activist bureaucrats such as Herbert “Nugget” Coombs enthusiastically endorsed the idea that Indigenous communities in remote regions should be established largely outside modern capitalist Australia. After Whitlam’s 1972 election victory unemployment benefits were made available to all Indigenous people, even if they lived in communities where there were no jobs. It proved to be one of the most poisonous policy decisions of the 20th century.In the 1950s and 1960s Aborigines had been employed at remote settlements and missions in government-run enterprises, which enabled them to work and live there. Piggeries, orchards, chicken runs, vegetable gardens, sawmills, bakeries and butcheries flourished.After 1972 young people knew they could get paid more money by not working – “sit-down money”, or the dole. The enterprises collapsed.In many areas self-determination’s wave of social destruction was made worse by the equal wages decision of 1967. On pastoral stations Indigenous cattlemen worked in a largely cashless economy. They were paid for work largely in rations, clothes and basic accoutrements, while continuing to work and live with their families on traditional country. The rations were often paid to the women, giving them considerable influence.Once equal pay came in, pastoralists switched even more quickly to new technology, and to more skilled workers to run their stock.Combined with the total loss of incentive to work from sitdown money, and the new ubiquity of the modern cash economy – including guns, grog, pornography and drugs – the traditional societies of remote Australia began to rapidly disintegrate, precipitating a dramatic rise in rates of offending and incarceration.The fate of Vincent Lingiari’s Gurindji people illustrate this tragedy all too vividly. Writer and historian Charlie Ward describes how welfare payments, infrastructure development wages and “unprecedented amounts of funding” from the government fundamentally compromised Gurindji autonomy in the years after Whitlam had poured a handful of sand into Lingiari’s open palm in 1975.Younger generation Gurindji refused to work in the Gurindjioperated cattle operation, rejecting their elders’ traditional authority.A society that “had masterfully sustained itself by hard work and self-motivation” fell apart, chiefly “as a result of government assistance given under policies of Aboriginal selfmanagement”.Indigenous policy has been our greatest failure. Ultimately, it is not just a failure of policies but of ideas. In a society where all Australians depend on each other – economically, socially, politically – the notion that any group can be “selfdetermining” is a fantasy.Fifty years after the Whitlam government raised that fantasy into a religion, it’s time reality was given a stronger say.Alex McDermott is an independent historian.
We need a name for the carbon clergy’s wildly popular game of proclaiming large
numbers linked to short deadlines for scrubbing the economy clean of fossil fuel.
Let’s call it Eco-Bluster Bingo. Anyone can compete but the only Australian
professional leagues are in state and federal parliaments. There you get paid to play
and Canberra’s league is first grade.
You win if you outbid an opponent with an improbable emissions-cutting target set
on the nearest horizon. More points are awarded if you land both target and
deadline on an elegant zero or five. The coveted prize is the adulation of much
media, the envy of fellow players, and the gratitude of the legion of green industry
carpetbaggers who feed on taxpayer dollars like sharks on the carcass of a whale.
You also get to denounce the loser as a morally bankrupt planet wrecker to your
modest posse of followers on Elon’s X, Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram, and
Beijing’s TikTok.
The true savants of Eco-Bluster Bingo score bonus points for rote denouncements of all forms of Earth-devouring mining and the use of gas, nuclear energy (or any
wind farms in your electorate’s line of sight) on the road to the promised land of
Net Zero.
Then, feeling properly smug at sitting week’s end, our champion hops into an
imported commonwealth car – best if it’s one of the new electric BMW iX40 SUVs –
for a trip to Canberra Airport to sip fine wine from gas-furnace glass in the
Chairman’s Lounge, before burning jet fuel to fly business class back to
her/his/their capital city.
There they can climb into a minerals-hungry Tesla (its battery fully charged of
black or brown coal-generated electricity) for the drive on oil-based tyres across
bitumen roads to an inner-city estate built with the fossil fuel children of bricks,
steel and concrete.
Over an Aperol spritz (delivered from Padua by diesel-burning ships and trucks) our
hero’s pampered Eco-Superego hides the primal Id of their existence: fossil fuel is
almost as essential and invisible to sustaining their life as the oxygen they breathe.
Nothing in the built environment, including the clothes they wear and the
fertiliser-fed food they eat, is fossil fuelfree.
How do they square the circle of rank hypocrisy in the distance between what they
say and how they live? Douglas Adams gave an insight into this in the Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote that developing an invisibility shield had proved
impossible so the problem had been overcome by hacking the brain. Scientists discovered the next best real invisibility is to hide something behind an
“SEP field”.
The book’s narrator explains: “The Somebody Else’s Problem field … relies on
people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t
expecting, or can’t explain.”
Every Eco-Bluster Bingo player is wilfully energy-blind and minerals-blind.
So the technical and physical barriers to building their nirvana are literally invisible
to them because turning their unicorns into work horses is somebody else’s
problem.
Meanwhile some grunt, somewhere, has to have a crack at working out how our
hero’s Greenwished(™), bulldust numbers can be transformed into something
approaching reality.
Doing that demands writing reports chock full of heroic assumptions about billions
of tonnes of yet-to-be-mined minerals, imagined engineering feats and
uninvented industrial processes running on imaginary fuels. These studies in
fantasy are then proffered as proof of concept.
Nor do our ecowarriors ever trouble themselves with debating tricky technical
arguments. Why should they when they wield the One Ring that rules all
1 Greenwishing(™) arguments; casting the verbal spell of “climate change denier”
and turning your opponent into a reactionary toad.
This charge has now spread like Covid beyond heretics questioning “The Science”
to include anyone raising concerns about retooling the world around weatherdependent power in the space of a generation.
The totems of solar panels, and particularly the three-armed crucifix of the wind
turbine, are sacred symbols and despoiling them is now a thought crime.
Outside this climate church there is no salvation.
But let’s nail just one rational heresy on the door of this church.
Where will the minerals to build the bridge to net zero come from? Has anyone, as
the Americans would say, done the math? Physicist and former Australian mining
engineer associate professor Simon Michaux, from the Geological Survey of
Finland, has calculated the material challenge of meeting the stated emissions
reduction ambitions of the EU, China and the United States.
He found that the available minerals demanded by the transition to net zero were a
fraction of what will be needed to meet every country’s pledges.
Out of the veritable periodic table of elements the green transition will demand
let’s take one mineral: copper. In a paper produced this year, Michaux notes, “The human species produced approximately 700 million tonnes of metal over the 4000
years prior to 2020. For global economic demand for copper to continue its current
trajectory of growth, another 700 million tonnes would need to be produced in the
next 22 years.”
The world’s pre-eminent expert on energy systems, Professor Vaclav Smil, has
calculated the amount of copper needed to electrify just the world’s vehicle fleet,
noting the average electric vehicle contains about 80kg of copper, “compared to
less than 15kg in an internal combustion engine car”.
“Replacing today’s 1.4 billion ICE vehicles by EVs would thus require more than 90
million tonnes of additional copper supply during the next 27 years,” he said in a
paper for the American Society for Mechanical Engineers.
Smil went on to detail the staggering amount of mining that would be needed to
extract that copper, given the very best mines have only 0.6 per cent of metal in the
copper ore.
“This means that the extraction of an additional 90 million tonnes of copper by
2050 would require drilling, blasting, removal, processing and waste deposition,
amounting to about 15 billion tonnes of rock, a mass equivalent to the world’s
annual extraction of all fossil fuels and of all metallic ores, combined.”
So, a big job then. Just for the copper needed to electrify the world’s vehicles and
not counting the 610 million tonnes of copper that will be required for everything else.
And once we have solved the copper question, we can turn our minds to finding the
dizzying array of other elements needed for this witches’ brew.
It is impossible to predict the future but this much is certain, the path to net zero
won’t be mapped in fantasy numbers. That is a road to nowhere.
Technology may save us. Faith won’t.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
