Lucy Hamilton
The IDF ran in the Sydney Marathon the same week they spat on Zomi Frankcom’s grave
The iconic Sydney Marathon hosted more than 40 current and former IDF personnel on the weekend. In the same week, Israeli diplomats and military officers callously dismissed the murder of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom.
One year since 300,000 furious, heartbroken Australians marched across the Harbour Bridge to protest genocide, sending the political class a message about its favourable stance towards Israel, it’s utterly surreal to think that people associated with the nationstate that is the primary source of infant death and anti-semitism on the planet would be running over the same bridge.
More than 40 Zionist soldiers, whose army has been found to have committed genocide by the UN Special Commission were granted visas by Tony Burke to run a friendly marathon. At almost the exact same moment, a visa was plucked from Egyptian-American comedian Bassem Youssef. Youssef had a national tour locked in (I had tickets!), but the government pushed him off the dates by delaying his visa, demanding FBI checks and Egyptian security clearances. It couldn’t be clearer what this government stands for and protects: granting access to people accused of crimes against humanity, while leaving a legendary Egyptian comedian in the lurch for being a high-profile critic of those crimes.
“I’m not sorry for what I did,” said commander Colonel Nochi Mendel about Zomi’s murder in an October 2025 interview. In the week leading up to the marathon, Israel’s Ambassador to Australia Hillel Newman echoed this sentiment: “Israel had no intention to attack or injure in any way the aid workers that were on the convoy.” He refused to apologise to Frankcom’s family, before pivoting to blame Australians for daring to ask the question. “Sadly, there are a lot of haters of Israel in Australia.”
Mendel already said he was not sorry. Newman already refused the family. So while the Israeli government shits on the memory of Zomi Frankcom, a national humanitarian hero, and our cowardly government meekly allows her legacy to be insulted by a genocidal nation that kills children, it’s only natural that people like Or Saadon, linked to Sayeret Nahal, in the same brigade whose chief of staff ordered the strike that killed her, are openly allowed to wear blue and white flags in the country of her birth, running around Sydney in the week her case was dismissed.
Zomi Frankcom’s death was a warning to any foreigner who enters Gaza. Albanese’s silence over her targeted killing, and her insulting treatment by Israel and its diplomats, is a national disgrace that will damage Labor’s shallow political project. The IDF runners trampled on her memory on Sunday, with the overt support of those who mock us as they claim to govern in the public interest.
Some IDF soldiers have gang-raped prisoners, raped doctors to death, raped terrified Palestinians with dogs, and sexually abused freedom flotilla crewmembers. Others dress in the underwear of destroyed Palestinian mothers, a few brag about shooting and maiming innocent toddlers. Some snipe newborns and pregnant mothers attending designated maternity centers, others target terrified Palestinians while piloting drones playing sounds of terrified children from speakers. A few have burned innocent families in tents, a bunch bulldoze so many humans in their demolition units that they feel sick and can’t eat meat for months. Which type of IDF were running at the friendly marathon on the weekend?
Some of the marathon runners, like Roy Oryon, are from the notorious Golani Brigade that killed ambulance workers in Gaza and buried them in a mass grave. Others, such as Oryan Omer, served in the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate carrying out AI-targeting in Israel’s Gaza genocide and mass surveillance of Palestinians. Oriyan Avni, who does not serve in the IDF, is running for her deceased Prison Service dog handler brother, who worked as a torturer in the macabre and sadistic Israeli prison system and was killed as an act of revenge by a former inmate who suffered under him.
Investigative Journalist Yaakov Aharon spoke about the abominable activities of the Israeli contestants before a group of protesters at the marathon in Sydney. “The Israeli government sent us 40 athletes… raising funds for an Israeli-based charity named Shalva Team which is here for a quote-unquote ‘peace delegation… our spineless government has let them right in.”
Seeing the members of the IDF, the most reviled group of soldiers on the planet, raising money for charity after they have been engaged in the killing of civilians makes the stomach churn. And after years of churning, Australian society is getting sick of it. State and federal government support for Israel’s genocide, war, conquest for nearly three years, while forcing one pro-Zionist measure after another, has broken the social contract. Watching IDF soldiers run freely in our beleaguered country, a place that despises genocidal babykillers, demonstrates who they are listening to.
The “social cohesion” couldn’t be any more volatile. Over 79% of Australians abhor Israel. More than 300,000 of them marched across the Harbour Bridge to remind the Premier and the Prime Minister that they vehemently oppose Israel. Today, the Israeli contingent at the Sydney Marathon feels like a giant “fuck you” from our “leaders”.
As the Nazi death machine was ramping up, the cogs in the killing programme would seek leave away from the death camps, and take holidays when they could. But they were not welcome in many countries, and could only take a break in occupied or allied territory, while the rest of the world was understandably cut off from them. Nazis didn’t have the opportunity to stroll Times Square or take a dip at Bondi, and they sure as shit couldn’t run a fucking marathon over the Sydney Harbour Bridge!
After doing some things most humans shouldn’t have to imagine, the soldiers of Israel like to take exclusionist yoga holidays in India, or trek in fire prone regions of Patagonia. Others enjoy going to exclusive Jewish only towns to listen to techno music in Thailand. And some like to come here to Australia to run marathons in Sydney. They can escape their ghosts, the traumatic injuries from inflicting horrors on the innocent, somewhere fucking else.
The political class has totally abandoned Zomi Frankcom and the public and national interest, instead defending Zionist interests in Australia, shedding a mask it already lost supporting the miners, gamblers, and foreign interests extracting our sovereignty. Whether it’s sending weapons components and explosives to the genocide, pausing UNRWA funding meant to feed Palestinians, welcoming its President Isaac Herzog and allowing him to have a secret chat with ASIO, or allowing its criminal army to take happy snaps at the Sydney Marathon — those in power, supported by a complicit media, have demonstrated the depths of their depravity. And revealed their lack of humanity. And it only took covering up and normalising a genocide to finally do it.
The optics of IDF runners on our streets are the gap between the political class and the country it claims to speak for. After October 7, after the mass death and the disruption they have imposed, there is no normalisation left for these war criminals on a start list in Sydney. On its own, the story is a scandal, but after the treatment of Zomi, it’s a national outrage. It’s just another slap in the face by a group of people in the political class we have all realised are nothing like us, captured by allegiance to foreign interests that have installed them to act this way.
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