From maniacal to outright insane

The Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza was hit by a suspected Israeli drone attack on Tuesday while docked at the Sidi Bou Said port in Tunisian waters. Video footage from multiple sources confirm that a boat was struck from above with an incendiary device, causing the vessel to ignite with crew on board, damaging the boat and endangering lives. The attack on the group in sovereign waters, which included high-profile participants such as activist Greta Thunberg and actor Susan Sarandon, was not the first suspected attack by Israel on the flotilla this year, and not the first attack on Thunberg either.

In response, a report issued by the Diaspora and Antisemitism Ministry declared the flotilla as (actual) Hamas (yes, they really did it), claiming that it was an elaborate cover to “whitewash the narrative of the terrorist organisations and defame Israel”. As the sclerotic settler apartheid operation scrambled to produce an ‘evidence board’ linking Greta Thunberg to Hamas leadership, they ended up producing something that looked more like a ‘crazy wall’ from that Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme. 

But the real crazy thing is this: in 72 hours, on either side of the strike in Tunisia, Israel attacked six sovereign nations. And that is not a normal thing to do.

Between September 9 and 11, apart from the usual daily massacre in Gaza intensifying in the destruction of Gaza City, and the suspected drone strike on the flotilla in Tunisia, Israel conducted airstrikes in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. It has also carried out aerial operations in Syria (Homs, Latakia, and the ancient city of Palmyra), strikes in Yemen, and an attack on Hamas Leadership in Doha. Six countries in 72 hours. No country has ever attacked so many countries at once.

Israel’s efforts to crash its region into total-war are enough to tip the world into chaos on its own, but this week’s chaos is not contained to the Middle East. A revolution in Nepal, the collapse of the Macron government in France, the loss of cabin pressure in Kier Starmer’s moral authority and his mandate to govern the UK, Russian drones attacking Poland, and Washington’s naval blockade off the coast of Venezuela – the globe is on fire.

If there was a world tension meter, constructed with similar materials as the nuclear doomsday clock (89 seconds to midnight BTW), it would be ringing alarm bells at critical levels. There has been a dramatic global rise in unresolved global crises that have stacked up like a poorly made geopolitical Jenga tower by gravely incompetent and irresponsible world leaders. As the unreasonable call in their cheques, and the omnishambolic international snowball gathers momentum, it’s hard to shake the horrible feeling growing that something irreversible may be happening. 

Back at home, post Winter ball, the most vapid and creatively deficient political class in the OECD still doesn’t get it. While the finite and fragile porcelain of grand-diplomacy is being shattered by extrajudicial killings of diplomats lured under the pretence of ceasefire (again), the Albanese government is talking up its social media ban on the advice of a US-born E-safety Tzar, proudly declaring its ‘family like’ bond with a Fijian government that has touted an embassy in Jerusalem, and real wages growth in a country that spends less per GDP on its rapidly growing homeless and poor child population than Poland. The government attempts to alchemise its anaemic bandaid policies in light of the kinetic chaos on the planet, holding up fools gold in the air despite the flames of war and death enveloping the fragile human world.    

In the media throng, those who could have driven the national discussion and applied political pressure on the government, if only by virtue of not omitting the details of the carnage in the first place, flop around on a genocide two years in. The collective press has been extruding rose tinted information through a mixture of Israeli official statements and automated government decrees that ring eerily similar, while sacking journalists that use their actual job description to render these narratives completely incomprehensible and insane. While now there is a slow trickle of news starting to capture the totality of this biblical era destruction, it comes at the cost of all that came before it that was never said, and all the damage that has been done in light of all the subjectivity that was painstakingly weaved by our trusted journalists to blot out the irrepressible torrent of live-streamed massacre that has altered our emotional DNA and rocked the true essence of our social cohesion in a way that even a special envoy couldn’t pretend to imagine. 

So with the world slipping into a chaos, and the Henderson poverty line the benchmark for a Labor government that likes dressing up as Gough Whitlam when it touts its end-stage neoliberal policies and supports the proponents of this chaotic status quo, what does this mean for the rest of us? 

We are marching over iconic bridges, political party members press their parties for action to no avail. What we have in front of us is a political class who has chosen to throw its lot in with the group of stubborn belligerents that back the US/Israel empire, and the best we can do is vote for one of two major mobs that both support the decline.

Penny Wong’s concern, or Michaelia Cash’s absolutism present the same status-quo: Israel enjoys diplomatic, economic and military normalcy with Australia, it has a bipartisan group of political supporters in Canberra that enable Zionist voices to be disproportionately heard, and Zionist demands to be unreasonably met, at the expense of the wishes of the Australian public. The drones that attacked the Samud flotilla, the 2000lb bombs that currently flatten residential towers in Gaza City, the targeted assassinations that kill people in sovereign nations abroad, the endless attacks on neighbouring countries, and the bullets that rip through Palestinian children for sport – all of these things are currently supported, either openly or otherwise, by the Albanese Labor government and a large share of the political class.   

Whether or not they choose to believe it, the morbid position of a handful of world governments like ours in Australia, are the reason why Israel feels it can bomb six nations in 72 hours. And if they did represent us, our politicians would see a country terrified of what is going on in Canberra, a people aware of its complicity on the network of Western allies that shield and equip Israel, and a population who increasingly feel no longer represented by their governments, on housing, on cost of living, on matters of national interest like AUKUS, and on moral dilemmas of our time like Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The mask is off now for the Trump-led US global order, and the further we are frogmarched into its unprecedented moral abyss by our government, the more they will damage our social cohesion – and ultimately their viability as representatives of the people. 

Israel’s attack on the flotilla in isolation is a maniacal act, indicating a panic and a reactive obsession, but contrasting against the backdrop of its six-nation attack – it’s a cartoonish counterpoint where the country goes from maniacal to outright insane. The only thing that can be measured next to Israel’s depraved anti-human actions that threaten to shift the world tension meter to breaking point, are the actions of our Western leaders, like those in Australia, who are one of the final key elements keeping this genocidal nightmare alive.