By Jeremy Salt
Western governments and media remain silent on Israel’s genocide in Gaza while cracking down on those who speak out.
Across western countries, the allegedly rising tide of antisemitism is a bigger daily issue than genocide. As pushed by Israel’s lobbyists, the goal is clear: to divert attention from war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The tactic is old but tried and true—the deliberate welding of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests into one hate crime.
The targets are anyone speaking out or demonstrating against the genocide. Students, national broadcasters, and employees in the private sector are all being threatened, suspended, or sacked.
Wearing a keffiyeh or a Palestinian badge is not a sign of genocidal intent but of anti-genocide resistance. Yet, it is the genocidal state that western governments and the media are protecting, while the resistance is being targeted.
In Australia, a synagogue and cars have been torched, and anti-Jewish graffiti has been scrawled on the walls of Jewish institutions. Some arrests have been made, but mostly the perpetrators remain unknown.
Explosives and a list of synagogues recently found in a caravan on the outskirts of Sydney ignited a hysterical media firestorm about an imminent mass-casualty attack on Jewish institutions—until it was discovered that the explosives were 40 years old, believed to be stolen from a mine, and had no detonator. They had apparently been planted by a criminal seeking leverage over police
A Manufactured Controversy
Max Veifer, an Israeli “social influencer” and “content creator,” recently lured two Muslim nurses at Sydney’s Bankstown Hospital—Sarah Abu Lebdeh and Ahmad Rashad Nadir—into a videoed conversation before they realized he was Israeli.
The conversation begins with Veifer saying, “How are you, man?” and Nadir responding the same way. When Veifer says he’s from Israel, Nadir tells him in an amiable way that he’s got nice eyes but he is still going to hell.
When Veifer says he served in the IDF and asks, “What is the problem with that?” Abu Lebdeh responds for the first time: “Because you killed innocent people, that’s why.”
Veifer responds that, “I was protecting my country.” Abu Lebdeh replies, “This is Palestine country, not your country.”
“In war, people die…” Veifer says. “They started the war… Who started the war? Who elected Hamas? We spread positivity… We spread protection… We spread peace, and you spread hate.”
In the context of the Gaza genocide, the “peace” Veifer refers to includes the murder of 1,151 health workers, including 165 doctors and 260 nurses, with 120 ambulances destroyed and paramedics murdered. It is reasonable to assume the two Bankstown nurses were aware of the killing of their medical colleagues in Gaza.
At least two Palestinian doctors have been tortured to death in Israeli prisons, and a third—Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital—is missing after being abducted by besieging Israeli forces
Provoked by Veifer into making threats to kill Israelis, the remarks made by the two nurses were not anti-Jewish but anti-Israeli, and thus not antisemitic. The words “Jew” or “Jewish” were not mentioned once.
Both Nadir and Abu Lebdeh were immediately sacked for making threats to kill Veifer. There is no evidence that either of them has any record of violence against Israelis or anyone else or that they seriously intended violence. Provoked by an Israeli soldier, they were caught off guard and spoke emotionally and incautiously. They walked into the trap he had set for them.
Veifer’s stated intention was to draw Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s attention to the “tremendous antisemitism” in Australia. He remarked, “We want to live peacefully with everyone, we Israelis.” He went on to say, “We don’t want to go to hospitals or to different countries and experience this hate for no reason.”
No reason? The slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, including more than 14,000 children, is not reason enough?
Hospitals Turned to Graveyards
As for the hospitals, 36 in Gaza were ‘visited by Israeli soldiers, tanks, and planes. All were partly or wholly destroyed, with staff murdered or abducted by occupying forces in the most flagrant breach of international law regarding the protected status of hospitals and medical staff during wartime.
The ‘reason for Israel’s invasion of these hospitals was to destroy them. On January 3, 2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that 16 hospitals were partly functional and 20 were closed. The last fully functional hospital, Kamal Adwan, was evacuated under threat by occupying forces in December 2024. Only seven of UNRWA’s 27 health centers remain functional, while only 38% of primary health centers (52 out of 138) are fully or partly functional.
Hospital staff and thousands of Palestinians crowded around the hospitals have been killed or abducted while Israel’s denial of medical supplies meant certain death for patients with chronic health problems and a lowered chance of survival for badly wounded civilians.
Double Standards in the West
Under the heading of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” politicians and the Australian media have justified the onslaught on Gaza. The killing or abduction of several hundred civilians by Hamas on October 7 was heinous in their eyes. But Israel’s slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, including hospital staff, journalists, and UN employees, is apparently not. Criticism is rare, condemnation nonexistent, and justification common despite the mass of evidence against Israel.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued a warrant for the arrest of genocide architect Benjamin Netanyahu. His status is described as “at large.” He is accused of being “allegedly responsible for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population, as well as the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
The accusation of genocide against the Israeli government was found to be “plausible” in January 2024, with Israel not only refusing to obey the court’s instruction to desist but committing even more crimes.
Despite all of this, in January 2025 the Australian Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, was sent to Israel for friendly discussions with senior government officials, excluding Netanyahu but including President Isaac Herzog, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, and Justice Minister Yariv Levin.
The reason for the visit was to pacify Israel after Netanyahu’s theatrical outrage over Australia’s vote for a UN General Assembly resolution calling for the rapid withdrawal of Israel from the 1967 occupied territories.
Speaking at a “United with Israel” rally on October 13, 2023, Dreyfus described himself as “the son of a Holocaust survivor” (in fact his father George moved to Australia from Germany shortly before the start of the Second World War).
“There is no excuse for the atrocities of Hamas,” he told the rally. “There is no justification. This was not just an attack on the state of Israel and it was not just an attack on the people of Israel. This was an attack on the Jewish people.”
Clearly, October 7 was not an attack on the Jewish people but on a state occupying Palestinian land in violation of international law that well before October 7 was massacring Palestinians, starving them and depriving them of the basic necessities of life.
Dreyfus referred to Israeli children “butchered in their beds.” An infinitely greater number of Palestinian children have been ‘butchered in their beds’ or killed on the streets of Gaza but he is not known to have made any public statement about this.
According to the Times of Israel, 38 Israeli children were “murdered” on October 7 and 20 orphaned. By comparison, the Associated Press reported on January 25 2025 that 13,000 Palestinian children had “died” since October 7 (the UN puts the figure at “more than 13,000.” Other estimates are much higher but the true figure is not known because of unrecovered bodies under the rubble).
Palestinian and international aid agencies put the number of orphaned Palestinian children at close to 40,000. There is now a new category of wounded children with no surviving family (WCNSF), numbered 17,000 just by March 2024. Thousands of other children have been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon just in recent decades.
Not once has Mark Dreyfus or any other Australian government minister or shadow minister described the mass killing of civilians in Gaza by Israel since 2023 as murders or atrocities “with no excuse or justification.”
The government’s intervention is limited to remarks about the humanitarian catastrophe, without directly naming who is responsible, and calls for restraint and a ceasefire. The mass killing of Palestinian children, often in the most atrocious circumstances, is a subject not even up for discussion.
While taking a moral stand against the killing of Israelis, neither Dreyfus nor his ministerial colleagues have taken a moral stand against an Israeli prime minister indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity and a government accused by the ICJ (International Court of Justice) more than a year ago of “plausibly” being guilty of genocide. Ignoring the court’s instructions to desist, Israel continued its program of total destruction, mass killing, and ethnic cleansing.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has claimed “moral clarity” when speaking of the killing of Israeli Jews on October 7, 2023. He has described the Hamas attack as a terrible terrorist atrocity; as indiscriminate and abhorrent; as cold calculating butchery; as pitiless brutality; as mass murder on a horrific scale; and as the slaughter of innocent people.
Yet, deferential to the Israeli lobby, as Australian politicians always are, when it comes to the obliteration of Gaza and Israel’s mass murder of Muslims, Albanese and his ministers have not used one of these expressions.
While offering boundless sympathy to Jewish Australians, the Albanese government has acknowledged only ‘concern’ among Muslim Australians. They have the right to expect Albanese to express his ‘moral clarity’ by condemning Israel for what is globally regarded as one of the worst genocides in modern history. Instead, they have heard the most deafening sound of all – silence.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
