Nasrallah has left the building

But the progressive media mutes the celebration

Beqaa Valley, Lebanon 2018. Photo by Catay Cagatay on dreamstime.com

On Saturday in the supermarket carpark, the site of many a serendipitous encounter in my glamorous and edgy life, a friend I ran into asked if I’d be letting off firecrackers in the neighbourhood park that evening to celebrate the death by bunker-busting Zionist bomb of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. 

I said something to the effect that Jewish tradition frowns upon schadenfreude or rejoicing in the vanquishing of our enemies. A line from Proverbs warns: “When your enemy falls, do not rejoice.” On Passover we do this odd ritual where we recite the ten plagues that God brought down on Egypt to persuade Pharaoh to let the Jewish slaves go free and at the mention of each calamity — blood, frogs, death of the firstborn, death by pagers and 5000-pound bunker-busting bombs — we dip our pinkie into a glass of wine, removing a drop at a time. One reason for the ritual, according to the rabbinical commentaries, is to diminish some of our joy in victory because the jubilation came at the expense of others even if they deserved the punishment. 

I’m not convinced such ethical considerations have served the Jewish people terribly well over the millennia. I’m not sure the posture of compassionate avenger has telegraphed clearly enough to history’s rotating cast of genocidal Jew-haters that FAFO. Anyway — the question is academic. Apart from two relatively brief bouts of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel in the pre-modern era, the Jews lacked the means to defeat their enemies militarily. They had to place their survival in the hand of God, and most of the time God’s hand was otherwise engaged. 

It should come as no surprise that I don’t care for biblical injunctions, or rabbinical commentaries thereof, and I sure as hell don’t care for God. So as I wrote this piece on Saturday night, against the background noise of frogs croaking in my neighbouring park, I felt very much like letting off firecrackers to celebrate the news that the chief executive of the Iranian-backed Party of God had been terminated together with a thick layer of senior management. But Jews are a tiny minority in this country; ostentatious barracking for a foreign army doesn’t seem prudent, especially for a people historically vulnerable to accusations of dual loyalty and being a nation within a nation.

Other ethnic minorities feel less inhibited, and the events of recent days show us why. After protestors in Sydney and Melbourne carried framed pictures of Nasrallah and waved flags of the proscribed Hezbollah the law enforcement authorities in what’s become a familiar response said none of this breached the law. *

In a normal world it would be the Australian government staging fireworks, in a rhetorical sense, to mark the departure of Nasrallah. A racist fanatic of imperialist ambition, his militia is a destabilising state within the Lebanese state, one responsible for the murder French and US troops, not to mention that of 85 innocents in Hezbollah’s 1994 suicide bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, an atrocity almost never mentioned.

In a normal world social democratic leaders in the West would loudly and frequently call out the Islamist axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and Iran as enemies of civilisation, and certainly as enemies of independent trade unions and women and what some may call the LGBTQI community. But ours is not a normal world. Israel-hating constituencies in Australia, Europe and the US want left-of-centre parties to know that they’re angry and they vote. My hometown grows more unfamiliar by the day. 

The most LGBTQI-friendly places are these days among the most accomodating to Islamist influence. The Muslim call to prayer rang out from university encampments protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. In my LGBTQI-friendly suburb it’s commonplace to see pro-Islamist and virulently anti-Semitic material, much of it the work of Melbourne-based Free Palestine Printing. Stickers promising a Palestinian “return” to Jerusalem, for example. The other day I saw a photograph of a pole in Fitzroy Street St Kilda, home of the Pride Centre, bearing a cartoon of a globe depicted as a person leaping and beaming with joy, cherubs at their feet. The image was headed, “The World without Israel.”

St Kilda falls in a Federal Labor seat vulnerable to the Greens. Like Lebanon, the Greens have been taken hostage by radicals to the extent the party struggles to see Jewish Israelis as even human.

So in my view it’s not coincidental that in her address to the UN on Friday Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong lamented how 77 years after the body voted to partition Palestine into two states, “one Jewish, one Palestinian,” (technically, the terminology at the time referred to an “Arab” state) the latter has still not been realised and the world must impose a timeline for its creation. Personally, I’ve been a cheerleader for the two-state solution from this comfortable distance since I was 18. The Palestinians can have the Wailing Wall itself for all I care, had they not been offered almost as much in successive negotiations, rejected it out of hand, failed to submit a counter proposal and stoked a campaign of terror. 

It seems the more the Iranian axis draws Israel into conflict, the more Wong and a chorus of Western leaders double-down on the two-state mantra, implying all will be well so long as a Palestinian state is the starting point for negotiations and not the end point. I’m not convinced that gifting the Palestinian movement a state at this juncture would lay the foundations for mutual recognition of each people’s right to self determination. 

But the two-state mantra merely irritates me. What offends me is the twin mantra of calling for “de-escalation” in the region as soon as Israel exercises the right to self-defence that world leaders insist she has. 

“Escalation” on the Israeli-Lebanese border began nearly a year ago on October 8 when in an unprovoked act of aggression Hezbollah opened a second front against the Jewish state, displacing some 80,000 Israeli civilians, and thousands of Lebanese civilians across the border, and intensifying the scale of its attacks every day since, on one of those days killing 12 children and teens on a soccer field on the Golan Heights. Arguably “Escalation” began even earlier when Hezbollah refused to abide by the terms of the 2006 UN-brokered ceasefire for a demilitarised buffer zone with Israel — a fact that has agitated the UN, not. 

I don’t care if the chorus of disapproval from global leaders on Israel’s determination to change the status quo is really just a pantomime to strategic or domestic political ends. The clamour around “restraint” and “de-escalation” fuels the growing movement to de-legitimise the Jewish state in demanding it tolerate that which no other sovereign state would. When even a pinpoint operation such as the exploding pagers, with its tragic but minimal loss of civilian life, is labelled a war crime by human rights activists because the terrorists were grocery shopping at the time, one starts to suspect the outrage is less about the act than it is about the actor.

So if Bibi Netanyahu played the US and France in his feigned acquiescence to a 21-day ceasefire with Hezbollah; if his theatrical address to the collection of petty tyrants and mass-murderers that disproportionately comprise the UN General Assembly was choreographed to distract from the fatal strike he green-lighted, while in New York, on the Party of God’s HQ in Beirut, I can only applaud a truly breathtaking performance.

Others are cheering too, which is where things get interesting. We would expect young people at a Tel Aviv pub to do a victory jig — a year ago hundreds of their brethren had tried dancing for peace at the Nova festival only to be raped, mutilated and kidnapped by Hezbollah’s colleagues in Gaza — but the celebrations extended well beyond Israel.

Even before news of Nasrallah’s death was official, images of ecstatic Lebanese, Syrians and Iranians began circulating on social media. Women in Tehran and Beirut filmed themselves rejoicing. Rebels in the Idlib region in north-western Syria were handing out sweets to passersby and praising Netanyahu. These people have long memories: Hezbollah’s intervention in support of Bashar Assad during the Syrian civil war last decade helped the dictator maintain his bloody grip on power. Some observers suggest Nasrallah is being mourned more in the West than he is in the East. 

An obituary in The Washington Post included the strangely-worded observation that, “among his followers, Mr. Nasrallah was seen as a father figure, a moral compass and a political guide.”

Admittedly I haven’t carried out a scientific study, but I reckon those who get their news exclusively from the progressive media, such as The Washington Post, might not grasp that significant numbers of people across the Arab and Muslim world are toasting Israel at this moment.

In my previous post I noted that The Age frequently airs the views of Jewish dissenters on Zionism; what some of us call, the “AsaJew”s. But the paper is yet to devote space to Arab, Muslim or Palestinian dissenters from the dominant narrative that the Jewish state is an illegitimate entity in the Middle East. These voices exist. Their absence in The Age, the ABC, The Washington Post and so on is perhaps the clearest symptom of ideological capture.

Remember that a number of journalists from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian and most astonishingly from the union committee of the ABC have signed an open letter calling on the media to report the Israel-Palestinian conflict through a lens that assumes Israel guilty from birth. The letter also criticises the Israeli government for shutting down in November the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen TV citing “security reasons.” The letter described the Israeli move as an attack on “journalism itself.” 

The first paragraph of Al-Mayadeen’s lead story on Sunday read: 

“Despite the huge loss for Lebanon, the region, the Ummah, and the free world, there is no doubt that the blood of Sayyed Hassan [Hassan Nasrallah] will haunt “Israel”, and his legacy will continue to light the path of Resistance fighters worldwide.”

**

* Shortly after publication the Australian Federal Police announced they would probe at least six incidences arising from the Melbourne protests.