A personal view of Australian and International Politics
Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Jack Dodds (second from left) is a stockman by day, and an actor by night. (Supplied: Pat Greer.)
For most of the week, you can find stockman Jack Dodds on a tractor, rounding up cattle or mustering sheep on his farm.
But on Fridays, the 28-year-old lives out his other passion: performing on stage.
"It's … escapism," Dodds said.
"We're getting away from our world and going into something that's completely fictional or that has happened in history.
"We're stepping out of our world and into someone else's, which is actually quite refreshing."
Jack Dodds has written and co-directed a number of musicals that have toured the country. (Supplied: Jack Dodds)
Big stages
Growing up in the rural town of Molong, in the NSW Central West, Dodds knew he would end up back on the family farm.
But before committing to a life of livestock, he gave his passion for theatre a crack.
Now
he enjoys the best of both worlds, writing musical comedies including
Schapelle Schapelle, which has toured Australia, and Murder Horse.
Dodds said his outside interest was a way to handle the daily challenges of life on the land.
Jack Dodds runs a farm in Cumnock, in Central West NSW. (Supplied: Jack Dodds. )
"I need [theatre]; it's just the way that my brain works," he said.
"For
anyone that is on farm, tapping into a creative outlet … takes the
pressure off the reality that you can be living in, which is a very
stressful world.
"I think
having that creative outlet, a lot of farmers paint and a lot of farmers
are into sport, and I love sport too, but this is my main outlet."
For Dodds, theatre is vital for the survival of rural communities.
When not mustering sheep or driving tractors, Jack Dodds (left) can be found writing the next musical comedy. (Supplied: Jack Dodds)
He said it offered an opportunity to step away from the stresses of farm life.
"Once
you step out of your comfort zone, especially doing theatre or being
involved, that broadens your horizons for other things and sets your
mind at ease," Dodds said.
Amateur theatre
Geraldine Brown has found her passion for being on stage with the Molong Players. (Supplied: Peter Donner)
A
few times a week, Geraldine Brown leaves the stresses of her farm at
the front gate and travels a few kilometres to the Molong community
hall.
She is not there for a book club or for a Country Women's Association meeting.
Instead, she is writing the next Molong Players show, to be performed later this year.
"It
is a joyous outlet for living in the country, particularly when times
get tough because you can check all your emotional baggage at the door
and have a good time," Brown said.
Geraldine Brown lives on a farm a few kilometres from Molong town, in Central West NSW. (ABC Central West: Emily Middleton)
Still
going strong after almost 40 years, Molong Players has provided a
creative outlet for generations of amateur thespians and theatre lovers.
"Anybody who wants to be involved pretty much gets a guernsey," Brown said.
Molong Players has been operating in the state's Central West for more than 40 years. (Supplied: Molong Players)
"[Farmers]
certainly have helped out in backstage roles as well, in set building
and where we can utilise their technical skills."
Brown, who is a mixed farmer, has been part of the group for almost 20 years.
Geraldine Brown has been stepping away from the farm for Molong Players for almost 20 years. (ABC Central West: Emily Middleton)
"Whatever
it is that gets you off the farm, particularly if you're on it 24/7, is
an invaluable event or community group to be part of," she said.
"If it's dry, it's tough. If it's wet, it's tough. If the market's down, it's tough.
"And it gets you out of your head if you get off the farm and get involved in something."
A range of community members come together each year to form the Molong Players cast. (ABC Central West: Emily Middleton)
Actor and co-writer Mario Samir said the Molong Players shows also offered a night off for the community.
"It
gives a small community an outlet, gives them a night out during the
year that they all look forward to, because they know it's going to be
fun, it's going to be lighthearted," he said.
"It'll be a bit of a release of tension that perhaps you had to deal with all year."
Palestinian
poet Mosab Abu Toha, pictured in front of the ruins of a building in
Gaza, is appearing at the 2026 Sydney Writers' Festival. (Supplied)
When
Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu
Toha and his family were living in an apartment in Gaza, in the same
building as his parents and brothers.
Israel
invaded Gaza in response, and the family soon received warning that
Israeli forces planned to attack the area. They evacuated to the Jabalia
refugee camp, in Gaza's north, where they learned their home had been
destroyed by an Israeli strike.
The
refugee camp was also bombed, and the family moved to another location,
a school run by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA). It,
too, was bombed.
In November,
the month he turned 30, Abu Toha and his wife, Maram, made the
heart-wrenching decision to escape Gaza — leaving behind parents,
siblings and cousins — for the sake of their children, Yazzan, Yaffa and
Mostafa, who was born in the US and has an American passport.
"In Gaza, a child is not really a child," Abu Toha wrote in an article in The New Yorker, part of the Letters from Gaza series that won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
The
family fled south in a donkey cart, heading to the Rafah border
crossing. At an Israeli checkpoint on the way, a soldier singled out Abu
Toha, who was detained at gunpoint and taken away.
What
ensued was a terrifying episode: he was stripped, blindfolded,
handcuffed, beaten, forced into a truck and transported to a detention
centre in Israel, where he was interrogated on suspicion of being a
member of Hamas.
The poet
professed his innocence and was eventually released with a cursory
apology. He rejoined his family and, in December 2023, they made their
way to Egypt and then the US, where they still live.
Abu
Toha — whose 2022 debut poetry collection, Things You May Find Hidden
in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for
Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award — writes about this traumatic
period in his acclaimed second poetry collection, Forest of Noise
(2024).
This week, the poet and
founder of Gaza's first English-language library will appear via video
at the Sydney Writers' Festival to discuss his poetry and the occupation
that shaped it.
'Poetry is immediate'
Abu
Toha wrote half of the poems in Forest of Noise before October 2023 and
the other half afterwards, in Gaza, Egypt and the US.
"I
wrote some poems while I was watching my people, my friends and
relatives and neighbours, being slaughtered," he tells ABC Arts in a
video call from his home in the US.
"For
me, as an individual, as a writer, as an artist, it was very important
for me to express myself using my art form, which is poetry."
Abu Toha has written essays for the New York Times and the Washington Post as well as The New Yorker. (Supplied: Mohamed Mahdy)
Poetry as a form is well-suited to the task of conveying life in a war zone.
"Poetry
combines the human sense of seeing and watching and smelling, but also
feeling, something that you can't easily express in other forms," he
says.
"Poetry is immediate.
You're not planning to write a poem. You're not sitting, for example,
and saying, 'OK, I'm going read some books … in order to write about
education in Gaza.'
"It's not something that you prepare for. It is something that compels you to sit and write about these feelings."
Writing poetry has allowed Abu Toha to confront his fears, which often manifest in disturbing nightmares of the bombardment.
"I
have relatives in my family who were killed with their spouses and
their children. So many times, I would wonder, what does it mean to be
buried under the rubble of your house?
"Because
whoever was killed in an air strike, it's not necessary that they were
killed instantly. Maybe they were bleeding under the rubble, like what
happened to some of my relatives.
"Poetry helps me … explore these scenarios that could have happened to me."
The language of war
Abu Toha began learning English in fifth grade and immediately felt an affinity for the language.
He wrote the poems in his two published collections in English.
"I haven't written, unfortunately, a single poem in Arabic since October 2023," he says.
He finds writing in Arabic different to writing in English.
"When
I write in my mother tongue, it's like exploring universal themes:
family, what does it mean to be a father, a son … What is the sea? What
is the sky? What are the clouds? And how do you see them as a human?"
Abu
Toha offers an example: a poem he wrote in Arabic, in which he
considered death in philosophical terms. "I personified death," he says.
"When
I talk to death, I talk to it as a natural phenomenon, as if death is
responsible for the crashing of a plane, for car accidents, for
illnesses.
"And I was questioning death — 'Why don't you knock at the door before you enter the room?'"
English, however, brings with it different associations.
In Under the Rubble, he writes: "heaven has been blocked by the drones / and F-16s and the smoke of death".
"When I write about death in English, it's about death that comes through airstrikes, through bullets," he says.
Growing up in Gaza
Abu
Toha was born in 1992 in the Al-Shati refugee camp, one of eight
refugee camps in Gaza. (There are more refugee camps in the West Bank
and in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.)
Of the 2.4 million people who live in Gaza, around 1.6 million are registered refugees.
"Interestingly, and unfortunately, and heartbreakingly, that is the same refugee camp where my father was born," he says.
It was also the camp where his paternal grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great grandmother lived and died.
Abu
Toha hopes "the world will take action, not only to stop [the violence]
from happening, but also to hold accountable those responsible for the
crimes of occupying my country". (Supplied)
In
2000, when Abu Toha was eight, the family moved to Beit Lahia, a city
not far from the Jabalia camp where his mother was born.
Jabalia — the largest camp in Gaza, with a population of 110,000 — has been largely destroyed by Israeli air strikes.
"Israel is not only killing Palestinians, which is a tragedy, but it's killing refugees," Abu Toha says.
"And Israel is not only bombing houses; Israel is bombing refugee camps."
One attack on Jabalia, on October 31, 2023, killed more than 120 people.
"I was a witness to that massacre," Abu Toha says.
"I took videos, I took photos, very, very graphic. I can't start to tell you about that."
For
the young Abu Toha, life in Beit Lahia, an agricultural town surrounded
by trees and fields, was very different to living among the cramped,
narrow alleys of Al-Shati.
"[There] you barely can walk between the houses," Abu Toha says.
Like much of Beit Lahia — "now a heap of rubble" — the high school Abu Toha attended has been destroyed in the war.
He tells me it's where a nine-year-old girl, Ritaj Rihan, was shot by Israeli forces on April 9, 2026, while sitting in a makeshift classroom among the high school's ruins.
Abu
Toha documents the dead on his social media accounts, "humanising" the
Palestinian victims of the war, like Ritaj, who would otherwise remain
an anonymous statistic.
Like the photos and videos he shares on Instagram, his poetry is another record of life under the Israeli occupation.
"In
2000, I was seven years old when I first saw a helicopter firing a
rocket on a building a few hundred metres away from where I was," Abu
Toha says.
The episode appears in his poem, Younger than War:
I saw a helicopter fire a rocket into a tower,
concrete and glass fell from high …
At the time, I was seven:
decades younger than war, a few years older than bombs.
In
2009, when he was 16, Abu Toha was injured in an Israeli attack that
killed seven people, the subject of the poem Things You May Find Hidden
in My Ear, published in his first collection.
"At the time, it was the most tragic event in my life but later I witnessed so many other tragic events," he says.
In
2014, the year he completed his English degree at the Islamic
University in Gaza, Israel launched a 50-day attack on Gaza. More than
2,000 Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians, including three of Abu
Toha's close friends.
He wrote about the incident in No Art:
I've personally lost three friends to war, a city to darkness, and a language to fear. This was not easy to survive, but survival proved necessary to master. But of all things, losing the only photo of my grandfather under the rubble of my house was a real disaster.
"That was in 2014. If the poem was to be written today, it would be hundreds of friends, unfortunately."
Founding Gaza's first English-language library
Abu
Toha's graduation ceremony was postponed after the Islamic University's
English department, which held many books, was destroyed in the 2014
Gaza War.
He visited the ruins and found a copy of The Norton Anthology of American Literature amid the wreckage.
He wrote in Literary Hub in 2022 that "carefully lifting the anthology from under the rubble felt like saving the life of a child".
Rescuing the book gave Abu Toha an idea: to establish a library in Gaza.
Growing up in Gaza, "the term library was absent", he says. "There are no libraries in the refugee camp."
"I
hope that when the war ends I can go back to Gaza, to help rebuild my
family home and fill it with books," Abu Toha wrote in The New Yorker. (Supplied)
In
2016, he set up a Facebook page requesting book donations. Receiving
books, however, posed a challenge in a besieged city lacking a regular
residential postal service.
Since
2007, Israel has instituted an air, land and sea blockade of Gaza that
means everything that enters the city must first go through Israel.
As a result, it took weeks and weeks for deliveries to reach Abu Toha.
"That was one of the hardest parts of creating the library," he says.
Abu
Toha eventually raised enough money to rent a space and opened the
first branch of the Edward Said Public Library, named after the
influential Palestinian and American academic, in 2017.
It was the first English-language public library in Gaza, and a second branch with a computer lab opened in Beit Lahia in 2019.
"Unfortunately, both branches have been destroyed by the Israeli attacks," he says.
Abu Toha labelled the act a war crime in a statement posted on social media at the time:
"All
the dreams that I and friends in Gaza and abroad were drawing for our
children have been burnt by Israel's genocidal campaign to erase Gaza
and everything that breathes of life and love," he wrote.
"The obliteration of Gaza's universities, schools, cultural centres as well as religious sites must be condemned."
A message for readers
So, what does Abu Toha hope the Australian audience at his Sydney Writers' Festival appearance takes away from his poetry?
"For me, my poetry is not merely poetry. It is not my personal experience as an individual," he says.
For
Abu Toha, poetry is not just about self-expression and survival. It's
also about bearing witness to the devastation of Gaza, what he describes
as "live-streamed genocide".
This
is a particularly important task since Israel banned international
journalists from entering Gaza after it launched its invasion in 2023.
"These are not personal poems. These are collective poems," he says.
"They
should not be read as an individual account, but these are accounts of
the lives of hundreds if not thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians, some of whom were killed, some of whom are being killed
right now, some of whom may get killed [in the future]."
One example is Right or Left!, which he wrote after an airstrike killed his friend and his friend's family.
"That poem is about us finding the bones of a girl after she was buried under the rubble for months," Abu Toha says.
We only find one small bone from her body. It is a bone from her arm. Right or left? It does not matter as long as we cannot find the henna from her neighbors' wedding on her skin, or the ink from a school pen on a little index finger.
"This is not about me," he says.
"This is about my friends, the families of my friends, my neighbours, my students."
On
a dirt field on Mexico's Pacific coast, five cousins between the ages
of eight and 13 strip down and kick off their shoes. Nearby, adults help
them fasten the pre-Hispanic-style "fajado," securing loincloths and
leather belts that wrap around their hips.
The
Osuna children grab the rubber ball, all 3.2 kilograms of it, about
seven times heavier than a regular football, and begin playing. Only the
hips may touch it, forcing players to leap through the air or dive low
when it skims the ground.
As
Mexico prepares to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the nation is
looking back 3,400 years to one of the oldest team sports: the ancient
ball game known as ulama, a ritual practice nearly erased during the
Spanish conquest.
The sport survived only in the remote pockets of north-western Mexico before its late 20th-century rebirth.
Today,
authorities and its modern players are leveraging the momentum of
international soccer to shine a spotlight on the ancient sport once
again.
Practitioners do not want the game to become a novelty. (Getty Images: Anadolu/Daniel Cardenas)
While
players acknowledge that tourism fuelled the sport's revival, many
worry that projecting an "exotic" image undermines a tradition central
to their identity.
"We must rid
the game of the notion that it is a living fossil," said Emilie
Carreón, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico,
UNAM, and director of a project aimed at studying and practising the
sport.
That's exactly what the
Osuna family is trying to do. After ulama player Aurelio Osuna died, his
widow, María Herrera, 53, continued his legacy, teaching the ball game
to their grandchildren in their small village in Sinaloa, 1,000
kilometres north-west of Mexico City.
"This seed will bear fruit some day," she said.
A pre-Hispanic ritual
One of the rules of ulama is that only the hips can be used to play the ball. (AP Photo: Marco Ugarte)
According
to the Popol Vuh, the sacred Mayan book, the world was created from a
ball game, where light and darkness clashed to balance life and death
and set the universe in motion.
Long
before the Maya, the Olmecs, the earliest known Mesoamerican
civilisation, practised the sport; the recreation of this clash of
opposing forces was common in various pre-Hispanic cultures. The
evidence is in millennial rubber balls unearthed in Mexico and in nearly
2,000 ball courts found from Nicaragua to Arizona.
The
game, depicted in codices, stone carvings and sculptures, had many
variations and meanings, from fertility or war ceremonies, to political
acts and even sacrifices.
The ritualistic side of ulama is an important aspect of the sport. (Getty Images: Anadolu/Daniel Cardenas)
While
some players were beheaded, possibly the losers, Guatemalan
archaeologist and anthropologist Carlos Navarrete explained this
occurred only during specific periods and in certain regions. The
physically demanding game was primarily a big social event, drawing
crowds for fun and betting.
Spanish
conquistador Hernán Cortés was impressed by the spectacle presented by
the Aztec emperor Moctezuma but the Spanish ultimately banned ulama and
ordered the destruction of its courts, likely viewing the tradition as a
form of resistance to Christianity. For the Catholic Church "the ball
was the living devil," Carreón said.
People have been playing ulama since pre-Hispanic times. (AP Photo: Marco Ugarte)
The
game, played by hitting the ball with the hip, the forearm or a mallet,
survived only on the Mexican northern Pacific coast, where the colonial
process led by Jesuit priests was less aggressive and ulama was
accepted in Catholic festivities, said Manuel Aguilar-Moreno, a
professor of art history at California State University.
On
the opening day of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, spectators watched as
burly men contorted their bodies in unexpected ways to keep the rubber
ball moving for as long as possible. The exhibition sparked studies
about the ball game and how to preserve it in the following decades.
The game's revival
Juan Osuna is a third-generation ulama player. (AP Photo: Marco Ugarte)
Luis
Aurelio Osuna, 30, Herrera's eldest son, began playing hip ulama after
school, just as his father did decades ago in Los Llanitos, a ranch next
to the port city of Mazatlán. Now his three children also play.
Osuna
and his mother teach the children how to hit the ball and guide them
through the complicated rules, which include a scoring system with
points that are won and lost.
They do it out of passion, but also out of pragmatism in a state where organised crime is pervasive.
"We need to find a way to keep them entertained with good things," Osuna said.
Hip ulama teams have up to six players and the Osuna family sometimes participates in tournaments or exhibitions.
Decades
ago, matches were big events tied to religious feasts, sometimes
stretching on for an entire week. But those days are gone, as interest
waned and rubber balls became hard to get.
In
the 1980s, filmmaker Roberto Rochín documented the work of perhaps the
last rubber ball-maker in the mountains of Sinaloa. The artisan made
them similar to the Olmecs, who discovered that mixing hot rubber sap
with a plant created a strong, elastic and durable material. This
civilisation made some of the oldest balls of the world.
A spectacle sparking mixed feelings
The "hule", or ball, can be contested with for ritual, religious and even conflict-resolving purposes. (Getty Images: Daniel Cardenas/Anadolu)
During
the 1990s, staff from a resort in the Mexican Caribbean travelled
across the country in search of Sinaloan families who could represent
the ball game as a tourist attraction in the Riviera Maya, where no-one
played it anymore.
"It's pure
spectacle: they paint their faces and put on feathered costumes,"
Herrera said. Yet, she acknowledges the value. "That's where the revival
began."
The ball game began to
spread and to be known outside Mexico. Osuna, with the family team his
father had formed, ended up playing hip ulama in a Roman amphitheatre in
Italy. It attracted so much attention that they were hired for a
deodorant commercial, he said.
Participants say they are not performing monkeys as officials try to popularise the sport. (Getty Images: Anadolu/Daniel Cardenas)
As
the World Cup approaches, authorities and corporations are launching
exhibitions in Mexico City and Guadalajara, and featuring ulama players
in ad campaigns highlighting Mexican heritage, a move that has sparked
mixed feelings.
"We're
not circus monkeys," says Ángel Ortega, a 21-year-old ulama player from
Mexico City who recently participated in a TV commercial alongside
football players.
Ilse Sil, a
player and member of the UNAM project led by Carreón, believes that
institutional support will help to preserve ulama but officials need to
promote the game in communities and schools to recruit more young
players, as it remains a marginal sport with approximately 1,000
players, mainly in México and Guatemala.
In
Los Llanitos, Herrera's grandchildren love playing. They don't care
where — in the dirt field, in a court or even in the house corridor —
but always with the precious inheritance: a handmade decades-old rubber
ball from the mountains of Sinaloa. They say it cushions the blows
better.
Eight-year-old Kiki is
the most enthusiastic. He says he is determined to keep practising until
he fulfils the dream of leading a team of his own.
Benjamin Netanyahu said Itamar Ben-Gvir's treatment of flotilla activists was "not in line with Israel's values and norms". (Reuters: Jonathan Ernst)
Politics is never at its optimal when it reaches the "yes but whatever our side did, the other side was worse" stage.
Unfortunately, that's long been a recurring theme in the mire that is the Middle East.
For
the last two-and-a-half years, that has been a particularly cursed and
complex theme, particularly in terms of the way the rest of the world
has perceived events.
The
undoubted horrors of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 were
greeted with shock, anger and grief. But as the sheer scale of Israel's
response in Gaza continued to grow — the scale of the killing, the
extent of the destruction, the apparent targeting of aid workers and
journalists — the moral "balance" was repeatedly challenged and
rebalanced.
Defenders of the
actions of the Israeli government and the Israeli Defence Force would
insist that any criticism was blind to what Hamas had done.
In the past couple of weeks, there has been a new battleground of accusations and counter-accusations.
Israeli footage of activists from intercepted Gaza flotilla sparks global fury (Sarah Ferguson)
Protests outside the New York Times
Just as an Israeli investigation into the security failings of October 7 was released — and, with it, horrific reports
of what happened to Israeli prisoners of Hamas — an opinion piece in
the New York Times detailed equally horrific allegations about the
treatment of Palestinian prisoners in the hands of Israel.
A storm of protest erupted over the New York Times piece, challenging the allegations it published.
But
as many pointed out the time, the protests held outside the newspaper's
offices in New York were targeted at the fact the newspaper had run the
story, not the disturbing underlying allegations.
The
fact that, on both sides, the allegations involved sordid accounts of
gross sexual assault gave the stories a particularly horrific tone.
But
as anyone who has seen pictures of Israeli hostages released from Gaza
or those of Palestinian prisoners (like veteran journalist Ali
al-Samoudi) knows, the maltreatment has been shocking in much more
mundane ways, linked to beatings and starvation.
And
now, this week, the issue of the treatment of prisoners held by Israel
has been on display after the IDF detained more than 400 members of an
international flotilla seeking to take aid to Gaza.
In
an age when the US has repeatedly blown up vessels off Venezuela, the
legal niceties of detaining foreign citizens in international waters
seems a bit petty but should always be noted.
As
ANU international law expert Professor Don Rothwell notes, the IDF
claims the interdiction was to enforce Israel's longstanding maritime
blockade of Gaza, which in turn it says isalegitimate act of naval warfare during an armed conflict such as that of the US and Iran.
Along
with many other countries, Australia now recognises Palestine as an
international state, but since Israel doesn't recognise Palestine, its
actions in Gaza aren't recognised as an international armed conflict
between two states.
Therefore,
Rothwell notes "any attempt to enforce the blockade off the coast of
Cyprus has no legal basis under international law".
Rothwell
points out that "for Australia, interference with the freedom of
navigation has been a constant concern in the South China Sea, and more
recently in the Strait of Hormuz".
"It should likewise be a cause for concern in the Mediterranean."
But freedom of navigation is one of those (rather important) arguments that's been lost in recent times.
What also seems lost, particularly in Israel, is the significance of its actions, as compared to the way its actions are seen.
Itamar Ben-Gvir released footage on Wednesday in which he is seen taunting activists from a Gaza flotilla intercepted by Israel. (Reuters: Ronen Zvulun)
National security minister sparks outrage
Far-right
Israeli minister for national security Itamar Ben-Gvir released footage
on Wednesday in which he is seen taunting activists from the Gaza
flotilla intercepted by Israel, which immediately sparked an
international outcry.
Dozens of
activists can be seen being forced to kneel on the ground, face down,
with their hands tied behind them, at an Ashdod port facility where they
were being processed ahead of their likely deportation.
A
female activist shouting "Free Palestine" is grabbed by the head and
shoved to the ground by officers who drag her out of Ben-Gvir's way as
he tours the facility.
Ben-Gvir is seen waving a large Israeli flag and shouting in Hebrew: "Welcome to Israel! We are in charge here!"
He
is also heard urging guards at the facility "not [to] be bothered by
their screams" as a woman can be heard crying out in the background.
It
is not just that all this was captured on film that sparked the
outrage, it is the fact that Ben-Gvir posted it himself and that, as
national security minister, he is responsible for prisons.
Jaded
Palestinian observers complained that it seemed the world was only
interested in brutality towards prisoners when it was foreigners being
treated like this, not Palestinians.
But the other disturbing aspect of this incident has been the reaction in Israeli politics.
There
has been plenty of commentary in the Israeli media denouncing
Ben-Gvir's actions, but the focus of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and his foreign minister seemed to be on the perceptions it created
rather than what had actually happened.
Netanyahu
issued a rapid and rare rebuke, insisting that the way his national
security minister "dealt with the activists … is not in line with
Israel's values and norms", though he added that Israel has every right
to prevent "Hamas terrorist supporters from entering our territorial
waters and reaching Gaza".
Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said Ben-Gvir had "caused harm to our state in this disgraceful display".
"You are not the face of Israel," he said in a social media post.
The domestic political front
It
is now unofficial election season in Israel, with a push to dissolve
the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, and go to the polls a little
earlier than they are due to be held in October.
The
assessment here is that this is to avoid going to the polls when they
would coincide with memories of October 7, and reminders of the failings
of the Israeli government and security forces that allowed that to
happen.
The electioneering is
now on in earnest, and the rhetoric is only going to get more extreme as
the far right battles it out for an even greater say in the next
parliament.
The problem though
is that so much of the political debate, such as it is, is not focused
on what Israel is doing — whether that is in regards to peace flotillas
or Iran — as perceptions of what it is doing and how this may affect the
rapidly diminishing support for Israel internationally, particularly in
the United States.
For
example, Naftali Bennett is a former prime minister of Israel. He
recently announced he would join forces with the leader of the
Opposition Yair Lapid (who also briefly served as prime minister) to
jointly run in the upcoming elections to defeat Netanyahu and his Likud
party.
In an Israel that has
continued to move to the right, Lapid is often perceived as left-wing
because he was the last prime minister to publicly support a two-state
solution.
But not anymore.
Bennett said at the launch of the new joint team that "we will safeguard
the lands of our country and will not hand over a single centimetre to
the enemy".
Bennett's lengthy response this week to the Ben-Gvir controversy this week was telling.
"This is how we will fix Israel's hasbara," he began in a post on social media.
Hasbara
— the Hebrew word for "explaining" — is the complex communications
operation run by Israel which extends well beyond public diplomacy to
push Israel's message in the international community.
As
an organisation, it now runs under the control of the prime minister's
office and, since the war on Gaza, its budget is estimated to have
jumped from around $15 million in 2023 to $700 million in 2026.
Much of the commentary in Israel about Ben-Gvir's actions goes to the damage he has done to the hasbara message.
"Everyone
was talking today about the hasbara disaster caused by a failed
minister who sold out Israel's security for likes on TikTok. And they
are right," Neftali Bennett wrote.
"The
Netanyahu-Ben-Gvir-Deri coalition has weakened Israel's international
standing to an unprecedented low, endangering IDF soldiers abroad and
arming our antisemitic enemies around the world.
"But condemnation is not enough. Instead of just talking about what not to do, it's time to talk about what to do."
Bennett
went on to list what his new political force would do if it won office,
including establishing "a powerful national hasbara authority", which
would "set Israel's messaging strategy, coordinate between bodies, and
ensure that the Israeli response is swift, unified, and professional".
That is, not change the underlying actions, just the public relations machine.
His
comments seem to suggest that Israeli politics really doesn't get the
point, which is that Israel probably needs to spend less time worrying
about controlling the optics and more time considering the implications
of its actions for its long-term international support.
