Extract from The Guardian
Zomi Frankcom was only 43. She was one of our finest Australians. Self-giving, courageous and compassionate; in her life we see the expression of the deepest and truest values of what we aspire to be, indeed, of what it should mean to be an Australian.
Her death along with six other aid colleagues from World Central Kitchen should never have happened. World Central Kitchen had done everything right in communicating clearly with the IDF their plans for food delivery and displaying their logos clearly. An IDF spokesperson acknowledged this, saying World Central Kitchen had responded to Israel’s needs also. They were humanitarian and neutral.
Her death triggered me because it could have been me or any of my colleagues. We all follow the same protocols in delivering aid in war – communicating with the military transparently. We all rely on international humanitarian law for protection following these protocols, as we are neutrals.
Zomi was part of the food lifeline to keep people in Gaza alive. Humans need about 2,100 calories a day, or if in a food basket, 661g of food. This amounts to 1,388 tonnes of food a day that must be trucked in for a population of 2.1 million people. Because of the Israeli blockade on Gaza these trucks have been going for many years. It is nothing surprising or new. But since the barbaric Hamas attack on 7 October and the war, we now are seeing Palestinian children starving and 300,000 to 500,000 people in Gaza at risk of famine.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has offered a full investigation of this tragedy but rather glibly said this sort of thing happens in war. No, it does not. Accountability cannot mean just a “war defence” and should mean that someone in Israel may be charged for their deaths.
Zomi and her colleagues were humanitarians saving lives. That is what aid organisations do in all conflict zones and we do it under the coordination of the UN’s Office for Humanitarian Affairs. Our every move is logged and checked with the military and this thing does not happen.
Netanyahu’s response smacked to me of impunity and recklessness. And the world has until recently been wringing its hands while the innocent deaths (now more than 32,000) of women and children in Gaza has been beamed on to our television news for the last six months.
We have seen in the past the equivocation from our leaders to assert a simple proposition: namely that an innocent Palestinian life is equal to an innocent Jewish life. That is what my faith teaches me and what universal human rights means. And in the binary rush of Netanyahu and Hamas to claim victimhood to win political support we ignore that humans can simultaneously be both victims and perpetrators. Both Netanyahu and Hamas oppose a two-state solution and both need and feed off each other.
We can predict our leaders’ response in saying, well, Israel has a right to defend itself but it must do so proportionately and subject to international law. But what happens when they don’t? It leaves us feeling overwhelmed. And we find it so unbearable and feel so impotent that we look away.
Zomi and her colleagues did not look away. They were not impotent nor paralysed. They put their lives on the line as have more than 200 other aid workers who the UN reports have died in this war so far in Gaza.
This is why I sense a tipping point. I was pleased to hear our PM call for accountability and particularly Penny Wong to speak of this as being an outrage.
It is an outrage. Zomi deserves our outrage as do all innocents in this war.
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