Terror On The Beach

Last Saturday the Israeli military shot and wounded a five-year old girl on the beach in Rafah, southern Gaza.

In July Israeli gunships bombed tents on the beach in Khan Younis, killing five.

In March last year Israel killed two unarmed Palestinians on the beach and buried their bodies under the sand with a bulldozer.

In May and June of last year, an Al Jazeera Arabic investigation found Israeli snipers killed Palestinians on the beach in Gaza who were walking towards them with their hands up. Their bodies were left strewn on the sand, later eaten by stray dogs.

In June last year video phone footage captured Israel bombing the tents of displaced people on a Gaza beach.

In July last year Israeli soldiers filmed themselves firing mortar shells at people on the beach in Gaza for fun.

In August last year Israeli gunships once again opened fire on the tents of displaced Palestinians on the beach, killing and wounding.

In August this year Israel bombed a tent on the beach in Gaza which had been turned into a makeshift café, killing four.

This café attack came after the far-more deadly café attack just a few weeks earlier, in late June, which targeted the popular Al-Baqa Cafeteria and killed thirty-nine people including a one-year old girl and numerous journalists.

Even the BBC couldn’t ignore this one.

The beaches of Gaza, and in particular Gaza’s beach cafes, have for many years been a regular site of Israeli slaughter.

In July 2014, Israel bombed the Fun Time Beach Café where dozens had gathered to watch the World Cup semi-final between Argentina and The Netherlands. Nine people were murdered, five of them children.

Seven days later Israel launched missiles at children playing football on the beach in Gaza, killing four.

These are just a selection of terror attacks on beaches, the ones I could find, the ones that were filmed, the ones we know about.

Most people won’t have heard about any of these. There were no outraged statements, no sombre-faced TV presenters reading these deaths as headline news. These beach atrocities didn’t provoke days of front-page coverage and live blogs.

Who knows how many people in total have been killed on the beaches of Gaza. Dozens? Hundreds? No one is keeping score.

Unlike the Bondi beach attack, where the score keeping is precise. We know the number of dead and we know their names, their faces, their stories.

The coverage of Bondi is an injunction to identify and to feel empathy.

This coverage, in contrast to the relative silence regarding beach atrocities in Gaza, speaks loud and clear: Jewish lives matter and Palestinian lives don’t.

Not, anyway, to the western political and media elite.

This has been obvious for years, especially the past two. The last few days have driven home this fact.

15 dead Jews is days of headlines and global political reaction.

15 dead Palestinians is just another Tuesday.

Six days ago, the UN reported 360 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since the ‘ceasefire’ was announced. The number has since risen to 393. How many of their names do you know? How many of their faces have you seen on your screens? Mothers, sons, husbands, brothers. In one instance in late November, a ten-year old and a nine-year old, brothers, murdered while collecting firewood.

Despite nearly 400 dead, the media report that the ceasefire ‘is broadly holding.’ And not only that, they report it in the same breath that they report Israel breaching the ceasefire.

Do we think, do we honestly think, that if 400 Israeli soldiers, let alone civilians, had been killed since the ceasefire, the media would report that the ceasefire was ‘broadly holding'.

Obviously that’s a rhetorical question because none of us are that stupid.

The imperialism is so disgusting and so racist, yet so many will not, cannot, see it for what it is. They will, and they have, unconsciously absorbed the racism of the media environment around them. The differentials between the coverage of Jewish deaths and the coverage of Palestinian deaths are intentional, shaping thoughts, feelings and politics.

Here’s another truth about the Bondi attack you’ll never hear from the mainstream media: if international law existed the Chabad of Bondi wouldn’t have been allowed to host that event on Bondi Beach, and the rabbis wouldn’t be dead. They’d be in The Hague.

I say this because the Chabad of Bondi, a local chapter of the global, fanatically Zionist Chabad movement, had raised funds to provide material support for genocide. On Israeli TV earlier this year, the dead rabbi who helped run the Chabad, Eli Schlanger, live-streamed a fundraising appeal from the West Bank while ranting about how Arabs could never be allowed to own the land he was standing on.

Schlanger was also pictured on numerous occasions over the last two years with IDF soldiers, grinning ear-to-ear while holding guns and missiles. He shouldn’t be dead. He should be behind bars, charged with war crimes, with being an accessory to genocide and running an organisation that funnelled funds to a genocidal foreign entity.

Dead Australian rabbi Eli Schlanger with an IDF soldier

But as is now obvious, there is one rule for Jewish Zionists and there are rules for the rest.

It is estimated that up to one thousand Australian Jews were called up by Israel as reservists and participated in the genocide of Gaza. There are stone-cold Jewish killers walking on Bondi beach, on the streets of Sydney, and on the streets of other Australian towns and cities. No one knows the precise number, because Australia doesn’t track them. Australia’s government doesn’t care if their citizens leave the country to kill if they are leaving to kill Palestinians.

It’s the same across the west.

Palestinian lives don’t matter.

Only Jewish lives do.

This is reaffirmed over and over and over again, and, since the weekend, has once again been made loud and clear.

A look at the Chabad website also makes this clear. In a Q&A designed to provide Jews with propaganda to regurgitate when Israel is questioned, they tell their followers that every innocent in Gaza, every child killed by Israel is a human shield, that their deaths are ‘tragic inevitabilities’ and Israel can’t be held responsible.

In December 2023, by which point thousands of children had been slaughtered in Gaza, the Chabad of Bondi held a party in solidary with Israel.

We’re constantly told that Israel and Judaism are two separate things.

But the Chabad of Bondi, like many Jewish organisations in the west, make essentially no distinction between Jews and Israel. They side with genocide and celebrate the mass slaughter of children.

So if the attack was blowback for this position, if it was blowback for imperial violence, it would hardly be a surprise, and it would hardly be the first time.

The last two years could lead us to conclude that international law isn’t coming for Zionists and their crimes. The answer, nevertheless, remains international law. Applied universally, without fear or favour.

But to get there, we’re going to need to build a new system where no one, no religion, and no state, is above that law.

A system where every terror attack on any beach is viewed, treated and punished equally.

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