COMMENT BY GERARD HENDERSON FOR THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN – SATURDAY

2 AUGUST 2025

How times change. On 28 July, Bob Carr, the former Labor NSW premier and former Minister for Foreign Affairs, was interviewed on ABC Radio National Breakfast by Sally Sara. It was essentially a soft discussion – with one exception.

Sara put it to Carr that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong “have made it clear that certain conditions need to be met before Australia should recognise a Palestinian State including hostages being released, better governance from the Palestinian Authority [based in Ramallah on the West Bank] for example”. She then asked, “Are they reasonable conditions?”

To which Carr replied: “Well, yes, yes, yes. But those conditions are outweighed by a bigger fact and a bigger truth. Namely, that a vast civilian population is starving, that deaths are coming fast, unspeakable cruelty is being visited against babies and children in the enforcement of something not seen in the modern world.”

Carr’s position was unequivocal. To wit, that Israel should desist in its war against Hamas leaving the terrorist group in charge of Gaza without the release of its Israeli hostages – alive and dead.

That was on July 28. On July 31 The Australian reported that Arab leaders have called on Hamas to disarm and leave Gaza. The news was that the Arab League including Egypt, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates had signed on to “The New York Declaration”.

The intention of “The New York Declaration” is to bring about a situation whereby a demilitarised Palestinian state would come into existence living side by side with Israel. Specifically, the declaration entails that Hamas must hand over weapons to the Palestinian Authority which was driven out of Gaza by Hamas in June 2007 after which Gaza became a dictatorship.

As part of the declaration, Arab States for the first time condemned Hamas’ massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023. It is interesting that many of Israel’s high-profile opponents in Australia have not condemned Hamas for October 7. Rather, on the October 9, 2023 demonstration outside the Sydney Opera House and elsewhere, many of the protestors supported Hamas. This was before Israel retaliated against Hamas with a military invasion of Gaza on October 27, 2023.

And so it came to pass that, within a few days of Carr’s outburst, members of the Arab League stated that the priority in Gaza was for Hamas to disarm.

Sara did not challenge Carr when he made the hyperbolic claim that “there’s a pattern of behaviour here that really demands comparison with the worst of the last 100 years of Stalin’s Ukraine, of the Warsaw Ghetto, of Mao’s Great Leap Forward”.

Carr is a well-informed man. He knows that the communist dictator Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union initiated a forced famine in Ukraine in 1932-33. Some four million Ukrainians died in what is called the Holodomor. Not one of Stalin’s murderers agreed to any food aid of any kind.

Likewise the Warsaw Ghetto in early 1943. This was the siege by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany against the Jews living in the Polish capital. It was a small part of Hitler’s genocide which lead to six million Jewish deaths in total. The Nazis made no attempt whatsoever to provide food aid to Jews in Warsaw. Likewise in Mao’s forced famine between 1958 and 1962 in which some 45 million Chinese starved to death. In all three instances, Stalin, Hitler and Mao commenced the hostilities.

As Carr surely understands, all wars are brutal occasions in which, sadly, civilians die. Most would accept that the Second World War was a just conflict in that the Allies defeated Hitler’s Nazi Germany. However, it led to numerous civilian casualties.

In his book The Bombers And The Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940-1945 (Penguin, 2013) the British historian Richard Overy wrote that between 1939 and 1945 hundreds of European cities and hundreds more small townships and villages were subjected to an aerial bombing. It was conducted by the Allied powers – Britain, the British Commonwealth and the United States.

Overy added: “During the course of the conflict, a staggering estimate of around 600,000 European civilians were killed by bomb attack and well over a million more were seriously wounded, in some cases physically or mentally disabled for life”. The conflict ended when Hitler suicided on 30 April 1945 and Admiral Karl Dönitz formally began discussions which led to Germany’s total surrender on May 7, 1945.

Carr has not called for a Hamas surrender in the Israel-Gaza war. But now, among others, key members of the Arab League have. Writing in the London Telegraph on July 31, Adrian Blomfield reported that “Israel’s long and bloody war in Gaza has left Hamas so enfeebled that Arab officials believe there is now a golden opportunity to deliver a final blow”.

On Sky News’ The Kenny Report on July 29, Mike Kelly was interviewed by Chris Kenny. He is a former member of the Australian Defence force who held ministerial roles in the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments. Moreover, Kelly is a lawyer.

Kelly told Kenny that Carr “is not an expert on the laws of armed conflict” and added that “there are very few people who are”. In response to Carr’s claim that “Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war”, Kelly commented that Carr’s “not an investigator, he’s not on the ground, he doesn’t know what’s going on; nobody who’s not on the ground will be able to make judgments about this”.

Moreover, Kelly acknowledged the problem “when Israel’s fighting a war against the terrorist organisation [Hamas that]…is using the civil population as a weapon” and as “propaganda opportunities”. Kelly concluded by quoting Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority as having called Hamas the “sons of dogs”. The reference is a BBC report of April 24, 2025.

The worst outcome for the Israelis and the overwhelming majority of Palestinians would be for Hamas to emerge from the conflict still in charge of Gaza while suppressing Palestinians.

Overy wrote about “the devastated urban wastelands immediately after the war” in 1945 and how some wondered “would Europe ever recover”. But it did.

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Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

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