Gloating is not how we find peace
I was listening to the news on the ABC – Australia’s National Radio broadcast station – this morning.
I celebrate a ceasefire and the release of the Israeli hostages. It sickens me to the stomach that all the love is going toward a convicted felon, rapist and almost certainly a pedophile, who has lived his entire life as a grifter and con artist. America could have ended the war any day of the week in the last two years with the stroke of a pen. No more arms sales, bribes or military gifts. And the same political bullying that has been applied this last week, applied in week one. One must ask why now, and not in October 2023?
Yet here we are. Gaza is in total ruins. More than 70,000 dead, likely far more, 70% of those women and children. Still held hostage by a rogue state that is allowed to arm itself to the extreme, unable to scratch its nose without permission. And the West Bank, with no Hamas, is eroded by settlers more each day, over 900 Palestinians killed in the last two years, their homes taken, their dignity and livelihoods destroyed. It continues as I write. And the world does nothing.
As the hostages, who have endured terrible things, get welcomed into the warm embrace of world-class hospitals that have whole wings dedicated to the special needs of hostages, I think of the millions of Palestinians rushing to return home to rubble, every single semblance of home gone, children suffering the lifetime trauma of endless bombs. Their warm embrace is the allowed in aide, which is a weird thing, because Israel insisted that they were not starving the Palestinians.
I listen to the politicians speaking about peace. Lasting peace. Oh, I wish it were to be. But I do not believe it.
How can peace prevail when one group is allowed to thrive, armed to the eyeballs, and the other is to remain captive in a ghetto? How can peace prevail when trauma is so vast and untreated, it simmers like a slow-boiling volcano? On both sides.
How can peace prevail when one group of humans is looked down upon as vermin, while the other is given global privilege and political support?
This is the story of colonisation, the tool of capitalism, written in the blood of 2025, streamed live on Social Media.
Some of us wake up to the brutality of our history and wealth. Others refuse to look, for the price of seeing truth means we must question our identity, the ground we have walked upon. For many it is easier to look away.
Peace is either peace for all, with equal dignity, or peace is impossible.
One reporter, bless her, actually said that the President is flying to Israel to gloat.
Gloating is not how we find peace. Gloating is how we keep division. Gloating is for the conqueror, meaning there are the conquered.
His son-in-law stood before a crowd in Israel yesterday and said, ‘Instead of replicating the barbarism of the enemy, you chose to be exceptional,’ and I wonder what world he lives in to see it in such a way. I watched barbarism, genocide, rape of prisoners and apartheid streamed live, with the perpetrators being Israel.
Yet it is helpful under colonialism to make the ‘other’ barbaric. It makes the political killing of thousands or millions of ‘others’ acceptable. This tool of othering as barbarians has been used to exterminate whole nations of people, including the Australian Aborigines of my land.
I am deeply heartened by so many of my wonderful Jewish friends who refuse to sanction the acts of Israel.
I hope for peace, yet I do not anticipate it. I await the next transgression, possibly provoked deliberately and covertly by the monied states, as they have done throughout colonial history, assassinating presidents who seek to keep their wealth for their people. The type of transgression that will ignite a spark and allow property developers to land grab. And I wonder how the rest of the world will respond.
I celebrate the return of the hostages, and I mourn the decimation of millions of lives.
Photo Taken October 11th 2025, Article published October 13th, 2025
