A letter to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Australia
Dear Ms Wong,
My impression of you is that you are a decent and good person.
Yet I wonder why you and the Prime Minister are so profoundly silent on the atrocities in Gaza?
I wonder if you are captured by the Israeli lobby? Or so caught under the hegemony of the USA?
It simply doesn’t make sense that the Labour government is so complicit in what most experts in genocide call genocide.
It makes no sense that Australia sides with a government that says the types of things in this document. https://law4palestine.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Law-for-Palestine-Database-of-Israeli-Incitement-to-Genocide.pdf
An example:
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”, Yoav Gallant
I am ashamed to be an Aussie represented by a government that sides with genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and starvation.
I do not understand why you treat the Australian people with such contempt that you cannot come up with any story that justifies your silence and complicity, or your endearment to two of the worst bullying regimes in current history. Israel and the USA.
If there is information that you possess that makes your choices make sense, why do you not share at least some of it? Help us, the people you have been elected to represent, understand.
And if there is nothing, just compliance with the bullies, then shame on you. And shame on Australia.
Your government was elected with such a majority that you have this brief moment in time to put a clear moral stake in the ground.
Yet you do nothing.
Is this cowardice? I am asking genuine questions because I do not understand.
I watch more and more children starve to death. I watch more and more children get about with half arms and legs. I watch Israel get exceptional treatment from the West, as if their ridiculous belief that they are the ordained people of ‘their’ land is true. Their rights and no one else’s, based on some mythical story.
I watch our media, our institutions, cave to the Israeli lobby, and I wonder how this is possible, this capture.
I refuse to use the term that has been weaponised to shield Israel from criticism. The accurate word is racism. When critics of Israeli state policies are automatically labelled with that weaponised term, it creates a double standard that allows one form of racism while condemning all others. This selective application means that while racism against one group is universally condemned, racist language targeting other groups—including dehumanising terms like ‘animals’—becomes acceptable.
The State of Israel is not the Jewish people, just like the State of Australia does not represent the views of all Australians. Criticising a state, like I am doing with both Israel and Australia, doesn’t make you racist. It makes you an active citizen, of a state and the world.
Human Rights are Universal or they are naught.
Exceptionalism is racist.
Selectively choosing when to honour International Law, the International Court of Justice, and other bodies designed to prevent egregious acts by rogue states is hypocritical. Sanction Russia, cheer Israel.
Australia can continue to play supplicant to the bullies on the world stage, or we can take the moral high ground. I am sure there is a price to be paid for taking the moral high ground. There often is. But history always speaks to those who dare to take the moral high ground.
But I wonder, sincerely, how you can sleep at night knowing that in our morning, another 50, 100 or more people are dead. And the children starve.
I feel completely at a loss and in despair that we as a country do so little.
Please, can we, can our government, do something besides weak half-measures that satisfy something or someone the Australian public cannot understand?
Can we do what we do so well in sport? Stand as David against the Goliath? Allow us to lift our heads from the shame that I and many others feel, to be proud to be called Australian, standing for the dignity and rights of all humans.
Sincerely,
Christine McDougall
Photo July 2nd 2025, Article written July 2nd 2025
PS. I have sent this to Penny Wong and my local federal member. It might seem like nothing, yet if all of us take action, write, protest, post and speak, the tide will turn.