Israel has recommenced its war on Gaza, with airstrikes that killed more than 400 Palestinian people, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

The psychology of this is deeply depressing. On the receiving end, an American doctor in Gaza was reported as saying:

All I could think was: we’re going back to this, and the world is going to continue to not care.

On the Israeli side, the most charitable interpretation is that Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are locked in a mindset that is now basically nihilistic. The logic, as The Australian headlined, that they have “los[t] patience with Hamas terrorists” and that this, therefore, is all they can do, can only be explained by the same rationale that caused general Curtis LeMay to propose, of the North Vietnamese, to “bomb them back to the Stone Age”. It’s the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy of people who long ago ran out of ideas.

The leaders of Hamas, if they could be picked out, deserve everything they cop for their cynical and inhuman behaviour. But the pretence that it’s anyone other than the innocent who are, again, going to die, finds no support in morality or law. Not now, if it ever did.

Israel, with the unqualified support of Trump’s America, is immune from criticism, let alone consequences. The breakdown of the international “rules-based order”, which Trump is accelerating, could not be more clearly illustrated than by the absence of any deterrent or discouragement regarding what Israel is clearly about to do.

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For Australia, it’s another shifting of the sands in the cataclysmic storm the Trump regime has whipped up. Everyone knows we no longer have a friend in America, let alone a reliable ally or (laughably) guarantor of our security, no matter how much longer our government and opposition try to pretend it’s business as usual.

On Ukraine, a smallish show of spine has energised Anthony Albanese to call out Trump’s duplicity and float the possible deployment of Australian peacekeepers, while even Peter Dutton has indicated that Ukraine isn’t the party at fault.

On Gaza, not so much. On this, there is a wider difference than most people would realise between Labor and the Coalition, but a difference of symbolic consequence only. In practical terms, we remain a solid defender of Israel, and domestically our federal and state governments have moved as one — along with the mainstream media and institutions such as the universities and major arts bodies — to enact legal barriers to dissent (the Coalition’s latest thought bubble on including questions about antisemitism in the citizenship test is just one banal example).

It’s been a difficult dance, for a country with such a long tradition of championing the structures and institutions of international law such as the UN, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, to maintain that adherence while also declaring unstinting support for Israel as it openly disregards the same institutions and the laws they uphold.

To keep the balance, the government has declared distance by voting against Israel on some UN resolutions, particularly regarding the right of the Palestinians to have their own state and the continuing illegality of the occupation of the West Bank.

But what do you do when the prime minister of Israel has an ICC arrest warrant out for him, on charges of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity? What do you do when his government declares that it is withholding humanitarian aid from Gaza, an action that is unequivocally criminal under international law?

Most urgently, what do you do when Israel goes back to the indiscriminate bombing of the ruins of Gaza, when objectively the only real consequence will be the deaths of many more civilians?

It is, of course, far simpler to depart from America’s side where its leader is openly cuddling up to a fascist invader in Putin — no surprise that “goodies and baddies” Tony Abbott is happy to call out Trump’s treachery on that conflict.

The Palestinian people, on the other hand, have never been a US ally or friend. Their government has been declared, throughout the West, terrorist. They carry the blame for the atrocities perpetrated on October 7, and are now being held to the flames for it. Sooner or later, however, the utter destruction of the Palestinian nation and the cultural (if not actual) annihilation of its people will come into view.

We are entering the end game in Gaza, as bombs seek out and destroy those remaining heads that emerge from the rubble.

It feels mindless now. I’m reminded of what I wrote three days after this war began:

In the law’s absence, only two pathways remain for resolution of the ongoing conflict — the parties continue their trial by combat, the brutally simplistic mediaeval mechanism for determining the winner of a legal dispute, or they find a way to remember what they have in common: humanity.

The challenge for our government is to stand up for humanity and not surrender to the seeming inevitability that many, many more must die.

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