I am ashamed about how complicit I have been, how perfectly comfortable I have been, to sit back and ignore what’s been happening, without speaking out.
I am ashamed to face the reality that 10 deaths weren’t enough for me to speak up. Nor one hundred or even a thousand.
That perhaps it’s only because there’s more public sentiment growing to make me more willing to speak up, as though I needed permission.
Over 60,000 people have died in the conflict in Gaza, by a conservative estimate, and until this moment my voice hasn’t been heard. I have lived my comfortable life without speaking up, without protesting against it.
I haven’t been complicit ten times, or one hundred, but more than 60,000 times.
18,000 of those times have been the death of children. Not armed soldiers, or militants, not protestors or antagonists, but simply children.
And while I get to enjoy the adulthoods of my children whose biggest life issues have been very first-world, the children in Gaza face death just because they exist.
For the past weeks I’ve had to pose that question to myself. But it should have been for the past 15 months.
How many people have to die before I care enough? Before I care enough to take action, to speak out, to take a stand?
An easy out is to tell myself, ‘But what can I do?’, ‘What impact can I have?’. All the while posing such questions in the privacy of my head, sipping coffee, listening to streamed music, with a beautiful roof over my head, warm from heating and water easily at hand.
Judge me harshly, that’s okay, because it’s how I am judging myself.
Have I lost my way? That I am more prepared to enjoy the comforts of my privileged life over standing up for what I believe is right.
For weeks all I’ve been able to come up with are poor excuses. What can one man do? What change can one man make?
It is too easy to use that as an excuse, to do nothing because there’s no end goal in sight for taking action. That I’ve been brought up to plan around actions towards goals when in situations like this there’s something much more fundamental at stake.
Right over wrong.
I saw this quote from Mahatma Gandhi which resonated with me;
Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.
So what is the truth?
Who could have believed in the world’s information age that this question is the hardest to answer. But as Gandhi postures, it isn’t a global truth, but my truth that matters.
The truth, as I see it, is that I’ve been complicit in letting mainstream media and our politicians, on both sides, make me feel that there’s nothing to be done here, nothing that’s our problem to resolve.
You could be forgiven for thinking that nothing is happening in Gaza if you watched the mainstream media.
Compared to other events that are considered significant, where we face a barrage of 24/7 coverage, you can be hard pressed to find meaningful coverage at all, unless you’re prepared to go to independent media.
It gives one pause to ask why.
Why are we not seeing daily images and stories of the horrors, of starving children, of journalists and aid workers being killed?
When in other countries, other major events, that’s exactly what we would see. The answers aren’t easy to uncover and are potentially equally uncomfortable to confront.
So I look toward our leaders. What is their stance, what is it that they are doing about this? What actions are they taking?
Our Foreign Minister, Penny Wong’s greatest action hasn’t been to sanction and force change from Israel and do everything possible to end this humanitarian crisis. No, her most significant action has been to spend precious time to get Mehreen Faruiq censured and sanctioned for the most heinous of crimes, holding up a sign during the opening of parliament.
A sign that demanded the end of starvation of children. The exact words that were so outrageous:
Gaza is starving, words won’t feed them. Sanction Israel
Devastating stuff. (sarcasm)
No such action on the horrendous atrocities that are being perpetrated daily in Gaza. Just time and effort to worry so much about the traditions of parliament, but not the decency of protecting human life.
Michaela Cash, leader of the opposition, called it street theatre but in a moment of total hypocrisy claimed that the censure of Faruqi wasn’t enough.
“Rules without enforcement are meaningless. Standards without accountability are hollow, and institutions without discipline become irrelevant.”
One might want to ask whether those same standards are being applied to the rules of the United Nations and International Criminal Court, both of which our leaders are making irrelevant through their complicity. Rules that have been ignored throughout the conflict.
What of our Prime Minister, what actions has he undertaken?
He’s finally begun to speak up, a written statement and a speech to condemn the aid situation. Once could cynically suggest that these statements are only now occurring 15 months into the conflict because of changing public sentiment.
Outside of that the only action he has taken is for his government to create a Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism.
This role appears to be a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist in Australia.
Where are the tens of thousands of instances of such crimes, the 18,000 examples of it that would demand such a strong response.
You won’t find them, but this action, taken following several isolated instances all of which can be addressed using existing laws, received prompt and decisive action. Unlike his approach to what is happening in Gaza.
Look under the surface of what the envoy is recommending and her background and you can see more uncomfortable truths that paint an unflattering picture on what matters more to our leaders.
Nor has Albanese or Wong spoken out about the two Australian citizens captured on board the Handala, an aid ship intercepted by an illegal Israeli naval blockade. You could be forgiven for thinking that Israeli citizens matter more than Australians, based on this silence.
Our leaders have been complicit in allowing this to continue. They can suggest it’s complicated but it’s difficult to see that they care enough.
Actions speak louder than words.
They’ve done it in other countries, in other circumstances in the past, but for reasons they aren’t willing to explain to the general public they are unwilling to do so.
Gaza is more than just a massive humanitarian crisis.
This humanitarian crisis is uncovering the bigger problem, the greater crisis that has been forcing its way to the surface over the last decade.
A crisis in faith, but not the religious type.
Faith in leadership, faith in the supposed international rules-based order that politicians claim to follow, faith in humanity.
Faith in ourselves.
Faith in myself.
What do I stand for? What do you stand for? What do we stand for, as a country, as a race of people?
The more I’ve thought about this, and over the many drafts of this post I’ve rewritten, more uncomfortable questions arise.
- Does it matter who the people are as to whether or not we care?
- Does our leadership, our political class, believe in the same principles that exist within the rulers of Israel, and is that why we don’t resist as a nation?
- What would the many thousands of our ancestors who died in the World Wars fighting for actual freedom accept so willingly in this situation? Or would they be horrified at how comfortable we’ve become?
This isn’t who I want to be.
I want to believe that there’s real hope in our world… for our world. For everyone in this world, not just a few.
I can only attempt to imagine the daily horrors the people in Gaza are enduring. What I can imagine is that one of the few things that keep them going, over the love of their family, their children and a desperate desire to keep them alive, is the hope that the world will come and help.
Imagine believing in that hope, that simple element of humanity that has kept so many victims of crimes and horrors alive in the most desperate of times, only to discover that the world isn’t coming.
That no international peace keepers are being deployed like they have in so many other situations. That no one is sanctioning the other side, and doing everything in their power to force it to stop.
That the daily dramas of a first-world life are much more entertaining and distracting than confronting the reality of what is being perpetrated ON OUR WATCH.
Imagine being shot as you walked to get aid. Imagine seeing your child gunned down just trying to get one meal this week.
It’s uncomfortable to try.
It is a spotlight on our character. It points out the deficiencies, the things we’re willing to accept so as to not upset our way of being.
We are outraged about the price of eggs, the cost of living in our country.
And perhaps we should be.
But what about the cost of living in Gaza in 2025? What about the cost of being a Palestinian?
How can we have allowed it to become this bad?
How many people need to die before it’s enough?
We know that the only way to see real change locally, is to create such a groundswell of public sentiment that our leaders have little choice but to act. Where is it? What can I do to bring about this change?
What actions can I take, not just write words?
What number will it take for us to care enough? To pressure our politicians to do something that shows the kind of spirit that we say our country is full of. The ‘fair go’, looking out for the underdog.
It shouldn’t have taken me this long to express my concerns, it shouldn’t have needed so much death, destruction and horror to shake me from the comforts of my life. To care more about these people than the queue to buy lunch, the traffic delays, the horror of someone saying the wrong thing in a meeting.
But it has. I have been complicit.
I can do better.That’s the uncomfortable truth.
I can do better.
We can do better.
We must do better, or what is it we stand for?
* Sources for counts of death come from Al Jazeera and other news outlets. Add reference articles
* article from The Guardian Australia, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jul/23/mehreen-faruqi-sanctioned-for-gaza-sign-protest-ntwnfb