Journalists based in Canberra are a compromised lot, something that was glaringly evident by their performance – or more accurately the lack of it – during an address to the National Press Club by the new Israeli Ambassador, Dr Hillel Newman, on Tuesday (March 31).
Though many of the questions started out promisingly, they were not prosecuted to any satisfactory conclusion, allowing Dr Newman, a seasoned PR practitioner who has served as consul-general in Los Angeles and ambassador in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, to override the queries with statements that were mostly half-truths.
For example, Matthew Knott, defence and national security reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald, started off the Q&A by asking Dr Newman about the new law passed by the Knesset which can impose the death penalty on Palestinians who are found guilty of terrorism offences that threaten the security of Israel.
Knott is one of two journalists from the SMH who wrote a report on 7 March 2023 claiming that China was set to launch a war to retake Taiwan within the next three years. Both he and his collaborator in this report, Peter Hartcher, the international editor of the SMH, have kept a low profile when the bogus report was raised this month.
The South African-born Dr Newman brushed aside any implications that the law resembled anything in his country of birth, saying: “Just like in the United States, in Japan and in India, which have capital punishment, Israel has the right, as a sovereign state, to decide [to use] capital punishment.”
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said after the law was passed: “The law is worded in such a way that it targets only Palestinians. And it will turn the killing of Palestinians into an accepted and common tool of punishment through several mechanisms.”
Journalists were ill-equipped to follow up on Knott’s initial, somewhat hesitant, question. Nobody asked why, if the law was such a non-controversial piece of legislation, its promoter, the national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was celebrating by drinking wine in parliament and passing a bottle around with a broad grin on his face.
But then no Australian journalist seemed to be aware of this. Neither did anyone raise the fact that it is illegal under international law for the Knesset to pass legislation covering Palestinians in the occupied territories. An occupying power cannot generally apply its domestic laws to occupied territories.
Other Israeli rights groups including Adalah, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, HaMoked and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel have also condemned the law, as have some opposition parties, which announced that they would petition the High Court of Justice to nullify it.
Democrat MP Gilad Kariv, a member of the Knesset National Security Committee, called the bill an “immoral law that contradicts the foundational values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”.
Dr Newman’s statements about the law were not exactly correct; he said there was a right to appeal, but the reports about the law make it clear that there is no such right. This was a hallmark of everything that Dr Newman said; he rarely gave his audience the full picture, as if daring them to contradict him.
He probably knew that most of the journalists in the room were compromised, all having gone on junkets to Israel paid for by the government in Tel Aviv.
As the independent Australian news site Michael West Media reported back in January 2024, “Should we be surprised by the national political timidity and mainstream media slant (when it comes to reporting truthfully about Israel)? In the context of a concerted four decades-long lobbying campaign by pro-Israel groups seeking to influence Australia’s media and politicians, then the answer is ‘probably not’.
“Strategies utilised by the Israel lobby have included sponsored travel to Israel for journalists and politicians alike, back-channel private diplomatic initiatives, and old-fashioned hectoring of politicians and media institutions, especially publicly funded bodies such as the ABC and SBS.”
No wonder Dr Newman seemed to be so cocksure as he spoke at the NPC on Tuesday.
His talk covered his own career and also the now-tired line of October 7 2023 having changed everything. Here, again, he repeated the old myth about Israeli women being raped on that day, a tale that has been debunked more than once. No Australian journalist questioned him about this falsehood.
About the only journalist who seemed a bit worked up about Dr Newman’s half-truths was Anna Henderson of SBS, who raised the issue of the killing of Australian aid worker Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom in Gaza two years ago.
Frankcom and six others working for the aid organisation World Central Kitchen were killed when a missile fired from a drone operated by the Israel Defence Forces slammed into a truck which had the WCK logo clearly painted on its roof.
Dr Newman refused to apologise to Frankcom’s family. Australia has requested audio of the drone strike footage on behalf of the family, but Israel has so far refused to comply.
Henderson said she had been told by IDF sources that the inquiry into the incident had been closed. Dr Newman claimed the delay could be because legal cases in Israel often take years, and not because the investigation had been shelved. He said he would follow up on the case.
Not that Australians should hold any hopes of anything new emerging as a result of Dr Newman’s pledge. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese raised the Frankcom killing with Israel’s president Isaac Herzog when the latter visited Australia last month but there things have stood since then.
When Australia released a report into the killing in August 2024, Tel Aviv accused Canberra of misrepresentation and crucial omissions in its response.
Former Australian Defence Force chief Mark Binskin found the incident was caused by failures to follow IDF procedures, mistaken identification and decision-making errors exacerbated by confirmation bias.
But even this raised the hackles of those at the Israeli embassy. “The Australian Government’s statement about the report regrettably included some misrepresentations and omitted crucial details,” the embassy said in a statement on August 5, 2024.
It claimed the federal government had misrepresented the way the report was conducted, the degree of co-operation and openness exhibited by the IDF and “certain aspects of the tragic incident”.
Time and again, it became crystal clear that the Australian journalists were ill-equipped to pick apart Dr Newman’s claims. Indeed, many of them seemed nervous to even question him, something that particularly noticeable about Ben Packham of The Australian. His report on the talk mirrors this.
Had the journalists been informed about events and history, someone would have questioned Dr Newman’s reference to antisemitism given that the residents of modern Israel have no connection to the Semitic line, the line that comes down from Noah’s third son Shem. All Israelis are converts from various European and other countries. But then is anyone in the Canberra bubble aware of this?
Also, his reference to the Bible made no sense. The word Jew was first mentioned in the book of Kings in the King James Version of the Bible, the 11th of the 39 books in the Old Testament. Of course, this was changed by the publication of the Scofield Bible by Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, who was allegedly guilty of several acts of dishonesty and fraud. He was allegedly an army deserter. He claimed titles, including Doctor of Divinity, he did not have. He abandoned his wife and children, leaving them without means of support.
As former Anglican bishop George Browning wrote: “Scofield was influenced for good by the missionary to China, Hudson Taylor, and by the publisher Dwight Moody, but he was influenced with ulterior motive by a Jewish Lawyer, Samuel Untermeyer. In Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem, Prof. David W. Lutz writes, ‘Untermeyer used Scofield, a Kansas City lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism’. (It is said there are more Christian Zionists than there are Jews in the world – probably by a significant margin).
“Influenced by Untermeyer and assisted by publication through the Moody Bible Institute, Scofield produced the Scofield Bible. This Bible went on to become the fundamental text of Biblical literalism and the foundation stone of American conservative evangelicalism and consequently, the American political right. Multiple millions have been published, even finding a place in the theological library when I was a student!
“So, what is the Scofield Bible about? It divides human history into seven dispensations of which we are supposedly living in the sixth. The first dispensation is titled “innocence” and is, of course, the period of Adam and Eve, before sin became a human experience! You can see how Scofield followers have come to believe creation stories as literal history – as is apparently the case with a staggering percentage of US citizens.
“The dispensation we are supposedly now in, the sixth, is titled ‘grace’ and is defined as the period between Christ’s resurrection and Christ’s return. The pre-emptive feature of this period is to be the restoration of Israel to what he claims to have been the unrestricted area from the ‘rivers to the sea’, the land promised to Abraham. According to Scofield, when this occurs, Christ will return and rule from Jerusalem for 1000 years, during which time the world’s dross will be expunged. The 1000-year reign connects ‘millennialism with ‘dispensationalism’ as the cornerstones of Scofield’s ‘theology’.
“Rather than diminishing in the 100+ years since Scofield’s death, his legacy has not only retained its influence, but since the 1967 Six-Day War, and Israel’s control of all Palestinian land, it has, in fact, deepened. How else can we explain why the accelerating occupation of Palestinian land against international law has been totally unchallenged and why the US has vetoed all motions at the UN Security Council that in any way criticised Israel, let alone refused to sanction it? Christian Zionists, who have influence at the highest levels of American political life, include Mike Pence, vice-president under the previous Trump administration, Sarah Palin and, of course, Mike Huckabee.
“An oft-used Biblical misquote is a distortion of Genesis 12: 3. In reference to Abraham it reads, “Those who bless you, I will bless, and those who curse you I will curse”. The misquote is, ‘those who bless Israel I will bless and those who curse Israel I will curse’.
“In the Biblical text, Abraham and his descendants are called chosen for one clear reason: through them all peoples of the world are to be blessed. Chosenness in the Biblical text has nothing whatsoever to do with benefit for self, least of all land at the expense of others. It is that through righteousness and mercy, harmony and justice, blessing might flow to all. This is, of course, the very opposite of how chosenness is interpreted in defence of Israel’s outrageous actions.
“Returning then to where we began, given America and American politics have, and will have, enormous power over the future of both Israel and Palestine, the future for Palestinians will remain bleak if this grotesque distortion of Christian, let alone Biblical, truth remains at the heart of US policy and decision-making.
“All three Abrahamic religions have reason to cherish extraordinary contributions to the well-being and harmony of life on this planet. But equally, all three have reason to seriously repent of having pursued agendas that are not core matters of belief, but flow from partisan rivalry and desire for sovereignty and power.”
How many Australian journalists have chosen to delve this far into matters such as these?
But I digress. Dr Newman attempted to cast blame for the ongoing stoush with Iran on that country, omitting completely the fact that Israel was the one to kick off hostilities. When asked about the invasion of Lebanon, a sovereign nation, Dr Newman blamed Hezbollah, saying: “The fact that any missile is launched is a situation which is intolerable…We have no beef with Lebanon right now, but they attacked so we have to respond.”
Dr Newman waxed lyrical about Iran’s non-existent nuclear threat, but was never asked about Israel’s own nuclear arsenal which is said to now contain about 200 warheads. Veteran American journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a book, The Samson Option, in 1991 detailing how Israel acquired its nukes, and also cited one instance when it had used that arsenal to blackmail the US into acting against its foes.
That was during the 1973 Ramadan War (Israel calls it the Yom Kippur war) which began when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on October 6, 1973. While there was genuine fear in Israel, the country called its first nuclear alert and used that to blackmail the US into helping it get out of its corner. What was known as Israel’s kitchen cabinet met and decided to make its nuclear missile launchers operational along with eight specially marked F-4s that were on 24-hour alert. The initial targets were the Egyptian and Syrian military headquarters near Cairo and Damascus.
The Soviet Union was not targeted but there were signals that were intercepted by Israel intelligence and these were taken to be from Soviet operatives in the country. It was hoped that the Soviets would urge their allies in Egypt and Syria to limit their offensive.
The man calling the tune was the late Henry Kissinger who had made no secret of his strategy: “to let Israel come out ahead but bleed” so that it would be amenable to discussing peace. Israel put its operational nuclear missile launchers out in the open to ensure that American spy satellites would see them. Finally, the US had to back down and resupply Israel so it fight back and the threat to the country. By October 14, Israel removed the nukes from their forward positions.
An instance of Israel using its nukes to ensure American action came during the 1991 Gulf war in which the US led a coalition to oust Iraq from Kuwait. American officials knew that Israel’s entry into the war would ruin the whole operation and so there were many visits to Tel Aviv to convince then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to stay out of the action on the understanding that Israel would be protected.
But Shamir, a former terrorist in the Irgun militia, was a crafty old fox. He had his nuclear officials position weapons on trailers on rail lines in a position where they would be definitely spotted by the Americans, just to ensure that the US would keep its word.
Dr Newman, of course, as an educated man, would be fully cognisant of each and every thing I have mentioned. And a lot more. But then he has a job to do. His job is hasbara, not communicating the truth. I must say he does a pretty good job.