No, Jenny Leong, There is No ‘Occupation’ of Gaza

Jenny Leong, a member of the Greens Party who sits in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, recently delivered an antisemitic outburst: “Australian Politician Says ‘Jewish Lobby’ Uses ‘Tentacles’ to ‘Influence Power,’” by Jack Elbaum, Algemeiner, February 6, 2024:

…She continued: “It is incredibly telling that after a conversation where myself [sic] and other speakers made countless mentions of the genocidal attacks and occupation occurring in Gaza right now, that two months later more focus isn’t being put on the deaths of over 26,000 people, many of them children.”

Who is she kidding? The world has been fixated on those figures of casualties put out by Hamas. We know that Hamas has a long history of exaggerating casualties to make Israel look bad. There was, for example, that nonexistent “Jenin massacre” in 2002, where Israel was accused of massacring “500 civilians.” It turned out, as confirmed by Western intelligence agencies, that only 52 Palestinians died, and at least 45 of them were combatants. Another such instance was Hamas’ claim that Israeli airstrikes had hit the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, killing “500 civilians.” Both Israeli and American intelligence investigated and discovered that there had been no Israeli airstrike. An errant missile fired from Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad had fallen short, landing not on the hospital — which remained intact — but on the parking lot adjacent to the hospital. And instead of 500 dead, there were between 10 and 50 people killed (it’s not known how many were civilians). This record of misattributing attacks to Israel, and exaggerating Palestinian casualties, by Hamas, should be kept in mind.

There is no “occupation” of Gaza — see the paragraph just above. There is a war going on. These are different things. There are no “genocidal attacks” by Israel — see the third paragraph above on all that the IDF does to minimize civilian casualties.

And, pace Jenny Leong, there is no “occupation” of Gaza. There has not been any “occupation” of Gaza since 2005, when every last Israeli was pulled out. The IDF soldiers are in Gaza now not to “occupy” anything — they have no desire to remain in Gaza after their objectives have been met — but to take the war to Hamas, the terror group that committed atrocities as it murdered 1,300 Israelis on October 7.

Her comments and apology come amid increasing concern over antisemitism on the far-left, which has celebrated violent resistance against Israel since October 7, when Hamas invaded the country, killed 1,200 people, and kidnapped more than 240 more.

The far-left everywhere has embraced the malevolent fiction that Israel is a “colonial-settler apartheid state” and the Israelis are guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” For these leftists, Zionism has replaced “capitalism” as the main enemy; “Jews” are again the all-powerful financiers they were in the time of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and must be exposed and marginalized. Who are these far-left anti-Israel and antisemitic politicians? They include, among others, the following: the former head of the Labour Party (he has since been expelled), Jeremy Corbyn, who has called the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah “my friends,” and attended a ceremony at a cemetery in Tunisia honoring terrorists who committed the murders of Israeli athletes in Munich; the leader of the left-wing party La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who in 2019 vowed never to accede to the “arrogant dictates” of CRIF, the umbrella of French-Jewish communities. In 2014, Mélenchon defended Arabs who stormed and torched synagogues in France and denounced Jewish supporters of Israel as “citizens who decided to rally in front of the embassy of a foreign country [Israel] or serve its flag, weapon in hand.” Another is Pablo Iglesias, leader of the Podemos Party in Spain, who has called Israel an “illegal country” and hosted a talk show with antisemitic content that aired on an Iranian-funded TV station. In Italy, several members of the left-wing Partito Democratico have denounced Israel. One of that party’s leaders denied that Israel “exists” (meaning: it should not exist); another one posted on social media a claim that Israelis were behaving just as Hitler did in exterminating the Jews, by doing “the same thing” to the Palestinians.

So Jenny Leong, as a member of the far-left Greens Party, in her anti-Israel animus is behaving just as we have all come to expect of leftists worldwide. Today it is parties on the right that are most willing to side with Israel, such as the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen in France, and the Fratelli d’Italia of Giorgia Meloni in Italy — a complete reversal from the past, when rightists in both countries were the bearers of the anti-Israel standard.. Israel will have to take its supporters where it finds them, and today, that means on the center-right, including those just mentioned in France and Italy, and the Republicans in the U.S., the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in Canada, and Peter Dutton, of the Liberal Party in Australia. Some in Israel still reflexively worry about right-wing parties; that’s a superannuated prejudice they will have to overcome.