MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Mr JOYCE (New England) (16:04): I thank all the contributors thus far. I've never been to Israel. I've been asked a few times, but I've never gone.
I always feel that I'm participating in a debate which I really don't know much about or which I don't know that I want to be a part of. But, certainly, 7 October has made me think again. This was a bestial, ferine, sadistic thing—the apotheosis of evil—inflicted upon innocent people.
I heard the previous speaker say that antisemitism has been around for a while. It certainly has. It probably dates back to the Book of Esther and the fifth scroll.
It was obvious with the Persians at that stage, who decided they wanted to get rid of the Jews, and with the Romans, 70 years after the birth of Christ, with the taking of Jerusalem. Their goal was just to wipe out and disperse the Jewish people. In Medieval Europe, they were blamed for the Black Death.
They were blamed for poisoning the wells. They were precluded from being in professions by the use of guilds. They were precluded from ownership and from public office.
Under Urban II, during the Crusades, on the liberation of Jerusalem, they decided that they were actually going to wipe out the Jewish people on the way through. There were the pogroms and the lunacy that was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written by the Russian secret service. Even Luther had a fair go, trying to have a crack at the Jews.
And, of course, there was the Holocaust, which is the absolute apotheosis of evil, right up there with 7 October—the same thing. The only difference is the numbers. What you have to understand, and what I understand, is that, obviously, the Jewish people have to protect themselves.
They have a very, very good reason to protect themselves. The important thing is that they were invaded. They didn't start this fight.
They were invaded by a terrorist organisation, which, unfortunately, in 2006, won the elections in Gaza. It's a terrorist organisation with the imprimatur of a section of geography of the world. And, that being the case, Israel has to do what Israel has got to do.
If it happened to Australia, we would not rest in this chamber until it was absolutely and utterly dealt with, 100 per cent. Think about it in history. The Americans didn't stop at the corner of Germany and say, 'We're just going to leave sections of the SS alone,' nor did the Russians.
The Americans, at the end of the Second World War, didn't stop at the edge of Japan and say, 'We'll just leave them alone from this point forward.' They have to bring it to a conclusion by the defeat of the enemy. That is what is happening here, and what Hamas has to do is surrender. That's what they've got to do—surrender and hand back the hostages.
That's what happens in a war. Jeannette Rankin said: There can be no compromise with war. It cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense, for war is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.
That's Jeanette Rankin; that's not me. We all want this war to stop, because the epitome of evil is war. The only way it can stop is for the people who started it to surrender.
When that happens, we have the capacity to bring this absolute carnage to a conclusion. Around 7 October is a discussion of how people can get their minds around what they did to children and to women—just the bestial nature of it. The fact is that right now there are still human beings who have been jammed down holes in the ground to starve to death.
That's happening right now. So we absolutely must put our shoulder to the wheel and recognise exactly how this started.