 Welcome to CN Live, season six, episode three, Complicity with Israel. It's hard to imagine a decision that is more impactful in a nation than a decision to go to war, or to arm and support the destruction of another country or its people in an act of genocide. And yet in Western nations, sometimes under the cover of so-called national security, such decisions are taken and executed in secrecy and with impunity, regardless of the cost to human life, both foreign and domestic, and damage to the environment. We have three guests with us from the UK and Australia that have been tracking the ongoing supply of military aid and intelligence to Israel, which continues despite the International Court of Justice decision on intermediary measures to prevent what it considers a plausible case of genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel. Australian Green Senator David Shubridge is investigating what weapons Australia is exporting and where they end up. Peter Kronow, an investigative journalist from Declassified Australia, is looking into satellite-generated signals of intelligence shared by Australia with Israel to target Gaza. And Matt Kennard from the Declassified UK has been reporting on similar aid from Britain gleaned from spy planes flying out of Cyprus. Meanwhile, the most significant military aid is still being supplied to Israel by the United States, sometimes bypassing congressional approval, which in most cases is necessary, unlike in Australia, where no parliamentary authorization for arms shipments is required. You may have heard that Australia is providing military equipment to the state of Israel, but there's a reason you probably don't know the details. The Albanese government is trying to hide them. So here's what we do know. We know that over the past five years, the Australian government has provided over 350 military export permits to Israel. Imagine a permit is this box. The box can contain any number of guns, ammunition, armor, software, equipment, anything really that can be used to destroy or cause harm. The government has to approve every single time we give this to another country. But the government refuses to tell the public what's in it, refuses to say how much is in it, how much it costs, and who that other person might be giving it to. We do not track if these boxes move from one country to another. For example, exports passed from Australia to the United States can just be given to Israel by the US without any questions being asked of Australia, without us knowing. So we have no idea the scale of our true involvement in Israel's military invasion of Gaza. All we know is that over the past five years, the government has approved 350 of these to go directly to the state of Israel. But that's all the government will tell us. They are desperate to keep secret what military equipment they have provided. But the public has been doing the work the Albanese government won't. We know that Australia's supplying military equipment to Israel, but did you know we also make the mechanism that allows Israel to drop bombs from planes? Back in 2019, Australia became a core part to the supply chain for the F-35. It's a type of fighter jet. More than 70 Australian companies are involved in its production. Did you know that Australia also helps make the armor for armored vehicles currently operating in Gaza and the occupied West Bank? BizAloy is an Australian company that makes a specific type of metal designed to be used as armor for tanks and military transport. In 2017, BizAloy announced it would provide Israeli arms manufacturer Rafael with steel to use as armor for Israeli military vehicles. Rafael brags that this armor has been combat proven. As journalists like Anthony Lowenstein points out, this is code for tested on the population of Gaza. We are supplying armor for the very tanks used to commit genocide and crimes against humanity in Palestine. BizAloy also provides steel to Placen, an Israeli company that makes armored cars for army and militia use. These cars have been bought by the State of Israel to conduct raids in the occupied West Bank and sold to civilian militias for illegal Israeli settlements. Let me say that again. Extremist armed settler groups have been helped to take the land and homes of Palestinians with military equipment made in part in Australia. We're joined by David Schubert, Senator David Schubert. Senator, I have a question for you. It just so happens in the United States, 19 Democrats wrote to the administration asking for explaining why the administration has bypassed Congress to send weapons to Israel. They've done it now at least two times. The Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, has to testify under oath that they're doing this because it's a national security threat to the United States, which of course in this current circumstance with Gaza is really a stretch. But the point is that for a United States government to send arms to another country, the Congress has to approve them except in this emerging circumstance. But from what your videos that I saw are said, in Australia there's no such procedure whatsoever. What is the procedure or lack of one in Australia for sending arms to a foreign country? Well, remarkably, we've kind of looked to the United States as having far better laws on transparency for international arms transfers. Now, before you begin investigating something from an Australian perspective, you know, I've come from a progressive side of politics, you would have surprised me greatly to have thought we should be aspiring to the US standards for arms exports. But remarkably, our parliament has almost no oversight other than through periodic, what are called budget estimates and an estimates hearings of defense, almost no oversight at all of our defense exports. It's done secretly with inside the Department of Defense on some criteria that are meant to include issues about human rights and concerns about furthering international conflicts. But we never see the assessments that are done. And then the government then even refuses to tell us what weapons have been granted export permits. And then if that's not bad enough, the system also says that once we export weapons to another country, there are no checks and balances at all about that country, then exporting it to a third country. So we don't know. They won't tell us. They pretend it's a national security issue, although how on earth weapons that we send to other countries is a serious national security issue for Australia, I don't understand. So there's no end user certificate to show who's supposed to get it and not send it to anyone else. Correct, they don't track that at all. And we'll probably explore what that means for a number of weapons manufactured in Australia that are exported to the United States, that are exported to the United Arab Emirates and to Europe. So literally once it's handed over to another country, Australia just washes the sands of it. It's hard to imagine a more opaque system in what's meant to be an open liberal democracy. Well, there's also in that letter that the Congressman sent to the Secretary of State and the rest of the administration is asking whether the US is following the Leahy law. This is a law that was passed some time ago that if it's established that a country is abusing, grossly abusing human rights, so you can't sell American arms to them. I presume there's nothing like that in Australia either. No, we don't have Leahy laws. And again, it is pretty extraordinary given the US's history of some pretty brutal foreign conflicts that we look to the United States as having better set of constraints around its arms sales and its international military deployments than Australia. I think many observers of the US would say that there's a kind of exclusion to Israel from the Leahy laws, political, if not legal. But yeah, absolutely. Those Leahy laws considerations should put constraints on the US in any way, assisting what the IDF is doing in Gaza, but there's no equivalent in Australia. We do, however, have a set of laws under our criminal code about war crimes and their extraterritorial. So anybody engaged in a war crime, whether they're an Australian citizen or not, is liable for prosecution in Australia if they come onto Australia's shores. So that's something that you would hope would be a kind of warning sign for anyone wanting to engage in the ongoing war on Gaza. Lastly, I was in the audience at Merrickville Town Hall maybe a year ago or less where you spoke on a panel. And the discussion was about the fact that Australian Prime Ministers can take the country to war with no notification to parliament whatsoever. Another part of secrecy that I found astounding now, of course, in the United States Constitution, Congress is opposed to declare war. That hasn't happened really formally since Second World War. There was a War Powers Act. They're trying to get around it to get some kind of accountability. Presidents will ask for a resolution, but it's weakened the constitutional framework for going to declare war. But yet in Australia, there's no such thing at all, even to be weakened, is there? No, and for my observations for the US, it's an absolutely critical democratic control on executive power. It's hard to imagine a decision that is more impactful on a nation than the decision to go to war. And in the US context, they have the capacity to deliver unparalleled destruction on other countries. And of course, that should be subject to democratic control. And yes, there have been repeated efforts by administrations in the US to get around that, to rely upon a sort of broad-ranging congressional authorization that was granted decades ago and we've seen that abuse. But in Australia, it's actually even worse than that. We have two major parties which loosely mirror the Republicans and the Democrats here. One is called the Coalition. One is called the Labor Party. And they both are viciously against the idea of there being any parliamentary either side of the decision to go to war. They hold that jealously as a decision of the executive. And they're offended at the very principle that there should have to be a parliamentary vote before they commit Australia to war. I mean, increasingly, that's why they've been referred to as the war parties in Australia. They've never seen a war they haven't wanna join. Because that also extends to the August deal which requires no parliamentary input. Matt Kennerd in London, I wanna ask you the same questions about how it works in the UK. The British government to sell arms to another country. Is there, what's the involvement of parliament there? Anyone who's selling arms to a third country has to get an arms export license, but it doesn't do anything. It's just a window dressing. In law, the UK cannot sell arms to a country if there is a chance that they may be involved in violations of international humanitarian law. Now, I'll tell you one fact which just shows that it's just ridiculous and it's not upheld. 40% of our weapons go to Saudi Arabia. We plied them with weapons while they were destroying Yemen, bombing funerals, hospitals, schools, blowing up school buses. So like so much of the whole international system which is talked about by highfalutin academics in seminars about all these different responsibility to protect international law, blah, blah, blah. If it impacts the ability of the UK and America and other countries to make money, then it's just thrown out the window. And we're seeing that in Gaza, right? They're smashing up the system to get this done. So in the UK, there is an arms export regime which sounds nice when you describe what it involves but it's not adhered to at all. So we sell, as I say, 40% to Saudi Arabia. The basis of that is a deal that was made in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher with the Saudis called Al-Yama Mar which was at the time the biggest arms deal in history and it's still going, billions of pounds and mainly all of it, all that money goes to BAE Systems which is the largest arms company in the UK dwarfs all the others by a massive amount. It's just, and it used to be a state-owned company but it was privatized by Margaret Thatcher. Although it was privatized, it's like so many of these corporations, it's basically part of the state still. Like there's a whole part of the UK government taxpayer funded part of the department for trade and industry which is role is to promote arms companies which is primarily BAE around the world. So we're paying to promote this private arms company. So that's how it is in the UK. In the case of Israel, we haven't been supplying munitions explicitly for the war in Gaza like the Americans have, although we might have been, but they're saying we haven't but the work I've been doing is about how the UK base on Cyprus, which is huge and I've been there, it's more than a base. I should give a little bit of history. Cyprus got independence from Britain in 1960 or at least that's what the history books say. It didn't get independence from Britain. Britain retained two massive, what are called sovereign base areas. In the West it's called Akritiri, in the East it's called the Kalia and they're not just bases, they're huge expanses of land, that there's bases within them, but the two bases together comprise 3% of Cyprus' land mass. There's also what we'll call retained sites which are within Cyprus proper, like there's one and there was a demonstration this weekend actually at one of those called RAF Trudos which is the highest point in Cyprus and it's a massive UK military base but also NSA base as well because like all the imperial assets of Britain, how we make ourselves useful to the Americans and how we maintain what's called the special relationship as we open all our assets around the world to the Americans. And nearly, well, pretty much every UK base around the world is also an American base and that's the case in Cyprus. But anyway, this Cyprus base has become extremely important in the current assault on Gaza by Israel because it's a 40-minute flight time to Tel Aviv from RAF Akrateri. Now, RAF Akrateri is the main air base on these bases that the UK has and it's right near Tel Aviv and right near Gaza. So, and the US has been using, secretly, they've never publicly said this, the US Air Force has been using RAF Akrateri to supply munitions to Israel, mainly to Nevitim base, which is in Beersheba in the Negev Desert, that's the main base that's receiving all the munitions and they're flying from RAF Akrateri. And the other thing that's happening from RAF Akrateri that I did a story on recently is the UK has flown 50 spy flights using a plane called the R1 Shadow, which is an advanced surveillance aircraft. And they did publicly say we're gonna start flying over Gaza to get intelligence. They said it was all to find hostages, right? But they didn't tell the number. So I went through the flight records and found it was 50. There's more than one a day going. And this bear in mind, there's only the foreign secretary of David Cameron said the other day that there's only two British hostages held by Hamas. So you're talking about 50 flights. It's a stretch to think that the only intelligence that providing to Israel is stuff about where these hostages might be. Also, the other fact is like Israel's on the ground in Gaza and has notorious surveillance capabilities over the whole territory. What benefit does a UK spy plane have? So I think much more will come out in future about that. But the UK, which is what I can talk to, and I'll just finish because I know I'm babbling on, but the UK has an integral role in the Gaza genocide. And it's not talked about at all. And mainstream media has not covered any part of it with the only outlet. And in fact, I'm the only journalist that has done any work on it really. Some of these articles have been co-authored with Mark Curtis as well, the editor of The Classified. But just to give you a taste of the impact we've had, and bear in mind, we're alternative media site. There's two reporters on our website. The president of Northern Cyprus, because Cyprus was illegally occupied by Turkey in 1974 and they've never left, him and the president of Cyprus proper have both had to make comments about our stories about Cyprus being used to supply Israel, the US supply in Israel. There's been the UK High Commission in Nicosia has had to make a statement and made a statement about it, denying some of the stuff. There's been three protests now. One in Limousol, which is right near at Criteria. It's the second biggest city in Cyprus. There's been one at RAF Trudos, which I mentioned. There's been one actually at RAF at Criteria as well, a couple in the weekends ago, all that. And there's, until recently, there hadn't been one word about any of it that got into the mainstream media in the UK, which is even shocked me because we're ignored all the time by the British mainstream media. But when you have presidents talking about big protests about bases which they try and keep quiet. So it's a big problem for the British, but nothing. And then recently, the Guardian published their first article, acknowledging the protests, but obviously didn't mention us at all. Didn't mention that we'd sparked it. So Cyprus has become what Haaretz said, the central hub for the international operation to support the Israeli assault on Gaza. Well, that's pretty significant there. Just to finish off that initial questioning, how was war declared in Britain? What role does parliament play there? We don't have a War Powers Act. Formerly, the prime minister has to, there's a vote, for example, there was a vote for the war in Iraq in parliament and that passed. But there's basically zero democratic accountability for the military and particularly for special forces. Now, I interviewed Jeremy Corbyn a couple of years ago and before he became Labour leader, he was saying he was trying to get a War Powers Act passed in Britain and he was basically told by the national security state, shadowy people. And part of that War Powers Act he said there should be some democratic accountability for special forces, SAS, SBS, all the different elements of that. And he was told, don't touch this. So he was told basically there's a whole area of the state that you're not allowed to go anywhere near. And that is how they operate. And the special forces is interesting because we're fighting all over the place. Like we did a story a couple of years ago about how we had a secret detachment of 30 special forces in Yemen. We don't know if they're still there. They might be there now. I'll finish with this as well and it relates to Gaza. In late October, it was reported in the Sun newspaper which is a horrible murder tabloid that the SAS had deployed to RAF at Qatiri in Cyprus. The following day, a denotus was sent out by the UK military to every media editor in the UK saying, don't report on the activities of the SAS related to Cyprus. Now for viewers who don't know what the denotus committee is, this is an embarrassing institution that we have in Britain that even Americans, I talked to about, I can't believe that we have it because American national security reporters might collude with the state behind closed doors but they're a bit embarrassed about it but in Britain it's explicit. So we have a committee which is run by the UK military. It meets every six months at the Ministry of Defense in London and it has a small collection of journalists and national security state officials, intelligence officials and they just talk about what they can and can't publish. And one of the functions of the denotus committee is when they don't want information published in the media, they can send out what are called advisories which is what they did with the SAS around Gaza. And that's why I think any journalist that abides by that in the case of Gaza is complicit and there's been no new information about the SAS involvement in Gaza since that denotus was sent out, which is an outrage because it's definitely had an impact enough and even more outrageous is the only reason we know about that denotus going out was because a small paper called The Socialist Worker publicized that they got it but none of the other media even admitted that they had received it. So if the socialist worker hadn't got it and exposed it, we wouldn't even know that denotus exists and that's how this worked. So the SAS I think definitely are in Israel probably in an advisory role, possibly in a combat role we don't know but another story we did was that nearly huge military transport vehicles are flying pretty much every day and did fly every day for two weeks soon after October 7th from RAF Equitiri British ones, from RAF Equitiri to Tel Aviv. Now these are C-17s, A-400Ms, they're huge military transport vehicles. They can carry over a hundred personnel, three Black Hawk helicopters in the case of the C-17s. So what are they carrying? Like they tell us it's no lethal aid. They say it's medical equipment and diplomatic engagement and stuff like that. But why would you need a huge military transport vehicle every day to go to Tel Aviv if you're just that? But my suspicion is definitely on some of those flights would have been SAS personnel. But again, we don't know. So it's all secret. What makes it worse is you do not have to obey the denotus, right? You're not legally obliged. You got one and you didn't obey it, right? And we sort of said, Mark Curtis, the editor of the gas pipe, we did a story about UK support for the oldest dictator in Africa, Paul Bia of Cameroon. And basically the UK military were drawing up plans to keep him in power and stuff like that. And we got hold of them, published a story. They contacted Mark, said we'd like you to censor your story on UK support for Bia. Mark sort of said, what is this? Is this an advisory? Is this a denot? There's a hilarious email exchange where they basically don't say what it is. And what I think it is, is they just expect people to fold instantly. So it's kind of like a gentleman's sort of old boys club is that come on, just censor that for us. But when you start picking a part about what actually is this, there's no formal, it wasn't a formal advisory. But anyway, we didn't censor the article and then wrote a piece about rejecting it. But that was the first time that had happened. I think nearly every single time with the mainstream media, they just abide by these denotes and we don't even know about them. So... Well, I used to be on the Insight team with the Sunday Times based in the U.S. And we came on a story of a guy who was a double agent for the FBI and MI5 inside the real IRA in the U.S. And they ordered Sunday Times not to publish it. We ignored it. Sunday Times ignored it and did publish that story. But let me bring Peter Chrono in. Peter, you did an interesting, very interesting story in November that we republished in sort of news about the role of Pine Gap. I'd like you to describe what Pine Gap is for some of our audience who don't know anything about it and what role it's playing right now in Gaza. Well, Pine Gap is basically a U.S. military base located in Australia. It's jointly run with Australia. There's Australian personnel there, but out of the 800 staff that run the place, there's only about 100 Australian government employees amongst that over half are American. The base is a humongous base full of ray domes, those huge golf ball-shaped domes. My current count is that there's now over 40. They've had a bit of a building spree in the last couple of years. Bulldozed a few more acres of land beside the base and popped up some new domes. And they seem to be in preparation for the potential conflict with China being missile detection, connected to missile detection. But the base collects pretty much everything. I mean, it collects everything from missile launch data through to mobile phones and it can target whatever it likes. If it's got your mobile phone details, it can target where you are within your GPS circle, know a five-meter radius. So that sort of data has been absolutely remarkably spectacularly used by the United States during the drone wars in Afghanistan, especially but Pakistan and other places because it allows the tracking of a mobile phone as it moves around. One of the problems is that people tend to share chips, mobile phones and chips. So they give it to their brother or their cousin and they end up destroying when the drone missile hits, they end up destroying the mobile phone, but it may not be the individual that they're looking for. So even though it's very precise, it's also extremely imprecise. The research has shown that they kill a huge number of people in the region around the actual mobile phone if that's what they're tracking. But they can track internet connections, sat phones. In Israel Gaza, apparently the Hamas have been very careful in the way they've used communications and they've done a lot of hurrying, handwritten messages back and forth to avoid this sort of detection because Israel and the US, the NSA are all over that sort of communication. Once things lit up in Gaza, the assets of Pine Gap were focused on the area. Obviously they've got another strong focus on Ukraine but Gaza was of particular interest. So what that allows is potentially the tracking of the launches of the Hamas rockets. So if people sitting at the desks in Pine Gap have their eyes open, this shouldn't be any surprise when Hamas rockets get fired. So Pine Gap is across all that communication and what it allows. I mean, you have to understand the technology involved here. It's absolutely astounding but the US are putting up new satellites basically one a year because they're improving the technology as we go. The last, I think there's four in the range of satellites used across the equator, 36,000 k's above the equator. Pine Gap picks up the data that they can collect. They put up another one in June last year, Orion 11. Orion 12 is due to go up this year. Each time improved capability to suck up data and send it down to Pine Gap. Now, most people used to think that Pine Gap was just a passive reception location in the desert in the middle of Australia, getting information and sending it off to the NSA. Well, it certainly does that but one of the documents I got through the Snowden archive shows that Pine Gap also processes, analyzes and reports on the data that it's receiving. So it's not just only receiving and forwarding on the data. It's doing the analysis and reporting. So, okay, there's no red button where they fire a missile in Pine Gap but there's everything up to that including tracking the exact location of people on the ground. So that is an amazing ability that the NSA has through Pine Gap. The NSA has a very close intelligence relationship with what's called ISNU, the Israeli SIGINT National Unit which is the overall intelligence unit for signals intelligence in Israel. And they share all sorts of access, targeting analysis and reporting. They don't share everything, of course, but one can only imagine the use of that connection for Israel during this war against Hamas. Did you say that they help Israel with targeting in Gaza as well on Pine Gap? Well, there was a leak that came out describing the relationship between the NSA and ISNU, the Israeli Signals Intelligence Unit. And it stated that those two organizations share information on access, intercept, targeting, analysis and reporting. Now, there was a bit of controversy over identifying US citizens in that. That went back and forth. And that was a few years ago. How far that relationship has developed, we don't know. But we also got to know that Israel has its own ability to spy. It has its own spy satellites. In fact, it's planning or hoping to use Australia as a base for launching a new spy satellite for the Israel military. So it's a very active field. And I won't get into it, but it's created a lot of surprise over how Israel was caught off guard given that they own the communication spectrum. So yeah, the analysis is provided. I presume it's by tasking that the Israelis would say, we would like these following things please. And then the NSA would decide what they send. I mean, clearly they're not a member of the Five Eye Alliance. They're not able to get the GEMs that Australia supposedly can also get, but they're a very close ally. And as a result, when they're in a time of need, that's what the US does. It supports its allies. It's a proxy war, as we understand. The US is slowly gearing up in the Middle East. And Ukraine and Israel are the proxy vehicles for fighting this war. So clearly the US wants to use its assets in the best possible way. Pine Gap sits there. It's on high alert. It's really running very busily, is what I understand at the moment. There's been some protests happening out there. The local peace group has mounted a couple of protests which involves closing off the entrance gate to Pine Gap. It's about 15 Ks south of Alice Springs. Obviously there's a rear entrance and the staff get in through the back gate. There's no surprise there, but the symbolic effort involved in closing off the entrance to Pine Gap is significant because the media has picked up on that. Although I must say, except for one minor example, no other media in Australia have covered this. The fact of Pine Gap support to what's happening in the Middle East is not reported. And I have to say, not without my attempts to get people interested, I've spoken to some senior journalists about it and their attitude is, well, not surprising. Well, I guess that's what they would do in this time. No interest in reporting it. I don't think there's a denotus like Matt suggests. I think Australia's had the denotus system in the past. It's sort of moribund now. It's been gone for about 20 odd years, 30 years. It sort of fell into disuse, but we don't need one, you know, when people are so supportive of what government is doing and, you know, it's insidious now. Those decisions don't need to be received via an email from the Defense Department. They're received through discussions across the editorial desk. Now I contacted the Defense Department at the time. They would not respond to this story. Would have been easy to say, rubbish, you haven't got a story, it's not a story. But from staff who work in the place, it is what's happening from the research that's been done over the years by people like Dez Ball and Richard Tantor. It is definitely a location that has all of those capabilities. From the Snowden leaks, we know in great detail, we've now got documents, NSA documents that refer in pages of detail of the functions of Pine Gate. So we know what it does. We know it's being used at the moment, but the Australian public are pretty much in the dark unless they really declassified Australia. And that's something they should do. Well, I mean, it's extraordinary complicity and the lack of transparency that David Shubridge was talking about before that's the exact opposite of what the media is supposed to be doing. You opened up a lot of new avenues to discussion, including complicity in a large crime going on in Gaza that might involve the governments we've been talking about. But let me turn it over to Elizabeth for some question. And thank you, Elizabeth. Yeah, sure. Given the capabilities in Pine Gap, do you think there's any explanation for the dumb bombs that Israel is using in Gaza? Do you think there is any excuse for that other than basically direct attempt at ethnic cleansing? Well, it's bizarre to see the arguments bounce back and forth between the use of dumb bombs and the use of precision weapons. But even the dumb bombs are now precise, you know, the JDAMs, the whole point of them is that they're using big blunt bombs that used to just drop and destroy massive buildings. They can now put them down to a five-meter radius so they can really target them. And in fact, declassified Australia discovered that Israel was using them on the F-35s in Gaza and only discovered that by reading Israeli media. There was an aviation magazine mentioned a visit by the Israeli Air Force Head. And he was bragging about the use of the JDAMs in close support of Israeli troops on the ground and posed with a photograph beside one of the F-35s. So, look, the capabilities are chosen. You know, if a dumb bomb is used, because it wants to have a huge area of destruction and there's no great problem if it goes a little bit over the edges. But look, I think if dumb bombs are used, they're used smartly, they're chosen to be used. And the appalling effects upon the civilian population are done consciously. These are not accidents of war. These are decisions made at probably the highest levels of the Israeli Defense Department. Yeah, and given those flying capabilities, not only that you're reporting, but also that Matt's reporting on as well with the aid of the UK, you would imagine they know exactly how many civilians they're affecting with these weapons. David, I had a question for you also about the weapons that Australia is supplying to Israel's efforts. Can you tell us more about them? Like, what weapons is Australia supplying specifically? Well, I mean, one of the geniuses of having a completely secret export system is I can't give you a list of the weapons that we know for certain. We can identify, well, at least not through any official source. We can identify through commercial statements that have been made and some of the previous statements that have been made by the Department of Defense when they were trying to trumpet Australia's arms exports. And there's a kind of, there's an agreed position between both the Labor Party, notional on the left and the coalition to make Australia one of the top 10 arms exporters on the planet. That's for some reason an ambition they have. So I can't imagine a worse ambition for a country, but that's one of their ambitions. And so at different times, they have Trumpeted Australia's military exports. For example, they point out how Australian industry is intrinsic in making the F-35 fighter bomber, which we know has been one of the principle methods of delivering lethal force, dumb bombs, smart bombs into the Gaza Strip. For example, Australia makes the mechanism that opens the Bombay doors. We exclusively make that mechanism. So every time the bomb is shot from an F-35, it's facilitated by a product made in Australia. Australia makes a significant amount of armoured steel that is used in the Israeli tanks and armoured fighting vehicles, both in, from a company called Raphael, one of the Israel's biggest defence conglomerates, another company called Plasan, which makes armoured vehicles as well. We supply the armoured steel to that. That's used not only in Gaza or in the war in Gaza. It's also used by militia groups or armoured vehicles in the West Bank as well. We also supply a significant number of drone parts and drones that we know have been used in the Gaza, in the war in Gaza. And there's at least two Australian suppliers of drones to the IDF, the Israeli Defence Force. We also know that Australia exports a large amount of aluminium to Israel. Aluminium is one of the key components, particularly for ammunition. And to give you some idea of how critical it is after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Australia immediately cancelled aluminium exports to Russia to prevent it being used in the Russian armaments industry. But in fact, Australia is still pumping out as much aluminium as we can to Israel. We know it's a critical component. The last thing I'll touch upon, it's not the end of the list, the last thing I'll touch upon is Australia has two facilities that make 155-millimetre artillery shells. One has a joint venture with a German international arms manufacturer called Rheinmetall, often identified as one of the least ethical German arms manufacturers on the planet. But Rheinmetall is a joint operation in one state, and there's another joint operation with Thales, the French multinational, often identified as one of the least ethical French international arms dealers in another state. They produce 155-millimetre ammunition, which is primarily at the moment being exported to the US. But as I said before, we have no export controls. Once we export it to the US, the US can send it wherever it likes. And at the moment, the US is emptying its stockpiles of 155-millimetre artillery and sending it straight to Israel. So there's a high likelihood that either Australian 155-millimetre artillery has been channeled through the US to Israel, or it's been used to facilitate other US artillery shells being provided to Israel. And that is a dumb weapon holds. It has like a 50-metre lethal blast radius every time they're used. There are a number of other sort of co-ventures we have with Israel, including, particularly for importing some of the most offence Napoleon weapons that Israel has tested in Gaza and tested in Palestine, like the spike missile and others, joint ventures with the Israeli defense industry. But none of this comes through the government and through the government data. All of this comes through commercial disclosures, inadvertent PR. Yeah, and before I move on to a question or two from Matt, I did want to also just open the interview to tell our viewers a little bit about your film series as well. Oh, well, look, I mean, for many of the reasons Matt and Peter have said, we've had enormous difficulty getting any of the mainstream media to cover the arms exports made by Australia to Israel. We've had our defense minister say that official government figures that actually show some of the defense exports, they're just wrong. She repeatedly says they're wrong. There are millions and millions of dollars that are identified in official foreign affairs and trade figures. She just boldly asserts that when they say millions and millions of dollars of weapons have been, arms and ammunition has been exported to Israel, she just says, oh, the figures are wrong and they've been wrong for a decade or more. And the mainstream media just says, oh, well, the official figures are wrong. The government just released a whole series of additional figures from October. They show yet more arms and ammunition exports to Israel. Again, the position of the government's oh, they're just wrong. So nobody reports on them. When we identify some of the material I've just said to you, we often have journalists very interested in it. They start writing up the story. They themselves want to tell the story and then the editor just kills it. And that has been a repeated theme. It is pretty extraordinary. As Peter says, we don't have de-notices like Matt has but Matt, we don't need them in Australia. There's just a general vibe that you don't report on this kind of stuff and it's pretty bloody and serious. But what I will say is, when we put up that material and we do it, in short videos we've released on social media, TikTok and other places, there's an enormous appetite for it. People want to see the truth. They really want to find out what the hell is going on. They know the government's not telling them the truth. And I've got to say, it's one of the things that erodes the trust in democratic government. It erodes trust in institutions. It's not just damaging because of the appalling violence that inflicts in Gaza. It's damaging to our very democracy. It's damaging to our social cohesion. It's damaging to the institutions of democratic government. Yeah, I mean, you see huge protests in all of these countries that are so complicit in what's going on in Gaza. So it really does highlight that it seems that the will of the people is not being carried out by their governments in these Western countries. Matt, I wanted to ask you one thing as well. And that is that you mentioned that the UK tries to describe those spy flights as only to look for hostages as if it's a non-military flight. But wouldn't that involve looking for Hamas infrastructure, which obviously is a military effort in and of itself? Can you talk a little bit more about that and how deceptive that is to describe it that way? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely deceptive. And it's all semantic games as well, because they say it's, I can't remember the specific wording, but it was something to do, something along the lines of it's intelligence shared is all to do with hostage rescue operations. Now, you could say, you could define the whole assault on Gaza if you wanted to as a hostage rescue operation. So, and they don't ever get any pushback. As David says, the media is just not present. It doesn't exist as a critical, as what we're told is a fourth estate, a check on power. So they never ever get questioned. They haven't been questioned about even the flights that we've revealed that are going pretty much daily from RFF Criteria, big military transport vehicles. And again, that is another semantic game. So they initially said it's not carrying lethal aid, but wouldn't say what's on it a couple of weeks later. They said, I can't even remember the wording, but it was really, you could tell that they're playing semantic games. And I think in the coming months, we'll find out there was much more insidious thing coming on. We might even never find out because the media is not looking. But the whole thing is running secret. And it is, the media is complicit. And it's really, really important to make this point again and again. And I think that the Gaza assault has revealed that in ways that I think all of us probably knew that was the case before. But the fact that the whole system rests on the media not doing its job and keeping people ignorant is so revealed by Gaza. Because as you said, when people know the truth, they come out and protest. Like the Cypriot Peace Council, which was created like 70 years ago, they were thanking me. They said, thank you for letting us know our country is being used to supply weapons for a genocide. Thank you. And I'm sort of like, how is it come down to me as an alternative media reporter on a small website to reveal this really like important historic fact? But that's the situation we're in. I mean, another part of it is the UK has a secret military agreement with Israel. And it was signed December 2020 between Sir Nick Carter, who was the head of the army at that point and his Israeli counterpart. Now, that's never been written about in the mainstream media. We've written about it. And there was a parliamentary question asked, can we have a look at maybe this military agreement which we've got with Israel? They were like, no, it's classified at a high classification because of the nature of the agreement. Now, it's possible that that agreement commits the UK to joint self-defense or something. So it might be that our actions there in supporting them in Gaza are obligated by this agreement, but we will never be able to see that. Now, how is that a democratic country? Doesn't sound like a democratic country to me. And I think that what this has really revealed is that we don't live in a democracy in the UK. And it sounds like it's a similar thing in Australia and the States. If we had a democracy, as you said, the powers that be would have to be responsive to their citizens, which I think the majority are against the support that we're giving to the genocide in Gaza. But it's really revealed that actually the UK is an oligarchy and it's a bipartisan issue, like so much of this stuff. Again, a short sign of an oligarchy because look who's in the White House, it's Biden, a Democrat, right? The Republicans are equally pro-Israel and pro-genocide. In the UK, we have Sunak in power, pro-genocide from the start. Kiyostama had a Labour Party pro-genocide. So you cannot vote in the UK for a party that has an actual chance of forming a government that is not pro-genocide. Now, that's a really preposterous and non-democratic proposition, isn't it? But that's where we are. And like I say, I think that this has to be a transformative moment for the UK, for America, for Australia, for everyone because the system has never been as exposed as it is now. I don't think, like even the war in Iraq, which was when I was politicised in 2003, when I started really questioning everything I've been told about everything in terms of politics and foreign policy because we were friends with Saddam at one point and now we're saying he's evil incarnate and we need to bomb them to like, I had a real realisation. Now you're literally seeing people, because of social media, seeing kids being blown up every day. They've killed 118 children every day that Israelis and Gaza for four months nearly. And people are seeing that and they're seeing both leaders of both parties come on TV and defend that and defend arms sales and defend support that we're giving. And I think a lot of people are thinking, wow, everything I've been told is basically a lie and we need to use this moment to transform everything and actually make our society democratic because if this isn't a transformative moment, there never will be because I can't imagine anything at the system ever being more exposed. That also goes for the media because as David was saying and Peter as well, the media is just not covering it. And I think that with the advent of social media, that contradiction is so obvious now. A lot of my non-political friends have said to me, wow, like look at the Israeli propaganda is so cartoonishly evil. And these are people that aren't like pro-Palestinian or even know about the cause, but things are becoming a bit more obvious now. And I think we need to take advantage of that. In alternative media circles, if we can really push our influence and push our stories out now, this is an opportunity and the system will probably come back at us at some point because the only, the journalist that really changed consciousness in the mainstream was Julian Assange and we know what happened to him. So that's what happens if you really start having an impact in the mainstream and there's a lot of obstacles to that, but hopefully we can sum up them now. Yeah, I completely agree. And you see recently former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was insulting pro-Palestinian protesters saying that they were Russian assets basically that needed to have their finances investigated by the FBI. Then she made a comment outside of her house, I believe to protesters saying go back to China where your headquarters are, something to that effect. So you really see the establishment struggling with this opposition that has never been this strong before. And I agree with what you just said in the sense that I too have people in my non-journalistic life who during the era of something like Russiagate had no political engagement whatsoever, but when they're seeing a genocide live stream day after day have been completely politicized and are going to protests. So I think the people that somebody like Nancy Pelosi is now calling a water carrier for Putin is a completely newly politicized group of people that were never involved before didn't really understand Russiagate for the lie that it was. And so it's a whole different ballgame than it was just a few years ago even. But Peter, I had one more for you and that was what role does the Australian Strategic Policy Institute play in defense policy in Australia? And can you tell us a little bit more about who's in that group as well? Oh, look, in terms of personnel, don't have the list in front of me so I might just put that aside. So let me start answering the question again. Now the Australia Strategic Policy Institute is a defense department created think tank in inverted commerce. It involves primarily people who are on the inside, former defense department intelligence people, defense contractors, and they were initially established with the aim of providing contestable intelligence so that it would improve the ability of the defense and intelligence agencies in giving advice to government that they would have their assumptions challenged and they would actually provide alternatives. They don't do that at all. They're breaching their foundation document the way they're currently running. They are a megaphone for everything to do with the US Alliance. They've set up a Washington office, God damn. Overall, they're just an assumed mouthpiece for media. Now, the mainstream media love them because these people are accessible. They wear shirt and tie. They smile to the camera. They're clean cut and they provide a reinforcement for the views that are generally around in mainstream media. So they're the go-to experts in inverted commons for stories like this. Now in the past, they've also reached out to journalists and given them fellowships, given them prime positions on the stage at conferences. So they're doing a recruitment as well into mainstream journalism. And as a result, they get remarkably terrific coverage. Now, unfortunately, that hasn't worked on the Australian population. We did, we looked at some of the survey material around polling that's been produced by the Lowe Institute in Australia and it shows that most people want Australia to be neutral. The majority are against Australia becoming involved in any US wars, whether it be in the Middle East, against China over Taiwan, the majority of people want Australia to be neutral. They are happy to have a military involved in humanitarian efforts or in peacekeeping, such as East Timor or Voganville, with Australian, you know, Australia's got out in the streets in their masses and supported those military engagements because it was helping people being crunched by, well, Indonesia's military in one case. So the Australian people are very smart and despite the deluge of propaganda pouring over them, we still have the majority of Australian people not in favor of supporting US wars, not supporting joining wars, unless there's UN support for that. So that's an incredible fact, no one gets told. And when those polling surveys are reported in Australia, those questions and answers are never mentioned. The most recent one talked about do Australians see the US alliance as being important? And most people say, yeah, well, it is important. The other question was, do you want to join the US alliance in the next war? Well, overwhelming answer is no, but that didn't get reported. It is a one-way traffic here in Australia and that is pro US, pro the alliance, pro the UK, pro AUKUS. And unfortunately, the questioning that should be happening through democracy, the democratic process in parliament and the democratic process through Australia's media is broken. I mean, a simple question asked in parliament about are nuclear weapons transiting Australia? Brought the most arrogant put down of the parliamentarian asking the question, when in reality, that's the whole purpose of parliament. The minister for foreign affairs seemed to forget that they were sitting in parliament answering questions in question time because they're meant to be accountable and meant to tell the public what's going on. So, you know, the system's broken and unfortunately we're seeing it after the ICJ decision. The Australian government has stepped away from it. Now, Pine Gap operates with full knowledge and concurrence. That's the statement that's regularly brought out. Full knowledge, well, that's impossible. You can't know every hitch that the US or what others are doing. So concurrence, basically we kind of know what's going on and we kind of agree. That's what full knowledge and concurrence means. Okay, well, when it comes to the crunch, I think the lawyers might have something to say about that. Australian staff, if they're involved in some of these targeting analysis, processing, reporting to the NSA for targeting of locations and people in Hamas, if that can be shown to be war crimes, if that can be shown to be genocide, I think personnel and their bosses have a few problems. Now, it's going to take legal action. Certainly the Australian government is going to run a protection racket and not want to investigate this hell. I can't even get an answer out of the defense department. And that leads me to my last question and that's to David and just to ask, you know, is it totally bipartisan support for Israel politically, you know, amongst the political establishment in Australia or is there some corner of opposition, like real opposition that we don't seem to see in the UK or the US? Well, there are 15 of us Greens in the federal parliament in the Senate and the Lower House and we have been united in our opposition to the war in genocide. And the, you know, the War parties, the coalition and the Labor party hate us asking questions. And as Peter pointed out, when we dare ask a question about a US B-52 has been stationed on Australian soil and do they carry nuclear weapons? We get this, you know, mock-a-frontery from the Foreign Affairs Minister. How dare you ask that question? This has just been political. I mean, you know, how dare I and my colleagues politicise stationing, you know, mass murder weapons on Australian soil? I mean, how dare we make that a political issue? That's outrageous. They're furious about us. And they have increasingly tried to find new ways to secrete the information even in parliament. There's a joint committee for oversight in the security apparatus, for example, in Australia. And they viciously oppose having anybody who's not a member of the Labor party or the Liberal party. You know, the Liberal party is one part of the coalition. They don't even want their national party members to be on that oversight security committee. And the thought that they'd put a green on it, you know, they'd literally go into shapes of fear and anxiety at the thought that they might be green or independent on the oversight committee of security forces, security apparatus. So, you know, there is this wall of opposition within both of those parties. And you might occasionally get a Labor MP indicate that they're a little bit troubled about it and suggest that, you know, killing Palestinians is a bad thing. They will get immediately stomped on and silenced by their party and they're not allowed to, you know, put kind of formal motions to the parliament or support any motion that we put. There's just absolute walls of opposition if we put a ceasefire motion or some transparency in this space. But I think they're clearly feeling anxious about it. You know, it's very hard to continue to put a wash over the killing and killing of kids. It's very hard to put spin over the amount of violence being inflicted on too many people trying to live their life in Gaza. And, you know, I think, as Matt and Peter both said, that the wash of spin that they're putting over it, you know, another well-dressed Israeli spokesperson coming up and trying to justify genocide, the public are just, you know, I think very troubled by it. I think that the challenge we have is to, as Matt says, make it more than just an arm-asking moment, make it a kind of moment where we start disassembling these existing power structures, which don't only just justify and support the genocide in Israel. I mean, they just support the appalling use of Western military power whenever it chooses, against whomever it chooses, when it seemed to be convenient for the business or geopolitical interests of the US. And I think exposing Matt, trying to dismantle that trying to get some democratic oversight of it all, I think is really critical. And then let's do everything we can to use this moment to change things. David, this is not a new problem, unfortunately. I'm reading John Pilger's book, A Secret Country About Australia, and he writes, quote, Australia said the Minister for the Interior, Wilford Kent Hughes in 1950, said that Australia must become the 49th state of America. Now, unfortunately for him, Alaska became the 49th. Then Australia, and then John writes here, that the Australian traditions to fight other people's wars against those with whom Australians have no quarrel and who offer no threat of invasion. So what is Australia, I have, before I get to the really big question that we're gonna end this show with, I wanna ask David, what does Australia get in return for all this subservience or what do they get? We view ourselves as a kind of sub-imperial power. We happily join on with pretty much every US conflict. I mean, even the UK will stay out of some that we join into. We pretty much join every US war that we possibly can in order to show some kind of blind pathetic loyalty to the United States on the hope that if there's some sort of as yet unidentified fear-driven invasion of Australia, that this provision of the ANZ Australia, a treaty between Australia and the United States about defense where the US will promises to consult with us if we get attacked on the hope that that means when they consult with us, they'll actually come and defend us when this mythical attack of Australia happens. And it's all just sort of like puppy love that we show to the US in every possible instance on the hope that that will come true. But I think we should also realize that Australia benefits from this so-called rules-based international order. I mean, it benefits our extraction industries, our resource industries, it benefits our finance industries. We benefit from the so-called rules-based order, not to the same strategic level as the United States, but we benefit commercially. And we also want the US to be hegemonic in the world on the assumption that they're a bit like us and they'll come and defend us if Bush comes to shove. Of course, that is a kind of an utterly obscene way of viewing the world that you're willing to just blindly follow the United States regardless of the morality of their conflicts, regardless of the morality of their international posture. And also it requires an ongoing manufacturing of fear in Australia about some fall of peril coming to us from Asia to the North. And of course, there's a deep racist history of Australia in that and the current fear that they're doing everything they absolutely can to generate is a fear of China. And China has not indicated ever either a capacity or interest in invading Australia or physically threatening Australia. And yet we're constantly seeing the mainstream media posit China as some kind of material threat to Australia for which we need to amongst other things spend 368 billion Australian dollars in buying nuclear submarines. We need to be part of US's forward posture in the South China Sea and ready to attack China and in the South China Sea and this whole idea of forward defense. So what do we get out of it? We get a sense of misplaced loyalty. We get a hope that this attack that has no real prospects of happening that the US will come to our defense and we get material financial benefits out of it. And in return, all we have to do is engaging grossly unethical wars and sell out our sovereignty. It's usually the United States has to pay people off like the warlords in Afghanistan with pallets of cash come. But here Australia's paying the 360 billion themselves just to have that feel that close to Washington. We just gave the US 4.7 billion Australian dollars, 3 billion US dollars to help it build more nuclear submarines including ballistic missile submarines, the new Columbia class of submarines which are just a sort of floating war crime designed only to deliver dozens and dozens of nuclear weapons on the cities and facilities around the world. So we're literally paying the US to build the next class of ballistic missile submarines on the hope that some crimes will fall off the table to us. You couldn't make this stuff up, John. No, what do you get from, what does Australia get from Israel? Do you get space software to use, destroy an Australia? We get a significant, we do, but we also have a significant import of weapons from Israel. I think just since this new government has come in as a notionally left-wing labor government, we've signed fresh or extended contracts for some $300 million worth or so of Israeli weapons. We've repeatedly signed contracts with Israeli arms manufacturers even since the 7th of October, including things like the spike missile, that appalling missile, which is used to punch through the walls of residential buildings and kill families and people living inside residential buildings in Gaza. We've seen how that's been used in Gaza and now Australian military says, you all want to buy that and we want to support the industry that makes that and we have entered into contracts to buy tens of millions of dollars worth of that particular appalling weapon. And that's since the 7th of October. So yes, and I could go on at more detail about the efforts being made to sort of link the Australian defense industry with the Israeli defense industry, but at a federal level or the site level, there are constant efforts to do that. Well, let me get to the really big question. I'll start again with you, David, because you may have to leave. We saw the International Court of Justice here in the Hague where I am not throwing out this case and actually putting Israel on trial for genocide, which after decades of impunity, is a bit shocking to people. I think there's a lot of loopholes in what they said. I'm not gonna get into that. But without question, this is a big change that Israel is being put on trial for genocide. We also had, at the same time, a hearing in the Northern District of California on a lawsuit that the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York brought against Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, that they are complicit in genocide. They brought that back in middle of October, weeks into this phase of the conflict. So we've got these two court cases. And what we've heard on this program tonight from Matt, from Peter, and from you is essentially evidence that you've collected of complicity by the Australian and the British governments. Let's leave the Americans aside for the moment. Tell me, is that how you see it, David, that Australia is complicit in this genocide because of the way it's participating and the way you've described tonight. And should Australian officials be worried? I saw at the end of Peter's article, they put a question in about this and got, I think, to the Defense Ministry or the Foreign Ministry and got no answer. So, David, I'll start with you. Should Australian officials be sleeping very well at night, giving what's going on illegally? Well, if you want to get a sense of Australia's complicity in it, Australia responded to the ICJ ruling, which, amongst other things, said, aid must continue to Palestinians, that the evidence for crimes was deeply troubling. But one of the critical things was they said, stop the collective punishment of Palestinians and ensure that aid and supplies continue to go into Gaza. What was Australia's response to the ICJ ruling? We suspended our support for UNRWA, the principal aid delivery agency to Palestine. We literally suspended it. And that was only a matter of less than two weeks after our Foreign Affairs Minister went to Israel and trumpeted that we were giving $20 million more aid to Palestine and Gaza. Yeah, so our response to the ICJ ruling was to actually suspend aid to Palestinian civilians. If you want evidence of complicity, if you want evidence of thumbing our nose to the international rules-based order, if you want evidence that Australia will do whatever the hell it likes, regardless of the international rules-based order, and they feel utterly immune from accountability, you had it in that statement from our Foreign Affairs Minister. I mean, our job, surely our job, is to do everything we can to force accountability. There are notionally laws in our books that should provide accountability when our governments and individuals are complicit in genocide. Let's see if those laws work. I believe Australia is also participating in some way in the operation against the Houthi in Yemen. And the United States officials, they say we don't want the border spread in the Middle East, we're doing everything we can to continue. But in fact, they're stopping this Houthi group doing what the Vietnamese did in 1979 when they invaded Cambodia to stop the genocide of the Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. And it's the Yemenis who are the only ones, these Houthis who are trying to do something and why did the US send immediately a carrier group to the Mediterranean and one to the Gulf is to prevent any other country from coming in to stop the Israeli. So is Australia also participating in this? Yeah, Australia was very embarrassed about there. If it's to participate in Yemen, they desperately wanted to send a warship to Yemen, but because our defense procurement is so utterly incompetent, we didn't have a warship that could actually, for any significant amount of time, survive prolonged low cost drone attacks by Houthis in Yemen. So we couldn't send a ship and they were very embarrassed. They super wanted to send a ship, they couldn't send a ship. So instead they put like six people on a Boeing and sent them off and said, yep, we're doing everything we possibly can to support the US. They 100% supported the US and UK bombing. And they literally did it within I think 24 hours of the US saying and us saying in response, we need to do everything to stop this conflict escalating. We need to do everything to stop it from becoming a regional conflict. No country should engage in this as a regional conflict. And then literally, within 24 hours, they've started an ongoing bombing campaign against Yemen. And this is after the UK, Australia and the US have done everything they can to fill the conflict in Yemen. I mean, the UK through BAE has been a massive weapons exporter to Saudi, but Australia has exported hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to the United Arab Emirates, which we know have been used in the civil war in Yemen. And then we pretend, then we pretend, oh my God, isn't this terrible, instability and conflict in Yemen, that's creating regional instability. We better bomb them. After we have spent decades literally fueling that conflict through our arms exports. I mean, the obscenity, the hypocritical obscenity of how our governments act is really being exposed at the moment. Thank you, Senator David Schubertsch. Peter, at the end of your piece, you said that you put a question into one of the miniatures I'm forgetting, which one about the issue of complicity. Where do you stand with it? That was back in November. Have you heard from them yet? I'll better check my email. Maybe. Yeah, we'll wait, we'll wait, okay. But look, this is the same Defense Department who declined to preview the NSA documents that were leaked to the ABC for the documentary I did on ABC Radio. We contacted the Defense Department and said we've received these NSA documents referring to Pine Gap. Would you like to take a look at them and tell us if you think any of the information there should be redacted and tell us the reasons for that? They wouldn't. They wouldn't. They referred us to the NSA because I guess that's where the decisions get made, isn't it? Now, look, the story about UNRUS, you know, as a journalist, it has all of the signs of being a put up job that's been saved up for a bad news day. Apparently it came from information from interrogations done in October. So it's a package of a story that's been sitting there waiting for a day to see sunlight. And surprise, surprise, it saw sunlight the day after the International Court of Justice found a very negative finding. So much of the media oxygen has been sucked up by this dubious claim of UNRUS involvement in the October attacks. I think we really ought to take a close look at that not because of the complicity of the UN in these things. And I've got to say, if there is any complicity, that should be prosecuted and the people should be outed and that should be dealt with, should have been done in October when they found out, supposedly. But as a journalist, come on, you know, it is nothing but an oxygen sucker to suck the news attention out of the International Court of Justice. I mean, the coverage of the International Court of Justice has been appalling here in Australia. It's been mentioned a couple of times, you know, people can do searches and say, oh, there's an article in the Guardian, there's something on the ABC. But I tuned in on the night, the decision, the findings were being read and the ABC was running a gardening show on one of its channels. And on the other channel, it has a program, discussing things America, and they didn't happen to discuss this. So, I mean, people hate that sort of story coming out inside the ABC. They don't know what to do with it. The good people want to report it and just get it out there. But unfortunately, it just doesn't flow that way. But a story like UNRWA, surprise, surprise. Bang, it's out there. We've got the government responding within five seconds condemning them. I mean, just a Google search, you can find out the information has come from interrogations. And we know from the war on terror, the dubious information that comes from interrogating people. So, hey, yeah, I think the Australian government is extraordinarily nervous about the complicity that Australia has at the moment because not only are we potentially in breach of the Geneva Convention by not taking steps to prevent genocide, we're obliged to do that. And it's not to make speeches to prevent genocide, it's take steps. We're also not doing the R2P doctrine that's popped around for the last 20 or 30 years, the responsibility to protect. Now, that works with the Uighur. That works with women protesting against repressive regimes in whatever country it may be, Iran at the moment. But it doesn't seem to work for the Palestinians. So, I think that the defence lawyers and foreign affairs lawyers in Australia are burning the midnight oil, doing a lot of overtime, preparing explanations and covers to be able to continue the operations of places like Pine Gate to be able to provide briefing notes to ministers so that they can wriggle out of the responsibility. We do have a responsibility to uphold the Geneva Convention by taking action. And I haven't seen that happen. The only country I'm trying to practice R2P is the Houthis in Yemen. Let's move on to, thank you, Peter. Finally, Matt will go to you in the UK. What's the sense there? Are there any officials there who think that this, you know, app before the ICJ ruling and this case in California, the idea of an American official or an Israeli official standing trial for it is impossible to imagine. Then the International Criminal Court is probably not going to happen. They've been sitting on the Israel file for four years now, going on five, after the Palestinians became an observer state, they joined the ICC and they put forward their complaint. And even though there's, Mr. Khan is the prosecutor who's done nothing, but the ICJ has ruled this. It's changing the political calculus here for the first time you can imagine that maybe Western officials need to be a little bit nervous. What's happening in the UK in this regard, Matt? I agree with you to a degree, but I also think that they're not going to be nervous because they know the system protects them. I mean, look at, we've got Tony Blair and George Bush still running around celebrated by the media. They're two of the biggest war criminals alive today and they've never even had a sniff of a day in court. So the idea that the support that we're giving to Israel in, well, it is direct support, but what I mean is we're not, it's not British bombs dropping on Gaza. Well, actually they might be British made, but they're not from RF planes. That would get them in the dock. I think it's a bit of a stretch. I also, I'm not as optimistic about the ICJ ruling because although they said yes, but there's a plausible chance that they're committing genocide, actually they chickened out of what they should have done which is called for a ceasefire. And there was a bit of debate after this that they can't do that. But actually in the case of Russia, they did do that. They said they should immediately end their military operation in Ukraine. That's what they said. And so they can say that. And obviously what's going on in Gaza is some orders of magnitude worse than what Putin did in Ukraine. And it continues the genocide every day. So I'm not that, but having said that, I do think that they're probably like, as you say, this is the first time that the impunity that the West and its satellites have enjoyed forever effectively has got a bit shaky. And I think that the UK is quite aware. And I think this is also the first time that even in the whole history of Western imperialism that they've celebrated their war crimes and advertised their war crimes in such a way. So I mentioned Bush and Blair in Iraq. And obviously they lied their way into an illegal war and committed, shock and awe was an incredibly destructive way of invading Iraq. And then obviously the two battles of Fallujah, all sorts of war crimes happened. But they nice it up, didn't they? They never, I mean, rhetorically, they never went on TV and said, we wanna kill civilians and we did it with human animals. Apart from, they talked about that in terms of terrorist, but these Radis are going in. And just, I mean, if you read, if you listen to the South African prosecutors, I mean, they're just the list of what the Israelis are said. I mean, it's outrageous. So I think that probably does scare the patrons quite a bit. And there was one specific case actually that I saw in the UK pilot, which made me think that maybe they are a bit worried, which is that, as I mentioned, RF at Qatiri, the UK is claiming that it's not sending any lethal aid to Israel via RF at Qatiri, but they're not commenting on whether the fact that the US Air Force is using at Qatiri to deliver munitions, we know they are. But so there's a good MP who asked good questions and he asked, can I find out if the US is using RF at Qatiri to deliver weapons to Israel and Israel and the Ministry of Defense said, no, we don't comment on allies use of our bases. And then he said, okay, you don't have to tell me it was on them, but are you aware of what's on them? That's what I just want to know. Do you know when they come in and they said, we can't answer that question either. Like, so they know that obviously they are aware, they have like every flight that lands will have a list of the cargo that's on it, right? That's standard, even if the US is operating completely independently of the on UK territory, but they can't say it because I suspect they are worried that if they admit that they know that the US are delivering munitions via Cyprus, they are complicit legally in a ministers could be prosecuted. So that was a, that when I saw that they're scared to even say that whether or not they're aware of what's on US flights to RF at Qatiri, I thought, well, okay, maybe they are a bit scared. But the whole system, it's like you said, it's a house of cards, it doesn't exist. And all this stuff is just, it's air, that is pumped out by the media and actually just doesn't really exist. When the time comes, how the international system runs is like the mafia, it's what they call the great game. Everyone's playing it. We're just pawns and there's red lines. If they want to get something done, if it's in their interest, they don't care. And this Gaza is the most extreme version of that because the destruction is unprecedented really. In that, I mean, the amount of people they've killed, they've killed in nearly four months is just incredible, the destruction. They've dropped like over two Hiroshima bombs on this little strip of land, so 20 miles long. So, and I'm not optimistic that there'll be any justice. I mean, Karim Khan's an interesting one actually because he was backed to become chief prosecutor at the ICC by Israel and the UK and his brothers in the House of Lords. If you look into his history, it's quite interesting. He's an established man and he's working for certain interests, I think. And I think the fact that he hasn't put an arrest warrant out from Netanyahu or some of his ministers after, even Yoav Galan, right? Soon after he said, we are withdrawing all food, water and electricity from 2.3 million people. That's a clear violation of the Geneva Convention on collective punishment. Instantly, he said it, he's advertising it. So an arrest warrant can go out, it's straight away, but there's nothing happening. They've also been investigating the ICC since 2014, Israeli war crimes. So why has no arrest warrant gone out since 2014? Because some people say, well, they need more time to send out arrest warrants. Well, they've been investigating for eight years now. And 2014 was savage as well. Not quite as savage as we're seeing now, but there was definitely huge amounts of evidence of war crime and nothing's happened. So I think that we should push, though. As you say, I think there is optimism in the sense that a door has opened a little bit and we should push. We have the fact that Israel is on trial now for genocide probably does have a massive psychological impact on a sort of generalized global level because we are seeing that things that we never thought were possible are now possible. So we need to keep going, push harder. Yeah, that's what I was talking about, just the psychological change that this is born about. But I agree with you about over-optimism about the ICJ's decision. I'm getting a lot of heat from people because I see a lot of loopholes here. In particular- Oh, I've got to go, sorry, guys. Okay, David, thank you for being here again. Bye. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thanks so much. Cheers. Bye-bye. The court has told Israel that they cannot kill Palestinians within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention. So Israel could easily argue that they're killing people outside the scope. You could even commit a war crime and not be committing genocide, right? So they are killing people. We're not doing that. So they also not telling them to stop genocidal acts. They're saying them to prevent them. They haven't decided yet formally that there are genocidal acts and the issue of the ceasefire, this is the one that's getting a lot of people upset. The argument is that Hamas is not a state. Therefore, like you said in the Russia-Ukraine decision, Russia and Ukraine estates, that's why they have jurisdiction of both and they're both UN members. Hamas is not a UN member. So the court cannot tell Hamas to do a ceasefire. That's the argument why they could not have done a ceasefire. However, under the law of belligerent occupation, a country, the occupied Israel, could not use this kind of offensive violence against the occupied people. Under the Geneva Convention, they are required to look after their welfare. So I'm just gonna say that based on that, on that law, I think the court could have ordered Israel to suspend their operation in Gaza, not as a ceasefire between two belligerents, but as the occupying power, because it's illegal for them to behave that way. I just wanted to say that piece because this has been a difficult, it's a difficult decision because you can interpret it in many different ways. And I think that that's one of the problems with it. And I agree with you that it's, I'm not so optimistic about this decision, but it does change the game a little bit because now we're seeing Israel at least normally gonna be put on trial. So we're gonna end this now unless Peter, you wanna add something. No, I'm done, I gotta fly. Okay, thank you very much. Nice to meet everyone, cheers. Thank you, Peter, Kronow in Sydney, and Matt Kennedy in London, Elizabeth Voss in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Cathy Vogan back in Sydney in the studio, and we appreciate everybody for joining us and we'll be back soon with another episode of CN Live. For CN Live, this is Joe Laurie in The Hague, saying goodbye. If you are a consumer of independent news, then the first place you should be going to is Consortium News, and please do try to support them when you can. It doesn't have its articles behind a paywall, it's free for everyone. It's one of the best news sites out there and it's been in the business of independent journalism and adversarial independent journalism for over two decades. I hope that with the public's continuing support of Consortium News, it will continue for a very long time to come. Thank you so much.