Declan Hayes: Israeli President Herzog’s victory tour of Australia

Although he is subject to multiple international arrest warrants, Israeli President Isaac Herzog is currently touring Australia like he is a prize horse that has just won the Melbourne Cup. Queensland has been quick out of traps by pushing through legislation outlawing as hate speech the chant: “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and the Aussie courts have played their part by decreeing that Herzog’s victory tour is all kosher, dinky-di and on the level.

Although Australia has witnessed massive protests against Israel’s wanton Gazan slaughter, the Aussie authorities prostrating themselves before Herzog show the powers that be are not listening but are instead on the side of the Aussie, South African and American colonists on the West Bank, who continue to brazenly shake down the locals there.

Although the proximate reason for inviting Herzog to Australia was to show solidarity with Australia’s Jewish “community” following the murder of 16 Jews on Sydney’s famous Bondi beach in 14 December 2025, for that empathetic gesture to ring true, similar gestures would have to be extended to Palestinians and, indeed, to Australia’s Alawites, whose relatives back in Syria are still being massacred as part of Israel’s Greater Syria ethnic cleansing project.

The Alawites are particularly relevant to this Herzog caper, as it was a Syrian Alawite, Ahmed al-Ahmed, who disarmed one of the Bondi Beach murderers and who got shot twice at close range for his troubles. Still, as the Alawites, like the Palestinians, are children of a lesser God, to hell with him and to all peaceful Alawites and Arabs like him.

 

Israeli President Isaac Herzog is currently touring Australia like he is a prize horse that has just won the Melbourne Cup.

The chant to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea is just that, a chant and not a detailed plan to reverse the illegal appropriations that have been ongoing in Israel/Palestine since the late 1940s. Although the phrase “globalise the intifada” also faces being banned, that too is only a phrase and is not on an operational par with Israel’s ongoing efforts, through its Jeffrey Epsteins and Isaac Herzogs, to globalise the whitewashing of its own unspeakable crimes.

The ordinary Aussie battlers have no recourse other than to spew out feeble slogans at emasculated marches and to hope against hope that their political leaders will have their Damascene moment and forthrightly oppose these Israeli crimes that tarnish us all. But to oppose Israeli crimes would mean having an army of mini Jeffrey Epsteins on their back, exposing their “foibles”, while the Isaac Herzogs down under would leak all their putrid linen to Australia’s Israeli-friendly media. Best perhaps to keep schtum and continue to take the shekels, not least because the Israeli fascist state continues to show the world how to police the irksome masses with Napoleon’s whiff of grapeshot.

The LAPD are the latest in a very long line of police forces to send their members over to Israel to learn policing methods that would be more at home in Nazi-occupied Europe than in today’s United States or Australia. The loud-mouthed Irish, for their part, still allows the American regime to render Palestinian citizens to Israel via its controversial Shannon airport, and all while chanting the same inane chants their mates down under do. Back in Blighty, meanwhile, you get jail for supporting Palestinian activists and in Germany, which needs no lessons in finessing their brutality from Israel’s police force, you get a trip to accident and emergency for speaking your mind.

So much for the Little League. At the top table, Israel, India, the UAE and Ethiopia are forming a new Red Sea axis around Somaliland and Algeria feels another destabilising colour revolution by the usual suspects is coming its way. Whatever about Algeria, countries like Ireland and Australia in hock to Epstein’s mates do not have to worry about such turbulence as long as all they are allowed to do is march around in circles shouting meaningless slogans.

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After all, as this Aussie report argues, Epstein was a good bloke, a true-blue mate, who would do his Aussie mates a turn and, as he had his fingers into all sorts of Aussie cash cows, wiser councils would warn against crossing him and his. Best then for the ordinary Aussies to march around in circles and for Melbourne Cup winner Isaac Herzog to remind the non-comatose that their nag, much like the king (or is it the ex-Prince of York?) in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, has not a moral stitch of clothing to his name.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Maghrebi.org. Declan Hayes is an Irish academic, author and geopolitical expert.

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