Julie Macken

I am sure I am not the only person who stopped what she was doing early on Tuesday morning to listen the most anguished interview I have ever heard on radio.

Dr Saya Aziz — an Australian anaesthetist working at a hospital in Gaza City – was describing the nightmare she was working in, witnessing, smelling and tasting, as this genocide continues unchecked. Radio National’s Sally Sara held her silence as Dr Aziz described hell.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stop wondering in the midst of this utter collapse of the international order and our shared humanity, what is to be done?

This is a question we must all grapple with – our own humanity demands nothing less. Nevertheless, we have no guarantees of an answer because we are at the point of the map that reads, beyond here, there be dragons.

Whatever we think about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, whatever we think about the politics of doing something, or not doing something, we are as witnesses, already in a relationship with the conflict. Further the conflict is so brutal, unrelenting and appalling, we are also in a psychological relationship with it.

The most obvious impact of this relationship is the moral injury it delivers. This is how we describe the damage done to our conscience and moral compass when we perpetrate, or witness or fail to prevent acts and behaviour that transgress our values, ethics and our souls.

Just as being witness to domestic violence can transform the observer, not only the victims, so to is this violence transforming all of us. The question is, in what ways are we changing?

In an individual, moral injury can lead to distress, depression and suicidality. In a nation it can destroy our trust in the national leadership and others in positions of power. It drives a sense of cynicism that is itself corrosive of hope and leaves us with a feeling of very real aloneness as we understand deeply, that if we were ever confronting the horror of Gaza, we too would be abandoned.

But, despite the pervasive sense of powerlessness many in Australia feel right now, there is action we can take to protect the “sacred core” of who we are collectively and individually.

I have spent the last seven years trying to work out how Australia became a country that abuses and, at times, tortures, refugees. The situations are very different, need that be said, but there are lessons we can take from that national experience and what is happening in Gaza.

In the course of my research and book, Australia’s schism in the soul, I interviewed some of Australia’s pre-eminent psychiatrists, all of whom had worked with refugees and asylum seekers over the last decades. In discussing their experience of both the government policy of mandatory detention and its impact on those caught up in this brutal carceral regime, it became clear there was something new to be found in amongst the abuse and the horror.

That is, that political activism — no matter how distressing and visceral — can be a mental health strategy. It is an action that has the power to protect what Donald Winnicott called the sacred core of the person under attack. This is so, in part, because political action has the power to transform what was once experienced as personal into something understood as political.

For instance, in my book, Dr Peter Young suggested that the Australian Government hated hunger strikes in the refugee camps because they had little control over such a personal and political action. Hunger strikes also carry the language and symbolism of political protest. In the face of the deathly shallowness of Australia’s detention regime, this form of political resistance created a vitality and reality that was otherwise absent. This action reasserted a sense of identity: it is I that take this action, it rejected the invitation to sleep and imagine a change was going to come and finally it stayed in contact with reality, even when that reality was brutal. No one looked away.

If we accept that we are, however reluctantly, in a relationship with the violence we are witnessing in Gaza, and if we accept that observing such horror and being unable to prevent it is a source of moral injury to us as people and as a nation, then we are in need of psychological help.

Political action, taken together in whatever form we are able to take it, is the first step in recovery. Moral injury is now understood as injury to the soul and to the soulfulness of the community and nation; it needs to be brought forward into the community for a shared process of healing.

This work begins with all of us.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/09/interview-that-described-the-hell-gaza-has-become/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The response from Palestinian movement Hamas to US President Donald Trump's plan for a peaceful resolution to the Gaza conflict may not come for a few days, media reported, citing a source.

The plan calls, among other things, for an immediate ceasefire and the release of hostages within 72 hours. The document also stipulates that Hamas and "other groups" must renounce their involvement in governing Gaza, both directly and indirectly. The enclave will be governed by a "technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee" overseen by an international body headed by Trump.

On Monday, the White House released Trump's 20-point peace plan for Gaza. Al Jazeera reported, citing a diplomatic source, that Egypt and Qatar handed over the plan to Hamas, and the movement promised to study it.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20250930/hamas-promises-to-review-trumps-20-point-plan-for-gaza-peace-1122889780.html

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

The Gazans Do Not Deserve Tony Blair
He destroyed Iraq and he destroyed Britain. What will he do with Gaza?

Have the Palestinians not suffered enough?

For two years, the unfortunate people of Gaza have faced a horrific military assault. Yes, people can debate the rights and wrongs of Israel’s actions, but the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of people have faced death, injury, bereavement, fear and malnutrition.

Now these people are going to endure—Tony Blair? 

“Blair would help oversee Gaza transition under Trump plan,” the BBC reports. Trump’s “plan” involves a campaign of demilitarization and redevelopment. Happily, the president has dropped what seemed to be a plan of ethnic cleansing and hotel construction, but inflicting Blair on the luckless Gazans seems cruel nonetheless.

Blair, whose government held Britain in its cold and clammy hands between 1997 and 2007, is best known in the Middle East for cocreating the invasion of Iraq. This nightmarishly stupid endeavor, based on overheated claims about Saddam Hussein’s military capacities and childish delusions about liberal democracy flourishing amid sectarianism and clannishness, left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of coalition soldiers dead, as well as providing fertile grounds for the development of ISIS. Such were the horrors of the war that it made Bush and Blair’s doomed adventure in Afghanistan seem comparatively sane—and that war ended with the Taliban simply retaking control after 20 blood-soaked years.

This is the man tasked with sorting out Gaza? How about bringing in Sam Bankman-Fried to reshape its economy, or Ghislaine Maxwell to campaign for women’s rights?

Blair’s failings don’t end here. It might seem churlish to bring up his lamentable role in expanding mass migration or the higher education system. Gaza is hardly liable to suffer from an excess of migrants or universities. But the point is that Blair is self-important and delusional—launching secular crusades without a sense of realism. He is a great marketer inexplicably elevated to leadership—holding forth on the world stage as if he can conjure up a brighter future with the sheer power of clichés. The tragedy is that people have tried to put his “narratives” into practice.

Since 2016, Blair—now Sir Tony Blair—has been the frontman of the modestly titled Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. With 800 employees working on projects in 40 different countries, some have speculated that Blair is more powerful than he was in 10 Downing Street. On the back of multi-million dollar donations from the likes of Larry Ellison of Oracle, the TBI—it sounds like a gastrointestinal disorder—have been involved in AI boosterism and advising leaders on governance and geopolitics (“I’m Tony Blair and here’s what not to do …” et cetera). Their links with power were seemingly demonstrated by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s recent announcement that Britain would adopt a system of digital ID cards coming days after a TBI report on digital ID.

It would be dishonest to suggest that the Tony Blair Institute can offer no valuable insight into the Israel/Palestine conflict. One suspects that a lot of people could have done with reading Beth Oppenheim’s June 2023 article for the TBI, which warned: “Without a political process, the next Gaza-Israel escalation is only a matter of time.” Well, yes.

Still, ending wars takes a lot more risk and insight than anticipating them. Blair’s sweeping plan for Palestinian development, while admittedly humane compared to some that we have heard, brims with vain technocratic optimism, appearing to think that economic development can be manifested in a political vacuum. Blair is a big believer in the power of AI, and his techno-optimism seems to have made him even blinder to the sheer messiness of human beings.

All this smells of the worst sort of imperial arrogance, without even the entertaining pomp and circumstance. Bluntly, if Blair could make such a hash of “modernizing” the peaceful and prosperous Britain of the late ’90s, how can we expect that he will “modernize” Gaza?

I suppose that Blair could point to his role in the Good Friday Agreement, which—largely—ended violence in Northern Ireland. But Northern Ireland was not Gaza, and Israel is not Great Britain. If nothing else, peace in Northern Ireland would have been a different proposition if Belfast had been left in smoking ruins, or if the IRA had carried out an attack on the scale of October 7.

Establishing a durable peace in Palestine will absolutely take ambition. It will absolutely take international involvement (unless people think Hamas can lead the Gazans to a glorious future). But Tony Blair is not just ambitious—he is deeply and devastatingly hubristic. A series of avoidable catastrophes in government did nothing to diminish his self-belief. Like an evangelical veering towards the status of a cult leader, he remains blissfully convinced that he can reshape the world. 

I agree with him. He can. But not—I suspect—for the better.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-gazans-do-not-deserve-tony-blair/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.