The Intercept: Keep your focus on Hamas militants.
JOHN TRACEY: The death counts come from Hamas …
The Intercept: When reporting on the dead, always use the passive voice, and don’t mention how they were killed or by whom.
JOHN TRACEY: Whose side are you on – Hamas or the Palestine Liberation Organisation?
The Intercept: Keep your focus on Hamas.
JOHN TRACEY: The Hamas/White Helmets/Al Jazeera media agenda does not report on the real extent of the genocide because Hamas caused it.
The Intercept: As often as possible, remind your readers of October 7.
JOHN TRACEY: When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023 they knowingly and deliberately sacrificed the people of Gaza as collateral damage in the war against Israel.
The Lancet: In January 2025 GHM had undercounted deaths due to traumatic injury by 41% in its reports on the Gaza war, with the total estimated traumatic injury deaths as of October 2024 probably exceeding 70,000 as opposed to the GHM’s reported 41,909—59.1% of them being women, children and the elderly.
JOHN TRACEY: The Hamas hospital daily death counts are only of deaths by traumatic injury that the hospitals were aware of and registered – only people killed by Israeli bullets and bombs.
The Intercept: History began on October 7. Also, it is important to mention that the missiles were fired by Iran-backed Hezbollah. Try to mention the tunnels.
JOHN TRACEY: Israel’s response was not just predictable, the Hamas strategy was to draw the IDF into Gaza where the battleground for a prolonged war had been prepared beforehand.
The Intercept: When writing about Palestine, try not to ask Palestinians what they think. They might be Hamas or Hamas sympathizers.
JOHN TRACEY: Either there was direct collaboration between Hamas and ultra-Zionist elements in the IDF or Hamas was just a useful idiot of the ultra-Zionists, but either way Hamas gave the ultra-Zionists and the US exactly what they wanted on October 7 2023.
The Intercept: Keep your focus on Hamas.
JOHN TRACEY: Hamas/Al Jazeera has largely ignored the full extent of the genocide and only reported on Israeli attacks.
The Intercept: When talking about Muslim communities, throw around phrases like “terrorist hotbed” and “Hamas sympathizers.” This works even when those communities are in the U.K. or America.
JOHN TRACEY: The democratically elected government of Syria, which the US previously imposed sanctions on, was overthrown by a rebranded version of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) who had been fighting a decade long civil war funded and enabled by the US. During the Syrian civil war ISIS’s main global propaganda tool was the “White Helmets” media units who fed information and footage to Al Jazeera.
When all else fails, remember:
Begin on October 7, 2023.
Nothing important happened before this date.
History began on October 7.
[With thanks to the Intercept]
Voices
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT PALESTINE
Sisonke Msimang
A concise guide to proper media behavior when discussing the “complicated” situation.
In Gaza, Famine Is the Weapon — and So Is Aid
What has changed since 2024? You accuse me of not listening to the Palestinian people but you are denying and de-legitimising the only political agency the Palestinian people have. Why?
During 2024, the Palestinian people always had their own ‘agency’. The West and other elites suddenly discovered this in 2024.
Palestinians do not lead need Arab, Iran, or Chinese elites to tell them what to do.
What you need to do is to listen to what Palestinians say.
You’ve got to stop disparaging Palestinian leaders like Remah Naji. This is doubly vexing because half of what you say comes directly from Israeli talking points .
My talking points come from Beijing not Israel, the two report the situation very differently. The latest update is China has taken a step back and supports the Egypt/Arab Gaza reconstruction plan, which will be financed by China. The Beijing declaration has meaning and power if China defeats Trump for control of the Middle East and Mediterranean. What’s your alternative, what are you gathering support for? Smoothing of the dying pillow?
I criticised Remah about the Greens and land rights, workers rights, climate science and the Olympics in Toohey Forest – when she was representing the Greens in my electorate. I have never criticised her about Palestine, except to point out the hypocrisy of her stance on Palestinian self determination and the Greens First Nations policy. As I remember, I asked her if she would support a Palestinian Voice to the Knesset in line with the Greens First nations policy of a voice to parliament? However I have been and am critical of JFP for representing the suffering of the people of Gaza as a rallying point for local ideological proselytising with no connection to real historical-material forces. I think JFP and the Greens have used Remah as a token Palestinian to justify their own ideological thought-bubbles, just like the same sub-culture tokenizes and ideologizes Aboriginality.
You are of course correct that the war did not begin on October 7 2023, it is a continuation of the original Nakba. However Israel’s attack since October 7 is the most savage attack since 1948 and has had enormous consequence on Palestine including collapsing all the social, political and cultural infrastructure that was created and developed since 1948, as well as all the deaths and injuries. Why do you deny its significance? Just another phase of the war? Your idea that the Palestinian people will decide is meaningless when there is no mechanism for them to decide. The only choice the people of Gaza have now is to go through the US security check to get minimal food and be registered for deportation when a suitable venue is available, or to starve to death. Until now, resistance in Gaza meant to survive until tomorrow, now resistance means to starve to death. It is only the “elites” as you call them that are in a position to advocate for Palestinian land and self determination. Those same elites had a deal with Israel and China in 2023 that Hamas sabotaged on October 7 2023. That is pretty significant I reckon.
Some pertinent facts:
Israel is a Zionist colonial project stealing Palestinian land as outlined in the Balfour declaration in 1917.
Israel has never supported a two-state-solution.
There is no civil war in Palestine. The Palestinian resistance is conducting a defensive struggle against Israel and it main ally, the United States.
China’s objective, by supporting the two-state-solution, is not a serious challenge to Israeli military dominance.
For the past 20 years, 2.5 million Palestinians have been living in a concentration camp (Gaza) under constant threat of genocide.
Another 3 million Palestinians are living in the West Bank under a form of apartheid more severe than South Africa Afrikaans rule.
Yesterday Israel has approved 22 more illegal settlements on the West Bank. The total number of illegal settlements in the West Bank is approaching 200. These moves are to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The Palestinian resistance has outlived all attempts to destroy it over more than 100 years.
For these reasons and more, Palestinian resistance had no choice but to challenge Israeli siege of Gaza in October 2023.
Ian Curr
30 May 2025
The fourteen factions of the Beijing declaration supported (with various conditions) a two state solution. Why do you oppose it? What do you know that the Palestinian leadership does not?
Israel supported a two state solution in the Oslo agreement and tentatively agreed to it in the 2023 deal with China. Oslo did not fail because Rabin was assassinated, it failed because Hamas and the PLO went to war against each other. A people cannot defeat an empire if they are at war with themselves – that is why Palestine is not free today. The 2023 China deal collapsed on October 7 2023 – this gave the ultra-Zionists the ability to capture Netanyahu and the war is the only thing keeping Netanyahu in power. Israel cannot be defeated militarily, it is a US battleship in the desert and the whole US fleet will come to its aid if necessary – eg Yemen. Israel can only be captured economically – trade deals, which is what China did in 2023 and which was the basis of the Oslo agreements. Israel is an economic disaster now and will also be needing reconstruction funding from somewhere – it is ripe for the picking. Yes China’s interest is in stabilising, controlling and expanding trade, it doesn’t give a fuck about Palestine. China’s main interest is getting Israeli hi-tech weapons systems. Is that a reason to oppose the Chinese peace plan to end the genocide? John Howard just wanted the Sunrise oil and gas fields, is that a reason to oppose Australian troops going into East Timor? What’s the real alternative?
Neither Israel nor the US support a two-state solution. Israel is a settler colonial state with illegal settlements throughout the occupied territories. The Zionist plan was always for an Eretz (greater) Israel, from the river to the sea.
Note: John T: “Your post was a personal attack on me. Please don’t write about me if you are not going to let me respond.”
I temporarily placed John T’s comments in a moderation queue. Wbt has published 656 of his comments, and many of them are actually incorrect and bordering on the abusive.
And I did warn John T that I can not allow people to use WBT as a platform to attack Palestinian resistance, often using Zionist talking points whether those Zionists are in Tel Aviv, Washington, Canberra or Beijing.
The truth is I have neither the intellectual ability, time, or energy to prevent people from using Workers BushTelegraph as a platform of attacking anti-colonial organizations like Justice for Palestine Magan-djin (JFP). I ask that commentators and readers alike be aware of their responsibilities and to take heed that the primary objective of Workers BushTelegraph is to promote worker political education and consciousness.
These attacks are without foundation spewing forth from the safety of the keyboard while thousands of people’s lives are being lost. I can not understand how people can be so obsessed with themselves that they demand the right to attack the resistance struggle and pretend to know better than those in the thick of it .
This evening, I attended a National Palestine Activist Conference organised by JFP. I heard a panel of Palestinian and Aboriginal people answer the question of why we support Palestine. After a spirited Welcome to Country by a local Yuggera man, there was an atmosphere of unity and solidarity in the conference of about 180 people.
The conference is giving a voice to Palestinian and Aboriginal activists. One of the speakers said that Zionism has been defeated. While I’m not so sure about that, it is good to hear people with a positive outlook determined to fight on.
The conference continues over the weekend. One of the panellists will be Elder & Educator Dr Mary Graham.
Ian Curr, Editor, 31 May 2025
Get real! Land rights and self determination will not be given to Palestine by Israel and the US, it doesn’t matter what they think. Only a combination of China/BRICS economic force and a unity of Hamas and Fatah militias can free Palestine. All else is ideological fantasy. Do you support the Beijing declaration of unity and the China/Egypt/Arab states peace plan? Or do you refuse to recognise the Palestinian leadership and its agenda, preferring instead to support some hypothetical benign ideological generic fantasy of “the people”? If you, and JFP, cannot acknowledge the Palestinian leadership on its own terms – the good, the bad and the ugly, then you are just ballast in the Zionist battleship. The Palestinian leadership (and the Bunya nut family elders here) are real people with names and faces and organisations, they are not an ideological concept to be agreed to, disagreed with or amended to conform to our ideological scripts in Australia. Do you support the Beijing declaration or not? Whose side are you on?
FACT CHECK. Zionism is godless. They were and are a secular racist movement originating from Europe whose project was to establish a settler colonial state. The Zionist program for ethnic cleansing of Palestine is dislosed by their hasbara slogan: “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
Palestine was not the Zionists first choice. The Uganda Scheme was a proposal by British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain to create a Jewish homeland in a portion of British East Africa. It was presented at the Sixth World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903 by Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement.
Arab revolt began almost immediately against Zionist colonial expansion under the Balfour declaration and the League of Nations mandate system, which granted to Britain colonial control of historic Palestine and Trans Jordan from 1920 to 1948 . Under the Sykes-Picot agreement The Colonial Powers carved up Syria Lebanon and Iraq. Much of this was motivated by the thirst for oil which began in the 1920s and drove imperialist expansion predominantly by the United States but with French and British intervention, which continues till this day. As I have argued with you ad nauseum the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is all about theft of land by Zionists.
John Tracey, please don’t quote to me biblical references as if that were a historical document. Biblical reference to Israel has little, if any, relevance to the state of Israel set up by the UN in 1948.
Another of the Zionist schemes was to set up a colonial outpost in the Kimberleys on Aboriginal land in the 1930s. Although unsuccessful, this project provided a template for the later destruction of Aboriginal land under the Ord River scheme.
“It (Lake Argyle) was made, less than fifty years ago, out of thousands of stones, blasted from a mountain on Miriwoong Country in the largest non-nuclear explosion in history” – Alana Hunt. See https://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2025/04/17/they-are-blowing-up-country/
Fuck Zionism. Why aren’t you talking about Palestinian political parties, organisations and agendas? You have much to say about Zionism but who do you support, other than your own fantasy of “the Palestinian people”? Do you support the PLO/China/Egypt/Arab/UN and now EU peace plan to end the genocide, or not? If you are silent on it you are as good as a Trump-Gaza supporter.
I didn’t quote the bible to you, I put a comment on Chris’s page responding to his post.
Palestinians are in a war to the death. It is common sense not to assist the Zionists by discussing tactics in public.
WBT supports Palestinian voices. Read what they have to say.
Critical enquiry suggests the bible is a work of fiction.
Workers BushTelegraph is NOT a platform for attacking Justice for Palestine Magandjin.
Readers should be aware that there are attempts to use this small blog platform to attack Palestinian resistance using Zionist talking points.
These attacks are without foundation.
There is a very real struggle ongoing both inside and outside Palestine that affect the lives of millions of people.
Ian Curr
Editor
30 May 2025
Full text of what I wrote –
Palestine. Whose side are you on – Hamas or the Palestine Liberation Organisation?
Most commentary about Palestine from all sides overlooks the Palestinian civil war which has raged between Hamas and the PLO for the past twenty years. Israel has resourced and enabled both sides of that war.
The war in Gaza is on the news every night. Just like COVID deaths a few years ago, the daily death counts feed the news cycle and have become the story. The death counts come from Hamas controlled hospitals and are primarily reported by Al Jazeera, which is the global propaganda machine of the Qatar government. Qatar just gifted Donald Trump a flying palace as part of a deal to lift US sanctions on Syria. The democratically elected government of Syria, which the US previously imposed sanctions on, was overthrown by a rebranded version of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) who had been fighting a decade long civil war funded and enabled by the US. During the Syrian civil war ISIS’s main global propaganda tool was the “White Helmets” media units who fed information and footage to Al Jazeera. The White Helmets are now operating in Gaza, providing film footage and narrative to accompany the daily death counts just like they did in Syria.
The Hamas hospital daily death counts are only of deaths by traumatic injury that the hospitals were aware of and registered – only people killed by Israeli bullets and bombs. They do not count deaths from untreated illnesses, lack of hygiene, infectious diseases, malnutrition, suicides and mercy killings – all the things that are designed to happen in siege warfare. Since October 2023 Israel has severely restricted the supply of water, electricity, fuel, food and medical supplies to Gaza and bombed hospitals and social infrastructure. From the beginning of the siege the weakest and most vulnerable have been dying. The trickle of aid that has gone into Gaza has kept some people alive but the general health of the people has continued to deteriorate and the ranks of the weak, vulnerable and dying have been growing every day since October 2023. These deaths are unreported and invisible but this is where the genocide is happening.
The Hamas/White Helmets/Al Jazeera media agenda does not report on the real extent of the genocide because Hamas caused it. When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023 they knowingly and deliberately sacrificed the people of Gaza as collateral damage in the war against Israel. Israel’s response was not just predictable, the Hamas strategy was to draw the IDF into Gaza where the battleground for a prolonged war had been prepared beforehand. Hamas/Al Jazeera has largely ignored the full extent of the genocide and only reported on Israeli attacks. Similarly Al Jazeera does not report on the millions of deaths indirectly caused by wars in Syria, Yemen and Sudan, only the combat is reported and only from Qatar’s perspective.
In 2023, before the October 7 attack, The Palestine Liberation Organisation and China had negotiated an in-principle agreement between Hamas, Fatah, The Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu, Egypt and China for an independent Palestinian state with the Gaza Marine gas reserve as its independent economic base. China leveraged Israel with Belt and Road infrastructure loans, access to BRICS trading especially in gas and China buying Israeli military technology. Hamas smashed all that on October 7. Why? Because the ultra-Zionist power bloc including factions in Israeli parliament and intelligence service wanted to prevent Netanyahu negotiating a Palestinian state, and the Biden government wanted to stop Israel becoming part of the China/BRICS network so the CIA supported the ultra-Zionists in Israeli intelligence. It is known (not speculation) that Israeli intelligence had prior warning of the Oct 7 attack and various defence systems were disabled at the time of the attack. Either there was direct collaboration between Hamas and ultra-Zionist elements in the IDF or Hamas was just a useful idiot of the ultra-Zionists, but either way Hamas gave the ultra-Zionists and the US exactly what they wanted on October 7 2023.
I support the PLO and the Chinese peace plan for Gaza – an interim Hamas/Fatah unity government until elections can be called. As far as I know there is no other peace plan. The best thing Australia could do is support the Chinese peace plan and recognise Palestine as a trading partner and use Australia’s existing trade with Israel to leverage China’s peace plan, which means Australia trading with BRICS, which means keeping the Darwin port in Chinese hands, which means abandoning AUKUS.
They said that the American war in Indo-China was the living room war. They are now calling the genocide in Palestine the Instagram war. Unfortunately people with very little connection to the struggle or participation in grassroots organisation have become all-knowing pundits. One such person is John Tracey, your go-to strategist on the way forward for Palestine. John has a better understanding of the struggle than the Palestinian people themselves.
With two exceptions (at least), Wong and Albanese and a small group in a remote continent, 14,000 kms from Gaza.
Can anyone guess what group?
Do you support the PLO/China/Arab states peace plan, or not? What are the Palestinian people that I should be listening to telling you about it?
Palestinians will decide their own fate.
The 2024 Beijing declaration for an interim unity government was signed by fourteen Palestinian factions including Hamas and Fatah. Do you support this? Or are you talking about some other Palestinian people?
This has been a very long struggle. It remains to be just that. A lot has changed since 2024.
Did you see this? See https://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2025/05/21/vale-to-the-martyr-sinwar/#comment-816715
Are you going to support Blackfulla writers?
This has been a very long struggle. It remains to be just that. A lot has changed since 2024. I’m hoping for a reformation of the PLO. But it is important to keep things in perspective. The only reason why people like yourself are discussing this is because the resistance has been strong, like it was in Vietnam during the American war in Indo-China.
Did you see this? See https://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2025/05/21/vale-to-the-martyr-sinwar/#comment-816715
Are you going to support Blackfulla writers?
I’m hoping for a reformation of the PLO.
I can see no future for the PA.
This has been a very long struggle. It remains to be just that. There is a long way to go. A lot has changed since 2024. You can see that from the response by Albanese and Wong this week.
But it is important to keep things in perspective. Whatever the elites signed in Beijing in 2024 has faded.
The only reason why people like yourself are discussing this is because the resistance has been strong. It was similar when the resistance was strong in Vietnam during the American war in Indo-China. The living room war in the US was a product of the strength of the NLF.
BLACK & WRITE
Did you see this? See https://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2025/05/21/vale-to-the-martyr-sinwar/#comment-816715
Are you going to support Blackfulla writers?