For two years the chant was rehearsed, circulated, aestheticised: “globalise the intifada!”. A resistance moment. A noble liberation struggle, cleansed of consequence. Now that it has arrived not as metaphor but as blood, the same people who normalised the rhetoric – progressive activists, influencers, podcasters, the Greens, the Labor left – present themselves as mourners. Today it is condolences, unity, and prayers.
But you do not get to globalise the intifada and then feign surprise when it turns up.
This did not erupt spontaneously. It was built – patiently, rhetorically – until violence no longer felt aberrant but earned. Shock, at this point, is not innocence; it is evasion.
The Prime Minister calls for unity and convenes the National Security Committee of Cabinet. Necessary, yes – but no longer enough. The problem he faces is credibility. For two years the response to antisemitism has been managerial rather than moral: statements instead of lines, calibration instead of resolve.
The record is plain. Within hours of the October 7 Hamas massacre, and before Israel inflicted its biblical rage upon Gaza, Jews were openly abused outside the Sydney Opera House. Synagogues and childcare centres were firebombed and homes and vehicles vandalised. Hate preachers operated freely. Week after week, marches moved through our cities celebrating “resistance”, praising terrorism, calling for Israel’s elimination, and chanting explicitly for the globalisation of the intifada: violence against Jews, everywhere – for what else could that word mean? Jewish students and academics were harassed on campus. Jewish artists were doxed and frozen out of cultural life. Antisemitism was rhetorically dissolved by equating it with Islamophobia, converting a specific hatred into a moral blur.
Step by step, it was normalised.
The year ends with an Islamist terrorist attack at Bondi Beach – an ordinary, intimate place, place many of us walk, eat, linger. We were in Sydney last weekend, and had we stayed another night, we would very likely have been there ourselves, walking the promenade and then taking refreshment, as is our custom, at the North Bondi RSL, just across the road from the park where the atrocity occurred. Authorities had warned such an incident was probable. They were not speculating; they were reading the climate.
Antisemitism in Australia has risen to levels unseen in living memory – even in small country towns like the one we live near and in Byron Bay, meccas of alternative lifestyles and long-styled as havens of inclusion and wellness. Alongside this rise sits another failure: the government’s inability to confront antisemitism with clarity and force, preferring symbolic gestures and offshore moral posturing while hatred hardened at home.
Now, suddenly, our leaders discover grief. Social media is more revealing. Facebook fills with empathetic words and memes from politicians, public figures and keyboard activists who spent the past two years condemning Israel in ways that blurred – and often erased – the distinction between Israeli policy and Jewish existence, creating at best, indifference to Jewish fear and, at worst, a permissive climate of hostility toward Jews as such. Today it is all tolerance, inclusivity and unity – and an air of regret and reverence that reeks of guilt.
But not all. Social media has fractured along familiar lines. At one extreme are conspiracy theories — false flags, invented victims, claims the attackers were Israeli soldiers. At the other is denial: what antisemitism? Between them sits a more revealing response. There is genuine shock and horror, even remorse — but also a careful foregrounding of the Syrian-Australian man who intervened, coupled with a quiet erasure of the victims’ Jewishness; a reflexive turn to whataboutism; and a refusal, even now, to relinquish the slogans and moral habits of the past two years. If antisemitism is acknowledged at all, it is ultimately laid at the feet of Benjamin Netanyahu.
So the question must be asked plainly: can many on the left side of politics, no matter how well-intentioned (and ill-formed) can honestly say that nothing they have posted over the past two years contributed, even indirectly, to prejudice against Jewish people? Nothing that helped turn anxiety and empathy into hostility, criticism into contempt?
Australian Jews warned that today’s chant would become tomorrow’s attack. They were told they were exaggerating, weaponising history, crying wolf. Yet despite inquiries, legislation, and repeated arson and vandalism, the ecosystem of hate was allowed to deepen. Two years of weekly protests chanting “From the river to the sea”, “Globalise the intifada” and “Death to the IDF” – calling for the eradication of a nation state and its people – were treated as politics, not incitement.
In July 2024 the government appointed Jillian Segal, a lawyer and businesswoman, as Australia’s first Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism (followed soon afterwards by the appointment of Aftab Malik as Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia). Her report, released a year later, was unambiguous: antisemitism had become “ingrained and normalised” across universities, schools, media and cultural institutions. She called for curriculum reform, university accountability, migration screening, and a serious national effort to explain what antisemitism is and why it corrodes societies.
Five months on, the government is still considering it. It has been under heavy pressure from many quarters to hasten slowly, including from within its own ranks: there were calls from the Labor left, including motions from branches and petitions, for Segal to be sacked and her report shredded.
Mere days after Bondi, the pushback has already begun. Pro-Palestinian platforms – and even some Labor branches and members – have denounced Jillian Segal, her report, and Prime Minister Albanese’s intention to implement its recommendations as an assault on democratic institutions and civil liberties. So, argue that that the Australian government is using the atrocity as a pretext to accelerate its repression of the Palestine movement, and, even, to protect and defend Australia’s complicity in what is viewed as the Gaza genocide. What this framing conspicuously avoids is any reckoning with the antisemitism the report documents- or with the immediate, practical questions now facing authorities. Among these are the potential for copycat attacks, and what duty of care is owed to the Syrian-Australian man who intervened to stop the attack? Hamas and sections of Middle Eastern media have already branded him a traitor. In this moral economy, even heroism is conditional – and quickly becomes a liability.
The partisan responses have been opportunistically predictable. The Murdoch media accused the government of weakness. The Liberal Party, led by Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, accused Labor of neglect. Pauline Hanson followed, reliably. None of it alters the central fact identified by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore: the taboo on antisemitism has collapsed. Perhaps because Jewish identity is lazily collapsed into Israel. Perhaps because the world’s oldest hatred never disappears; it waits for permission. That permission was granted – gradually, rhetorically, respectably. And antisemitism does not arrive announcing itself. It seeps. It jokes. It chants. It flatters those who believe they are on the right side of history, until history arrives and asks what they tolerated in its name.
This did not come out of nowhere. It arrived exactly as advertised, and this is what it looks like.
Commentator and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen is always worth reading – and below is his latest piece for The Australian. In my opinion, he is one of the most articulate and knowledgeable analysts of political and military affairs in the contemporary Middle East.
In the following analysis of Israel’s invasion of the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, in response to the Hamas’ murderous assault on October 7th last year, he argues that despite calls from the US and others to “fight a different war”, the realities on the ground and the torturous dynamics of Israeli and Palestinian politics – which few outside observers are aware of or are even interested – dictate that is that the present carnage and destruction is unavoidable when you conduct large-scale combat operations in a heavily populated city in which a committed and unscrupulous enemy has spent years and millions of dollars constructing an elaborate and powerful attack base within and below a crowded and built-up urban landscape unmindful of the human consequences of its actions. The Hamas and its Islamist allies have taken Mao Zedong’s dictum that “the guerrilla must move amongst the people as fish swim in the sea” to extreme lengths, not only embedded within civilian population, but denying it protection and shelter whilst exploiting its vulnerability.
UN and world opinion is demanding Israel cease its brutal operations, and the Arab street and western progressives, if not expressing support for the Hamas, are justifying its actions, including downplaying or even denying the atrocities of October 7. Israeli military planners are therefore in a moral and tactical quandary. With the Hamas and its Islamist allies and enablers posing a real and long-proclaimed existential threat to the Jewish state, what would a rational, reasonable person have Israel do to defend itself? If the current approach is inhumane, what is the alternative?
Kilcullen concludes that the only way Israel could have avoided the present outcome would have been to not go into Gaza at all – or for October 7 never to have happened. Short of a permanent ceasefire, which seems highly unlikely, or the Hamas surrenders and releases the remaining hostages living and dead, which also seems improbable – or a fundamental transformation of the conflict through direct intervention by Hezbollah in the north – “things seem set to continue as they are for the immediate future”.
“There is much discussion in the mainstream media about what comes next if the Hamas is destroyed or effectively neutered and Gaza is “liberated” from its thrall. Should the IDF reinstate the occupation it ended two decades ago? Should Israel hand the enclave over to the Palestinian Authority, to use a decidedly un-Muslim analogy, organize a piss up in a brewery? Or should the UN, or at a stretch, the Arab League, a club of autocrats and tyrants, assume military and political administration until it can be reincorporated into a reformed and workable Palestine? And even then, should any of these scenarios work out, would Israel be in the mood to make nice? The Hamas pogrom has not helped Palestinians in besieged Gaza, nor will it help those in the occupied West Bank who have been subjected to IDF incursions and vigilante violence by angry settlers. Nor will it encourage Israel to moderate its draconian policies and end the occupation”.
I concluded then, and believe still that “the whole thing is a bloody mess (literally and figuratively) and the implications for Israel, Palestine and others unpredictable”.
David Kilcullen, Weekend Australian March 24, 2024
Bulldozers deployed near the Gaza border. Menahem Kahana/AFP
You can tell a lot about a military force, and the conditions under which it operates, by watching how it prefers to fight. Americans, for example, prefer stand-off strikes with laser-guided bombs and long-range rockets: they seek the illusion of distance, precision and cleanness, avoiding the bloody, complex reality of ground combat. Russians, by contrast, are famous for massing enormous weights of artillery against a single point, then flinging “disposable infantry” into meat-grinder assaults.
A central tool of Israeli tactics is the armoured bulldozer: slow, implacable, destroying obstacle after obstacle as it grinds forward. Israel’s ground campaign in Gaza has relied heavily on these bulldozers, which weigh more than an Abrams tank and can demolish buildings, clear rubble, destroy strong points or build berms under heavy fire.
US criticism of Israel’s approach reflects the preference for precision. Council on Foreign Relations president emeritus Richard Haass, one of America’s most distinguished foreign policy thinkers, wrote recently that Israel could have fought a different war. Its approach, Haass wrote, “should have been more precise, giving priority to eliminating Hamas’s leadership and key fighters as intelligence allowed. Israel should have relied more on small-unit operations rather than aerial bombardment.”
Armoured bulldozer.Menahem Kahana/AFP
While acknowledging that this might have taken months or years, and “some Hamas fighters who embedded themselves in schools and hospitals would have escaped punishment”, he argued that “this would have been preferable to killing thousands of civilians, further radicalising the Palestinian population and alienating the region and the world”.
It might indeed have been preferable, but would it have been possible? Could Israel really have adopted a stand-off approach, using small-team raids and surgical strikes to target Hamas leadership, do minimal damage to Gaza and its population, and still achieve its objectives? Answering these questions starts by understanding why the armoured bulldozer has become so central to Israeli tactics in the first place.
We are talking here of what is, rather than what ought to be. In an ideal world, October 7 would not have happened, Israel would never have needed to mount a full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, and thousands of civilians – Israeli and Palestinian, men, women and children – would be alive and well today instead of dead, wounded or held hostage.
But those things did happen, and any attempt to make sense of the war needs to take that fact as its starting point.
Richard Haass. Alex Wong/Getty Images
For reasons we will explore, destruction of the urban environment itself, rather than merely defeating an opponent within it, has become a key part of how the Israel Defence Forces fight in cities.
This, in turn, reflects the reality that, in a multi-generational struggle for territorial and demographic dominance, across a tiny area – all of Israel is only about twice the size of Greater Melbourne – it’s often simply impossible to disentangle opponents such as Hamas from the populations and landscapes in which they hide. Under these conditions, military commanders sometimes see destroying an urban area outright (or flattening parts of it) as the only way to achieve their missions. Some analysts (including several Israelis) condemn this as “urbicide” – killing entire cities rather than just fighting within them – but many IDF commanders, tasked by Israeli politicians with clearing a deeply embedded enemy from a densely urbanised, heavily populated area, see few other options.
On the ground in Gaza, infantry and armour move together in integrated combat teams with dismounted troops, tanks and armoured personnel carriers co-operating to support the manoeuvre of bulldozers as they push forward, clearing rubble, destroying Hamas positions and knocking down houses. Demolition teams, equipped with explosives and moving on foot, systematically blow up structures that could pose a threat. Tunnels and bunkers are blown up or bulldozed, their entrances sealed, with explosions often caught on video and disseminated on social media by the troops themselves. These videos have prompted criticism and some were cited as evidence in the genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. But the videos also encourage civilians to evacuate ahead of advancing troops, reinforcing official IDF calls for the population to leave, and arguably reducing their exposure to combat.
Palestinians flee after Israeli bombardment in central Gaza City. AFP
Much of the Gaza Strip is now not only uninhabitable but uninhabited. The IDF advance has pushed the population ahead of it, with civilians fleeing along evacuation corridors such as Salah al-Din Road, the main thoroughfare that runs down the middle of the strip and connects Gaza City with Khan Younis farther south. Both are depopulated, with 1.5 million civilians now crowded into Rafah in the far south. Only about 300,000 civilians now remain in northern Gaza. (Before the war, the entire strip had a population slightly less than 2.2 million people.)
As the advance pauses each evening, rather than withdraw and thereby cede territory that would then have to be recaptured, the bulldozers build berms and defensive positions for the assault troops, allowing them to encamp in the ruins and restart the advance after resting. Most camps are used for one or two nights, then abandoned as the advance moves on, but some are semi-permanent forward operating bases. Attack helicopters provide fire support and air cover.
By January, entire neighbourhoods in Gaza had been razed using these methods.
Israeli forces also are constructing a buffer zone along Gaza’s landward border. Described before the current war as the “world’s largest open-air prison”, Gaza already had a 300m-wide exclusion zone that separated residential areas from the border fence. Israeli observation posts covered that zone and could shoot anyone approaching the fence.
But October 7 showed that a determined enemy could cut the fence at numerous places, so bulldozers and combat engineers have been widening the buffer since. Israeli officials say this is a critical security measure to allow civilians to return to the settlements that Hamas attacked on October 7. IDF engineers also are bulldozing buildings to construct an east-west road across the northern third of the strip, cutting Gaza in two and creating a field of fire 300m wide.
IDF D9 Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. IDF Spokesperson’s Unit
The bulldozer (or perhaps the steamroller) is an apt metaphor for the campaign itself – the IDF is, in effect, bulldozing its way across Gaza, slowly but implacably pushing the population ahead of it, destroying Hamas as it goes, while removing much of the urban area itself. This represents a brutally terrain-centric approach to battle. But it also reflects the reality of deep entanglement among armed enemies, civilian populations and dense urban areas, in a zero-sum territorial conflict fought explicitly for control of living space. It embodies decades of tit-for-tat adaptation by both sides.
One battle – the Battle of Jenin, fought in a West Bank refugee camp in April 2002 – was an inflection point. The term refugee camp is technically accurate but gives the wrong impression: the Jenin camp was not a temporary collection of huts but a densely built-up area with multi-storey concrete structures. The IDF entered the camp to clear it of Hamas and other militants who were using it as a base for suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. Nine days into the battle, after severe losses in an ambush, the IDF pulled back, reorganised, then re-entered using new tactics based on small combined-arms combat teams centred on armoured bulldozers. The bulldozers cleared improvised explosive devices and booby traps, destroyed fighting positions, then flattened a 200m-by-200m area in the centre of the camp, which became an IDF base, effectively ending that round of fighting.
The IDF approach in Jenin was studied by US and Australian commanders during the Iraq war. They concluded its impact on civilians – and its physical destructiveness – made it a last resort at best. US forces tried (often unsuccessfully) to protect Iraqi civilians and avoid urban incursions. They built kilometres of concrete T-wall in Baghdad, for example, to keep hostile populations apart, separate them from insurgents and stop militants moving around the city, precisely so as to avoid destructive armoured forays into inhabited areas.
But Iraq – where the US-led coalition saw itself (and was seen by locals) as a purely temporary presence, trying to defeat an enemy with minimal damage, then stabilise things enough to leave – was far different from Israel, where both sides claim much of the same territory as their own. This is a demographic and territorial conflict between populations with irreconcilable claims to the same tiny area of land, a zero-sum contest where destruction of settlements and denial of access helps cement control at the expense of the adversary.
A more apt analogy for today’s fighting would be the battle against Islamic State in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul during 2016-17. This was an enormous battle, about the same size and duration as the current Gaza campaign. It did massive damage to Mosul, which before the battle had a population of 1.2 million people, and lasted nine months.
Islamic State had just over two years to put Mosul into a state of defence – from June 2014, when it captured the city, until October 2016, when the Iraqi-led offensive to retake it began. In that short period, Islamic State fighters developed dense belts of booby traps, dug deep defensive positions, and embedded themselves in the human and physical fabric of the city, thereby making it impossible for an opponent to attack them without also damaging the city and killing civilians.
Ultimately, Mosul soaked up more than 90,000 Iraqi troops and hundreds of foreign advisers, against 6000 to 12,000 Islamic State fighters. The battle displaced at least a million people, destroyed large parts of the city and may have killed as many as 40,000 civilians, according to the Asayish, the Kurdish Regional government’s intelligence service.
Hamas, by contrast, had almost two decades in complete control of Gaza (from 2006 to 2023). It used that time to develop a fearsome defensive complex, with numerous strong points and hundreds of kilometres of underground passages, embedding itself thoroughly into the physical environment of the strip and its population. The organisation had 30,000 fighters in total before the Gaza campaign began, far more than the Islamic State garrison defending Mosul.
Any ground invasion of Gaza was therefore bound to be bloody, protracted and destructive, on the scale of Mosul or larger. This is exactly what we are seeing, and what most military analysts expected.
Palestinians gather as humanitarian aid is airdropped: AFP
The notion of a clean, surgical, stand-off campaign, using precision strikes and small-team raids to destroy Hamas without damaging Gaza or harming civilians – as attractive as it sounds in theory – is simply not practicable, as our own recent history in places such as Mosul shows. Again, we are talking about what is rather than what ought to be. But reality is reality: the only way for Israel to avoid the kind of campaign that is happening now would have been not to go in at all, leaving Hamas in control of Gaza, which was politically unacceptable after October 7. To understand why that was so, we need to return briefly to Jenin.
Jenin was designated in the 1995 Oslo II Accord as part of “Area A”, putting it under the control of the Palestinian Authority, but the IDF repeatedly raided the camp before and after the 2002 battle.
From March 2022, incursions increased to an almost nightly tempo under Operation Breakwater, a counterterrorism effort targeting Jenin and the town of Nablus, 35km farther south.
The IDF said in mid-2023 that at least 50 attacks against Israeli civilians had originated from Jenin in the preceding two years. In late July, weeks before the October 7 attacks, Israeli tanks, bulldozers and infantry launched their largest incursion into Jenin since the 2002 battle. Since the IDF launched its full-scale ground invasion of Gaza, raids into Jenin, Nablus and other West Bank towns have continued.
This is what some Israelis call “mowing the grass” – repeated raids into an area to disrupt terrorist groups and reduce the threat.
IDF commanders historically knew that such incursions were only a temporary measure, doing little more than managing the threat until it inevitably regenerated. They recognised the destruction and enduring hatred that the raids caused among local populations but accepted that the intractable politics behind the conflict precluded any permanent solution.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Leo Correa/AFP
This attitude – resignedly mowing the grass, forever, with no hope of any permanent settlement given the underlying politics – changed radically for many Israelis on the morning of October 7. After that assault, public pressure for a final defeat of Hamas built up inexorably on the Netanyahu government, from a population stunned by the audacity, scale and suddenness of the attacks, infuriated by the intelligence failure that allowed them to happen, horrified at their brutality, and demanding Hamas be destroyed once and for all.
Mowing the grass was no longer acceptable.
Tactics are downstream from politics, and this fundamental change in the underlying politics of the conflict is why, despite escalating criticism from the Biden administration and a genocide accusation in The Hague, Israel’s campaign has unfolded in such an implacable, bulldozer-like manner.
Since October 7, opinion has hardened even further on both sides: in polls last month a large majority of Israeli respondents expressed opposition to a Palestinian state “under any circumstances” and opposed a ceasefire until all hostages are released. Likewise, in November last year, 59 per cent of Palestinians surveyed said they “extremely supported” the October 7 attacks, while 16 per cent “somewhat supported” them.
The IDF’s campaign, successful though it has been in achieving the goals laid down by Israeli political leaders, has reached the point where politicians themselves have to take it to the next stage. This is all that any military operation can deliver. But given the hardening of Israeli and Palestinian public opinion – and the fact Hamas still holds 130 hostages and has refused to guarantee their safety – it’s hard to see any space for a political solution.
The pre-October 7 political conditions, of uneasy coexistence and periodic mowing of the grass, have been overtaken by events, suggesting that the campaign (with or without a temporary ceasefire) will end only with a complete Israeli tactical victory in Gaza. Whether such a victory would meet Israel’s broader strategic goals – and whether the country could then rebuild relationships that have been tested by the conflict – is a more complex question.
Israeli soldiers near a roadblock of burning tires placed by Jewish settlers. Sven Nackstrand/AFP
The next military objective is Rafah, where vast numbers of civilians are now crowded, under horrific conditions, into one of the last remaining Hamas-controlled areas. The more the advance squeezes civilians into this southwestern corner of the strip, the greater the pressure on Israel for a ceasefire or evacuation of non-combatants. That pressure has been growing from the US congress and the Biden administration, with stop-start negotiations periodically raising hopes of a temporary ceasefire but offering little likelihood of an enduring end to the fighting.
But even as the campaign inside Gaza itself comes to a crisis, two other crises threaten to expand the conflict. Roughly 1900 km south of Gaza, in the Bab al-Mandab, the narrowest point of the Red Sea, forces loyal to Ansarallah – the so-called Houthi movement that controls much of Yemen – have mounted a successful campaign to interdict shipping, using drones and missiles, in support of Hamas and probably at the behest of Iran, which sponsors both the Houthis and Hamas.
Targeting Western and Israeli-connected ships, the Houthis have managed to reduce regional shipping by more than 90 per cent since last November. Perhaps more important, the cost to ship a 40-foot container from China to Europe has almost tripled since the start of December, putting significant pressure on global trade. This brings other players – including several European powers and, most important, China – into the equation. China’s approach has been characteristically cautious, but the Red Sea crisis is increasing pressure on Tel Aviv to end the conflict, even as the IDF nears its last major objective.
A second problem is Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy whose forces sit just across Israel’s northern border and are vastly more militarily capable than those of Hamas. Indeed, it is hard to overstate how much more powerful Hezbollah is than Hamas: it possesses an enormous inventory of rockets, drones and missiles, exercises functional control of Lebanon’s government, and has barely used its most capable assets since the start of the Gaza conflict. Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, repeatedly has called for an end to the war, and Hezbollah is intensifying its artillery and rocket attacks against northern Israel but is yet to mount a ground offensive or unleash its full force. If it were to do so, Israel’s strategic position would worsen catastrophically, overnight.
All this is true, but also perhaps irrelevant. In war, military action is driven by political decisions, and political decisions are shaped by public opinion.
In Israel’s case, public pressure for a permanent defeat of Hamas is now overwhelming, and this in turn drives political decisions that have resulted in the Gaza ground campaign. In turn, the evolution of Israeli (and Hamas) tactics and tools over decades of conflict have shaped the way that campaign is being conducted. To imagine that Israel could or should have fought the campaign using a surgical, precision, stand-off, small-team approach would be a fundamental misunderstanding of urban warfare and of how the underlying politics driving the conflict have shifted since October 7.
While many Australians are rightly watching the Gaza war with horror, the harsh reality – as Mosul shows – is that this is what happens when you do large-scale combat operations in a heavily populated city. The only way to avoid this would have been for Israel not to go in at all or for October 7 never to have happened. Short of a ceasefire (which seems highly unlikely) or a fundamental transformation of the conflict via direct Hezbollah intervention, things seem set to continue as they are for the immediate future.
David Kilcullen served in the Australian Army from 1985 to 2007 and was a senior counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in 2007 and 2008, when he helped design and monitor the Iraq War troop surge. His 2015 essay Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State won the 2015 Walkley award for long-form writing and was published as a full-length book in 2016 by Oxford University
It’s most amazing exhibits are its smallest, the tiny alphabet of the bronze age city of Ugarit from the 4th Century BC, said to be the world’s first alphabet, and its largest, the interior of second century synagogue from the Greco-Roman city of Dar Europa on the Euphrates.
The museum has not only survived Syria’s war unscathed, and for a long time closed to safeguard its contents, it has been reopened for almost a year. Whilst this is wonderful news, reflect on the memory of Khaled Mohammad al Asaad, renowned Syrian archaeologist and historian, and Director of Antiquities in Palmyra who was murdered by Islamic State in August 2015 for endeavouring to protect Syria’s archaeological treasures, and reflect also on the destruction of the World Heritage site for which he sacrificed his life.
Palmyra, the ancient and venerable ‘Pearl of the Desert stands in an oasis in the Syrian desert, north-east of Damascus. This once great city was in its day one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world, at the junction of trade routes between Europe, Asia and Africa. Although a vassal of Rome, it was the capital of the third century Palmyrene Empire, and of its famous queen, Zenobia. She led a revolt against the Roman Empire, expanding her domain throughout the Levant and conquering Egypt, and ruled until 271, when she was defeated by the Romans and taken as a hostage to Rome by EmperorAurelian.
Palmyra contains monumental ruins from the 1st to the 2nd century, its art and architecture spanning several civilizations, combining Graeco-Roman techniques with local traditions and Persian influences. There are few remnants of the ancient world that compared wit it. Ba’albek, in Lebanon, maybe; Ephesus, in Turkey, possibly; and also, Apamea, in western Syria between Hama and Aleppo. Palmyra’s treasures hide in plain sight. For all the world to see and wonder.
When Da’ish captured Palmyra and Tadmor, the adjacent town (it’s name means ruin in Arabic) al Asaad refused to flee and though tortured for a month, refused to reveal where valuable artifacts had been moved for safekeeping. He was then publicly beheaded, his remains displayed amidst the ruins he has spent his life preserving for us, for humanity, for history. His murderers declared in a sign hanging from his body, that he’d did because he had overseen idols and had attended infidel archaeological conferences as his country’s representative.
Da’ish then proceeded to dynamite Palmyra’s monuments.
Four years on and the suffering of the Syrians continues unabated. The so called-civilized rulers of the so called-civilized world stood by and watched, first with fear and loathing, and then opportunistically and strategically as innocent Syrians were savaged by all sides in a war of all against all. For want of will and resources, and party to the proxy wars that are still being playing out between neighboring states and heat powers. Whilst the territorial Caliphate is no more, thousands of of the murderers and desecrators have melted into the Syrian and Iraqi deserts to carry on their atavistic struggle.
What is happened in Palmyra is no worse than what has happened in many Syrian and Iraqi towns and villages during the last nine years.
We now confront the fact that whilst the recent destruction of Paris’ iconic Notre Dame Cathedral encouraged a deluge of plutocratic philanthropy, the great and good of the western world, having expressed horror and outage at Islamic State’s destructive iconoclasm, are not demonstrating such open-pocketness when it comes to the reconstruction of Syria’s ancient and priceless archaeological heritage. The reason, it is said, is because the Assad government, victorious in its vicious and bloody reconquest of the country, is subject to international economic sanctions. Neither aid for the destitute and displaced nor the reconstruction of ancient monuments is forthcoming on the scale theses crises require.
Expensive, inspirational 3D representations of Palmyra’s lost monuments in London, Paris and New York are no substitute for for actually funding the reconstruction of the real thing.
We republish here a timely feature from the Sydney Morning Herald addressing this melancholy irony. It recalls many of the places we visited when we were last in Palmyra. We drove in from Damascus on a long desert highway that even in peacetime, had mukhabarat checkpoints and also boasted The Baghdad Cafe where we took refreshment, and departed a few days later on the Homs road. The feature photograph was taken from the breakfast room of our hotel in Tadmor – which the author says is now destroyed. The picture below was taken from Fakhr-al-Din al-Ma’ani Castleabove Palmyra. It was a magnificent vantage point for a panoramic view of the ancient city, and also for watching the most spectacular sunsets over the Syrian desert. It is now a military outpost.
In ages far beyond our ken, These stones weren’t set by mortal men. In friendly fields and foreign lands. They say these walls were by giants’hands were raised. But few, few remember when. With mortar mixed with blood and soil And leavened thence with sweat and toil. The masons and the muscle All are bones, bones, dry bones, And nothing else remains. Their histories are carved in stone. Their mysteries are locked in stone. And so the monuments decay As lonely sands stretch far away, And hide the stones.
Paul Hemphill, Ruins and Bones
The article follows our small photo gallery.
Read also, in In That Howling Infinite, Ruins and Bones, a tribute to al Asaad, and to Palmyra, and all, The Rubble Of Palmyraby Leon Wieseltier, published in The Atlantic, 5th September, 2014.
All the world talks about the damage to Palmyra, Aleppo and our other World Heritage sites, but hardly anyone outside Syria does anything to help. Damascus museum archaeologist Houmam Saad
Islamic State barbarians almost destroyed this World Heritage-listed site. Its wonders can be saved – so why is there such little international will to do so?
“Your heart will break when you see Palmyra,” says Tarek al-Asaad, looking out the window pensively as we cross the wide Syrian steppe on the road towards the ancient city. For Tarek, Palmyra represents a deep reservoir of sorrow that includes the public execution of his father Khaled, a renowned archaeologist and historian. Khaled had been instrumental in achieving Palmyra’s UNESCO World Heritage listing in 1980. The world stood by, horrified, while the fanatics of Islamic State, also known as IS, took to its majestic monuments with explosives and sledgehammers 35 years later.
We stop at a roadside store, where a young boy with old eyes is gathering aluminium cans to sell for scrap. Inside, soldiers of the Syrian Army guzzle sugary vodka drinks and beer. It’s May and the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, when Tarek eats and drinks nothing from dawn to dusk, but the young conscripts are on leave and in a mood to celebrate. Tarek buys supplies for his first night in Palmyra since he fled the city in 2015 for the relative safety of Damascus, Syria’s capital.
Palmyra’s Temple of Bel in March 2014, and in 2016. Getty Images
Tarek’s father, Khaled al-Asaad, was 83 when he was beheaded by IS. He had devoted more than 50 years to uncovering, restoring and publicising the remnants of this historic Silk Road hub that reached its peak in the third century. Tarek, one of his 11 children, grew up in the modern town of Tadmur next to the site. “Every day I would rush out of school to ride in the wheel-barrows and buckets that carried the soil from the diggings,” he remembers. Khaled retired as Palmyra’s head of antiquities in 2003 but stayed on as an expert much in demand. Fluent in ancient Palmyrene, a dialect of Aramaic, he translated inscriptions, wrote books and advised foreign archaeological missions. Meanwhile, Tarek, now 38, a nuggety, full-faced man with a ready smile, ran a successful tourism business.
We’re travelling towards Palmyra from the western city of Homs, through undulating pasture sprinkled with crimson poppies. Bedouin herders, austere and watchful, graze flocks of long-haired goats and fat-tailed sheep. Soldiers hitch rides on passing trucks through concrete-block settlements edged with green rectangles of wheat and barley. Roadside military checkpoints mount extravagant displays of patriotism: the double-starred national flag is painted on concrete barriers, oil drums and blockhouse walls while banners depict Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad looking resolute behind aviator sunglasses, or waving to crowds. Sentries who inspect identity papers are relaxed and happy to banter. “I hope the fasting is going okay for you?” asks a driver. “We’re not fasting, we’re kuffar [non-believers],” jokes a guard, alluding to the jihadist insult thrown at adversaries.
Further along, pasture gives way to stony ground studded with pale green tussock. Remnants of the war are more evident here; burnt-out trucks and tanks, toppled electricity pylons and fortified berms of rammed earth crowned with barbed wire. Near a military airbase ringed by radar stations the checkpoint is heavily guarded and businesslike.
A Russian tank transporter going our way is a reminder that IS still fights in the desert beyond Palmyra, where several Syrian troops were reportedly killed this month. While IS lost its last Syrian stronghold of Baghouz in March, small bands continue to mount guerrilla attacks. This is my first visit to Palmyra since a trip as a tourist in 2009, drawn by the mystique of its spectacular architecture beside a desert oasis. Two years later, Syria was torn apart by war. As we approach Palmyra through a gap in a low mountain range, one question is playing on my mind: has the remote and mesmerising site suffered a fatal blow, or can it rise again?
Palmyra’s Grand Colonnade suddenly emerges out of a sandy plain. It is the city’s still magnificent spine, a kilometre-long avenue of towering limestone columns that slowly turn from pale gold to burnt orange in the setting sun. We park near the ruins and set out on foot to take a closer look. At the Grand Colonnade’s eastern end, the great temple of the Mesopotamian god Bel lies in ruins – though its portico somehow survived IS’s explosives – and the ornately carved triumphal arch is a pile of massive blocks. The invaders also blew up the tetrapylon that marked the city’s crossroads and the Baalshamin temple, a richly decorated combination of Roman and indigenous building styles. The theatre’s finely chiselled facade is a pile of rubble along with several multi-storey burial towers that sat on a bare hillside.
On the crossroads of international trade, cosmopolitan Palmyra developed an unorthodox and pluralist culture reflected in its surviving art and architecture. That, along with its location between the Mediterranean coast and the Euphrates river, made it a tempting symbolic and strategic target for modern-day fundamentalists. Muslims lived at Palmyra for 13 centuries, establishing mosques in structures that earlier functioned as Byzantine churches and pagan temples, but the bigots of IS were scandalised by almost everything they found. Every act of vandalism was videoed for use in IS propaganda, its shock value aimed at attracting extremist recruits and intimidating opponents.
Islamic State-photo of the destruction of Palmyra’s 1900-year-old Baalshamin temple. AAP
IS occupied Palmyra twice: between May 2015 and March 2016, and between December 2016 and March 2017. During its first takeover, Tarek escaped, but Khaled refused to leave. “I phoned my father and begged him, ‘Please leave; Palmyra has been lost to evil people and you are not safe,’ Tarek says. “He answered, ‘I’m glad you got away, but this is my home and I’m not leaving.’”
After six weeks of house arrest, Khaled was imprisoned in a hotel basement and tortured to reveal the location of hidden treasures that Tarek says never existed. After a month in the basement, the old man was beheaded with a sword in front of an assembled crowd. “He refused to kneel for the blade, so they kicked his legs out from under him,” Tarek says. An online photograph showed his corpse tied to a traffic pole and his head, spectacles in place, positioned mockingly at his feet. A placard tied to his body labelled him an apostate who served as “director of idolatry” at Palmyra and represented Assad’s government at “infidel” conferences abroad.
Before war broke out in 2011, tourism and agriculture supported more than 50,000 people in Tadmur. Only a few hundred have returned, burrowing into half-demolished buildings along streets that sprout giant weeds from bomb craters. Tarek is not among the returnees; he lives with his mother Hayat in Damascus, where he manages a cafe. Russian sappers have cleared Tadmur of IS mines and booby-traps and power and water is back on. Commerce has made a tentative recovery, with a bakery, a hole-in-the-wall pharmacy and a simple restaurant. Its owner, Ibrahim Salim, 45, grills chicken on the footpath under a banner portraying President Assad and his Russian patron Vladimir Putin. Salim says he fled Palmyra after IS killed his wife Taghreed, a 36-year-old nurse, for the crime of treating an injured government soldier. “Security is good, so I can sleep peacefully in Tadmur now,” he says. “We hope the school will reopen soon, so more families will return.”
UNESCO has extolled Palmyrene art – particularly its expressive funerary sculpture – as a unique blend of indigenous, Greco-Roman, Persian and even Indian influences. As IS battled Syrian troops for control of Tadmur in 2015, Tarek rushed to save the most valued examples in Palmyra’s two-storey museum. With him were his archaeologist brothers, Mohammed and Walid, and their brother-in-law, Khalil Hariri, who had succeeded Khaled al-Asaad as museum director. They packed sculptures, pottery and jewellery into wooden crates and were loading them into trucks when mortars exploded around them. Shrapnel hit Tarek in the back and Khalil took a bullet in the arm. They got away with hundreds of pieces, but left many more behind. UNESCO has praised Syria’s wartime evacuation of more than 300,000 exhibits from the country’s 34 museums as “an extraordinary feat”.
We walk to Palmyra’s museum. Khaled’s former workplace is a desolate shell, its walls pockmarked by bullets, windows blown out and the foyer roof holed by a missile. Galleries that showcased the accomplishments of millennia are bare save for a few statues and bas-reliefs. They are minus heads, faces and hands – desecrated by IS cadres enraged by “idolatrous” objects, Tarek says, adding: “They even pulled the embalmed mummies out of their cabinets and ran over them with a bulldozer.”
I find only one intact exhibit – a portrait of Khaled (pictured) by Sydney artist Luke Cornish, a work that I and Cornish assumed had been lost. Painted onto a steel door, the portrait is propped against a wall and covered in a protective sheet of clear plastic. Tarek doesn’t know how it survived or who put it in the museum. “Someone must have hidden it from IS, because they would have destroyed it for sure,” he says.
Tarek al-Asaad with the portrait of his late father, Khaled, by Sydney artist Luke Cornish. Alex Ray
No fewer than 15 employees of Syria’s museum network have suffered violent deaths in the eight-year war, but only Khaled’s murder made world headlines. The news prompted Cornish to pay him a remarkable tribute. Cornish makes art by spraying aerosol paint over layers of stencils. Twice a finalist for the Archibald Prize, his award-winning work achieves a near-photographic realism and carries strong humanitarian themes. In June 2016, he went to Syria to film a group of Australian boxers on a “hope-raising mission” led by a Sydney Anglican priest, “Fighting Father” Dave Smith, known for his use of boxing to help at-risk youths. Between bouts and training, Cornish held impromptu stencil-art demonstrations for children in war-ravaged places such as Aleppo, once Syria’s biggest city.
“The kids were fascinated by the immediacy of the medium,” he told me in Sydney. “Most were very poor and had never known anything but war, so it was great to see them having fun putting stuff like [cartoon character] Dora the Explorer on a schoolyard wall or along a bombed-out street. Even with soldiers around and artillery going off, we always drew a curious crowd.”
Before leaving for Syria, Cornish prepared a stencil in the hope of painting Khaled’s portrait somewhere in the country. He got the chance when the boxers went to Palmyra. They arrived more than two months after a Russian-backed offensive first expelled IS from the city, and a week after St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra played a concert there to celebrate – prematurely, as it turned out – Palmyra’s liberation. The orchestra performed Prokofiev, Bach and Shchedrin in a Roman-era theatre that IS used as a backdrop for mass executions.
Cornish chose the door of the theatre’s electrical room to paint the man he calls “a hero who sacrificed his life for what he loved”. A YouTube clip of Cornish working on the painting led Tarek to contact him. “Luke’s painting was a beautiful gesture and a very kind gift to our family. We think of him as our friend and brother,” Tarek says.
But six months later, IS retook Palmyra, dynamiting the theatre and posting a gloating video of the damage. Cornish had assumed his painting was lost, too. “I’m used to having my work destroyed on the street, but having it blown up by IS is something else,” he says.
A beheaded and mutilated statue in a Palmyra museum. Getty Images
Syria boasts six World Heritage cultural sites and all are on UNESCO’s endangered list. Normally, World Heritage funds would be released to protect the threatened properties. In Syria’s case, UN support has been limited to the restoration of a single Palmyrene statue, and training for museum staff. A UNESCO emergency appeal for $US150,000 ($222,000) to safeguard the portico of Palmyra’s Temple of Bel has failed to attract support from potential donors. At the national museum in Damascus, white-coated conservators have begun the exacting job of repairing hundreds of Palmyra’s damaged exhibits. It is an almost entirely Syrian effort, done on a tiny budget. “We hope for more international help because Palmyra belongs to the world, not just to Syria,” says Khalil Hariri, the Palmyra museum director. He says the fallen stones of the triumphal arch, theatre and tetrapylon are mostly intact and can be put back together, but the museum service can’t afford to employ workers and buy machinery. Says a Palmyra specialist at the Damascus museum, archaeologist Houmam Saad: “All the world talks about the damage to Palmyra, Aleppo and our other World Heritage sites, but hardly anyone outside Syria does anything to help.”
More than two dozen European and US organisations have sprung up to promote Syria’s imperilled heritage. They collect data, hold meetings and issue statements of concern. One such group spent £2.5 million ($4.1 million) to erect a two-thirds-scale model of Palmyra’s triumphal arch in London’s Trafalgar Square, then repeated the exercise in Washington, D.C. Money raised for Syrian antiquities would be better spent where the damage was done, writes Ross Burns, a former Australian ambassador to Syria and author of four books on its archaeology and history: “Putting money into faux arches and 3D models vaguely mimicking historical structures does little more than salve the consciences of outsiders whose nations have encouraged – even funded and armed, then walked away from – the conflagration that grew to overwhelm Syria.”
Syria is a nation of many faiths and ethnicities that emerged in its present boundaries only in 1945. Its rulers have popularised a shared history as a tool to promote national identity and social cohesion. In 2018, UNESCO’s Director-General Audrey Azoulay acknowledged this heritage as “a powerful force for reconciliation and dialogue”. She added a caveat: UNESCO would help rebuild Syria’s historic sites “when conditions allow”. That could mean a long wait.
The UN has banned its agencies from providing reconstruction aid until a “genuine and inclusive political transition negotiated by the parties” is achieved. The ban reflects the stance of the US, European Union and other nations which have imposed economic sanctions on Syria. The Australian government did the same in 2011 in response to what it called the “deeply disturbing and unacceptable use by the Syrian regime of violence against its people”. A year later, the Gillard government applied further sanctions and called for “intensified pressure on Damascus to stop its brutality”.
Luke Cornish ran up against the sanctions when he tried to send $28,000 raised for Syrian orphans to SOS Children’s Villages International last year. Sanctions have isolated Syria from global banking and payment systems, so the charity advised him to wire the money to its German bank account. However, his Australian bank declined the transfer, Cornish says, adding: “I made the mistake of using the word ‘Syria’ on the transfer description.” The UN Special Rapporteur on sanctions, Idriss Jazairy, says the restrictions have “contributed to the suffering of the Syrian people” by blocking imports ranging from anti-cancer drugs and vaccines to crop seeds and water pumps. Though not endorsed by the UN, the sanctions have had a “chilling effect” on humanitarian aid and obstruct efforts to restore schools, hospitals, clean water, housing and employment, Jazairy reported in 2018.
What, then, are the prospects for restoring Syria’s endangered antiquities, including Palmyra? Answers may lie in an ambitious Russian-funded project to rebuild Aleppo’s Great Mosque. It’s a masterpiece of Islamic architecture and symbol of the city, which lies north-west of Palmyra and lost one-third of its famed Old Quarter in fighting which ended in 2016. The mosque’s 45-metre minaret stood for more than 900 years until it collapsed during fighting in 2013. Today, it is a thousand-tonne pile of limestone blocks overlooked by a towering crane. Putting the minaret back up is the job of an all-Syrian team of architects and engineers, stonemasons and woodworkers. They must also restore the badly damaged columns, ceilings and walls of the prayer hall and arcades surrounding the mosque’s vast courtyard. Project director and architect Sakher Oulabi, who showed me around the site, says the workers feel a heavy responsibility: “We all understand we are doing something very important for the soul of our city and our country.”
Driving the rebuild is the Syria Trust for Development, chaired by Asma al-Assad, the President’s wife – so the project has considerable clout. Nevertheless, its technical challenges are almost as formidable as Palmyra’s. The minaret’s 2400 or so fallen stones must be weighed and measured, strength-tested with ultrasound and photographed from many angles so that photogrammetry – the science of making three-dimensional measurements from images – can help to determine where every stone fits. Materials and techniques must be as close as possible to the original: “An expert may notice the difference between new and old, but the public must not,” engineer Tamim Kasmo says. However, limestone that best matches the original is in a quarry outside government control, in Idlib province. As a senior US Defence Department official, Michael Mulroy, noted, Idlib harbours “the largest collection of al-Qaeda affiliates in the world right now”.
The Grand Colonnade, built in the second and third centuries; noted by UNESCO as an example of Rome’s engagement with the East. Alex Ray
Palmya’s giant stones are as white as old bones when we leave the site one evening at dusk. Tarek joins friends for iftar, the meal that breaks the Ramadan fast and begins with dates and water in line with a tradition supposedly begun by the prophet Muhammad. Our driver, Ahmad, has put aside the pistol he’s been carrying in his belt. He insists there is no prospect of an IS comeback, but says he carries the weapon because local roads can be dangerous. All the town’s hotels are destroyed, so we bed down in a private home and hear artillery fire throughout the night.
At dawn, a steady wind blows cold off the mountains. A road runs past the wreckage of a luxury hotel, where guests once dined while overlooking the ruins and below which Khaled al-Asaad was chained for his last 28 days, to the high perimeter walls of the Temple of Bel complex. From here, having sought the blessings of temple deities, ancient camel trains made the long desert crossing eastward to the Euphrates, with merchandise destined for markets as far away as China.
At the temple entrance today, a young soldier is hunkered down in a guard-post made from ammunition boxes and corrugated iron plastered with mud. “I was here all winter, but at least it didn’t snow,” he says. He apologises for having to inspect our papers and invites us to wait on plastic chairs while he clears our visit with a superior. I ask about the night’s gunfire. “It was only the army practising,” he says, pointing to a nearby mountain with a medieval citadel on its summit. A decade ago, I stood on its ramparts to take panoramic photos of Palmyra, but now it is an off-limits military zone.
Tarek and the soldier discuss welcome news: the spring that feeds Palmyra’s oasis is flowing for the first time in 27 years. The source of the city’s historic wealth, it has watered settlements here since Neolithic times. The spring’s revival has come too late for Tarek’s family orchard; its olive and pistachio trees have withered and died. But he takes it as a hopeful sign that enough of fabled Palmyra can be restored, for the prosperity of its people and the wonder of the world.
In That Howling Infinite 