How apt for Scott Morrison to take advantage of an “opportunity that has arisen for him” to join Boris Johnson on a trip to Israel, as he put it in a clunky press release today issued by his media team. Unsurprisingly for a prime minister who sought to defy international law and legitimise Israel’s illegal declaration of Jerusalem as its capital, Morrison’s media release is a checklist of pro-Israel talking points: the Hamas atrocities were comparable to 9/11, criticism of the Israeli response is anti-Semitic, nothing short of full support for Israel is acceptable, Israel doesn’t have a partner to establish a two-state solution with; the only clichés missing were “the Middle East’s only democracy” and “Israel made the desert bloom”.
Morrison’s travelling companion Boris Johnson is not so much visiting Israel as fleeing the UK, where his colossal failures in handling the pandemic, which cost thousands of British lives, are currently the subject of a parliamentary inquiry. That has revealed further detail of just how astonishingly dysfunctional Johnson’s government was in its response to the onset of COVID and how experienced officials predicted that a catastrophe would occur as a result.
Morrison’s pandemic failures — mainly thanks to the hard line held by state premiers — are only small compared to Johnson’s, thank goodness, although the death toll in our aged care homes, the badly bungled vaccination rollout and the grotesque waste of taxpayer money were bad enough. In other respects — an addiction to lying, an obsession with announcements over substance, the stench of widespread corruption that characterised their government, the C|T-run campaigns, the contempt of colleagues, and the sordid scandals, Morrison and Johnson are two peas in a pod, with only the Brit’s unruly mop of hair likely to enable puzzled Israelis to be able to tell them apart.
Their visit is particularly apt because Israel is currently led by a figure very similar to them, albeit with key differences. Netanyahu’s handling of the pandemic, at least until the second wave hit the country, was far better than Johnson’s. And unlike Johnson and Morrison, Netanyahu is alleged to be personally corrupt — he remains on trial for fraud and corruption. He has also had a far longer career as his nation’s leader than either Morrison or Johnson managed.
But Netanyahu’s incompetence is at the core of current expectations that he will be forced from office whenever the assault on Gaza permits it. Not only was he leader when the most remarkable Israeli security failure in 50 years occurred, his support for Hamas as part of his strategy of preventing any two-state solution is a matter of public record. Moreover, his own intelligence services told him his support for illegal Israeli settlements, and tolerance of settler terrorism against Palestinians, was undermining Israel’s security and defence capability. Like Johnson, Netanyahu failed in the most critical job of a political leader — protecting his own people.
Netanyahu also shares with Morrison and Johnson both a penchant for lies and an enthusiasm for Donald Trump, whom the Israeli once acclaimed as the most pro-Israel president ever (among other things, Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital). Trump, transactional as ever, later turned on Netanyahu for “letting him down” and not giving him enough credit, and attacked Netanyahu over the Hamas attacks, before blowback from Republicans forced him to retreat.
Trump is in the middle of one of his multiple trials for his various crimes in the US, otherwise Johnson and Morrison would have been the perfect companions for the former president’s own visit to Israel as head of a coalition of the incompetent to support the most disastrously incompetent Israeli government in generations.
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