When Times Were Better: Victoria’s Ties with Israel’s Defence Industry
Times were supposedly better in 2022. That is, if you were a lawmaker in the Australian state of Victoria, a busy Israeli arms manufacturer, or cash counting corporate middleman keen to make a stash along the way between the two. That view is premised on the notion that what happened on October 7, 2023 in Israel was stunningly remarkable, a historical blot dripped and dribbled from nothingness, leaving the Jewish state vengeful and yearning to avenge 1200 deaths and the taking of 240 hostages. All things prior were dandy and uncontroversial.
Last month, word got out that the Victorian government had inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Israeli Defence Ministry in December 2022. “As Australia’s advanced manufacturing capital, we are always exploring economic and trade opportunities for our state – especially those that create local jobs,” a government spokesperson stated in January. It’s just business.
No one half observant to this should have been surprised, though no evidence of the MoU, in form or substance, exists on Victorian government websites. (It is, however, listed on the Australian government’s Foreign Arrangements Scheme register.) For one thing, Israel’s Ministry of Defense had happily trumpeted it, stating that its International Defense Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) and the Victorian statement government had “signed an industrial defense cooperation statement” that December. Those present at the signing ceremony were retired General Yair Kulas, who heads SIBAT and Penelope McKay, acting secretary for Victoria’s Department of Jobs, Precincts, and Regions.
That an MoU should grow from this was a logical outcome, a feature of the State’s distinctly free approach to entering into agreements with foreign entities. In April 2021, the previous Morrison government terminated four agreements made by the Victorian government with Iran, Syria and China. The agreements with Iran and Syria, signed in November 2004 and March 1999 respectively, were intended as educational, scientific and training ventures. The two agreements with China came in the form of an MoU and framework agreement with the National Development and Reform Commission of the PRC, both part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The Israeli arms industry has taken something of a shine to Victoria. One of its most aggressive, enterprising representatives has been Elbit Systems, Israel’s prolific drone manufacturing company. Through Elbit Systems of Australia (ELSA), it established a Centre of Excellence in Human-Machine Teaming and Artificial Intelligence in Port Melbourne after announcing its plans to do so in February 2021.
One of its main co-sponsors is the state government’s Invest Victoria branch. The body is tasked with, in the tortured words of the government, “leading new entrant Foreign Direct Investment and investment opportunities of significance as well as enhancing the business investment environment, developing and providing whole-of-government levers and strengthening the governance of investment attraction activities.” RMIT University’s Centre for Industrial AI Research and Innovation also did its bit alongside the state government in furnishing support.
The two-year partnership with ELSA’s Centre of Excellence had rosy, arcadian goals. The company’s then managing director and retired Major General Paul McLachlan wanted to impress his audience with glossily innocent reasons behind developing drone technology, which entailed counting any “number of people in designated evacuation zones, then to co-ordinate and communicate the most efficient evacuation routes to everyone in the zone, as well as monitoring the area to ensure that everyone has been accounted for.”
McLachlan, in focusing on “the complex problems that emergency management organisations face during natural disasters” skipped around the nastily obvious fact that the technology’s antecedents have been lethal in nature. They had been used to account for the killing and monitoring of Palestinians in Gaza, with its star performer being Elbit’s Hermes drone. A grisly fact from the summer months of July 2014, when the IDF was making much use of Elbit’s murderous products in Gaza, company profits increased by 6.1%.
This was not a record that worried the director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s defence, strategy and national security program, Michael Shoebridge. As he told the ABC, the MoU “would have been entirely uncontroversial before the Israel-Hamas war. But now, of course, there’s a live domestic debate about the war, and … most people are concerned about civilian casualties.”
It is exactly the slipshod reasoning that gives the think-tankers a bad name. It means that Israel’s predatory policies towards Palestinians since 1948 can be dismissed as peripheral and inconsequential to the current bloodbath. The racial-administrative policies of the Jewish state in terms of controlling and dispossessing Palestinians in the West Bank and the trampling, sealing and suffocating of Gaza, can be put down to footnotes of varying, uncontroversial relevance.
The Victorian Greens disagree. On February 7, the party released a statement promising to introduce a motion calling on the Victorian government “to end its secretive relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence.” They also demanded the government to “sever any ties with companies arming Israel’s Defence Force, which has killed 27,500 Palestinians in less than four months.”
Given the federal government’s brusque termination of previous agreements entered into by Victoria with purportedly undesirable entities, the Albanese government has a useful precedent. With legal proceedings underway in the International Court of Justice in The Hague seeking to determine whether genocide is taking place in Gaza, along with an interim order warning Israel to abide by the UN Genocide Convention, a sound justification has presented itself. Complicity with genocide – actual, potential or as yet unassessed by a court – can hardly be in Canberra’s interest. Over to you, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
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9 comments
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andyfiftysix
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Steve Davis
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John C
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JulianP
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New England Cocky
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andyfiftysix
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Douglas Pritchard
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Fred
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Douglas Pritchard
Return to home pagei still havent got an answer from Zionists and their apologists.
What have you done that has turned some palestinians into such cold blooded killers.
It hasnt happened in a vacuum, nor has it been spontaneous. 70 odd years i believe.
I am so tired of having everyone else drawn into your brutal cult.
This is an almost inevitable outcome of our willing participation in a financial system that has no moral foundation, that rewards cunning and deceit, and that entrenches poverty through its parasitical relationship with society.
It does not have to be this way.
The amoral aspects of the liberal system can be easily challenged as they are such an obvious affront to common decency. But we have a problem.
Any person undertaking economics or business management courses is taught to dismiss ethical and moral thinking as being irrelevant. The only moral standard that requires adherence is that provided by legislation. And with legislation being finely tuned by lobbyists and donors, the outcomes are almost unavoidable.
We need a national conversation to determine our direction.
The ALP could start that process, but will they?
As an Australian born and raised in Victoria I am deeply embarrassed and ashamed that our state government is interested in doing business with a bunch of murderers intent on genocide of the true owners of the land they stole. But a quick look around the influential suburbs like Toorak shows the extent to which jews have dug in to our landscape and taken control of so many of our financial insitutions. Just like they have already done to the Divided States of Absurdity. One day in the future they will probably try to claim Oz as the chosen land for their ‘people’ and start trying to annihilate those of us who are free thinkers, not conned gullible believers in ancient myths.
@andyfiftysix
Aside from all that has happened over the last “70 odd years”, the last straw could well have been the Israeli PM’s speech to the UNGA in Sept. last year during which he presented a map of “The New Middle East” in which there was no Palestine.
Apparently during that speech Mr. Netanyahu ” showed a series of maps, including one that did not show the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Gaza.” Despite the alleged purpose of him doing so – ” to illustrate the number of Arab countries normalizing relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords…”, there can be little doubt of the effect of that upon the Palestinians.
[ https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-map ]
THE IDF ZION@ZI FANATICS ARE PRACTICING GENOCIDE OF THE INDIGENOUS PALESTINIANS, DISPLACING & DISPOSSESSING THEM, TO DATE OVER 26,000 MAINLY WOMEN & CHILDREN, FOR THE BENEFIT OF AMERICAN & EUROPEAN ENTREPRENEURS WANTING CLEAR LEGAL TITLE TO THE ”STOLEN” LANDS FOR FRESH ZION@ZI COLONIST SETTLERS ESCAPING RUSSIAN CONSCRIPTION, AMERICAN CHAOS OR EUROPEAN INDIFFERENCE.
JulianP, may have been the last straw but if you look over the journey, from 1972 when arafat blew up the jumbos, their stunts have gotten increasingly more daring and brutal. My guess is the palestinians had a feel for what israel would do. Forcing the bear out into the open so to speak. Its a fucked idea…..if at first you dont succeed, try and try again. Sooner or later israel was going to be goaded into over the top action, and hasnt it been way over the top. Everyone is paying attention now…..a successful strategy one has to say. You know Bibi set israel up for this and they deserve what they get in the court of public opinion.
You guys will be unaware of the comfort I get from mixing with like minded individuals practicing the sort of scrutiny of our media that I find nowhere else.
I cannot trust myself to write objectivly about a genocidal nation that our government listens humbly to.
Cancel aid to Palestinian refugees, on the say so of a nation whose inteligence failed so dismally on 7th Oct.
An inquiry into circumstances, and veracity of the terrorists, nuclear armed, on the seventh, may reveal more than our government is willing to swallow?
DP: …”a nation whose intelligence failed so dismally on 7th Oct” – are you really sure? Of the various perspectives one can take on any issue, my cynical side thinks the Zionists have long prepared for an excuse to roll out their “annihilation” plan. That would require a sufficiently large trigger event to justify the current response. I would not put it past “nut-and-yahoo” to consider a bit of collateral damage/sacrifices as acceptable to kick things off at a time when domestic opinion was hardening to see him put in prison/kicked out of power. What triggered Hamas to carry out its disgusting heinous attack out of the blue – maybe a bit of agitation by a Mossad implant. My optimistic side hasn’t had anything to say about this needless conflict.
Fred. We are on the same page. You have to be manic delusional to think that you can con the civilised world into thinking that genocide is justified when a slick intelligence machine conveniently failed on 7th Oct.
Failed?
I would need more evidence from a source that I could trust.
Then turn round and insult our intelligence by naming all those who took part when there is a chance to starve international support for the victims.
Its like Bidens defense that he is a doddery, forgetful, elderly clown who forgot about the docs in his cellar, and then saying he can become the next president with the nuclear codes in his pocket!
What is happening is simply the next stage in the Zionist plan.