Israel was founded on terrorism. The 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, is when many Palestinians were forced or terrorised into leaving their lands, which were taken over by Israel. Among the terrorists were Yzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin, both later Prime Ministers of Israel.

The original ‘grant’ of land to Israel was made by European imperial powers around the time of the First World War, without any consultation with Palestinians. That is just how European imperial powers of the time thought and acted. The later creation of Israel as a state was a response to atrocities against jews committed during the Second World War, including the Nazi Holocaust.

Israel has maintained Palestinians as second-class citizens by force, fear and terrorism, regardless of their technical rights. Some people say this makes Israel an apartheid state.

Israel has continued systematically to steal Palestinians’ land. On the so-called West Bank, the jewish settlements progressively established there are commonly referred to as ‘illegal settlements’. Israel’s land seizures since 1948 have ignored resolutions and directives from the United Nations and have ignored so-called international law.

The United States has supported Israel virtually unconditionally. That support includes billions of dollars annually of financial aid and billions of dollars worth of weapons. The US does this for its own reasons of geopolitical power plays and because there is a powerful Israel lobby in the US that threatens any politician who does not support Israel.

Australia has supported Israel because of a local Israel lobby and, especially in recent decades, because Australian governments have chosen to grovel to the US in the hopes that the US will protect us if we are ever threatened. So the present Australian government is careful not to make any criticism of Israel that goes significantly beyond what the US says. Both governments make pious verbal requests of Israel to behave not quite so badly, please. Israel ignores these pleas.

If the US threatened to stop all aid to Israel then Israel would quickly reduce its abuses, because its survival depends on US support. Australia could stop all aid and urge the US to do the same, but it does not.

The Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians last October were terrorist in nature and inexcusable, though some of the worst stories of atrocities (beheading babies, systematic rapes and such) were invented by Israel. A significant number of Israeli deaths was at the hands of Israeli forces attacking Palestinian hostage-takers, indiscriminately killing hostages in the process.

Hamas was reacting to many decades of violent repression of Palestinians by Israel. Now Israel’s response is out of all proportion to Hamas’ attacks. This is classic propagation of trauma. Hitler traumatised European jews. Traumatised people are prone to respond violently to triggers. Rather than recognising their trauma and trying to heal it, the founders of Israel, in their desperation to escape after-effects of the Holocaust,  inflicted trauma on Palestinians.

The demolition of much of Gaza’s homes and infrastructure, with very high civilian casualties, has been indiscriminate and not credibly necessary to root out Hamas militants. The pattern of events is credibly consistent with an attempt by Israel to drive the entire Gaza population into the Egyptian desert. There are credible accounts of deliberate targeting of journalists, many of whom have been killed, so as to prevent the world learning the full atrocity of Israel’s attack on Gaza. There are reports that little of the destruction in Gaza is shown in Israeli media, keeping the Israeli population ignorant of what is being done in their name – though it would not be hard for them to learn if they tried.

I became disillusioned about Israel decades ago, as I became aware of its rogue behaviour, so different from the heroic little state portrayed in the propaganda, propaganda that induced many of my generation in its youth to want to live in a Kibbutz, as some kind of Utopian ideal.

Now, I do not think Israel has any right to defend itself by attacking anyone. It needs to withdraw its people back within the borders proposed in 1967 to establish two states, Palestinian and Israeli. It needs to confine defence to literal self-defence. It needs to accede to a UN peace-keeping force if necessary. It needs to cease oppressing Palestinians within its remaining territory and allow them to practice full citizenship rights.

If Israel is unwilling to do these things, and to cease its terrorist ways, then its right to continue to exist in its present form must be in doubt.