It must have been an unpleasant but perhaps instructive moment for Minister for Home Affairs, Immigration and Citizenship Tony Burke when a mob of 50 protesters descended on his Punchbowl office on Thursday 10 July, draped in keffiyehs, waving Palestinian flags and signs saying, ‘Bloody Burke’, and chanting, ‘Tony Burke, you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide.’

Only a few short weeks ago, Burke signalled his virtue to the entire world, revoking the visa of an American Israeli on no other grounds than that the man would ‘inflame’ community tensions with his pro-Israeli views. Now, here was Burke, ‘inflaming’ the same community.

This can hardly have been what Burke imagined would happen when he told Parliament on 14 August 2024 that between 7 October 2023 and 14 August 2024, his department had granted 2,922 visas to people from Gaza.

The mob that descended on Burke’s office were protesting the detention of Maha Almassri, a 61-year-old woman who arrived from Gaza last year and was dubbed the ‘Gaza granny’ after Asio deemed her a security risk and detained her in a pre-dawn raid.

After another arson attack on a synagogue in Melbourne on the previous Sabbath, and attacks on an Israeli restaurant and on a business that exports products to Israel, someone in the government finally decided it was time to take a stand.

The raid occurred on the same day that Labor’s special envoy on antisemitism, Jillian Segal, delivered her plan to combat antisemitism, which has soared by 300 per cent since the Hamas invasion of Israel and massacre of 7 October 2023. It outlines a comprehensive strategy to address antisemitism through education, legal reform, visa screening, institutional accountability and digital regulation.

The report sees education as central, calling for a nationally consistent approach to teaching about the history, harms and modern forms of antisemitism. It requires public institutions to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, adopted by Australia in 2021, and calls on the government to strip funding from schools, universities, cultural bodies and charities that fail to act against antisemitism, and revoke charitable status from groups spreading antisemitic ideologies. It calls for migration officers to be trained to recognise modern antisemitism so that they can protect community safety and reflect Australian values when they screen visa applicants and deport non-citizens who promote antisemitism.

Perhaps the training could start at the ABC, which repeatedly reports statements from the Gaza Ministry of Health as if it is a reliable source of information rather than a mouthpiece for Hamas terrorists.

In May, and then again in June, the ABC was forced to apologise after it reported the absurd claim that ‘14,000 babies would be at risk of dying in Gaza within a 48-hour period due to starvation’ when the report quoted had found there could be 14,100 cases of severe malnutrition of children up to the age of six months across a 12-month period, not 48 hours.

The problem is far from confined to the ABC. When Channel 9 reported on the Sabbath violence in Melbourne it presented Mohammad Sharab as a ‘peaceful’ protest leader at ‘antigenocide’ demonstrations despite pleading guilty to at least two assaults at protests and being on bail for an alleged kidnapping and torture. Channel 9 did this despite the fact that Sharab claimed on camera that attacking people eating in an Israeli restaurant in Melbourne was justified because the restaurant ‘aids or supports genocide’. He has also been recorded on camera calling repeatedly for ‘No ceasefire, no peace’ and saying ‘Long live the resistance. Long live Hamas.’

Let’s be clear, the only group in Gaza calling for genocide is Hamas. Its 1988 Charter explicitly calls for the killing of all Jews, quoting a hadith of the Prophet, and it also explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel. It only accepts a Palestinian state within 1967 borders as a temporary step in its goal of ‘liberating all of Palestine’. It describes itself as ‘one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood’ whose goal is to establish a global Islamic caliphate based on Sharia.

Moreover, accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza is legally, factually and morally wrong. The UN Convention on Genocide defines it as ‘Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.’

The key legal requirement is the specific intent to destroy the group. Israel’s stated and evident intent is military, aimed at destroying Hamas, a designated terrorist group that killed over 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and continues to fire rockets into Israel.

If Israel wanted to exterminate the Gazan population, it has the firepower to do so very quickly, but it does not. This contradicts claims of genocidal intent. Israel targets militants, tunnels and weapons depots, which Hamas has deliberately embedded in civilian structures resulting in a tragically high number of civilian deaths. Hamas also refuses to let civilians shelter in its massive underground network. This makes precision attacks on Hamas, and maintaining proportionality, extremely difficult, but civilian casualties in asymmetric conflicts and brutal urban wars are not evidence of genocide, or the wars in Fallujah, Mosul, and Aleppo would also qualify as genocide, yet they don’t.

In addition, Israel has coordinated humanitarian corridors, facilitated aid deliveries through Egypt and UN agencies, warned civilians in advance of strikes through leaflets, calls, and ‘roof knocking’. While these efforts have limitations and are sometimes imperfect, they show Israel is not trying to exterminate the population.

In addition, the International Court of Justice case brought by South Africa against Israel has not ruled that genocide is taking place, only that the accusation merits further review.

The fact is that the accusation of genocide is made by activists, regimes or NGOs that ignore or excuse Hamas’s genocidal charter and war crimes and apply a standard to Israel that they don’t use in other conflicts, such as Syria, Sudan and Yemen. This undermines real genocides like the Holocaust, Rwanda or the Yazidis under Isis and turns the term into a political weapon, not a legal or moral one.

As Burke has found out, there is nothing easier than calling for genocide while accusing others of committing it.

It was Winston Churchill who observed in a BBC radio speech on 20 January 1940, that ‘Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.’ In the case of Mr Burke, the crocodile arrived sooner than expected.