Foreign Minister Penny Wong was keen to remind Guardian readers that “Australia has not supplied any weapons or ammunition to Israel for at least the past five years”. Only, as the Albanese government was forced to clarify, that excludes components for the US F-35 combat aircraft that is used to bomb Gaza. Australia has made over four billion dollars to date from contributing to the global supply chain: a trade that has continued uninterrupted throughout the past year.

Then there’s signals intelligence from the US listening station – oops, sorry, ‘Joint Facility’ – at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. Part of a globe-spanning operation that is entirely at Israel’s disposal, as a US ally. The Nautilus Institute awaits a substantive reply from the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security to its demand for confirmation of Australia’s role in supplying it and whether any conditions are set down: “If not for a plausible and urgent claim of genocide, subject to a case before the world’s highest court that raises the possibility of Australian complicity, then for what would Australia ever exercise its sovereign right to veto what happens on Australian soil?”

As long as we are embroiled in these US global systems, we will indeed be complicit in any and every military operation carried out with support from Washington: the capital responsible for more arms spending than the next ten combined. And no president has ever given more help to Israel than Joe Biden, as he himself boasted to a White House news conference last week.

How come? “Were there not an........

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