By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

The grim anniversary of Hamas's killing and kidnapping spree in 2023 is just weeks away.

A year of unremitting death and suffering without a single redeeming feature. Neither hope, nor justice nor even the prospect of improved security. All have gone sharply backwards.

The unfathomable savagery of the attacks in a kibbutz and a music festival blindsided Israel's legendary intelligence apparatus while also vindicating Australia's designation of Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

Its October 7 attack was pure terror - deliberately exaggerated violence designed to further political ends. And Hamas's brutal authoritarianism continues without hesitation. Last month, it coldly executed six hostages when it feared the IDF was about to free them. Plainly a war crime on a war crime.

Those in Australia who exercise a democratic right to demonstrate on behalf of Hamas might reflect on its violent misogyny and homophobia and note it abhors dissent along with any separation between government, religious diktat, courts and personal freedom.

Of course, the looming anniversary also marks the Netanyahu government's unrelenting violence against Palestinians and its extraordinary efforts to frustrate a ceasefire - up to and including the assassination of Hamas's chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh.

But what about the liberal world?

A year on, several things have become painfully clear.

The first is there is literally no violent excess to which Tel Aviv could go that would halt America's supply of arms or break its international protection (via the UN Security Council) - not the targeting of schools, or hospitals, or refugee camps, or the murder of countless children, ambulance drivers, aid workers and journalists.

This is not advanced here as a theory. All of these things have happened. Repeatedly. Forty-thousand-plus dead in Gaza, the enclave bombed into an uninhabitable rubble. Apart from the tens of thousands annihilated, displaced survivors include women and children maimed, starved, traumatised and terrorised.

America has called lamely for a ceasefire but invariably trots out statements like this one from Joe Biden in May: "As I told Prime Minister Netanyahu, our commitment to Israel's security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad. Let me say it again - ironclad."

The record shows despite its professed misgivings, Washington has held Netanyahu's fanatically right-wing government together.

What steps the US does take are performative rather than corrective, more in the category of PR. This generally involves mouthing hollow phrases like the one favoured here also: "Israel has a right to defend itself, but how it does this, matters."

Really? In practice, how Israel "defends itself" entails colossal cross-border bombardment of civilians using American armaments. The tearing up of roads, the flattening of buildings, the destruction of infrastructure. And in the West Bank, indefinite occupation.

Stripped of its moral sophistry, Western fecklessness is manifest.

The families of Israeli hostages say Netanyahu has not prioritised their return because he prioritises his own survival. Many believe he wants the war against Hamas (which is actually a war against Palestinian statehood) to escalate rather than resolve.

Escalation would involve dragging Iran in, first via Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and thus America, too, this time as participant rather than just the gullible arms donor.

Why? Because the Israeli PM is a hostage, too. He knows as soon as this war ends, he is likely to be removed and to face pre-existing corruption charges. Plus, there will be inquiries into the calamitous intelligence and IDF failures of October 7, and probes into potential war crimes committed since.

Still, Netanyahu, who is as wily a politician as the world has seen, has moves to make yet. With the Biden White House now irrelevant, Bibi's new goal is an even more manipulable Trump White House.

Israel is a key force in American politics where its backers are even more powerful than in Australia. In both countries, its 'lobby' has worked assiduously to duchess legislators, ministers and journalists into toeing the line, or at least remaining silent.

Thus, on both sides of politics, the Americans are hostage to Netanyahu and to his powerful US electoral base. This is why Trump asserted to a debate viewership of 67 million last week, that under a Kamala Harris presidency, Israel would cease to exist within two years. Total nonsense, but the dog whistle of anti-Semitism would have been widely heard.

Polls show Harris is favoured by younger voters who tend to be less locked onto Israel, but Harris cannot win with these alone so don't expect her to enunciate the words that decency (and history) demand.

Other hostages in this year of heartless cruelty include the UN which is powerless to sanction Israel while its super-power enabler exercises its permanent veto.

It is a matter of some irony that inside Israel, where support for the war might be expected to be most fervent, there is deepening despair. Many accept Netanyahu will not pursue a peace deal involving hostages because he is himself hostage to the racist-religious hardliners in his cabinet who will bring him down if he tries.

For the journalists, governments and institutions who have self-edited in the face of mounting atrocities, a year must surely be long enough to speak strongly against Netanyahu's lawlessness - the point when silence goes from cowardice to complicity.

This, too, is plain.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.