As a book review, this is lacking. Even as an ad hominem attack, it is wanting. David McBride may not have been the whistleblower that the reviewer wanted, but he did identify that SOTG structures (and the entire Operation Slipper architecture after about 2009) were fundamentally morally compromised – like so many people I interviewed in my books about the Afghan war – and then he did something about it, which almost nobody did. This fact must at least be grudgingly acknowledged somewhere.

Ben Mckelvey

This reads more like a vindictive Facebook post than a scholarly review. ABR, in comments to Crikey, described Kevin Foster as a ‘fearless, cogent, informed reviewer’. In this case he is not. He is an aggressive, dismissive critic of David McBride, not an informed reviewer of a text.

Ronald Brown

I thought this was a good and insightful review of the book. Surely a reviewer has an obligation to try and understand the motives and intent of the author, especially in an autobiography? I believe Kevin Foster has done just that. I found McBride’s book appallingly superficial, but for some strange reason I felt compelled to finish it. Having read Foster’s review, I believe that he has accurately and succinctly articulated what I was actually feeling.

Peter Kelly

It is ironic that David McBride and his supporters flock to criticise Kevin Foster’s review en masse. How dare it be suggested that McBride is self-interested, something the book appears to inadvertently reveal? This is a review of an autobiography, and so the subject’s opinion of himself as told in the book is highly relevant. The reviewer has indicated that the value in the book might be what McBride is inadvertently saying, rather than what he intends to say.

Mia Aghajanian

I can understand the reaction here, but it betrays a deliberate ignorance of the opening lines of the review. Don’t idolise your ‘heroes’ – they are all flawed. This was the message that David McBride was sending while broadcasting his own flaws. He was part of the culture that he found distasteful in relation to the values that he assumed as a privileged élitist. McBride discovered that error. We see exposed the class assumptions of McBride’s cultural milieu. He does not do it as a class warrior. For that he deserves the respect that the reviewer affords. He should not be hailed as (nor does he claim to be) another working-class hero, and for headlining that, the reviewer should be congratulated.

Warwick Fry

I thought this was going to be a review of David McBride’s book. However, it reads like a personal opinion of his career and character. I fail to see how this text can be classified as a book review.

Sharon Luhr

This is not a book review: it is a very unfair character assassination that seems personal. I am appalled that it was published.

Ken Ford

This is a character assassination and not a book review. Absolutely shameful.

Lyn Malone

That’s not a book review. That’s a shameful personal attack.

Melissa McLelland

The real heroes were the two journalists at the ABC who chose to reveal the truth and have paid a terrible price while choosing not to self-promote.

Carol Oakes

Can’t wait to read your autobiography, Kevin.

David McBride

Kevin Foster replies:

A number of respondents to my review of David McBride’s The Nature of Honour have accused me of ‘character assassination’. Given that the subject of the review was an autobiography, I find this a little puzzling. McBride’s book concludes with his decision to leak classified documents to the media to expose what he believed was the endangerment of special forces troops in Afghanistan by ADF senior command. In what comes before this momentous decision, he takes the reader back through his life to explain who he is, how his values and beliefs have been shaped, how they affected the personal and professional choices he made, and so what it was that led him to do what he did. In the course of this, McBride inadvertently betrays patterns of thought and behaviour that reveal a man strikingly at odds with how he explicitly presents himself to the reader and how his supporters have portrayed him. In this context, failing to discuss McBride’s character would have been like reviewing Moby-Dick without discussing the sea.

Ben Mckelvey suggests that I have failed both as a reviewer and a hatchet-man, and that McBride deserves credit for leaking the material he did. Just to clarify, I reviewed what McBride chose to tell the reader about himself. The only hatchet on show here was of McBride’s own fashioning. I merely pointed out how he had laid about himself with it.

Mckelvey is wrong to claim that ‘almost nobody’ did something about the military crimes and moral failures in Afghanistan. Many serving and former special forces personnel spoke up about what they had seen and identified who was responsible, at considerable personal and professional cost. None of these people promoted him or herself as a champion of openness in the way that McBride has done.

As to his assertion that McBride was not the whistleblower that I wanted, Mckelvey implicitly raises the larger question of whether McBride’s motives mattered. Yes, they did. The ADF’s senior commanders ‘amplified’ the Rules of Engagement because they and their political masters were concerned about Afghan civilian casualties. McBride was resolutely opposed to these revisions. Convinced that they imperilled the men on the front lines, he laid out his objections in a twenty-four page, 101-paragraph memorandum to his superiors. When this was rebuffed, he handed classified files to the ABC, detailing what he thought were exemplary cases of the vexatious pursuit of special forces soldiers over civilian casualties, believing that their disclosure would force senior command to withdraw the amendments.

Careful what you wish for. In the same material, the ABC’s Dan Oakes and Sam Clark – the real heroes of this whole episode – found evidence that some of the special forces personnel McBride was working to shield from investigation had allegedly executed unarmed civilians and had then planted weapons and radios on the victims to cover their crimes. In the wake of these revelations, Australian Federal Police raided the ABC’s offices in Ultimo, and Oakes spent the next three years waiting to find out whether he would be prosecuted for doing his job. While Oakes sweated, McBride’s followers lauded him as the man who had laid bare the dirty secrets of Australia’s war in Afghanistan. When the Commonwealth pursued him through the courts, his cheer squad canonised him as a martyr to free speech – a role he happily assumed, but did not deserve to play.

Sometimes the truth is as inconvenient as it is unpopular.

Israel and Gaza

Dear Editor,

In order to explain to us why he does not subscribe to the expressions of horror and outrage at the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, David Trigger recommends that we read his review of Michael Gawenda’s book My Life As a Jew (ABR, December 2023). Trigger approvingly cites Gawenda’s assertion that ‘accusing Israelis, and by extension Jews, of behaving like Nazis is now commonplace among parts of the far left’. This deft little phrase – ‘and by extension, Jews’ – is an inexcusable slur against the millions of people around the globe who have clearly made the crucial distinction between Jewish people and the racist Zionist state. Professor Trigger, by tacitly endorsing the words of Gawenda, should not be allowed to propagate this dangerous insinuation. It is exactly the kind of claim which is being deployed to silence critics of the Israeli regime. In the United States and elsewhere, a McCarthyite witch-hunt against these critics is now in full swing, driving respected senior academics from their posts. There is no question that similar techniques are being or will be employed here.

When Professor Trigger recites the mantra that historical comparisons drawn between Zionist supremacist ideology and Nazism is ‘commonplace among parts of the far left’, must we presume he is talking about people such as Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sydney Hook, and scores of other Jewish intellectuals who made that comparison as early as 1948, stating unequivocally that Menachem Begin and his Herut party (later to become Likud), of whom Netanyahu is the ideological heir, were ‘fascists’, ‘racists’, ‘criminals’, and ‘terrorists’?

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine … It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents. (https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948)

Trigger also fails to note that such comparisons appear to be more common among far-right Zionist ethno-nationalists, to the utter horror of the staff of the Auschwitz Museum. As reported in the Jerusalem Post, the Auschwitz Museum in Poland expressed their disgust at the following remarks made by Metula Council head David Azoulai: ‘The entire Gaza Strip should be emptied and leveled flat, just like in Auschwitz.’

Memory of victims of Auschwitz has, at times, been violated and instrumentalized in various extreme statements. Calling for acts that seem to transgress any civil, wartime, moral, and human laws, that may sound as a call for murder of the scale akin to Auschwitz, puts the whole honest world face-to-face with a madness that must be confronted and firmly rejected. (https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-778465)

Anthony Redmond

David Trigger replies:

This comment appears to be prompted by my disagreement in another forum over the wording of a particular statement, written by Anthony Redmond to garner signatures, condemning Israel as a racist state in light of its huge military response to the Hamas murders of civilians.

Despite this awkwardness in the context of ABR, the comment underscores Michael Gawenda’s point in his book My Life As a Jew (written before the present conflict in Gaza): that legitimate criticism of the current Israeli government too often bleeds into complete dismissal of the country’s moral right to exist.

Likening Israel to ‘fascism’ and ‘Nazism’ has become de rigueur in certain leftist quarters, but for most Jews and many non-Jews it is offensive and appears anti-Semitic precisely because it lacks factual support. The rant of an individual mayor of an Israeli town is cited as evidence; this is astoundingly naïve from a scholar in the social sciences. There are some extremists who have been brought into the current Israeli government in a multi-party system that relies on horse-trading and abject compromises and the sooner these politicians are gone the better. There are also serious issues regarding Palestinian rights that must be addressed. However, there is no significant widely supported Israeli ideology, movement, or policy that is equivalent to the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews. Using accusations of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is sensationalist and a deliberate strategy of demonising the entirety of Israeli society.

Yes, there have been many views about the Zionist project among Jewish intellectuals. The enormous trauma of the Holocaust, alongside the long history of Jewish connections to the region, have produced a rich body of thought and diversity of opinion as to the complexities that inform modern Israel and its relationships with the global Jewish diaspora. The disagreements noted in a letter written in 1948, reflecting fierce ideological contestation within the Zionist movement, sit alongside a rich tapestry of continuing support for a viable Jewish homeland. Moreover, context matters. Menachem Begin, who is condemned in that letter, became the first Israeli prime minister to sign a historic peace treaty in 1978 with an Arab neighbour represented by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

Criticising aspects of current government policy or military strategy is part of normal political debate. However, what is not all right is persistently calling Israel a Nazi state, and/or suggesting that the Jews who live there and defend their society are adherents to a ‘supremacist ideology’ and are like Nazis. Such vehement bluster is both hopelessly ignorant of history and devastating for Holocaust survivors, their children and grandchildren. It encourages an ugly and threatening rise in anti-Semitism across the world. The book I reviewed, My Life As a Jew, addresses such issues admirably.

A word much abused

Dear Editor,

Apropos of Frank Bongiorno’s review of Raimond Gaita’s book Justice and Hope, I think that what Gaita has in mind could better be described as honour, respect, and compassion, rather than love (ABR, January–February 2024). Love is a word that is much abused and misused, perhaps due to emotion, perhaps because it is misunderstood. The essence of love is placing the well-being of another above all else irrespective of the cost to oneself and without the slightest expectation of anything in return.

As for Socrates, Plato cites in extenso in his Symposium the long dialogue Socrates is reported to have had with the prophetess Diotima, in which she declares that ‘love is of immortality’. Like our involuntary body functions of heartbeat, breathing, etc., our involuntary mental functions of morality, altruism, and love are all cogs that keep the wheel of life turning.

Rodney Crisp

Arts Highlights of the Year

Thank you for a terrific round-up of arts highlights of 2023 (ABR, January–February 2024). It was marvellous to read about and relive some of the best.

Virginia Braden

A ripe peach

Dear Editor,

Mounting a No case for the referendum was so easy (ABR, December 2023). It was the ripe peach that fell into Peter Dutton’s lap. For people engaged in promoting the Yes campaign, the level of ignorance about what constitutional change really meant must have been depressing.

In any case, I believe the expectation of what a Yes vote would have delivered, had it prevailed, was wildly optimistic. My husband and I both tried to change the vote of hard-line No voters – to no avail. Our arguments, forcefully put, fell on stony ground. In those moments, we saw the contented faces of white privilege looking back at us with pity.

Judith Masters

It is dismal and incomprehensible that Australia, one of the first countries in the world to give women the vote, despite its inherent misogyny, cannot recognise in its constitution, which hardly anyone has read or really cares about, the people who have lived in, loved, and protected this land for thousands of years.

Mary Billing