I’ve written about the Israel-Palestine conflict — and Australia’s relationship to it — for nearly twenty years. For some of those years, I lived in East Jerusalem. I’m an Australian/German citizen and I have regularly reported from around Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. In that time, my own views have evolved — I was once a liberal, Zionist Jew who believed in a two-state solution. Today, I back a one-state reality where all citizens can live equally under the law.

One of the US State Department cables that WikiLeaks released in 2011 gave a sense of the prevailing attitude toward Palestinians among Israel’s rulers. In 2008, Israeli officials told US diplomatic staff that they would “keep Gaza’s economy ‘on the brink of collapse’ while avoiding a humanitarian crisis.” Since then, Israel has kept its word, by enforcing an inhumane siege on Gaza, with Egyptian support.

For public consumption, Israeli politicians blatantly lied about the siege, claiming it was simply intended to prevent the ruling Hamas party from rearming. But the real objective was to punish the people of Gaza for daring to vote for Hamas in the 2006 election.