Here is what Usman Khawaja told the room where David Pocock was hosting a parliamentary friends of Palestine gathering:

From my point of view, this has, and still does, remained a humanitarian issue.

People want to muddy the waters and want to make it political and want to make it religious, but at the crux of it, it has always been a humanitarian issue. Innocent people have been dying for two years now and being starved out from Israel. And as we know, it is a man made famine. We know it is.

And so whenever anyone tries to bring religion or bring politics into it, I just don’t agree with that whatsoever.

For me, the way I explain is – say you have a good friend, and he is going out and he is killing people willy nilly. We know it is not right, and we say ‘why are you doing this’ and he says, ‘these people are rubbing me the wrong way, I don’t like the cut of their jib’.

[So you say] ‘Well that is not right, you can’t do that, it is illegal. You are not allowed to go out and kill people’.

And he is like, ‘well, that is just the way I feel.’

Would I still be friends with this person? The answer is no. I wouldn’t be. His values don’t align with my values. I would not be friends with them. And I would draw a line in the sand very quickly.

The same analogy that I used there, applies to Israel and the Australian government. We are allied, and we are accepting these war crimes. We accept these war crimes from an an ally, right now today, against the people of Palestine in Gaza, what then [is it for them] to turn around and [to do it to someone else. Do it to us, to anyone.

The standard we set for them should be higher than the standard we set for anyone else because we are aligned. And if we aren’t aligned, I am hoping, obviously the government doesn’t believe in the starvation of innocent people, then we should detach from that and we should make a statement and act.

Because if we settle on harsh words, and the reality is the harsh words do not have any impact, or care. Israel doesn’t care. Then maybe if we act, maybe then a few other nations will act and then together we can actually put enough pressure on Israel to stop what they are doing.

That is all I really wanted to say.