Don’t expect this outspoken Israeli general to hold fire in Australia

Major-General (retired) Noam Tibon, who is visiting Australia with his wife Gali for speaking engagements early next month, is not the type of person to say things just to please his audience.

Indeed, Noam’s role as keynote speaker along with Gali at the Union for Progressive Judaism’s annual UIA Progressive Appeal promises to be challenging to listeners both morally and politically if an interview he gave to The Jewish Independent offers any indication.

For one thing, Tibon finds Donald Trump’s plan to empty Gaza of all of its more than two million Palestinians to be a positive example of “thinking out of the box”. That response is in sync with the Netanyahu government and the clear majority of Jewish Israelis. But Israel’s leading human rights group, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) considers this, if implemented “a war crime and a crime against humanity.”

Interest in the outlandish Trump idea seems to be the only thing for which Tibon has common ground with Netanyahu, whom he bluntly describes as “the worst prime minister in the history of Israel”.

“He is the one responsible for the failure of October 7 and he needs to take responsibility and go away.”

Noam and Gali both played larger than life roles on October 7, 2023, with Noam rescuing his son Amir, his wife and two young daughters and others at Kibbutz Nahal Oz during the Hamas attacks. Gali ferried people wounded during the brutal surprise invasion to hospital. They had rushed from Tel Aviv in response to a call from Amir, a journalist at Haaretz who has since published a book, The Gates of Gaza, about his experience and the broader attacks.