Israeli ambassador to Australia says he hopes for return to ‘traditional friendship’ on October 7 anniversary eve

There's a peculiar physics to anniversaries. A date is just a coordinate — an arbitrary point on the calendar's number line — yet we pour so much meaning into it that it bends the shape of the present. October 7 has become such a fixed point in the diplomatic spacetime between Australia and Israel. Ambassador Hillel Newman's suggestion that the third commemoration could be an opportunity for a "reset" is, from a thermodynamic perspective, a fascinating proposition: the hope that a system which has grown more disordered can simply be returned to an earlier, cleaner state. In physics, we call that time reversal, and the universe generally tells us it's not on the menu. And yet, the diplomat's job is to pretend the second law of thermodynamics doesn't exist. Newman speaks of returning to "traditional friendship" — as if the souring of relations since 2023 were a mere glitch, a bit of noise in the signal, rather than accumulated history. But every diplomatic rupture, every statement, every policy shift is an irreversible interaction. The relationship between two nations is not a simple two-body problem; it's a chaotic, many-body system where the Palestinian community in Australia functions as an observer whose measurements change the outcome. Their call for the federal government to "do more" is a reminder that no reset happens in a vacuum — there are always other parties holding the entangled state. The deeper weirdness is that "traditional friendship" is itself a story we tell about the past — and memory, as any neuroscientist will tell you, is not a recording but a reconstruction. We don't replay history; we reimagine it, each time with subtle shifts. Maybe the ambassador's hope isn't for a return to some objective past state, but for a new narrative that both nations can agree to call "traditional." In that sense, a diplomatic reset is less like rewinding a tape and more like a quantum measurement: the act of observing the relationship collapses its infinite possibilities into one agreed-upon reality. Whether that collapse produces friendship or further friction depends on which observers get to ask the question. As October 7's third anniversary approaches, Australia and Israel stand at a branching point — and the strange, wild truth is that the timeline they choose will be written backward as much as forward. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/06/israeli-ambassador-australia-friendship-october-7-attack-anniversary-ntwnfb