Labor’s referendum position is completely at odds with its stance on Gaza

In October 2022, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong released a statement reversing the Morrison government’s Trumpian recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. “Australia’s embassy has always been and remains in Tel Aviv,” she wrote, claiming that “Australia is committed to a two-state solution in which Israel and a future Palestinian state coexist, in peace and security, within internationally recognised borders.” 

“We will not support an approach that undermines this prospect,” Wong added.

The government’s dramatic shift in language is at odds with its internal position on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. As recently as August, Labor was hardening its language on the Palestinian territories ahead of its national conference, referring to Israeli settlements in the West Bank as “illegal under international law”, and the territories as “occupied”, and a “significant obstacle to peace”. Labor support for Palestine dates as far back as Whitlam, a position consistent with his campaign against South African apartheid. Former prime minister Bob Hawke called for Palestinian statehood. As did former Labor minister and NSW premier Bob Carr. Yet it is Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who is often credited with breaking partisan position with the Liberals.

Strange then that upon Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza (let’s call it what it is), the Albanese government has pledged unconditional support for “Israel’s right to defend itself” from what it claims was an “unprovoked attack” by Hamas on border communities that killed at least 1200 Israelis and injured thousands more.

While the attacks by Hamas are horrific, and should absolutely be condemned, they were far from unprovoked, as has been covered at great length by Israel’s longest-running newspaper, Haaretz, as well as outlets including Time, Huffington Post, Jacobin and The Intercept. Palestinians have been threatened, intimidated, imprisoned, forced from their homes, deprived of the right to work and the right to movement, ethnically cleansed, tortured, murdered and occupied for decades by an apartheid government. 

Which is why 86% of Jewish Israelis blame the attack on Gaza on Israel’s leadership, according to a poll by the Dialog Center, 79% of whom are supporters of Netanyahu’s coalition. Fifty-six per cent of Israelis are calling for Netanyahu to resign. 

Annexation has been official Israeli policy since December 2017, bolstered by the “consent” of former US president Donald Trump, who proposed a partial annexation of the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “crush” aspirations for Palestinian statehood and has sworn that Palestinians will never have self-governance so long as he remains in power: that so long as he is alive, Palestine will forever remain an apartheid state under Israeli rule. 

Israeli officials deliberately poisoned Palestinian water wells by pouring cement into springs, making irrigation impossible, preventing Palestinians from drinking or watering their crops. 

Six months ago, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the complete erasure of the Palestinian village of Huwara, yet Gaza has been razed to the ground over the past week without condemnation from the international community. 

Just this weekend, an adviser to the wife of of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Tzipi Navon, posted a violent rant on social media fantasising about torturing to death Gaza residents she claims were involved in the killings of Israelis last weekend, and that “flattening Gaza” was not enough. “It won’t calm the storm of emotions, it won’t dull the intensity of the rage and pain that can’t find an outlet for them,” she wrote.

If Albanese, Wong and co are as true to their word as they claim, they need look no further than Netanyahu as being directly responsible for undermining any hope of a two-state solution. 

Netanyahu has used every power in his arsenal, up to and including alleged corruption, to erect an apartheid state that ends only with the complete destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people. (Not to mention the massive intelligence failure that saw the transfer of three battalions from the Gaza front to the West Bank to quell tensions between settler colonialists and Palestinians, while ignoring Egyptian warnings that “something big was coming”.)

In 2019, Netanyahu advocated for actively “bolstering” and “transferring money” to Hamas at a meeting of his Likud Party’s Knesset members as a scheme to support the annexation of Palestine. “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank,” he said.

He even boasted to police interrogators that he was communicating with Israel’s supposed “bitter enemies”, during one of three corruption cases pending against the prime minister.

“This is classified, don’t let it leak, okay? … We have neighbours, who are our bitter enemies … I send them messages all the time … these days, right now … I mislead them, destabilise them, mock them, and then hit them over the head … It is impossible to reach an agreement with them … Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames.”

Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, a former Israeli military general in Gaza during the 1980s, disclosed to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David K. Shipler that he provided financial support to Hamas and other extremist groups that use terrorism to undermine the peace process as a means to balance the influence of the secularists and leftists within Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Fatah Party.

Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official with more than two decades of experience in Gaza, lamented in 2009 to The Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my great regret, is a product of Israel”. In an official report, he cautioned his higher-ups in the early ‘80s against employing a strategy of division and manipulation in the Occupied Territories by setting Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists, urging them to “break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face”. Israeli officials, of course, failed to heed such warnings.

As noted by Mehdi Hasan and Dina Sayadahme for The Intercept: “First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.

This will be at least the fifth war Israel has waged on Hamas in the past decade, taking into account the chaos of 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021 and now 2023, with thousands of Israelis and Palestinians killed in the process.

The Australian government and its opposition seemingly make no distinction between Hamas and Palestinians. Men, women and children are all seen as legitimate targets. And in recent days there has been an alarming escalation in rhetoric regarding the right to protest, which speaks volumes about who does and does not count as Australian in this country, worthy of the full rights and protection of a constitutional democracy. 

While both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and NSW Premier Chris Minns were condemning that the protests were even occurring, claiming it was not advancing a climate conducive to peace, NSW Police was launching Operation Shelter, to surveil “community sentiment, potential protest activity, and potential demonstrations that might take place in the future”.

By Thursday morning, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton on 2GB was calling for the deportation of non-citizen protesters who supported anti-Semitic speech. 

By Friday Minns was defending extraordinary powers granted to NSW Police ahead of a second rally for Palestine on Sunday, permitting them the right to search protesters without reason, and arrest and charge people who refused to identify themselves, (powers that were ultimately not enacted). Minns claimed protest organisers had proven that they could not manage a peaceful protest, during a press conference walking back his attempts to prevent the rally from going ahead, challenging attendees and organisers to prove him wrong. 

The deliberate rhetorical linkage between the protest organisers and the extremist minority group that showed up to undermine the otherwise peaceful march is an extremely damaging escalation by Labor and the LNP alike, who used Islamophobic tropes to paint both the organisers and the entire assembly with the same fundamentalist brush.

How is using Islamophobic and racist language, threatening to deport anyone who does not unconditionally accept Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of the Palestinian territories any more acceptable than the anti-Semitic threats that were heard out of the mouths of a small unaffiliated group at the previous week’s protest? 

That thousands of people showed up to the multi-faith rally for Palestine in Sydney on Sunday, in defiance of government efforts to shut it down further, underlines how out of step state and federal governments are with the national mood.

It is worth reflecting on just how many of the tensions experienced over the past week could have been avoided had Minns simply not made the foolhardy decision to light up the Opera House in the colours of the Israeli flag in the first place. All before attending a pro-Israel rally himself alongside Dutton, NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman, federal MP Monique Ryan and dozens of ministers and MPs who stood up for apartheid and annexation by formally aligning themselves with the State of Israel.   

For the record, I am Jewish. To say my relationship with my faith is complicated would be an understatement. I am devastated and heartbroken for both the Israeli and Palestinian lives that have been lost since this conflict escalated last week. This should not be controversial. I mourn the dead and I have a deep sadness in my heart for the families for whom the next few years will bring nothing but pain and trauma. I feel a deep shame and guilt for the things that have been done in our name. I am also appalled and deeply hurt by the rise in on- and offline anti-Semitic sentiment and stunts over this past week. I am terrified for the safety and security of Israelis and Palestinians, of Jews, Muslims and Palestinians of all faiths in Australia, the Middle East, and the world over.

It feels as though we are entering an extremely dark period in our history, goaded by incompetent and opportunistic leadership who are seemingly comfortable playing culture wars with people’s lives. The events of the past week will leave a permanent stain on the stability of the communities that make up this country. 

But I can also distinguish between bad faith actors who show up to undermine the cause of Palestinian liberation, and the organisers who publicly condemned and disavowed these people and groups, who ejected them from the protest, “traitors” who were further condemned by organisers and speakers on Sunday, in case anyone dare mischaracterise the second Sydney event in support of Palestine as anything but peaceful. Australian free-Palestine groups are overtly not anti-Semitic. Just as I can distinguish between Hamas as a terrorist organisation and Palestinians as Indigenous people under occupation, so too I can distinguish between the diaspora of dispossessed people, who rightfully came together to mourn, to grieve, and to fight for the right to life, freedom, and self-determination. 

The state of Israel came into being as a form of reparations after the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews, up to 1.5 million Romani people and an estimated 500,000 gay people were murdered at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. We swore “never again” not just on behalf of Jewish people, but all people under occupation and subjugation.

We of the Jewish diaspora owe a great debt for our freedom, to help ensure no such horror occurs again. We survived. But the Palestinian people paid for our freedom and new-found sovereignty with their land, and with their lives.

Since 1948 the Palestinian people have lost more than 85% of their land to expansion and settler colonialism, according to Progressive International. More than half of the Palestinian diaspora live in permanent exile. Those who remain live in conditions of profound indignity. One in two Palestinians live in poverty. Estimates suggest that more than 800,000 Palestinians have been in Israeli prisons since 1967, according to the UN. 

Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, subsequently facilitated the destruction of 450 Palestinian villages and towns. Entire villages were massacred; tens of thousands of people were killed.

It must be understood that the Nakba of 1948 — the Palestinian Catastrophe — never ended. It continues to this day in the form of settler colonialism and apartheid characterised by legal land expropriation, forced evictions, mass demolitions of Palestinian homes, all accompanied by constant intimidation and violence by the Israeli army. Gaza has been reduced to an open-air prison where more than half of the 2.2 million Palestinians — of which 50% are children — live in poverty. More than 90% do not have access to clean drinking water. These conditions have been imposed on Palestinians for more than 15 years. 

Palestinians have never been granted the right of return. Meanwhile, I, a Jewish person, who has never visited Israel and has no connection to the land beyond the faith I was born into, could apply for Israeli residency tomorrow and be approved. 

On Friday, Israel warned 1.1 million Palestinians to evacuate from northern Gaza to the south ahead of an expected ground invasion in what some have characterised as an illegal annexation and settlement expansion masquerading as a military operation. It has been condemned by the UN, which called for the order to be rescinded and stated that it “considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences”. So-called “safe corridors” have been bombed and at least 70 people have been killed trying to evacuate. This is a genocide happening before our very eyes. And Australia is not only turning a blind eye but actively and unconditionally supporting a genocide and permanent apartheid of an occupied people.

These are the actions deemed too complex to judge from afar by Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong. And when pressed by RN’s Patricia Karvelas on her call for “restraint and the protection of civilian lives”, Wong answered, “What’s the alternative?”

The alternative is to call for an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal from Gaza, the occupied territories, and the West Bank. The alternative is to formally recognise Palestinian statehood. The alternative is not to provide unconditional support for a country that is proudly committing war crimes, in breach of international law. The alternative is to express support and concern for the permanently dispossessed Palestinian diaspora, guarantee their right to protect and push Israel for a peaceful two-state solution, an end to occupation, and the right to return for all Palestinians. It should also offer safe haven in Australia and permanent residency to any Palestinian who wishes to evacuate. 

In the wake of the failed referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, this government would do well to reflect on the contradictions in its domestic and foreign policy.