Progressivism and the solidarity left are coming to crisis over Palestine

Remember when Penny Wong cried on the floor of the Senate as the same-sex marriage plebiscite passed? How that became the icon of a certain type of progressivism? Mildly social democratic, thoroughly focused on gender and identity issues? The idea was that Wong could offer the whole package. 

Instead she represents what is happening in real time. The current Palestine/Israel crisis is marking the departure of significant sections of progressives from any notion that their politics of the culturally or identity oppressed in the West demands any sort of complementary position with regard to world events. 

We saw this start with the war in Ukraine. This is now a war of national defence; the Ukrainians have a right to fight (whether that’s the best option interests-wise is another question). But that does not mean wilful blindness to the way in which various pro-EU and NATO forces gained power in the country, and created a security crisis using global appeals to human rights to hide their part in a dangerous encirclement. 

People who were once progressives on social issues once understood the basics of that as part of their politics. As the cultural barriers to power have fallen — as small social groups of the “intellectually trained” have become the “knowledge class” — that has fallen away substantially. The blue and yellow flag went on to the Opera House shells, where the rainbow and trans flag had gone without much protest. As I’ve noted passim, if you put a rainbow flag up, make it an official state act; don’t be surprised what other flags people impose. The rainbow flag was just a prelude to the Israeli flag. When we help attack China over Taiwan, the flags of the AUKUS nations will get one Opera House shell each. Put out fewer flags. 

The Gaza crisis represents the full break, I suspect. Alliances between Western groups and global south groups, often with strong-to-lethal cultural conservative values, have been in recent decades a case of leaving things undiscussed. Hamas’ horror-terrorist attack has probably broken that with a double-whammy. Not only are we being asked to actively endorse a group that practises the most cruel intimate violence against children, teens and women, we have to put up with its founding charter’s apocalyptic anti-Semitism (only slightly dimmed).

You can see this in The Guardian, for instance. (Over at the Australian arm, Jeff Sparrow’s column has wound up, thus removing the last materialist/Marxist leftist from its opinion page.) What was until recently a paper which retained some current of anti-imperialism in its approach has retreated to a humanistic kumbaya Quaker-pacifist liberalism, which avoids any interpretation of events.

That’s all pretty bad news. But on Palestine, Israel and Gaza something else is happening. As a certain stripe of progressive takes their leave, other people are coming in. There is a deep, widespread disturbance about what Israel is doing. It is spreading from Arab Australians, Australian Muslims and other non-European Australians, plus the core left, but I think it is spreading to a wider group. And on that, I suspect Labor is starting to hear the marching feet. 

One gauge of this is who was on last week’s weekend marches for Palestine. In Melbourne, I watched (yes, the horror! Using one’s eyes and ears to try to interpret events again) the whole enormous thing — easily 10,000 people — come down Swanston Street. Many of the progressive faces one sees were absent. A whole progressive style of person — those out in force for Invasion Day rallies — was much less in attendance than otherwise. The familiar faces — those on every march — were absent. They’re not tweeting or posting solidarity. They’ve gone very quiet. 

What probably did it was the music festival massacre. And the canny decision of pro-Israel outlets to feature only murdered girls and young women from that absolutely unspeakable, unimaginable killing field. There’s no point trying to be equal opportunity here: contemplation of the pictures of these women’s bodies being broken up by bullets, the terror and waste makes the blood leap in anger. It also suggests a misogynistic targeting. Possibly false, since everyone was a target — and stories of rapes are yet to be definitely documented. But I suspect it’s been enough to create a breach. A conservative is an anti-imperialist with a daughter backpacking her gap year. 

However, this quiet departure of a section of progressivism appears to have been compensated for by the arrival of those new groupings. I suspect it goes beyond racial/cultural solidarity and is connecting with disquiet from many who identify with Labor as such a basic disturbance of their values that they can no longer consent to the attempt to neutralise a “non-core” issue with total compliance.

They will be assuaged somewhat by Ed Husic and Anne Aly’s breakaway from official Labor. Passionate independence, or a strategy of appeasement, a minority dissent to placate western Sydney? We’ll find out, I guess, but the fact that it is a minority position shows the next stage of what must be done. Arab Australians and other West Asian/Middle Eastern voters who disagree with Labor’s position should consider breaking absolutely from the party. 

We’re a long way from the glorious fraternity of Whitlam Labor and the Ba’ath Party of Iraq after all. The party is run by a right-wing core that hates its own pallid left and the Greens far more than it hates anyone in the Coalition. It’s a cross-party grouping headed by Richard Marles at the moment, whose job is to enforce the US alliance and the national security state within Labor. It has links into the permanent defence establishment and the arms industry — via ASPI — to the Coalition, via the ridiculous “Wolverines” group, the late Kimberley Kitching’s homeland, and to pro-Zionist advocates.

It’s always been there, this group, since before the 1954 split, generously, explicitly funded at times by the same US groups that funded Latin American death squads, Quadrant and modern jazz (pick the greatest crime). But the presence of some sort of ALP left held it in check. The left traded away its last substantial independence after the 2019 defeat. At the same time, Israel’s government and leading parties moved steadily towards outright Zionist fascism, and dimwits like Marles lack even the basic strategic sense to mark some sort of limit to consent — as evidenced by his implicit observation that anything Israel does is not a war crime, because Israel does it. 

Thus, just as Labor has now become a machine wholly serving capital in the economy, it is now a party wholly serving unlimited mass killing by the West on the global scene. The community groups that have supported it have to understand this. Labor, old neighbourhood multicultural Labor, is not coming back. As Adem Somyurek (!) perceived, this party and its Right factions take all the embedded solidarity non-European communities have, by virtue of their string cultures, use them as a base to substitute for the atomisation of Anglo-Celtic cultures, and then give them back nothing in return. 

Surely these groups can no longer underwrite a party whose every major faction is leaning in to devote all its energies to the killing of their communities overseas, to the application, without restraint, of imperial discipline? They need to withdraw absolutely. They need to either make arm’s-length arrangements with the Greens — who are standing with the Palestinians — or build towards community political forums as the basis for community candidates in 2025 who could take votes the Greens would never get, preference them, and open a new front on the thin contested strip of land from Grayndler, running west. 

But for all that, what needs to be recognised, and denounced, is the way in which the victories of social movement progressivism are being co-opted to the murder of subject peoples in the global south. This is a special responsibility for people in those movements. You put the goddamn rainbow flag everywhere. You billed and cooed as Labor funded your projects and advanced your agenda. Now it’s using you as cover. Time to make the most basic resistance.

As I say, kudos to the groups that’ve already done that, many of whom have policies I disagree with. Not throwing shade on them. But the effort must be redoubled. Because really, what Wong is doing is worse than anything anyone like Tony Abbott ever did. Abbott never denied that his cause was the West, including Israel. Wong et al have co-opted the energy of people fighting for liberation in the service of its opposite. If you don’t want to be passively enrolled in that process, it’s time you resisted it.