How Labor justifies its silence on Gaza to the media

It would be low political farce if the backdrop wasn’t so horrific.

Labor’s primary response yesterday to the growing evidence of mass starvation in Gaza, and mounting interest by other governments in taking real action against Israel or to recognise Palestine, was to condemn a Greens senator for mentioning it.

NSW Senator Mehreen Faruqi held up a placard reading “Gaza is starving. Words won’t feed them. Sanction Israel” at yesterday’s opening of parliament in the Senate chamber. It was a straightforward rejoinder to the government’s belief that merely criticising Israel’s actions in mild terms and saying that it might take action at some point down the track is sufficient response to clear evidence of genocide and ethnic cleansing — a strategy a growing section of the ALP itself doesn’t accept.

The government’s response was to move, and succeed in passing (after the Coalition tried to make it much harsher), a motion condemning “Senator Faruqi’s disrespectful protest”, which was “highly inappropriate and undermines our democratic system”, that she should “refrain from inflammatory and divisive actions which reflect poorly on the Senate”, and that she should apologise. Faruqi was banned from representing “the Senate as a member of any delegation during the life of this parliament.” Ouch. Guess that junket to Tel Aviv is off the agenda then.

For such an allegedly catastrophic act — one that undermined our democratic system — the punishment seemed surprisingly mild. Curiously enough, the actions of Pauline Hanson and her three senators in turning their backs on a Welcome to Country ceremony on Tuesday went entirely unrebuked by the government. Evidently it wasn’t inflammatory or divisive, and didn’t reflect poorly on the Senate. One Nation can have its junkets.

As if conscious of the contrast between Penny Wong primly censuring a placard and pictures of babies being starved to death in Gaza, the government tried some spin in the aftermath of the vote. A staffer from a senior minister’s office sent out an email at 5.20pm yesterday, with the line for “background use only”, which read:

A bit went down in the Senate this afternoon which has a few people unclear about what actually happened. Here’s a bit of an explainer to help in your efforts to file.

Such emails began a few years back as an effort from Labor media advisers to keep press gallery journalists abreast of what was happening on the floor of parliament and at estimates, recognising that few journalists could pay full attention to what was happening on busy days, and the rules of the Senate, in particular, are complex even for people in the building. The emails were on background and not intended for publication, to allow staffers to comment freely, and they both imparted genuinely useful information and provided the Labor view on what was happening.

More recently, however, both sides took to providing such emails, and they increasingly became mainly about spin, in the same way that the post-caucus/joint partyroom meetings off-the-record briefings for the press gallery became just another semi-official vehicle for messaging. The emails are unsolicited, and Crikey does not feel beholden to the demands that they be for “background use only”, because Labor’s attempts to shape the story coming out of Canberra in response to a genocide are firmly in the public interest.

The core narrative from the spinner was that Labor’s hands-off role in relation to the Palestinian genocide has been vindicated by the election result — which is certainly true in political terms — in contrast to both the Greens and the Liberals:

It’s no secret that the Greens want to gain maximum attention, and the Coalition by seeking to amend the motion to suspend Senator Faruqi would have given them exactly what they wanted. Both the Greens and the Coalition still want to reproduce the conflict here for their own political purposes. Neither have listened to the Australian people.

“Reproduce the conflict here” is an extraordinary accusation. To be fair to Labor, there’s certainly evidence of that in regard to the Coalition, which has been a reliable backer of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing. Not merely did the Coalition attack Labor for daring to sign the mealy-mouthed letter of earlier this week, but one of its MPs, Queenslander Andrew Wallace, yesterday issued a staggering media release accusing Labor of siding with terrorists in a “Disgraceful Attack on Israel”. “I stand with the US ambassador to Israel, the Israeli people, and Australia’s Jewish community in rejecting this statement and calling it for what it is: morally indefensible,” Wallace said. Claiming Labor supports terrorism is indeed pretty close to wanting to reproduce the conflict here.

But the only thing the Greens are reproducing here are the increasingly widespread descriptions of Israel’s atrocities and mass starvation of Palestinians as genocide, and calls for sanctions on Israel.

Labor’s spin is that of the aggrieved victim in all this, wanting to do the right thing, but without any capacity to do so, as the email continued:

Australians are understandably distressed by the ongoing violence, including the deaths of so many innocent civilians — but they also know that Australia is not responsible for what is happening in the Middle East.

And there is Labor’s straw man, stated in bolder terms than usual: that all this is unreasonable because what can Australia do beyond wringing its hands? But the argument falls at the first hurdle: Australia can do what other countries have already done, and call Israel’s atrocities what they are — genocide and ethnic cleansing. They can do what so many are calling for even within Labor ranks — impose sanctions on the Israeli government, not just egregiously racist individuals within that government. And it can rebuke America’s support for the genocide and ethnic cleansing.

It can use accurate words and it can back them up with real actions. And if, as Labor insists, it really doesn’t matter what Australia does regarding the Middle East, then what’s the downside of a more resolute stance on the atrocities of both sides?

Instead, the focus is on the decorum of the Senate, and highly selective outrage over division and disrespect. But it will take a lot of spinning emails to stop the flow of horrific images from Gaza.