Labor’s Gaza position and Australia’s indifference to Palestine

Labor’s dual strategies on Gaza — a little more pro-Palestinian and critical of Israel in international fora, and generally indifferent to the issue domestically — served it well in the recent election. It’s clearly deliberate, one such example being Albanese’s failure to mention Australia’s formal opposition to ethnic cleansing despite DFAT prepping lines for his team in February.

While the government now finds itself muttering tepid complaints about aid that “Israel has prevented from reaching vulnerable people” (“vulnerable people” being Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s phrase of choice for starving babies), close allies like Canada and the United Kingdom have gone significantly further in their criticism of the viciously genocidal Netanyahu government, including threats of sanctions.

That’s unlikely to do Labor much damage: Australians seem by and large indifferent to what is now clearly genocide, mass starvation and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

There is now little debate among experts — including Israeli scholars — that Israel is engaged in genocide. Israelis themselves, including former IDF officers, and Jewish people in other countries are increasingly using the term, even if it means being inevitably savaged as pro-Hamas or antisemitic.

The Netanyahu government has clearly used mass starvation of Gazans as a tool of war, to the verge of inducing famine. Its plans for ethnic cleansing of Gaza are no secret, as is its steady ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. It is being aided and abetted in these plans by the United States, in the usual sordid way of Donald Trump.

For the great majority of Australians without direct links to the region, however, that’s of little interest, assuming they pay any attention to the minimal coverage Australia’s commercial media gives to the mass killings of Palestinians through bombing, shooting and starvation. Labor can be assured that its lack of demonstrated interest mirrors that of the electorate.

The fact that Israel has supporters and advocates who will endorse its government’s actions and demonise any critics as antisemitic is undoubtedly a factor in both Labor’s timidity and the media’s reluctance to fully expose the monstrous actions of the Netanyahu government.

But in the wake of the election, it seems a smaller rather than significant factor. Well-connected supporters of Israel made a bad mistake over the past two years in allying themselves with the Coalition and endorsing Peter Dutton’s campaign to smear Labor and anyone who dared question Israel as antisemitic. That campaign failed utterly. The power of Israel’s supporters, with their blind support for Netanyahu and their hate-mongering against critics, appears overstated, in the same way as News Corp now looks a very diminished force within politics.

But it’s not entirely a coincidence that Labor’s silence on the genocide in Gaza has been simultaneous with the near-total silence of the government on Indigenous affairs since the referendum, beyond the ritualistic self-flagellation of the parliamentary class at the start of every year over the inevitable failure of Closing the Gap.

Since Albanese burned up so much political capital on attempting what would have been a modest but worthwhile reform that would have helped plug Indigenous communities into the heart of policymaking — a long-term project that both sides of politics signed up to in the wake of the “refresh” of Closing the Gap under the Morrison government — he appears to have decided that talking about First Nations peoples is a bad idea politically. Voters want him focussed on the cost of living, not what the No camp successfully portrayed as another form of handout to Indigenous peoples.

One link is that Indigenous peoples and Palestinians are both not white people, and therefore are both the subject of white resentment and fear, even if the fear is expressed differently.

Dutton effectively labelled all Palestinians as potential terrorists by proposing to ban them from entering Australia. The fact that an opposition leader using blatant racial labelling as a justification to reject people fleeing genocide didn’t instantly rule him out as a credible figure in Australian politics said much about the electorate.

The fears conjured up about the Voice were different: it was the fear of Indigenous peoples having something white people didn’t haveof Indigenous peoples wielding power they shouldn’t ever be permitted (remember when the Voice was going to dictate interest rates?). And worst of all, it was the fear that Indigenous peoples were going to divide us — something that horrified the right, presumably because dividing Australians is their job, not Aboriginal peoples’.

But the link is deeper. Australia and Israel share a rich historical connection — and it’s not the one peddled by the right, about democracy and freedom, etc. Both are societies founded on dispossession, colonisation and occupation, even if the military phase of Australia’s war against First Nations peoples is in the distant past (distant enough that the Australian War Memorial prefers to pretend it never happened).

Both also refuse to formally recognise the peoples they have displaced. Australians had the opportunity in 2023 to recognise that the foundational act of white Australian history was the invasion and dispossession of the continent’s original inhabitants, and refused to do so, by a strong majority.

Other colonial settler societies like the United States, Canada and New Zealand all have treaties with their first peoples, which formally recognise that those countries were founded on dispossession. Australia and Israel alone refuse to acknowledge the reality of their foundation.

To recognise Israel’s genocide of Palestinians would be to raise disconcerting questions about Australia’s relationship with First Nations peoples, and the stolid refusal of white Australia to accept the basic history of their country. Better to turn a blind eye. It might be different if it were white babies starving, or people who looked like us being bombed in refugee camps. Fortunately we don’t have to care too much, and accordingly Labor doesn’t have to either.