Labors cowardice on Gaza is world leading

The Albanese government has failed to join nations around the world in calling for an immediate end to the violence in Gaza, diminishing our reputation abroad and their political standing at home.

Eight months into the conflict and the Albanese government has not significantly condemned Israel for its actions in Gaza. (Source:Phillippe Lazzarini/UNRWA)

It’s been a tumultuous eight months for the Albanese government as it tries to navigate its position on the Israeli offensive in Gaza that has seen over 40,000 people, mostly women and children, destroyed in a brutal act of concentrated human punishment on Palestinians. Labor’s position, one that supports Israel’s actions through military, economic and diplomatic support, has been subject to scrutiny, and at times agonising outcry, by international humanitarian bodies, the United Nations, and the citizens of Australia.

Domestically, Labor looks to promote and implement the uninspiring raft of policies it has offered in its term of government, but all the childcare rebates and tinkered Scomo tax cuts in the world pale to one simple and clarion constant that pervades everything as long as this genocide continues: this Labor government currently supports Israel’s actions in more ways than one and is one of the few countries on earth that is continuing to do so.

Diplomatically, the current stance of the Albanese government is looking to be detrimental to the reputation of our nation regionally and globally, damaging the image of the party itself, while also departing completely from the continuity of our nation’s historical stance on the Israel-Palestine issue. Humanitarian-inclined Australians raised in a secular and thoughtful tradition, many of whom default to a generational Labor vote, are finding that Albanese’s version of the party is breaking with the traditional understanding of the conflict and Australia’s role within it.

In the wake of the attack on October 7^th, messages of solidarity from the Albanese government turned to messages of protection fairly quickly after it became clear Israel’s response was devastatingly disproportionate. Within a few weeks, as footage started coming in of refugee camps, hospitals and schools being flattened, and dead civilians being dragged from rubble, the “conflict” was looking more like an unprecedented massacre among a mostly civilian population using the assembly of the most devastating modern weaponry on earth. The Albanese government provided all the support it could to Israel, and as things have gotten marginally worse, hasn’t seemed compelled to change its course.    

When Foreign Minister Penny Wong visited Israel in January, the civilian death toll in Gaza was well and truly established over one hundred days of carnage. When she chose to cut UNRWA funding she did so knowing that food was being used by Israel as a weapon of war. Now, in a week when the last section of liveable space in Rafah has seen children bombed in tents and ICJ hearings are applying for arrest warrants, all we could get from the Foreign Minister, who seemed to be hiding, were details on the political situation in New Caledonia.

For some reason, Defence Minister Richard Marles hasn’t needed to talk as much as his colleagues on the Gaza genocide, despite commanding a defence portfolio overseeing contracts that provide weapons components that are integral to IDF operations in Gaza. The mounting dead didn’t sway his hand as he signed over a $917 million Australian army contract in February, nor did it make him or his government think about sending aircraft and troops to the Middle East to engage with forces we still don’t have clarity on.

And any minister that dare speak out, like Labor senator Fatima Payman, is repudiated and motivated to resign from committees, and who knows what else in the future. Even senior right-faction Labor figures like Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen are hounded in misleading and slanderous articles from senior right-faction pundits like James Campbell in the corporate press, using journalistic alchemy to somehow equate opposing a ground offensive into Rafah as “We must protect Hamas”. After writing such a piece, James Campbell was called onto “Insiders” later in the week by former-Murdoch host David Speers.

Pressured by a hyperactive foreign-owned press and the heavy right lurches of an opposition working for nothing else other than to shift the resting-state paradigm of Australia, Labor has lurched away from its morality and its essence. In trying to satiate a disingenuous corporate press, today’s Labor politicians have become enmeshed with the same private interest groups as their major party comrades in the Coalition, including the incredibly powerful Zionist lobbies who hold disproportionate influence over the corporate and political class.

The day after dozens of children were burned to death after the tents they were sheltering in were bombed by the IDF, in a “rare private interview” for the The Australian, pro-Israel former Prime Minister Julia Gillard used one of her few public appearances not to retract her statement of Support she signed with five former PMs, not to talk about her compromising capture by powerful Zionist interest groups, but to blame social media for antisemitism and the “ill-informed and unbalanced views about the Israel-Hamas conflict”.

Scott Morrison tweets from retirement about the absolute entitlement of Israel to its actions, Peter Dutton is recalcitrant in his approval of the conflict, and they are supported by a pro-Zionist corporate press. We can only imagine how a Coalition government would be handling this situation, but the response to this conflict, and how Australia will be seen by history in how it chooses to act, rests with an Albanese Labor party. And they have proven more disappointing in their handling of this genocide than many could have ever imagined.

This Albanese government has supported Israel with military economic and diplomatic cover, withdrawn UNRWA funding at a time of weaponised famine, abstained in the UN on votes calling for a ceasefire, and hasn’t issued more than a tourist visa for desperate Palestinian refugees. They silence voices of dissent back home, trample through the rising crescendo of public opinion telling them to do something about it. All the while, they insist anyone daring to speak up in opposition is wrong, that we don’t understand history, and then have the gall to drag us all into their own ghoulish reinterpretation of the situation, narrated by private interest groups and Zionist lobbyists.

For eight long months, over eighty percent of Australians have supported a ceasefire, while the government has barely condemned the rolling horrors in Gaza or the cadence of the violence. The cowardly Albanese government has lacked the moral fibre to repudiate this genocide in line with most of the civilised world, and shown an absence of the integrity required to take a firm position to challenge this inhumane act being imposed on us by a runaway Netanyahu regime in Israel. Once upon a time, a Labor government could have looked this situation in the eye and used its diplomatic clout to contribute to some kind of cessation to this bloodshed. Now, it ships weapon components and meets with Israeli government officials while the IDF obliterates lifeforms at will in the Gaza strip.

The government, like its predecessor, continues to rewire our economy along a militarised thread, solely devoted to US primacy. Through this we inherit its global ambitions, along with its disjointed and compromised position regarding its absolute support for Israel. These ambitions diverge us from the former paradigm towards human rights that modern Australia is built on and transport Australians against our will to a moral and ethical place we have never been. The immovable stance by Labor on Gaza demonstrates the damage of this militarised mindset, and it is bitter and awful for most of us, because it is something that only militarised people could ever allow to happen.

You would think it wouldn’t be too late to change course. Right now, in the late stage of this massacre in Gaza, governments around the world are starting to turn on Netanyahu and Israel’s goals. As the horrors in Gaza have intensified, world leaders and parliaments have begun to cry out at the sheer catastrophe in the region, and back at home for some reason you can’t even say a word about it on a Labor backbench without being torn to shreds behind closed doors and stripped of your committee postings.

Whatever it is that has captured the political class in Canberra, whether it be powerful private interests or the foothold of lobbying groups, it doesn’t really matter. For all the Faustian bargains they've made to secure AUKUS submarines that still seem like a fleet of Flying Dutchmen, it isn't going to save them if safe seats are dropping like flies due to their militarised and callous approach to security.

When Albanese spins lines about “a future made in Australia”, “building technology for the future”, or “more secure, well-paid jobs for Australians”, when Marles wants to harp on about selling off another arm of our strategic independence against the national interest, when Chalmers spruiks a neoliberal budget that barely addresses the social fabric, or Wong drily chides Russia for “cooperating” with North Korea, their silence on Gaza becomes all the more conspicuous, nullifying any “small potatoes” policy they have to talk about. This stance drowns out anything this government wants to achieve with policy, and the weight of propping up a genocide further isolates the political class from the people, irreparably damaging the party, but ultimately the soul of the nation, in ways we will not see till the public get to voice their position in an election