Mending relationships beyond the pale
Federal Attorney General is going to Israel, fifteen months into a genocide. Not to demand a ceasefire, but to ask for forgiveness.
The highest legal figure in the land, Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, will visit Tel Aviv to “help mend the fractured relationship” between the Australian government and the state of Israel. It will be the first government visit to the country since Foreign Minister Penny Wong in February 2023, and the trip by the attorney-general normalises Israels ongoing carnage in the Gaza strip, all but abandoning Australia’s adherence to international law.
Dreyfus’ isn’t visiting a normal place. Israel is a country where over seventy percent of the population support the cadence of the killing in Gaza, where over thirty percent think the response has not gone far enough. It’s a country where soldiers who gang rape prisoners become national TV celebrities, where messianic fantasies are mainstream, and convicted terrorists hold the balance of power in the Knesset. A nation in which the society has degraded and descended into what Professor Norman Finklestein calls a ‘lunatic state’, in a world where an ideologically indoctrinated nation is enabled with the lenience to continue its murder and depravity by the complicit collective West.
Australians have watched the rolling devastation of fifteen months of modern genocide in Gaza, and the resulting chaos throughout the neighbouring countries of the wildly belligerent state of Israel. The hundreds of hours of footage of broken body parts and shattered children are not shown on legacy media, nor spoken by our morally moribund in power, but slip through the cracks into daily internet streams of irrefutable terror. With its Prime Minister dodging outstanding arrest warrants, its defence force guilty of crimes against humanity, its population whipped up into a messianic far-right craze, Israel is a pariah state who has gone beyond the pale. And as nations around the world, including key allies, are putting in efforts to bring this crazed killing spree to an end, why would Australia’s top lawyer fly to Israel and spruik longstanding ties to a brutal nation the world has shunned?
Mark Dreyfus has walked between the lines on Israels side of the two-state solution partly in line with a subjective interpretation of the party platform that saw the ousting of Senator Fatima Payman. He is a part of a core of influential Labor leaders sympathetic to Israel. With a genocide that is getting harder to excuse, Dreyfus, the man that who wrote that “substituting Zionist for Jew is considered by some a method of expertly cloaking antisemitism with a critique of anticolonialism”, will meet with top Israeli officials in the morbid epicentre of the ever indefensible Zionist project.
The optics of this visit couldn’t sit in starker contrast to the Australian public. Penny Wong’s visit to Israel almost a year ago looked bad in the wake of her withdrawing vital UNRWA funding to starving Palestinian children, there are no words to describe Dreyfus limping over to Tel Aviv to kiss the ring of Israel at this stage of the destruction. The gall it took for Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu to lean over his genocidal chessboard and blame Labors ‘anti-Israel sentiment’ for a domestic arson incident at a Victorian synagogue, a domestic police matter for which there is alarmingly still no suspect, and the acquiescence of Labor to arrange this trip to ask for forgiveness partly in response, leave us wondering why our government insists on going against international law and the will of the Australian public in arranging a trip like this?
Albanese was trying to start a positive election year in Rockhampton, but he was copping heat in press conference, not about his support for the genocide, but why he isn’t going to Israel to kiss the ring himself. On ABC NewsRadio, the national broadcaster seconded the pressure by echoing the absurd assumption that a modern Western leader should visit a mass graveyard to ask for forgiveness from butchers, for not being absolute enough in its support. The press parroted Albanese’s lack of support for Israel as a political problem, when it may be that the unfavourable polls for Labor could be due to its moral, ethical, and competency shortage, rather than any shortage of total prostration and subservience to a pariah government in an increasingly alienated state.
Since October 7 2023, Australia has issued no changes to the diplomatic and economic relationship with Israel, instead legislating to silence criticism of Zionism. It has provided funding for Zionist linked organisations, appointed a special envoy for antisemitism, withdrawn UNRWA funding, voted in support of Israel on UN resolutions, diminished the significance of ICJ rulings, and sent ADF personnel to the region to command taskforces – hasn’t it done more than enough? In the wake of all this news, Australians on both sides of politics express concern about the motivation for these actions, even as it threatens electoral viability of the government, or results in the abandonment of morality itself.
Not in modern times has Israel dared to wreak such destruction on Palestinians, have Australians seen a bipartisan consensus on supporting the nation committing such a crime, or have people witnessed ‘trusted’ public figures moving stars in the firmament to shine a favourable light on a live-streamed extermination. This unforgivable moral hyperextension by the political class has broken the social contract with the public, who now see hypocrisy in the place of virtue, and betrayal instead of trust. Australians have been left to wonder what has shifted in our leaders moral compass to allow this change.
We now know that Whitlam was bullied and blackmailed by Israel to support the Yom-Kippur War in 1972, we witnessed the fallout on Kevin Rudd after Foreign Minister Steven Smith sent home the Israeli ambassador in 2010 for forged Australian passports used in extrajudicial killings by Mossad in the UAE, and we have seen the profoundly disproportionate influence of Zionist interests on the Australian political class on both sides of the aisle - all revealed in the moral abandonment of our elected representatives on the subject of Gaza. Instead of making rational and sane condemnations of the mountains of dead children piling up for fifteen months straight, politicians incinerate their political capital by cherry-picking condemnations of graffiti in the endless void of their silence on this fifteen-month-long massacre. Choosing to compete in a sycophantic footrace to support genocide, instead of joining with the public to repudiate the horror of our times, the Australian political class has lost touch with reality.
Netanyahu is not allowed to set foot on Australian soil and his country is a moral outcast and a global pariah. Why would a top government official visit his Israel to legitimise its government? The majority of the Australian public is appalled at a Labor government and its abdication of our obligations to international law, and demands support for Israel be halted and sanctions applied in line with the international community. But for a reason that is not good enough to Australians, in light of all the massacres, sniping of toddlers, shooting from drones playing voices of children crying over loudspeaker, the dismantled hospitals, and flaming bodies in tents in refugee camps, despite the illegal invasion and occupation of neighbouring sovereign countries, the ICJ arrest warrants outstanding for its leaders, the attacks on UN peacekeepers, the breaches of dozens of international laws, rules and conventions, despite every concession Labor has made for Israel, our attorney-general is off on a forgiveness tour to legitimise the unconscionable.
The Albanese government is ruining its electability with its position on this genocide. Beleaguered, with its vapid neoliberal economic policies not exciting the electorate, Labor is besieged by a malevolent press who pressure them into moulding around Zionist objectives, whilst chiding them for disrespecting Israel even if they do what is asked of them. In their slipstream, the Coalition offers total ideological compatibility with Israels paradigmatic interpretation on the new acceptability of human suffering, and should be repudiated nationally for their morally bereft break from tolerable Australian norms. Labor must salvage what little it has that sets it apart from the Coalition to be creative in the election year ahead, because the current configuration is not working. Albanese is not winning any election outcompeting a Murdoch backed Dutton on pro-Israel and pro-Trump visibility, but he didn’t get our vote for that, and he better remember that quickly and look at what Australians really want, or else his party is finished.
Excellent analysis.
Dreyfus (who is unfit to be Attorney General after his triple failures on whistleblower Daniel McBride, appointment of the now-compromised Brereton to the NACC, and deportation of an Australian citizen to the USA) shows himself willing to shill for the interests of a foreign state as opposed to Australians. He is not the foreign minister and has no mandate to represent Australia in diplomatic ventures. Such overinflated self righteousness and importance.
As a KC, he should know the implications of doing business with individuals wanted for crimes against humanity. The hypocrisy stinks. A very unimpressive ALP minister.
Magnificently well written demolition of both the Labor govt and LNP Opposition morally bankrupt stance on the Zionist genocide occurring in Palestine . The spineless cowardice of the Albanese govt in refusing to condemn the joyous slaughter of children , journalists, any living Palestinian within sight of snipers , doctors, academics can never be forgotten , OR forgiven . That a Zionist AG is sent to Israel to enforce Australia’s support is beyond appalling. Australia’s politicians seem all too keen to be seen as complicit in genocide . The Australian people , on the other hand , are apoplectic about this obeisance to a Terrorist State.