Israel and Gaza are not why Peter Dutton and Greens lost election


Uncountable Palestinian civilians are dead, and the war grinds on. For 66 days and counting, Israel has maintained its blockade of all aid, including food and medicine, into Gaza since it unilaterally terminated the ceasefire agreement in March and returned to its bombing campaign that barely pretends to be targeted anymore.

The Netanyahu government is now openly setting out its “new” plan to re-invade and occupy the majority of Gaza, pushing the more than 2 million Palestinian civilians into the ruins of a small southern section.

In case anyone was unsure what Israel’s government is thinking, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has been unequivocal: victory means that Gaza will be “entirely destroyed” before its inhabitants leave permanently. The mission is, explicitly, depopulation.

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The legal significance of this open pronouncement, coupled with Israel’s compounding actions since October 7, is that the International Court of Justice’s preliminary ruling back in January 2024 — that it was “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza — has long ceased to be a hypothetical debate.

The fact is that Smotrich’s own description of what Israel is doing and why falls squarely within the legal definition of genocide in both the UN Convention on Genocide and the Rome Statute that governs the International Criminal Court (which has issued an arrest warrant against Netanyahu). Forcible removal of a population from its homeland is genocide.

The reality on the ground is becoming ever harder to ignore, unless you choose to ignore it. The Financial Times editorial board called out the wilful blindness this week, declaring that “the US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation. They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.”

Should Australia be thrown into the same bucket of shame? As it happens, we’re having a quite different conversation here.

Israel and Gaza did not feature in the federal election at all, except to be wielded as a club with which to beat up some cheap political points against opponents: Peter Dutton to call Anthony Albanese weak, the Liberals to call the teals apologists, Labor to call the Greens antisemites.

Nobody — apart from the Greens — wanted to talk about the human rights catastrophe in Gaza, which continued throughout the entirety of the campaign. For voters, it barely registered, and there’s no evidence it materially influenced any electoral outcomes. That’s not, however, how the mainstream parties and media are painting it. They are in lockstep on their post-election narrative, exemplified by a post from Labor MP Julian Hill:

The extremist populist left and reactionary right shamefully weaponised the Gaza conflict and constantly sought to divide Australians and block progress. Defeat of both ‘leaders’ is the ultimate political price.

That is, Dutton and Adam Bandt both lost their seats because of their (diametrically opposed) stances on Israel. Only Labor, standing in the principled middle, was vindicated and rewarded.

Ignoring the Murdoch press, which on this issue produces pure propaganda, the mainstream media position was illustrated by David Crowe writing in The Sydney Morning Herald: “Bandt seized on the war in Gaza to accuse Albanese of knowingly aiding Israel in a genocide. There was no such support for genocide; the Australian government wants a ceasefire and a two-state solution. Most importantly, most Australians know their government did not have the power to stop the war.”

It’s true that the Greens haven’t been able to nail their case that Australia is involved in weapons sales to Israel, and Bandt’s accusation of complicity went too far. However, there is no basis for the widening narrative that the Greens’ and Dutton’s losses prove that Australia’s continuing silence on Israel is justified, nor that to suggest otherwise is to flirt with antisemitism.

The government will say it is not silent. That it has voted in the United Nations demanding the end of Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied territories, an end to settlement activities, and the removal of settlers, which the US voted against. That it has called out the illegality of Israel’s Gaza and West Bank occupations, consistently called for ceasefires and delivered the practical aid of giving visas to Palestinian refugees.

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This is all predicated on the myth of the “two-state solution”, which will never happen and everyone knows it. Israel has made sure of that, fairly or cynically as you may think, by its settlements policy and insistence that its own “security” is a fixed and unachievable precondition.

Those who support peaceful existence and self-determination for the Palestinian people may have hoped that, with its smashing win and huge majority, Anthony Albanese and his party might now feel emboldened to break away from the compact that declares any criticism of Israel off-limits and wields “antisemitism” as a cure-all silencer of dissent.

They may have hoped that this government would stop being so scared of the Israel lobby and Murdoch press, and remember that the Labor Party was, traditionally, a strong defender of the Palestinian cause. Within that frame, surely the wholesale destruction of the Palestinian people’s homeland calls for a more forceful response than rote expressions of “serious concern”, and now Labor can feel strong enough to deliver it?

The early indications are that those hopes were misplaced. And the war grinds on.

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