Australian Labor has gone anti-Israeli to unite its woke activists with its Islamic foot-soldiers. By Henry Ergas in The Australian.
In fact, Israel is about the only issue that these two parts of Labor’s camp can agree on.
Labor policy is awesomely one-sided and morally crazy. It could have been written by an Islamic government of Australia:
China launches the missile; Israel gets the indictment. That, in miniature, is the moral and strategic universe of the ALP’s draft national platform. In it, the real threat to Australia’s national security is not Xi Jinping; it is Bibi Netanyahu.
The numbers speak for themselves. China, which is undertaking the largest military expansion since World War II, coercing us economically and fielding nuclear-capable missiles and submarines in striking range of Australia itself, receives 76 words in the draft platform, including a perfunctory wish for peace in the Taiwan Strait.
Israel, the true supervillain, gets 447 and its own dedicated named section — beating China nearly sixfold — while receiving 64 words for every word devoted to Russia, whose invasion of Ukraine has caused more than 500,000 deaths. …
Domestic terrorism receives a single generic sentence, naming no agency, no incident and no perpetrators….
Yet when it comes to Israel, no level of detail is spared. The platform condemns the democratically elected Knesset, demands sanctions over allegedly “discriminatory laws” and displays a degree of prescription and moral certainty conspicuously absent elsewhere.
By contrast, China’s internment camps, its systematic repression of religious liberty and the destruction of Hong Kong’s freedoms are passed over in silence.
There is, of course, the obligatory excoriation of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank and of “settler violence”. But the platform prudently resiles from observing that on any even vaguely plausible figures, there have been more Palestinian terrorist attacks on settlers in every single year than there have been violent incidents attributable to settlers over the past decade.
Nor does Labor think it worth noting that the settlements occupy just 3.1 per cent of Area C, the part of the West Bank whose ultimate disposition was expressly reserved for final-status negotiations.
Meanwhile, China’s militarisation of the South China Sea — which is blatantly illegal under international law and a direct threat to Australia’s own security – does not secure a single word.
Stranger still, the conditions the government itself attached to recognising Palestine last September — that the Palestinian Authority demilitarise, hold elections, end payments to the families of suicide bombers and imprisoned terrorists, and remove violent antisemitism from school textbooks — have simply vanished. Hamas’s disarmament, which Penny Wong invoked two dozen times in the 12 months after October 7, has likewise disappeared. As for Hezbollah, it is as if it didn’t exist.
And at home? Reading this document, you would never know that merely eight months ago a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach was the target of a murderous Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack that killed 15 people – the deadliest terrorist attack in Australian history.
Antisemitism receives just two passing mentions, both filed as a “global problem” that is bracketed with Islamophobia, never once named as something happening to Australians, on Australian soil. …
Jews are excluded from Labor’s Australia:
LGBTQI+ Australians receive a dedicated 233-word section. Australian Jews receive none. No less marked is the contrast in commitments. Labor promises to strengthen legal protections for LGBTQI+ Australians against vilification and hate crimes. But when it comes to Australian Jews, there is not even a commitment to preserve the protections that already exist. …
It’s not even about Israel or Jews any more:
These gaps are not random errors. … It is the same trick a marriage counsellor recognises instantly: the fight about who left the dishes in the sink that is never really about the dishes.
The dispute has ceased to be about its stated subject and instead serves as the vessel into which a dozen other unrelated antagonisms are poured, until the issue itself matters less than everything that has been loaded on to it.
That happens in politics, too. An issue becomes the symbolic marker or fault line along which the society’s searing divisions crystallise, with the “all or nothing” choice of a side acting as the litmus test of political identity and credibility. …
Israel is today’s condensation issue, which is why the Gaza war — ranked, by any serious casualty count, well behind the wars in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Congo and Tigray — commands six times the attention the platform gives to the nuclear-armed power most drastically endangering Australia’s strategic environment.
China barely gets a paragraph because almost nothing is being projected on to China. Israel gets a section because every hatred, every tension, every cultural marker, is.
Facts are irrelevant, because Jews are morally excluded in Labor’s Australia:
But condensation accounts for how an issue becomes an obsession; it does not explain the tone. For that you need a second, far uglier mechanism: moral exclusion. Condensation explains why Israel occupies so much space; moral exclusion for why it is treated so differently once it does.
Moral exclusion works by placing a party outside the ordinary rules of fairness. Having been made into a pariah, criticising it no longer requires balance, evidence or restraint, as it has already been written out of the community to which those standards apply.
And with every norm swept away, the beliefs that underpin the exclusion become completely impervious to reality. Evidence ceases to function as evidence. Facts that contradict the narrative are ignored, discounted or reinterpreted, while real — or more often concocted — claims that appear to confirm it acquire almost unlimited moral weight.
Why is this the issue of the day?
Why Israel? Because it is the one target on which political forces that share only their outrage can converge.
- Islamist antisemitism provides the ready-made, centuries-deep script in which Jews – referred to in classical Islamic texts as “apes and pigs” – stand for corruption, conspiracy and defilement.
- The activist left [sees through the woke lens of oppressor/oppressed that Israelis are] “settler colonialists” and Palestinians become the epitome of every other anti-colonial cause.
- And nothing appeals more starkly to the leftists — who are proud to be ashamed of being Australian — than despising those who actually love their country and value its achievements, as Israelis so plainly do. …
Three different motives; one convenient target.
Creating antisemitism:
A political party that conspicuously discards the normal rules of proportion and evidence where Israel is concerned — as this platform so blatantly does — is a party that is deliberately and systematically courting the antisemitic vote.
But disproportionate hostility to Israel does not merely attract antisemites; it creates them. …
Labor is being reckless with our security, Australia’s morals, and Islam:
That is what makes this platform so dangerous. It is reckless about China. It is reckless about Australia’s national security. It is reckless about the threat of Islamist terrorism. And it is especially reckless about antisemitism.
To say this is not to suggest that a paragraph in a party platform can cause a terrorist massacre. But politics does something more subtle and ultimately far more enduring: it decides which prejudices are respectable, which hatreds are excusable and which victims cease to count. Bondi Beach occurred under Labor’s watch. Eight months later, it cannot even bring itself to name that attack and mourn its victims.
The crocodile tears are gone; Labor, at last, has told Australians plainly where its sympathies lie. But above all it has told us this: which Australians it is prepared to abandon.
The party that is all too fond of identity politics, and discriminating by race, gender and religion, has found a new target. Woe betide the Jews in Australia. Labor needs this issue to unite its woke activists and its Islamic foot-soldiers. Communism and Islamism together.