Joe Hildebrand: Labor’s loony left on mission to take down its own party with stance on Palestine

Labor ideologues want to tear the ALP apart for no practical benefit just so they can prove how morally righteous they are, writes Joe Hildebrand.

If there is one thing the Left loves more than lecturing others, it is destroying itself. Normally, that would be a habit best left uninterrupted. The problem is that the Victorian Left is now embarking on a lunar mission to destroy the ALP and the Albanese government in the process.

Rest assured, I know that many of my conservative readers would love nothing more than for that to happen, which in itself should give the Mexican Marxists some pause for thought.

But, of course, these knuckle-dragging numbats don’t pause or think. They just chant mindless slogans and press on with their dogma du jour with all the intelligence and care of a runaway steamroller.

Sometimes it’s climate change, sometimes it’s asylum-seekers, this time it’s Palestine.

The same dead-eyed ideologues who delivered the world’s longest lockdown now want to shame Anthony Albanese with a suspected anti-Israel resolution at next month’s Victorian Labor conference, which – thoughts and prayers be with him – the PM is, sadly, obliged to attend.

Despite their heightened political awareness, it has apparently escaped the notice of these woken warriors of the ALP that the first Labor government in a decade is currently at its lowest ebb and staring down the barrel of descending into a minority at the next election.

Cost-of-living pressures are crippling Australians and that frustration is being brought to bear on the government. This week, Albanese valiantly attempted to reset the national agenda with a new “Made in Australia” economic program to boost jobs and manufacturing.

And so what do his supposed comrades down south do? They plot to blow up the party and government by dragging it into an ideological quagmire over a war that has been raging for centuries on the other side of the world, that has no current tangible solution, and which Australia would have no impact on even if it did.

Penny Wong’s geopolitical Palestine solution sent shockwaves through the Jewish community. Picture - Rohan Thomson/ANU

That is merely reality, but reality is a foreign concept to these ideologues. They want to tear the ALP apart for no practical benefit just so they can prove how morally righteous they are.

In the good old days of the Soviet Union, which more than a few of these types once pined for, such treachery against the party would be rewarded with a bullet.

Luckily for them, Australia – like Israel – is a liberal democracy, which makes it all the more ironic that they are so hellbent on slagging off and undermining both.

Indeed, the casual observer could be forgiven for thinking the Labor Left had already got what it wanted on Palestine – namely the recognition of a Palestinian state.

This was the effective upshot of Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s back-of-a-beer coaster geopolitical solution this week that sent shockwaves through the Jewish community.

Australia, like the US and all other reasonable parties, has long held that a two-state solution is the only possible promise for peace in the Holy Land. Albanese, rightly, reiterated that in attempting to hose down Wong’s more bullish comments.

But that is a world away from saying we need to recognise Palestine now. The obstacles are so violent, immovable and plentiful that the very suggestion is darkly comical.

One obvious argument against is that such a move would cement the terrorist atrocity of October 7 as Palestine’s Independence Day. But there are countless more.

Who would govern this new Palestine? Definitely not Hamas, says Wong, yet they were the last democratically elected regime in Gaza. Is it to be a democracy or not?

Or is it the marginally more moderate Fatah regime that currently runs the West Bank and has been conspicuously reluctant to hold elections because it knows it could not win them?

And what and where are the borders of these two states? There has been no agreement on this since the modern nation of Israel was founded.

Thus, Wong, for all her intelligence, seemingly succumbed to the dangerous impotence of virtue- signalling herself by calling for a new nation with no knowable government and no knowable borders.

It is like that person we all know who says the party sucks but has no better ideas after you’ve jumped in the cab. It makes no sense to international politics or mainstream Australians.

My best bet is that Wong was throwing a sop to the Victorian Left in the hope that they would hose down whatever foot-stomping motion they had planned at the state conference.

But even the absurd and seemingly innocuous wordplay at the last national conference about “disputed” and “occupied” territories came back to bite Labor in the arse after October 7, fuelling ongoing fears the party is anti-Israel.

Now, yet again, the hard Left is trying to drive Australian Labor into the same ideological death trap that was the Corbynite disaster of the UK.

This would be a tragedy not just for the ALP but for Australian politics and Australian life.

And so the idiotic apparatchiks planning a hit job on Albo – supposedly one of their own, no less – should consider just how much blood they want on their hands.

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Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Labor’s loony left on mission to take down its own party with stance on Palestine