Campbell: Labor finding there’s just no reasoning with people in the grip of an obsession

Labor is finding out that, for many Muslim voters, just being better than the Liberal Party on Palestine isn’t good enough, writes James Campbell.

By a strange coincidence the week Senator “Ratima” Payman decided to bolt, the UK election gave the ALP a nasty warning about what might be coming its way.

Amid Keir Starmer’s triumph across the board, which gave Labour 412 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, were some results which bucked the trend.

In Leicester East, amid the slaughter nationwide, the Tories actually managed to grab a seat off Labour, while next door in Leicester South a rising Labour star was beaten by an independent.

In both cases Labour went down because large numbers of the party’s Muslim voters, who until very recently it had taken for granted, deserted it over the issue of Gaza.

They weren’t the only Labour MPs to feel the wrath of the UK’s Muslim voters. In Birmingham, backbencher Jess Phillips came within a thousand votes of being knocked off by the Workers Party of Britain over the Gaza issue. The reason Phillips is a backbencher is because she quit Starmer’s frontbench last year in order to vote in favour of a Commons motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

Labour leader and incoming Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and wife Victoria greet supporters as they enter 10 Downing Street following Labour's landslide election victory. Picture: Leon Neal/Getty Images

But being pro-Palestinian hadn’t spared Phillips from the anti-Labour surge among Muslins in her seat.

All up, five Labour MPs were unseated over the Gaza issue while his strong support for Palestinians is also said to have played a part in the re-election of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as an independent.

All was not plain sailing for Labour. Even before the election, Faiza Shaheen, joined by her husband Akin Gazi, challenged her exclusion from running as the Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green in May. Picture: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Back here our own Labor figures, already worried something similar might be brewing in Western Sydney and parts of Melbourne, have been looking on in horror.

Payman’s defection, which blindsided her former colleagues, has also concentrated their minds.

In both cases the problem confronting both Labo(u)r parties is the same – how to manage a voting bloc for whom the Israel-Palestine issue is a non-negotiable.

In some ways Labor – especially in NSW – has no one to blame but itself for the position in which it finds itself.

For years the Victorian Labor Right has looked on in fear and horror as their brothers have in NSW used the Israel-Palestine issue as recruitment tool in their endless battles for factional supremacy.

The problem for Labor is now much bigger than stacked branches demanding the people who recruited them deliver on their promises.

Senator Fatima Payman after crossing the floor to support Senator Mehreen Faruqi’s motion to have the Senate recognise Palestine as a state. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Labor is finding out that, for many Muslim voters, just being better than the Liberal Party on Palestine isn’t good enough. If, like Payman, you think the current conflict is the “the greatest injustice of our times” and “this is a genocide and we need to stop pretending otherwise”, then half-measures just won’t do.

That both of these claims are absurd, as what is happening in Gaza is neither genocide nor even close to being the greatest injustice in the world – as even a cursory acquaintance with the recent history of the Uyghurs or Muslims of Northern Sudan would tell you.

If pro-Palestinian Muslims showed the same concern for demonising China as they have with Israel, they might be worth listening to.

But they haven’t. It’s Israel, Israel, Israel, with an obsessiveness that makes it clear to anyone with eyes to see that the offence of Gaza is not really anything the Israelis have done, it’s simply the affront that the Jews, a people they see as weak and contemptible, should be in possession of land they think should belong to them. And, as the case with all people in the grip of an obsession, there’s just no reasoning with them.

Labor’s leadership now finds itself confronting an unenviable dilemma.

It can either hand the pen to Israel’s implacable enemies and allow them to write its policy on the conflict or it can brace itself for a sectarian insurgency in its heartland.

It’s isn’t often I quote the Prime Minister approvingly but on Friday he spoke a lot of sense. “Sectarian parties, if they emerge, will undermine our multiculturalism and, if that occurs, the people who will be most vulnerable are people from minority groups. It’s not in the interests of our society, or indeed any section of our society, for that to happen.”

Wise words, but I am not sure the intended audience was listening.

Got a news tip? Email [e-mail]