James Campbell: Tony Burke’s comments give cause for concern

Jewish leaders have privately feared that Labor will overtly flip to an anti-Israel stance and Tony Burke’s comments to the ABC didn’t allay those concerns, writes James Campbell.

Almost 20 years ago, when I was a junior staffer in the office of the Liberal MP for the Victorian state seat of Caulfield, I had a ringside seat at one of the many unsuccessful Liberal attempts to wrest what was then the federal electorate of Macnamara from the ALP.

The 2004 battle for Melbourne Ports – as the seat was called in those days – was the first time in Australian history the Liberal and Labor parties had both fielded a Jewish candidate.

It was estimated Ports had the largest number of Jews of any seat in the country, so unsurprisingly Jewish issues, especially funding for schools, played a big part in the campaign.

One of the major themes of our campaign was the Liberals were better on issues of concern to the Jewish community, unlike the Labor Party, which with its pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli wing, was not to be trusted. The problem with this argument was that incumbent MP Michael Danby and his Labor supporters had an excellent rejoinder: “You think the Labor Party’s bad now, imagine how much worse it would be if Michael wasn’t there!”

In the two decades since, it has been clear when it comes to Israel-Palestine the traffic in the ALP has been all one way, and though it slowed during the six years that Bill Shorten was leader, Jewish community leaders have, in private anyway, been open in their fear that sooner or later, Labor will flip to an overtly anti-Israeli position.

Tony Burke’s comments on the ABC regarding the invasion of Gaza should have been repudiated, writes James Campbell. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

We’re not there yet and there is still time to correct course, but the signs are not good, not if Tony Burke’s interview on ABC Radio National on Friday was anything to go by.

Asked whether he saw what was happening as a genocide, the cabinet minister answered: “I prefer to provide the facts as I just did, and I think your listeners will find their own words to be able to describe it. I think when we go straight to, ‘Do we use this word? Do we use that word?’, we end up in an argument about linguistics. What I want to talk about is what’s happening to individuals.”

The “facts” to which Burke was alluding were that he had framed a series of questions he had been asked by his constituents: “If neither fuel nor water is provided, then people say to me, ‘Who’s going to run out of water first? The family that’s evacuated because their home was bombed or the Hamas fighter? Who’s going to be more affected by the impossibility of importing medicines?

“‘Will it be the Hamas fighter or will it be the people in a hospital?’ The people in the area say to me, ‘When fuel runs out, desalination stops. But also, in a hospital who’s going to have the backup power kept separate from the supplies? The Hamas fighter or the people on life support or a baby in an incubator?’”

The answers may well be obvious but unfortunately that doesn’t make them the fault of the Israelis.

As Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler pointed out: “Hamas is the de facto power in Gaza and is solely responsibility for not just for the distribution of essential supplies to all Gazans, but also for the state of war Gaza now finds itself in.”

Moreover, as Leibler asked, if Hamas has supplies of fuel, food and water, why didn’t Burke call on it to provide them to its own people?

Burke could easily have drawn attention to the plight of Gazans – even saying he thought the Israeli response was disproportionate – without accusing it of the worst crime a state can commit.

That ministers in the Australian government are not prepared to immediately repudiate that idea shows how far the rot has set in.