Penny Wong’s speech ignores long history of Arab anti-Semitism

Penny Wong delivers a speechto the ANU national security college last week. Picture: Rohan Thomson/ANU

Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s speech last week flagging the possible recognition of a Palestinian state had more than a whiff of student politics.

It also included the sound of dog-whistling, with a coded message of support to voters of Middle Eastern background in Labor seats in Sydney and Melbourne. While Muslim voters tend to be socially conservative, the Coalition’s strong support for Israel won’t attract them. Nor will the Greens’ left policies.

But what a message Wong sent in a week that marked six months since the massacre of 1200 Israeli civilians on October 7. Four-time ALP election-winning prime minister Bob Hawke, a hero to generations of Israelis, must have been turning in his grave as Wong declared recognition – even without the support of Israel – could pave the road to peace.

The two-state solution was driven by former Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin in 1992, but was first mooted by the UK Peel Commission in 1937. Rabin’s fellow 1994 Nobel Peace Prize winner Yasser Arafat and Arafat’s successors rejected the plan at least three times.

Wong also seems to forget many of the Palestinians who have her ear in this country – think Nasser Mashni of the Palestine Advocacy Network – do not support the existence of the Jewish State. Wong and many Australian journalists seem unaware of the long history of pogroms against Jews in the Middle East.

Mashni claimed in a march marking six months since the October 7 that those with genocidal intent are Israeli Zionists. Like many on the left here, he claims – against all the facts – that Israel is committed to Palestinian genocide, even though Hamas specifically denies the right of Israel to exist, did perpetrate a genocidal massacre of Jewish civilians, and has promised more of the same.

Mashni is sure Zionism is the problem even though the history is clear: Arab anti-Semitism and the systematic murder of Middle East Jews predates Zionism by hundreds of years. On April 2, Mashni posted on social media: “Get out, get loud and be proud. 6 months since the genocide began! The facade of civility that Zionist Israel has sold to the world has been shattered. They’re feeling the pressure and it’s our job to ramp it up.”

Prime among the Jew haters of the Middle East is Hamas and Hezbollah sponsor Iran, where for years its supreme leaders have denied the Holocaust. No wonder so much social media, much of it driven by Iranian-paid activists, is full of anti-Semitic historical inversions.

Reflect on the false narrative of Israel as an apartheid state. Israel is in fact democratic and pluralist with Knesset members who are not all Jewish but include Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims, Druze and Bedouin. Most other Middle Eastern states reject political pluralism.

Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni.

Think too of the grossly anti-Semitic idea spread on social media here by senior journalists such as Mike Carlton that Israel deliberately murdered seven World Central Kitchen aid workers killed in Gaza a fortnight ago. With zero evidence, and before the official Israel Defence Force investigation, Carlton wrote: “It was cold blooded murder. Not some regrettable accident as Netanyahu’s obedient parrots here in Australia would have you believe.”

Even worse were Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Wong trying to send retired Air Force chief Mark Binskin into Israel to investigate. Would they let the Taliban send a representative here to look into our handling of the 10 incidents between 2009 and 2013 in which Afghan human rights advocates claim unarmed men and children were murdered by Australian soldiers?

And why intimidate Israel when Albanese failed to stand up to China after its navy launched a sonar attack on Australian naval divers in November?

Anyone familiar with the facts should understand Israel – before the terrible WCK killings – was deliberately favouring the private aid network because it regarded the charity as a good alternative to UN aid distribution.

Wong’s speech cynically tried to separate the Netanyahu government from Israel and Hamas from Gazan Palestinians.

Yet polling in Israel shows that whatever voters think of Netanyahu – and they passionately disapprove of him – they overwhelmingly support the war to rid Gaza of Hamas. Separate polling published last month shows Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas and increasingly support the October 7 attacks.

Yet two of our nation’s most senior political journalists, the ABC’s Laura Tingle and David Speers, on Wednesday on 7.30 followed the Wong approach.

Tingle asked Speers: “I mean, how much work does the government have to do explaining the difference between Hamas and Palestine on one hand and Israel and the Netanyahu government on the other to the Australian public?”

Wong’s speech, like most of what she and Albanese have said during the past six months about Israel, sought to create a moral equivalence between a democratically elected government in Israel and a terrorist organisation in Gaza.

Wong then extended that false equivalence to Australia’s Jewish and Islamic communities.

“It’s not OK to blame anyone in Australia for the actions of Hamas. It’s not OK to blame anyone in Australia for the actions of the Netanyahu government.”

As Sharri Markson said on Sky News Australia on Wednesday night, no one from the Jewish community is blaming local Muslims for October 7 but many from the Islamic community here are in fact targeting Jews for the war in Gaza. That is, there is plenty of anti-Semitism but little sign of Islamophobia despite the government’s desperate attempts to find some.

So what of Wong’s idea that recognising Palestine would spur peace? There is so much wrong with this it is amazing a senior government minister would think it, let alone say it.

Peter Hartcher, political editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, was largely correct on Thursday morning when he argued Wong was merely restating existing Labor policy on a two-state solution. Yet this newspaper’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, was also on the money the previous day when he said the speech was riddled with mistakes and was “emotionally manipulative” and “dishonest”, but politically compelling for a domestic audience.

This column would argue Palestine does not meet the central criterion for recognition: it has no viable government. Nor could the West Bank and Gaza be seen as a single national entity with clearly defined borders. Most importantly, many, perhaps most, citizens of Gaza and the West Bank do not accept the right of its neighbour, Israel, to exist.

Wong says a Palestinian state would have to exclude Hamas from any role in government. How could that be guaranteed without military intervention? And if she wants Hamas excluded why give it a moral victory with her speech?

How could the unpopular West Bank government of the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas be reformed? Does Wong expect a democratic election in any Palestinian state when neither Abbas nor Hamas have conducted elections for 18 years? Few regimes in the Arab world have free elections.

How would the international community stop Hamas murdering members of a new Palestinian Authority the same way it killed Fatah rivals in Gaza when it came to power in 2007?

How would Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbours, who have invaded Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973, be persuaded that tiny Israel should be allowed to continue as an independent country when the Arab world has been conducting pogroms against Jews for centuries?