ALP’s revolutionary hand now exposed over Israel

Australia's Foreign Minister Penny Wong speaks during a press conference.

With a striking dash of literary flair, both The Australian’s editorial and Claire Lehmann, in Monday’s paper, described our Foreign Minister as engaging in geopolitical “funambulism” over the Middle East and Taiwan. Funambulism is tightrope walking; the most famous and accomplished funambulist of them all was Philippe Petit.

On August 7, 1974, then 25 years old, Petit strung a highwire between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, 1312 feet above the ground, then spent almost an hour dancing backward and forward across it, without harness or any safety net, before being arrested and taken away for psychiatric assessment.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong isn’t dancing, but she does need to be reassessed. She’s not convincing anyone of her skill or judgment. And none of us should be following her across this imaginary highwire into geopolitical free fall. She is voting for the avowed enemies of Israel in the Middle East and for jittery uncertainty in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. Those calls are akin to appeasing Vladimir Putin in the matter of Ukraine. They are perilously poor calls.

To be a tightrope walker you need not only exceptional poise, but solid positions on either side of your tightrope. Wong doesn’t have solid positions. She has chimeras both behind and ahead of her. She is losing her way and compromising the rest of us. She may be playing petit electoral politics to constituents in western Sydney, but she lacks the verve and exquisite skills of Petit, and we can all see through what she is doing in our name.

Who is she kidding on the matter of Gaza? The idea, endlessly propagated by the rancorous coalition of anti-Zionists, that Israel is an “imperialist” and “colonialist” state is bunk. That organisations such as Hamas, with the backing of Iran’s deeply reactionary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Muslim Brotherhood, would “free” Palestine in any meaningful sense is so delusional that slogans calling for this ought to provoke ridicule from both university and political authorities.

Yet self-declared Trotskyists on our campuses and sophomoric simpletons on the green left identify with those barbaric forces. An “activist” banner at the University of Queensland in the past few days has been proclaiming “Free Palestine. From the River to the Sea! Smash Imperialism with World Revolution”. Beneath that deeply confused proclamation are the words “Revolutionary Communist Organisation”. World revolution? Where do these people think they are? In the world of the 1920s Comintern?

French high wire artist Philippe Petit

Let’s be clear. Until or unless Hamas is uprooted in Gaza, there is no possibility of a workable two-state solution between Israel and the tragically misled and misgoverned, indoctrinated and criminally incited Palestinians. Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation, which vows to obliterate Israel and create an Islamic state a la ISIS in its place, is dug in within Gaza. It has to be dug out. And that cannot be done by Marquess of Queensberry Rules, try as one might.

Hamas and other such organisations are as fanatical as the doomed Japanese defenders of Okinawa were in April 1945, when they defied the overwhelming power of the United States from tunnels, trenches, pillboxes and caves across the island and fought to the death. Massive destruction was wrought in rooting them out. Should there have been a ceasefire and a withdrawal of US forces before that was accomplished? To what end?

Israel has a perfect right to exist. It was itself created under a UN mandate in 1947. The benighted and anti-Semitic Arab leaderships refused to accept a generous two-state solution offered them by the UN. They have rejected every offer since. Yet they and their supporters seem to believe that their invariable defeat, when they have attacked Israel, should have entailed no consequences.

They insist they have a “right of return” to Israeli territory, as well as to the enclaves they still inhabit. Why is this not merely tolerated but encouraged by the so-called “international community”? Why is the success and prowess of Israel condemned as if that little state, surrounded by a sea of badly governed and rancorous enemies, ought to be meek and submissive?

Let Israel finish the job, then work to reconstruct Gaza as an enclave in which Palestinians willing to accept the existence of Israel can prosper. Let them educate their children not as bloodthirsty anti-Zionists but as cosmopolitan inhabitants of a Middle East that desperately needs what Israel has to offer and has been offering since the 1940s. Let the Abraham Accords and not Hamas – whether in Gaza or the West Bank – serve as the blueprint for how to move forward.

Then there is Taiwan. It would be a truly courageous feat of funambulism on the part of Penny Wong and the Albanese government to declare that China would benefit itself and win the respect and gratitude of the rest of us were it to acknowledge the extraordinary achievements of the people of Taiwan and offer them goodwill and de jure independence, instead of threatening to go to war simply to force them to accept communist dictatorship from Beijing.

But do we hear any such vision emanating from the Albanese government? Heaven forbid we “provoke” the dictatorship in Beijing. Let’s just dump abuse on democratic Israel. It’s a much softer target. Besides, what right have we to criticise the “united wishes of the whole Chinese people”? So it goes. A Penny for your thoughts, fellow voters.

Paul Monk is the author of a dozen books, including The West in a Nutshell (2009) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018).