Albanese cannot escape reality of record on Israel

With the government’s handling of anti-Semitism looming large as a pivotal election issue, it is no surprise Anthony Albanese has wasted no time in claiming a lifelong commitment, going back to his Sydney University days, to being an anti-racism campaigner, as he told the Sunday Telegraph. Since the Hamas terrorists’ barbaric October 7, 2023, slaughter of 1200 Jews, the government he leads, the Prime Minister insisted, has done “what we can” to curb growing discrimination against Jewish Australians. “My entire life, I have been engaged in anti-racism campaigns,” he added. That may be so. No one doubts his sincerity when it comes to anti-Semitism. But grim figures from the Australian Federal Police revealing that since December 9 there have been more than 100 anti-Semitic attacks targeted at our Jewish community show that whatever the Albanese government has done, plainly and simply is not working. It has failed.

How Mr Albanese and others in his government respond to what Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, described in The Weekend Australian as “a lot of anger in the community about the federal government’s handling of what has become an anti-Semitism crisis” presents the government, and more broadly the Labor Party, with a profound, seminal challenge.

The link between the growth of gross anti-Semitism sweeping Australia, and Israel’s brave fight for survival against terrorism in a war it did not start, is incontrovertible. Anti-Semitism and the government’s handling of the crisis cannot, as former treasurer Josh Frydenberg said at the weekend, be other than a central issue in the election. No amount of harking back to his student days is likely to help Mr Albanese explain his government’s failure “in not recognising the distinctness of anti-Semitism, the connection between hatred for Israel and hatred for Jews, and the need to fight it through clear rhetoric and early intervention”, as Mr Ryvchin said.

Bob Hawke, in 1974, had no difficulty in doing so when he sagaciously declared: “If the bell tolls for Israel, it won’t just toll for Israel, it will toll for all mankind.”

Fifty years on, there is little sign of the strong, coherent leadership Hawke showed in recognising the connection between anti-Semitism and the Jewish homeland’s fight for survival. Instead, there appears to be a wet lettuce leaf policy approach. Mr Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, while condemning anti-Semitism, have lost no opportunity to criticise and condemn Israel, our close ally for 75 years, making clear their distaste for the Jewish state and casting Australia’s vote with its adversaries at the UN. When she finally went to Israel last January, long after many other Western leaders had gone there to express support following the October 7 massacre, Senator Wong shied away from visiting the sites of Hamas’s bloodbath, where other foreign leaders had gone.

In Australia, the government’s lackadaisical, disjointed and unconvincing response to the most horrifying slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, and its consistently strong condemnation of Israel over its fight for survival in a war it did not start, has seemed to spur the evil forces of anti-Semitism in our midst. That is the legacy Mr Albanese will have to defend at a time when many Australian Jews are so distressed they are talking about migrating.

Their fears are exacerbated further when, as we reported at the weekend, extremist groups within the Labor Party – such as the Labor Friends of Palestine – are even incensed by the intended “fence-mending” trip to Israel that Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, the government’s most prominent Jew, is finally about to make.

Mr Albanese and his colleagues would be foolish not to heed Mr Ryvchin’s perceptive warning that “Jewish Australians have never before voted on the basis of which party will do a better job of keeping us safe and which party will support Israel when the chips are down”. But that is the prospect the Albanese government faces. As Mr Frydenberg said, since October 7 the Prime Minister has “vacated the space” on anti-Semitism. He has failed to follow the sensible leadership over Israel provided by Hawke and Julia Gillard, and Australia’s future as a tolerant society is on the line in the election.

Sadly, Mr Frydenberg could not be more correct as the election draws closer. Meeting the profound, linked challenges of anti-Semitism and the Jewish homeland’s fight for survival against terrorism will need more than Mr Albanese recalling his student days.