Greens mischief on Gaza a stern warning for election

Adam Bandt obviously believes there may be political advantages in trying to make out the Greens are not lonely outliers with their crackpot views on Israel and the Middle East crisis. But if he is even half-right that the Labor Party is, as he claimed in an interview with Rosie Lewis, “slowly moving” towards the Greens’ utterly absurd position on the Gaza conflict, Anthony Albanese – and Australia – should be worried.

But Bandt has doubled down by making it clear he expects to call the shots in the event of a minority government with Labor after the federal election. His priorities will be stopping future resource developments and increasing the spending on green subsidies. The irresponsible stand taken by the Greens on Gaza is a clear warning of what to expect.

For more than a year, Mr Bandt said, the Greens had been alone in calling for an immediate, permanent and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. “Now Labor is being forced to admit the Greens were right all along. Labor is now slowly moving towards our position we’ve held now for months. They attacked us at the time for it but now they are voting that way in the UN,” he said.

Sadly, as the way Australia has voted at the UN shows, there’s something in that, despite a government spokesperson condemning, as Lewis reported, the Greens’ “shameful” spreading of “false information”.

With the Albanese government having perfidiously abandoned Australia’s sensible 75 years of strong bipartisan support for Israel and adopted a policy of open hostility towards the Jewish state and support for the Palestinian cause, there should be little surprise that Mr Bandt is now excited to the point where he boasts the ALP is “slowly going Green on Israel”.

The need for the ALP is, however, to show Mr Bandt is wrong, and it will do that only if the Albanese government is prepared to retreat from what has become its constantly antagonistic stance against Israel – a pusillanimous position that ill serves Australia’s national interests and those of our strategic allies.

With Israel ending the year on a remarkably high note few would have thought possible a year ago, it’s time for our government to be clear-eyed about the reality of what appears likely to be Israel’s imminent victory over Iran’s terrorist proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen. As chief international correspondent Cameron Stewart reported, almost 450 days into the war “Israel is on the cusp of stamping its authority across the Middle East like never before, as it nears a ceasefire-hostage deal with a defeated Hamas and takes steps to cripple Iran’s last effective terrorist proxy, the Houthi rebels in Yemen”.

That, doubtless, is not what Mr Bandt and his fellow travellers in the ALP would want to hear. But it is a reality that demands from the Albanese government an unequivocal rejection of all aspects of the Greens’ policy on the Middle East and a rethink of the ALP’s hostility towards Israel.

The war will not end until the hostages still held by Hamas are released. Nor should it.

But as Stewart wrote, Israel’s demonstrable defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon, its “cowering” and humiliation of Iran – including attacks in the heart of Tehran – and its destruction of the deposed Syrian tyrant’s military forces have all combined to ensure Israel ends 2024 “as the unrivalled dominant force across a reshaped region”. The outcome of the October 7 massacre by Hamas terrorists in Israel has been cataclysmic for Iran and its terrorist proxies in the region.

Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House suggests, too, that Israel’s prospects look even better. The terrorists and those who sympathise with them would be wise not to ignore his warning that there will be “all hell to pay” if the hostages are not released. It is imperative that Mr Trump makes good on that warning.

What remains of the terrorist forces must be left in no doubt about what their fate will be if they fail to release the hostages. Those still being held remain, as always, the key to peace and an end to Gazans’ suffering – not pious pontificating and ultimately pointless voting, as the Albanese government has done consistently, against Israel and in favour of whatever the Palestinian cause of the day at the UN may be.

“Slow moving” or fast, it is an absolute imperative for Australia that Mr Bandt’s destructive anti-Israel claptrap is not allowed to gain traction in the ALP or anywhere else. Voters must take heed of the Greens’ mischievous stand on Gaza as proof of what the prospect of a hung parliament with the Greens in a balance of power position would mean.