Labor lacks coherence on Israel

Anthony Albanese’s insistence that “nothing has (been) changed in our position” by Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s speech on Palestinian statehood is hard to accept. Signs of potentially damaging incoherence within Labor over crucial, longstanding Middle East policy suggest otherwise. The Prime Minister himself was hardly full-throated in supporting Senator Wong’s provocative views. Instead, as Ben Packham reported, he sought on Wednesday to “downplay” the furore. Significantly, he sidestepped questions about Australia’s likely stance in a UN vote on Palestinian statehood.

Senator Wong, too, was less than forthright, claiming the international community was determined to break the “endless cycle of violence” but refusing to say how the government was likely to vote or what would come next after her speech. With substantial and still influential Labor figures such as former minister Mike Kelly, co-convener of Labor’s Friends of Israel group, raising serious questions about what Senator Wong said, and demanding “strict conditions” on any support for Palestinian statehood, her reluctance and that of the Prime Minister is no surprise.

Even the government’s handling of the tragic killing in an Israeli airstrike on a road convoy in Gaza of the World Central Kitchen team of aid workers, including Australian Zomi Frankcom, appears to be “intensely political” in the aftermath of Senator Wong’s speech, as Henry Ergas writes on Friday. Pointing out that the Australian Defence Force’s Doctrine on the Law of Armed Conflict explicitly recognises, in discussing collateral damage, that because our “major focus” in Afghanistan was on eliminating the Taliban’s leadership, the ADF targeted “road convoys with difficulties of identification and the consequent acceptance of non-combatant casualties as a necessary proportionate risk to achieve the military objective”, Ergas writes. “Seen in the light of that admission, the government’s reaction to Frankcom’s death seems both intensely political – preparing the ground for this week’s announced willingness to recognise Palestinian statehood – and seriously ill-advised. In effect, it drastically compromises the ADF’s position in future armed conflicts: no fighting force can hope to survive on the battlefield if it seeks to entirely avoid inadvertent casualties, or even make that, rather than defeating the enemy, its uppermost priority.”

Yet the Albanese government has chosen to turn the killing of the aid workers into a major crisis in our already deteriorating relationship with Israel, taking the unprecedented step of appointing former chief of the defence force Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin to ride shotgun on Israel’s inquiry into the tragedy. No other country whose citizens were among those killed has done the same.

Such, however, is the state of our relationship with Israel under the Albanese government. Peter Dutton was right on Wednesday when he branded its “shifting” policy on Israel “reckless” and attacked the rising tide of anti-Semitism as Labor’s Socialist Left faction, to which Mr Albanese and Senator Wong belong, hails the radical prospect of Palestinian recognition.

Since the shocking October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel the Albanese government has been guilty of sending mixed messages about Israel’s right to respond and how. A lack of moral authority has allowed the opportunistic Greens and pro-Palestine activists within Labor to sow political mischief. Events show the government, worried about electorates with high Muslim populations, is tying itself in knots over Israel and the war against barbaric terrorism in Gaza in a way likely to do neither itself nor our national interest any good.

Mr Albanese will pay a heavy price if, as opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham said, he persists with his “reckless pursuit of Greens votes” instead of good policy.