It’s a death by a thousand cuts as Australia abandons persecuted Israel

As a child growing up in Melbourne, I remember lining up outside the huge display windows of Myer at Christmas, wide-eyed in wonder at the snowy dioramas. This year anti-Israel agitators announced their intent to disrupt the Christmas windows launch scheduled for Sunday. Myer cancelled the event due to concern for the safety of staff and customers. The victims of this disruption were the children, parents and relatives targeted for wanting to be at this annual Christmas event.

Australia’s Foreign Minister encouraged further anti-Israel agitation when she changed Australian policy last week to vote against Israel in the UN General Assembly’s Second Committee in support of Palestinian sovereignty over natural resources in the disputed territories. We’d voted no or abstained on this resolution for more than 20 years. A Christmas window cancellation is just collateral damage in the Albanese government’s campaign.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Picture: Reuters/David Dee Delgado

General Delegation of Palestine to Australia head Izzat Abdulhadi.

The head of the General Delegation of Palestine to Australia, Izzat Abdulhadi, did, however, welcome the government’s change of heart in supporting Palestinian sovereignty over resources. Our new position “aligns with international law and the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, which has been recently published”, he said.

But the ICJ’s advisory opinion on Israel and the Palestinian situation demonstrates once again that when it comes to Israel, politics makes bad law. There was no proper legal analysis by the court of the status of the Palestinian territories. The court didn’t bother to analyse the existential security issues faced by Israel since its creation as a state. As the court’s vice-president, Julia Sebutinde, made clear in her dissenting opinion, the advisory opinion completely airbrushed out the agency of Israel’s neighbours and Palestinian leadership over decades that have been at the heart of the threat to Israel’s security and the absence of a Palestinian state. The ICJ made it appear the prolonged Israeli presence in the Palestinian territories was solely due to Israel’s obstinance.

Israel was also the only country singled out for condemnation by a resolution under the UN’s Sustainable Development agenda last week. We changed our vote to yes on a resolution blaming Israel for an oil slick during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Australia had opposed this resolution for 14 years. It no doubt assists the government taking away Greens votes for Labor. The resolution failed to mention that the slick happened during a war launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon, which created massive environmental damage in Israel through indiscriminate rocket attacks.

Compare this to another slick that occurred in early 2021. Crude oil began washing ashore along the entire 195km of Israel’s Mediterranean shore. The pollution was apparently a deliberate discharge from an Iranian-owned vessel, carrying Iranian oil to a Syrian refinery, travelling without radio identification and in breach of international sanctions. But there was no international concern or condemnation. Terrorism, even environmental terrorism, is tacitly supported by an overwhelming majority of the UN community when directed against the Jewish state.

In this context, we should note the general deterioration of other UN bodies. The Human Rights Council has become a legitimising shield for autocracies and criminals. The International Criminal Court has just announced an external investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct against its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. In May, Khan said there were reasonable grounds to believe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then defence minister Yoav Gallant were responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity from the day of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 onwards.

The ICC has never investigated any dictators, including the most violent, although it’s been successful in helping dictators punish political opponents. This is the same ICC that took up action against Israel at the behest of the corrupt South African government. The ICC judges are yet to vote on the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. But if they issued arrest warrants, the US may, at a minimum, consider travel bans on them. The incoming president has direct experience of lawfare.

The only course of action to resolve the longstanding Israel-Palestine dilemma is getting the key stakeholders back to the negotiating table, a goal not even mentioned in the UN resolution we supported and that in effect rewards aggression. Labor frontbencher Jason Clare said on Friday that backing Palestinian sovereignty was about “building momentum for a two-state solution”. Well, no. Our recent UN voting on Israel is a clumsy attempt to block progress towards a negotiated future on the Palestinian issue. It’s death by a thousand cuts when it comes to our support for Israel, an approach now part of the DNA of our Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. The government should reverse its vote when the sovereignty resolution comes up before the General Assembly next month.

Anthony Bergin is a senior fellow at Strategic Analysis Australia and expert associate at the National Security College.