Penny Wong’s Israel speech reveals Labor’s moral cowardice

Foreign Minister Penny Wong.

The Albanese government’s sudden support for the recognition of Palestine, in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s accidental killing of an Australian aid worker, says more about Australia’s political morality than about Israel’s.

Israel has made a dreadful mistake that it has honestly admitted, even sacking the two senior officers concerned and considering war crimes charges against them.

By contrast, Australia is on the verge of breaking longstanding bipartisan policy in response to political pressure inside the Labor Party.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s support for the recognition of Palestine, revealed in a formal, scripted speech at the Australian National University and subsequently backed by Anthony Albanese, is based on dubious morality and incorrect facts.

Of course, everyone wants peace in the Middle East and regrets the civilian deaths entailed in Israel’s just war against a terrorist state that uses women and children as human shields. But the immediate humanitarian ceasefire and the recognition of Palestine that Wong now demands would reward the people who regard peace as the total expulsion of Jews “from the river to the sea”.

It’s telling that Wong’s speech was immediately welcomed by Palestinian groups here that added, in their next breath, that it didn’t go far enough.

Australia has long supported a two-state solution to the Palestine issue, but with this vital qualification: that any Palestinian state recognise Israel’s right to exist behind secure borders.

The reality is that Israel will never be secure as long as its neighbours have pledged its destruction. Giving Hamas or even the Palestinian Authority a seat at the UN would just give official recognition – and a further official platform – to Israel’s mortal enemies. Indeed, arguably the mortal enemies of Western civilisation itself.

In demanding Israel “comply with international humanitarian law” – claiming a million Palestinians “are at risk of starvation” and citing the “196 aid workers” who’ve been killed “including Australian Zomi Frankcom” – Wong was all but accusing Israel of genocide while clothing herself in sanctimony via rhetorical demands on Hamas that she knows it will never meet.

After insisting that Israel not prosecute the war into Rafah, where the Hamas leadership is sheltering, she had the hide to add that “anyone who considers themselves a friend of Israel should be making that point”.

Hardly, senator. No true friend would counsel Israel against finishing the job without a viable alternative strategy.

Wong’s strategy is to “build the pathway out of the endless cycle of violence” via “recognition of each other’s right to exist. A Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel”. This would work, she claimed, because “there is no role for Hamas in a future Palestinian state”.

Our Foreign Minister assumes the act of recognising Palestine would somehow magically disappear the entity that’s not only implacably opposed to Israel’s existence but that after winning the one and only election ever permitted in Gaza brutally murdered all its opponents, including the local representatives of the Palestinian Authority. The best that can be said for this is that it’s Pollyanna foreign policy to surpass even Labor’s fanciful energy policy.

Wong is right to say there is “no long-term security for Israel unless it is recognised by the countries of its region” but wrong to add that this “cannot proceed without progress on Palestinian statehood”.

She seems to have forgotten the Abraham Accords under which the United Arab Emirates and Morocco recently recognised Israel and which October 7 was designed to torpedo.

In the initial aftermath of October 7, the Albanese government was clear: the Hamas attack was an atrocity, that the hostages must be returned and that Hamas must be destroyed. Ever since, it has been walking back that response under constant sniper fire from the Greens and its own activists.

The Prime Minister, who was instantly and angrily on the phone to his Israeli counterpart after one Australian death, took weeks to make a solidarity call after the barbaric massacre of 1200 Israelis, including one Australian, grandmother Galit Carbone. The Foreign Minister, who was too busy to visit the killing fields inside Israel, has regularly been escalating her demands that Israel avoid what’s necessary to track down their killers and destroy them.

Australia is now making demands of Israel that no country at war could possibly meet. We’re sending our own military investigator to Israel in a clear sign that we don’t trust Israel’s explanation of the Frankcom killing, despite Israel being light years ahead of Australia when it comes to investigating (and if necessary ’fessing up to) alleged war crimes.

In so doing, we’re pandering to the growing denial (at least among Western Muslims, as research last week from Britain’s Henry Jackson Society confirmed) that the October 7 atrocity ever really happened.

This insistence that the only legitimate war is one with almost no civilian casualties is not one we applied to ourselves in Afghanistan and it’s certainly not the view we took when nearly 15,000 Australians served in Bomber Command during World War II. Quite reasonably, we’ve never criticised the US when its drone strikes went horribly wrong, most recently when an innocent family was mistaken for a terror group in the aftermath of the scuttle from Kabul.

That’s because we’ve always understood that in war dreadful things happen; and that often enough, while good nation-states do their best to avoid mistakes, mistakes are made. Until now.

But that has been abandoned because it’s Israel and because Labor is under electoral pressure from the anti-Israel Greens in its inner-city seats, with the Labor Left threatening to pass anti-government resolutions at upcoming party conferences.

I get that our government can readily protest to the Israelis in a way that it can’t to Hamas. And that the Israelis take our protest seriously in a way Hamas never would. Still, a moral standard that’s not equally applied is not really a moral standard at all. It is a rank double standard.

The fact that the Foreign Minister, seemingly with the support of other senior ministers, has seized on this tragic mistake as a justification for giving the enemies of Israel a massive propaganda victory shows two things.

First, that ministers in the current government, either from the perceived electoral politics of western Sydney or from a Marxist sympathy with supposedly oppressed people who can do no wrong against their supposed oppressors, no longer accepts that there’s much moral difference between Israel and Hamas.

And second, that this government is incapable of maintaining a consistent foreign policy position when under domestic political pressure.

The Israeli government has made a dreadful mistake in the prosecution of a just war. By contrast, the Australian government is guilty of moral posturing to play politics. It’s abundantly clear whose behaviour is the more ethically indefensible.