Foreign Minister Penny Wong gave surely the worst speech of her life at the United Nations. It was so monumentally divorced from reality, so morally obnoxious in its treatment of Israel, so undergraduate in its pretensions of clear certainties in an issue of immense complexities, so selective in its politically convenient moral posturings, as to be utterly unworthy of her. And unworthy of Australia.
The Albanese government has revealed itself to be hostile to Israel. It’s also a government that, despite a few welcome gestures, seems to have relatively little concern for the welfare or sensitivities of the Australian Jewish community.
All this has to be set against a global crisis of anti-Semitism, of which the Albanese government has no grasp. This is the most ancient and terrible hatred of all. It’s so powerful today partly because it’s fuelled by diverse but converging streams. There’s the hangover of traditional Christian anti-Semitism, though all mainstream Christian groups have now repudiated that. There’s the anti-Semitism of white race nationalists. Both these forces are fairly minor compared with the two big engines of anti-Semitism today.
These are the irrational and wild hatred of Israel on the left in Western societies, which applies completely different standards in its judgments of Israel compared with any other nation, and which sees Zionism and the existence of an Israeli state as inherently racist and an outcrop of Western colonialism. This hatred of Israel is so intense and irrational that it frequently and easily becomes a hatred of Jews.
And there is the long established Islamic and Arab tradition of anti-Semitism. This is much at work in the contemporary Middle East. The Houthi movement of Yemen, which, like Hamas and Hezbollah is a proxy force of Iran, has a slogan it displays at many gatherings. It reads: “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse upon the Jews, Victory to Islam!”
The original Hamas charter was full of almost caricatured and obscene anti-Semitism. Hezbollah, entirely a creation of Iran, is similarly full of such hatred of Jews. Iran’s government frequently repeats its determination to “wipe Israel off the map”.
All these four distinct sources of anti-Semitism co-mingle in grotesque fashion and weirdly reinforce each other. In that environment, you might think a government claiming its foreign policy is driven by the highest morality would make countering anti-Semitism a major plank of its rhetoric.
At the very least, you’d expect any adult Australian government to be acutely conscious of this environment. While our government is certainly not in any way anti-Semitic itself, it fails dismally in confronting one of the greatest moral evils of our time.
In her speech, Wong did repudiate both Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organisations. However, she directed the bulk of her criticism at Israel. Yet nowhere was there a recognition that Israel is taking the action it’s tragically forced to take in Lebanon because Hezbollah has fired something like 9000 rockets, drones and other projectiles at Israel since the Hamas atrocities on October 7 last year. Wong says Israel has the right to defend itself but opposes any action it could possibly take in self-defence.
Wong also called for the UN Security Council to determine an independent Palestinian state should be declared very soon. And no one should be allowed to prevent this.
She declared, with sublime and fatuous undergraduate certainty, this would lead to “peace and security” for Israelis and Palestinians. At best, that’s an absurd attempt to ignore history.
Much of the Arab movement using Palestinian nationalism is motivated by religious and ideological anti-Semitism. The Palestinian leadership has non-negotiable demands that make a Palestinian state inconceivable in present circumstances. One is that every descendant and relative of any Arab who ever lived in the territory that is now Israel should be allowed to return and live in Israel itself. Not in the new Palestinian state, but in Israel.
This is millions of people and is obviously completely unrealistic. This so-called “right of return” is really an excuse never to negotiate compromise seriously. Wong understands that Australia has no influence at all on these matters but, bizarrely, decided to make it the centrepiece of her contribution at the UN. So now as an expert on the Middle East, and a foreign policy leader impelled by principle to speak out, could Wong show us the speeches she’s made urging the Palestinian leadership to abandon the right of return and other completely unrealistic positions?
For that matter, every analyst of the Middle East has been pointing out for months that Hezbollah’s increased tempo of rocket attacks on Israel would likely eventually trigger an Israeli response. Could Wong point us to the line of speeches she’s made denouncing Hezbollah for this and demanding it desist?
Similarly, any realistic analyst of the Middle East knows, as the Gulf Arabs certainly know, that the chief source of instability and conflict in the Middle East is Iran. Iran supplies weapons to Russia to attack Ukraine. It also bankrolls and directs all the region’s main terrorist groups, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and numerous others. So, as a Foreign Minister urgently concerned with peace in the Middle East, and impelled by the highest moral principles, can Wong direct us to her many speeches denouncing Iran for this behaviour and mobilising maximum diplomatic pressure on Tehran?
Quite the reverse. The Iranian ambassador to Australia posted on social media his hope that “the Zionist plague” will be “wiped out” by 2027 and was subject to the mildest imaginable rebuke by a mid-level DFAT official. The ambassador himself later claimed this was no rebuke at all. When taxed over this shameful cowardice, the Albanese government leaked the explanation that the Americans valued Canberra having an embassy in Tehran and if we did anything remotely sensible like expelling the ambassador our diplomats would be expelled from Tehran and we’d lose this priceless dialogue.
What an apathetically unconvincing rationale for cowardice that is. We should happily sacrifice this entirely worthless dialogue if keeping it means we sacrifice our basic principles.
The Albanese government is much more hostile to Israel than our friends and allies. Unlike the US, UK and even politically correct Canada, we didn’t criticise the absurd International Criminal Court prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants against Israeli government leaders. No Australian cabinet minister has visited the site of the Hamas atrocities against Israeli civilians. And so on and so on.
The Albanese government is completely out of its depth in this Middle East crisis, its words and actions only decipherable through the most tawdry of domestic politics. It’s unworthy of Australia.
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