Anthony Albanese either unable or unwilling to declare real position on Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Anthony Albanese’s confusion and dissembling over Australia’s attitude towards Israel’s right to respond to rocket attacks and clear Hezbollah terrorists from the Lebanese side of its border has dramatically deepened.

The Prime Minister’s claim that Australia is in lock-step with President Joe Biden and the US on Israel has been completely undercut by Washington DC as he refuses to extend Australian support to Israel’s right to respond, including pushing Hezbollah terrorists away from its border with Lebanon.

A day after extraordinary scenes in parliament where consensus could not be found over a condolence motion – for the 1200 Israelis killed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 last year – because of Labor’s insistence on calls for a ceasefire and a de-escalation in Lebanon, Albanese has repeated a patently false claim that the position is the same as the US.

What’s more, Albanese repeatedly refused to state that Australia agreed with the US position on Israeli ground operations to clear and “degrade” Hezbollah terrorist forces and sought to conflate earlier calls for a ceasefire with the current fighting in Lebanon.

Ducking and weaving on Sky News, Albanese has actually accentuated the policy differences with the US and the Biden administration while trying to deny there are any.

As Australian Prime Minister, he refuses to enunciate in a clear and straightforward manner our position on Israel in relation to pushing terror forces away from its border in Lebanon or address current US policy on Israel’s right to respond.

Albanese flatly denies there is any difference and dismisses as “nonsense” or “patent lies” suggestions that Australia is abandoning Israel or has changed policy relative to the US.

After an early morning parliamentary question time – to allow the Prime Minister to depart for an ASEAN meeting in Laos – in which there was no reference to Israel or Lebanon, Albanese gave an interview designed to settle the issue after an explosive previous day in parliament and before his departure.

That interview has only made him appear to be denying reality, not understanding what is happening and not appreciating the complexities of the different approaches to Israel’s response in Gaza to the Hamas attacks last year, and the ground operation in Lebanon directed at Hezbollah and Iran’s ballistic missile attacks.

On Sky, he argued that the position of Biden and of all G7 countries last week was “very consistent with our position”, yet he refused to endorse the Israeli right to respond to Hezbollah in Lebanon and continues to call for “de-escalation” and ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon.

After reports that Hezbollah was open to a ceasefire “de-linked from Gaza”, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the Biden administration supported “Israel launching … incursions to degrade Hezbollah’s infrastructure”.

“Now that Hezbollah is on the back foot and is getting battered, suddenly they’ve changed their tune and want a ceasefire. I think it’s not surprising, given the situation they find themselves in,” Miller said.

Albanese is clearly not in “lock-step” with the US and is either unable or unwilling to declare Labor’s real position on Israel, Hezbollah and Lebanon.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has clearly put Australia’s position in relation to a timetable for a two-state solution on Palestine without Israel agreement and called for de-escalation and ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon – as did Albanese’s parliamentary “condolence motion” on Tuesday.

All this is at odds with the equally clearly stated US position.

Australia is entitled to take a different view from the US if it decides to do so but it is not entitled to pretend a different policy is the same.

A bad start to the parliamentary week for the government over Israel has only got worse.