So just who is really in charge of our foreign policy?

Jason Clare and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Just who is in charge of Australia’s foreign policy in relation to Israel and the Middle East? What is the policy? And, who in the government can actually openly embrace, explain and defend the policy?

The simple answer to all these questions is that nobody knows – no one apparently in the Labor government, certainly no one in Israel or the US and, curiously, no one in the Albanese cabinet.

What is known is that the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Defence Minister, the Foreign Minister, the Health Minister and the Education Minister, as well as every Labor MP, all publicly declared positions in the lead-up to the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks that appear, at the very least, to be confused and contradict Australia’s previous bipartisan Israel policy and the US’s position.

Jason Clare, as Education Minister and Labor MP for the western Sydney electorate of Blaxland, which has a high Muslim and Lebanese constituency, is the latest to go public and revert to the original position soon after the Israeli retribution in Gaza, of accusing Israel of breaching international law and committing war crimes in bombing hospitals and schools.

“The bombing of schools and the bombing of hospitals, I think, are not complying with international law,” Clare told the ABC. “Every country has the right to defend itself, but it also needs to comply with international law.”

He said his electorate did not just see a war on the other side of the world but images of people dying who were often family and friends. “They’re asking for a ceasefire and for the war to end, and I don’t think that is too much to ask,” he said.

Clare’s contribution is the latest in a series of public declarations, which began with Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s change of policy in asking for a timetable for a two-state solution and a rejection of any Israeli incursion into Lebanon. That was followed up with Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles adopting the US language of Israel’s “right to respond” without specifying Lebanon. Cabinet minister Mark Butler’s unequivocal declaration of Israel’s right to respond to attacks was also thrown in, as well as Anthony Albanese’s Tuesday “condolence motion” calling for a ceasefire in Lebanon and Gaza and his Wednesday Sky appearance saying Australia was not contradicting the US position on Israeli land action in Lebanon and a ceasefire with Hezbollah or Hamas.

The Australian government policy on Israel and the two-state solution has changed, and the position is different from that of Joe Biden’s administration. It is also seen as being driven by domestic political considerations – such as Clare’s electoral survival – betraying Jewish Australians and encouraging increasingly aggressive and unpopular pro-Palestinian protests.

The government has every right to change foreign policy on Israel and a duty to do what it can to stem conflict in Australia, but the continuing confusion and lack of a clear political and moral position is only making the whole situation worse.