The tweet that captures the cowardice of the Albanese government
There is deep sorrow still on this anniversary of October 7 among Jews of the left like me, deep sorrow and pain. And there is a sense of betrayal.
On this sombre and sorrowful anniversary of October 7, in the Jewish community there are not just harrowing memories but also a pervasive sense of having been abandoned.
Abandoned by the Albanese government, by those who run our universities, by institutions such as the Australian Human Rights Commission and by many journalists who, in too many cases, are proud activists for the anti-Zionist, anti-Israel cause.
With Israel at war with Hezbollah, with Iran sending almost 200 ballistic missiles into Israel that led to all of Israel’s nine million citizens being forced into bomb shelters, with the war against Hamas still not over, there is little sympathy from the Albanese government and many people on the left for the people of Israel and what Australian Jews are being subjected to – an ever-growing hostility not just to Israel but to the Jewish people.
Many Australian Jews of the moderate social democratic left – Jews like me – are in despair with the left in general, where they once felt at home, and with the Labor Party and the Labor government in particular.
Anthony Albanese’s tortured response to the Iranian missile attack – a sort of meek and almost mealy-mouthed condemnation and then the inevitable meaningless call for “de-escalation” – was, for me, almost pity inducing.
He is a Prime Minister trapped by the political imperative not to say too much about what the Jews of Australia are going through. He must not offend the Muslim communities of the western suburbs of Sydney and the northern suburbs of Melbourne lest they turn on Labor in those half-dozen seats where they are concentrated.
A few weeks ago there was a meeting of the Labor Friends of Israel. A handful of Labor MPs and former MPs spoke to a couple of hundred people, most of them Jews. For many it was a disheartening thing, this small gathering of Labor dissidents, these Labor supporters of Israel who understand how painful and frightening it is for Jews, this explosion of hostility, and hatred of Israel and Zionists.
The disillusionment among left-wing Jews with the left is deeply felt and widespread. The Jewish left in the arts – writers and playwrights and artists – is being cancelled. Jewish students at our sandstone universities have been under siege from activists who increasingly are open supporters of Hamas.
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The Greens, I am pretty sure, are now almost Judenrein. The Greens represent a growing segment of the left that is virulently anti-Zionist and eliminationist in its attitudes to Israel.
But the Greens’ hostility to Israel, and the hostility to Israel and Zionism of a growing part of the left, its casting out of the ranks of comrades leftist Jews who continue to support Israel’s right to exist, pre-dates October 7. It has just become more virulent, this hatred of Israel, and more hostile to Jews.
There is deep sorrow still on this anniversary of October 7 among Jews of the left like me, deep sorrow and pain. And there is this sense of betrayal, most acutely felt in the days after October 7 but still there a year later. Friendships have ended.
I do not much care about the Greens, in the sense that they were never a part of the left in which I grew up. That hard and ideologically zealous left that too often has ended up supporting murderous, fascist-like regimes.
But the Labor Party has been the home of many Australian Jews. Bob Hawke, perhaps Labor’s greatest prime minister, was a lover of the Jews, a powerful supporter of Israel even if, towards the end of his life, he was increasingly concerned about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Bill Hayden, when he was foreign minister in the 1980s, worked to overturn the 1975 UN resolution that equated Zionism with racism. Jews have been major financial contributors to the Labor Party.
I cannot imagine Labor’s current Foreign Minister doing what Hayden did, taking on that resolution, helping to get it rescinded, at some political cost because some members of the Hawke government thought he was doing the work of the so-called Zionist lobby.
Two recent events encapsulate how morally obtuse and politically inept – if not cowardly – have been this Labor government’s responses to the massacres of October 7 and the subsequent war between Israel and Hamas. And now the war with Hezbollah and perhaps with Iran.
Around midday on September 2, the Prime Minister tweeted this: “It is devastating to learn that six Israeli hostages have been killed by Hamas. Australians offer our deepest sympathies to their loved ones and all those who grieve their loss. Every innocent life matters.”
As far as I can tell, this is all Albanese had to say about the execution of six young Israeli men and women whose bodies were found in a tunnel under Gaza by Israeli soldiers perhaps two days after they were murdered. They had been held for almost 11 months by Hamas terrorists in the tunnels of Gaza.
The hostages – five of them taken at the Nova music festival on October 7 – were shot in the head. There has been speculation that their guards shot them because Israeli army units were getting close to the tunnel where the hostages were kept.
This is unconfirmed. It could just as likely be that Hamas executed the hostages to sabotage the talks – the wearying, interminable, go-nowhere talks that of course went nowhere – about a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.
This one tweet from Prime Minister Albanese encapsulates the moral equivocations and in my view the cowardice of the government he has led this past 12 months, ever since the October 7 massacres
There was no condemnation of Hamas. There was no grieving over the execution of these young men and women, no sense of sorrow and pity for what they had been through. There was no outrage at what had been done. And there was no empathy for what his fellow Australians – Australia’s Jews – were going through.
Instead, he offered “sympathy” for all those who “grieve their loss”. But does he not “grieve their loss”? Does he not grieve at all? Could he not, at the very least – because he is Prime Minister for all Australians – grieve their loss on behalf of the Australian people? Did he assume that only Jews were grieving the execution of the six (Jewish) hostages?
It is devastating to learn that six Israeli hostages have been killed by Hamas. Australians offer our deepest sympathies to their loved ones and all those who grieve their loss. Every innocent life matters.
— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) September 2, 2024
The Prime Minister concludes his tweet with that terrible cliche, terrible because it is meaningless and is often a cover for prejudice: “Every innocent life matters.” Why the need to say this? At this time, hours after the executions, why the need for this mealy-mouthed attempt at context, at contextualising the execution of defenceless men and women?
There is the need because Albanese and Penny Wong and every other senior Labor minister, every time they express anything approaching sympathy for the victims of the Hamas terrorists, need to point to the fact there are victims too of the Israelis, of the Israeli military. Even when six young men and women, after almost a year in captivity, were executed by their Hamas captors.
There is a need because every time they call out and condemn anti-Semitism and label “un-Australian” every anti-Semitic incident, they invariably call out Islamophobia as well. Every act of Jew hatred has an equally virulent act of hostility towards Muslims.
While there were vigils held for the murdered Israelis in Melbourne and Sydney and families came together to mourn and mothers wept for the mothers of the murdered, that tweet was all Albanese had to say.
I cannot find anything Foreign Minister Wong had to say about the execution of the hostages. I am pretty sure that she did not make a major statement or hold a press conference or appear on the ABC’s 7.30 program where she condemned what Hamas had perpetrated and said she understood that many fellow Australians were traumatised and that nothing could justify this unspeakable crime. She did not and said none of that.
On August 2, weeks before the executions of the hostages, Wong did hold a press conference. At her side stood retired air chief marshal Mark Binskin, who in April was appointed by Wong to investigate the Israeli airstrikes on a World Centre Kitchen aid convoy that killed seven aid workers including Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom.
Wong held the press conference to release the non-classified version of Binskin’s report, a report months in the making, with more than one visit to Israel, and while he stood beside her as she spoke and answered questions, the Foreign Minister distorted – at best – Binskin’s findings, a stark and troubling illustration of this government’s moral confusion and, even more worrying, its political cowardice.
Binskin found that while there had been serious errors made by the Israel Defence Forces, there had been no deliberate targeting of the three cars that had been struck by drones, that the IDF had promptly and properly disciplined the IDF officers involved in the strikes. He found that the convoy had armed guards – one of whom fired his rifle into the air – and that the IDF, not without reason, mistook them as Hamas fighters.
Binskin said the IDF had co-operated with him in his inquiries and gave him access to the documents he requested.
In response, the Foreign Minister, in a voice of sombre outrage, said: “I want to start by saying the deaths of Ms Frankcom and her colleagues were inexcusable. We condemn the Israeli strikes that caused them. Zomi Frankcom and her colleagues from World Central Kitchen were killed in an intentional strike by the IDF.”
The press conference went downhill from there. Wong accused the IDF of attacking hundreds of aid workers in Gaza and called for possible criminal charges against Frankcom’s killers.
Reporters, who clearly had not read the report, then asked questions that implied that Binskin had found the IDF had intentionally targeted Frankcom.
And that was it, all done as far as the Binskin report was concerned and to be treated as just a further bit of evidence of IDF perfidy in these past 12 months, illustrating, once again, that the IDF deliberately targets aid workers – just as it deliberately targets women and especially children – and is hardly ever held to account for what it does.
When the Binskin report was released – perhaps even as Wong was obfuscating its findings – Australian Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi tweeted that the report was a whitewash and that it defied reason to believe that the IDF had not targeted the aid workers’ cars. It seems to me that Faruqi was just blunter than Wong about an investigation Wong had initiated and with which the IDF, at the most senior levels, had co-operated. Unfortunately for Wong, the result was a report not too much to her political liking.
In my view, Wong has played politics as Foreign Minister. Every statement she has made seems to me to be the result of political calculations., There is a coldness towards Israel and a coldness towards her fellow Australians, Jews whom she cannot bring herself to express any real empathy for.
On this anniversary of October 7, the Prime Minister’s tweet and then silence about the execution of the Israeli hostages and the Foreign Minister’s distortion of the Binskin report are illustrations of how far the Labor Party has moved from its once widely held support for Israel.
They are illustrations of how far the left, large sections of it, even in the Labor Party, has grown hostile to the Jewish state, and in many cases, to its existence.
And in turn, Jews, in particular leftist Labor-supporting Jews, are turning away from the Labor Party. Whether in large or small numbers is not clear but it is obvious to anyone prepared to look and see that there is widespread and bitter disappointment among Jews with the Labor Party and with the Albanese government in particular.
In the great scheme of things, among the many dreadful consequences of what happened on October 7 a year ago, among all the ways in which the world changed this past year, the abandonment of Australian Jews by the left and in part by the Labor government and the Labor Party may be considered a rather parochial, almost inconsequential issue.
But this growing hostility towards Jews by the left has happened in the US and Canada and Europe – in Britain and France and Ireland, everywhere in Europe – and in some ways this hostility has been even more virulent there than in Australia. And leftist Australian Jews are not alone. They have many politically homeless comrades in the US and in Europe.
Given that they have scores of staff and advisers, we must assume that Albanese and his advisers know all this about the left’s hostility towards the Jews, about the way Jews feel unsafe and unsupported. Surely Wong and her advisers know it, too. So perhaps – as seems likely – Albanese and Wong and other senior ministers in the Labor government have made the simple political calculation: The Jews don’t count.
Michael Gawenda is a former editor of The Age and is the author of My Life as a Jew.
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