Labor grudgingly finds its way to backing Israel’s right to respond

Richard Marles now says Israel ‘of course’ has the right to defend itself.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has made a grudging, partial course correction in the government’s previously anti-Israel rhetoric and record.

He now says that “of course” Israel’s right to self-defence, which the government has previously backed only in principle, includes “the right to respond” militarily to Iran’s attack with more than 180 ballistic missiles last week.

This was always the government’s view, Marles said, and only Opposition Leader Peter Dutton sought to pretend otherwise.

Not only that, but Marles claimed the Albanese government is now in lock-step with the Americans, “on the same page” with the Americans, and has been on the same page with the Americans all this time.

It’s a good thing Marles has moved the government on from its former position, in which the Israelis were viewed as having “in principle”, as a sort of ethereal Platonic idea, a notional right to self-defence, but the government explicitly condemned any action of self-defence the Israelis ever actually took or could possibly take in the physical universe.

But the grudging, partial and dissembling nature of Marles’s remarks is nonetheless a terribly depressing sign of how this government reacts to pressure. The Albanese government resembles a soft pillow. It seems to bear the imprint of whoever last sat on it.

Much of what Marles said, of course, is risible in its unreality.

If the government always held the view that Israel had a right to make a military response to Hezbollah and Iran, why didn’t it ever say so?

Joe Biden, and his Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, made it explicitly clear that they backed Israel’s operation to clear out Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure from anywhere near the Israel-Lebanon border.

It wasn’t a diabolical plot by Dutton but mere obvious journalism for reporters to ask the Albanese government if it held the same view.

At the time, the government would only repeat its simplistic and self-contradictory mantra: Israel has the right to defend itself, and there must be an immediate ceasefire.

The government often makes itself a hostage to some feeble slogan or formula somebody works out for it to avoid difficult choices. It never ends well.

Penny Wong addresses the UN last month. Picture: AFP

If there’s any confusion about the government’s position here, it’s entirely the fault of the government.

The confusion of course is a direct result of political cowardice, the hope that inner-city voters Labor is worried about losing to the Greens will hear only the anti-Israel stuff, while those who care about Israel will hear only the pro forma minimal assertion about ­Israel’s right to self-defence.

Instead of which everybody hears all the equivocations, verbal dodges, refusals to answer questions straightforwardly and rightly concludes the government is trying to walk all sides of every street.

There are many ways Canberra’s position on Israel and the Middle East is against not only ­Israel but also Washington.

One of these led Marles on the ABC’s Insiders to treat his colleague, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, in much the way the government has recently treated Israel, offering support in theory but not in practice.

One of the major ways Wong, in her recent speech to the UN General Assembly, dismayed the Israelis, contradicted the Americans and generally took flight from reality was her demand that an independent Palestinian state be declared and recognised ­immediately, regardless of whether an agreement was negotiated with Israel.

When questioned on this, Marles said that of course he agreed with Wong.

But when Insiders host David Speers heroically tried to pin Marles down on whether he supports declaring a Palestinian state regardless of whether an agreement has been reached with Israel, he wouldn’t mention the key point in Wong’s speech at all. Rather, he observed blandly that support for a two-state solution had long been ­bipartisan policy in Australia and there needed to be a path to a two-state solution.

Well, of course. That’s just the normal pabulum of international relations speak. Everyone supports a two-state solution eventually. The controversial bit of Wong’s suggestion was that the international community should just declare it, and no one, especially not Israel, should be allowed to stop it.

Wong’s ahistorical and deeply unreal suggestion ignores the depth and complexity of all the final status issues that would need to be negotiated and on which there are fundamental clashes. Of course she offered no schmick of an idea about how any of this could be resolved, which leads again to the conclusion that the whole thing was just domestic politics.

Marles soared majestically above these mundanities. He says he agrees with Wong, but he agrees so wholeheartedly that he won’t even repeat her most controversial suggestion.

Which leads to this inevitable question: does this government actually believe in anything at all?