Twenty years of Australian PM cowardice on Israel and Palestine

Australia's political leaders have tip-toed cautiously around conflict in the Middle East, offering words of support but showing little else, writes Tom Tanuki.

SIX AUSTRALIAN ex-prime ministers got together and penned a letter primarily concerned with condemning Hamas. Toward the end of it, they also managed to squeak out a bit of fretting about Israel’s bulk murder of civilians after the events of 7 October. (Really, 7 October came after nearly 20 years of making a concentration camp out of Gaza. But who’s counting?)

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have so far killed 3,600 children in retaliation. The number will have gone up by the time you read this. What is the strong statement of our ex-prime ministers about this? How will they find the words to meet this unthinkable barbarity?

First, they stammer:

‘On the battlefield in Israel and Gaza we do not presume to give strategic advice to Israel.’

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And then they whine:

‘Israel promises it will do all it can to avoid civilian casualties, we urge it to do so with all of its humanity and skill.’

Bold. I like it. Powerful, stately stuff.

It so happened that the full blockade of Gaza has occurred over the same period of time as the prime ministerships of those same six ex-leaders. So I thought it would be helpful to look at their track record on Israel and Palestine, which I did in this video.

Consider this quote:

We have condemned in the strongest possible terms the action of Hamas in sending rockets into southern Israel. Obviously, Israel has responded, we’ve now seen a further escalation.

We’ve always said we recognise Israel’s right to defend itself, but we have urged Israel to be very mindful of the civilians involved, of the prospect of civilian casualties, and obviously we have seen civilian casualties. And we have been strong in our continuing endorsement of the United Nations Security Council resolution for a halt to all violence.

Condemnations of Hamas, Israel’s right to defend itself, “be very mindful of civilians”. Am I quoting from the joint statement again? No. That’s something Julia Gillard said during a stint of acting prime ministership in 2008 (before she deposed Kevin Rudd and became PM). She made that statement in response to the brutality of Operation Cast Lead.

Israel, in three weeks, bombed the Gaza Strip and managed to massacre some 1,400 Palestinians, ‘including some 300 children and hundreds of other unarmed civilians’ according to Amnesty. Apparently, the appropriate response is about Israel’s right to exist.

Later, her prime ministership, according to her then-Foreign Minister Bob Carr (who has always been an ally to the Palestinians), was irrationally pro-Israel. Carr wrote in a memoir of his time in office that Gillard wouldn’t even let him use the words “express concern” regarding an illegal Israeli campaign of bulldozing Palestinian homes in the West Bank and settling ultra-Zionists on homes in their stead.

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Carr said that the Government was paralysed on Israel and Palestine by its obligations to the Zionist lobby group AIJAC (Australian Israel and Jewish Affairs Council), headed up by chairman Mark Leibler. Leibler is the person who apparently coordinated the abovementioned joint statement.

Gillard's predecessor, Kevin Rudd, reversed Australia’s dismally anti-Palestinian and pro-Zionist voting record at the United Nations and increased foreign aid to the Palestinians by an impressive amount. But he got into a stoush with Israel after their spy agency Mossad was found to have, for the second time, forged Australian passports in order to assassinate Palestinians abroad.

Rudd sacked the diplomat and reportedly made the powerful AIJAC unhappy. He went to a dinner with Leibler, who threatened him with Gillard’s prospects as a replacement. Later, she replaced him. (Rudd has always been clear that he is not intending to disseminate anti-Semitic power conspiracies about Jewish lobbyists like Leibler — rather, he says he is speaking to the very real power of the pro-Israeli lobby to stifle criticism of Israel’s record.)

So, our Labor governments over the course of the Gaza blockade have been stifled or have actively run cover for Israeli atrocities committed against Palestinians at the time.

That’s reaffirmed by this foreign affairs research paper:

‘Despite the areas of (largely rhetorical) change, however, in broad terms the Rudd and Gillard Governments maintained the Howard Government’s policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.’

John Howard, as abovementioned, consistently voted against Palestinian interests of liberty and statehood at the United Nations. The Liberal prime ministerships over the blockade are characterised by the zealous and irrational upholding of Zionist and anti-Palestinian sentiment, AIJAC-sponsored junkets to Israel to furnish uncritical pro-Israeli sentiment, and an all-round competition to see who can most generously describe their feelings of friendship with Israel.

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“I’m an unapologetic friend of Israel’s,” gushed Howard.

Howard also said in 2012:

“I have always greeted with extraordinary scepticism the criticisms that have been made about the alleged intransigence of the people of Israel and the governments of Israel on this issue.”

Such faith from Little Johnny!

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be the most Right-wing and provocatively anti-Palestinian Prime Minister in Israel’s history, but Malcolm Turnbull eagerly hosted him in 2017, and then flew over to Israel to celebrate occupation with his mate.

In Israel, Turnbull reflected on how we apparently share an enemy in “militant Islamist terrorism” and said in an opinion piece:

‘My Government will not support one-sided resolutions criticising Israel of the kind recently adopted by the UN Security Council and we deplore the boycott campaigns designed to delegitimise the Jewish state.’

The most slavish obsessives with Israel were Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott, both Christian fundamentalists who attend churches where pro-Zionist sentiment is common.

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Squealed Morrison:

“Israel has no greater friend [than Australia] anywhere in the world. We will be always consistent about that.”

Abbott gushed of our “unswerving support for Israel”. If I were to copy and paste all their fawning statements about friendship this would be a book, not a novel. They cut aid to Palestinians, returned to Howard’s era of voting against Palestinian interests at the UN and Morrison even recognised the capital of Israel as Jerusalem.

When Amnesty asked Morrison for comment on a damning 280-page report accusing Israel of apartheid policy against Palestinians, his response was: “No country is perfect.”

We don’t miss him.

To anyone who has long followed the Israeli annexation of Gaza and the West Bank, and their political imprisonment of Palestinians, this sense of deep disillusionment with power is familiar. We long ago learned to recognise the spin, cowardice and tip-toeing of those in power in the West. In politics and in media, our “Left” barely manages to speak diplomatically enough to achieve precisely nothing for Palestinians, while the political Right grows ever more bloodthirsty for the end of Palestine.

Our “pendulum swing” is to go from being abject cowards, over to baying for Arab blood and then back to “Left” cowardice again.

This is a lesson: don’t expect salvation for Palestinians to come from our leaders applying international pressure on Israel. It won’t.

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Tom Tanuki is a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist. Tom does weekly videos on YouTube commenting on the Australian political fringe. You can follow Tom on Twitter @tom_tanuki.