Albo’s envoys will entrench religious and political divisions for generations
Jul 17, 2024
Albanese’s advisers must have been smoking something when they decided that Australia should have envoys against antisemitism and Islamophobia.
The British elections showed the impact of disenchantment over Gaza among Muslim voters.
Sir Keir Starmer, the new British Labour prime minister is totally on the side of Israel, and various Muslim lobbies made it clear that much as they welcomed the demise of Tory governments, they had few hopes over a Labor landslide. In general terms, the higher the Muslim proportion of the population in an electorate, the more likely that the Labor candidate did not win, or scraped in with only a thin majority compared with before. It involved some tactical voting, but not the creation of a confessional Muslim Party or of a coordinated national campaign.
Given the landslide, it will not cause Starmer direct problems of governing, but serves as a reminder that policy making must respect domestic political opinion as well as his perception of the significance and importance of reflex alliance with the US.
Albanese’s advisers must have been smoking something when they decided that Australia should have envoys against antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Envoys for it, we can expect. It is true that other nations have done something similar, but each of these countries has different domestic circumstances, including proportionate populations.
It has been said that there has been a massive increase in antisemitic behaviour since the events of October 7 and the Israeli attack on Gaza. That may be true, but the quantification of this will always be a matter for argument.
The louder and more significant Israeli lobbies, including the one from which the envoy on antisemitism comes, include among their complaints of anti-semitic behaviour anything which is critical of the political or the military actions of Israel, or of the Zionist movement.
It may be true that critical references to Israel or Zionism may indicate more fundamental hostility to Jewish people or the Jewish religion, but whether that is so is not to be determined as a matter for deconstruction, semiotics, or divination by agents and advocates of the cause of the state or the Zionist dream.
Even the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, asked if criticism of Israel or anti-Zionism were antisemitic, suggested that it could be if one criticised either with more fervour than other states or movements. I am certainly doing that right now because I think that the response of Israel to October 7 has been so barbaric and ferocious as to put into question again whether Israel has ever abided by the conditions under which it was granted its national status.
I have always considered that firing into civilian populations, or hospitals or schools on the basis that fighters might be inside them is a war crime. Nothing about the barbarism of October 7 excuses the indiscriminate orgy of massacre that has followed it.
I expect that the ultimate effect of the envoys in Australia will be that two existing players in Middle Eastern politics will have state-sponsored positions with which to propagandise the respective causes of Israel and Palestine, including with the capacity to ascribe all actions on the other side to religious prejudice.
I very much doubt that it will lead to any outbreak of social cohesion, even in Alice Springs.
John Waterford AM, better known as Jack Waterford, is an Australian journalist and commentator.
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