Australia’s Israel Policy at the Crossroads: How much worse can it get before Australia takes a principled stand?
Nov 23, 2024
The horrific situation in the Middle East has landed Foreign Minister Penny Wong with a difficult and frustrating job. She is wedged between a so-far unacknowledged obligation to honour Australia’s legal commitments to condemn Israeli genocide and apartheid on the one hand, and on the other, a vociferous campaign by local Zionists and their supporters to back Israel’s military actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.
As a result Wong’s public statements sound clichéd and pusillanimous. She says the situation in Gaza is ‘unacceptable’, that Israel must stop killing innocent civilians, and must end its occupation of the West Bank and settler violence; there must be a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon and a path back to a just and lasting peace. Australia ‘supports’ Palestinian rights to self-determination, but not those of Hamas terrorists, and Palestine must not threaten Israel’s security. The Albanese government wants to see a reformed Palestinian government, one without Hamas. Israel has a right to defend itself, Wong repeats, without adding that the Palestinians should have the same right.
Australia officially supports a two-state solution, to which neither Israelis nor Palestinians will agree. Israel will not, with its goal of seizing Eretz Israel now in sight. And the Palestinians will continue to defy Israel’s occupation. Gaza will continue to be an ‘incubator for armed resistance‘, Palestinian negotiator Ahmad Samih Khalidi told the ABC. ‘It’s a natural reaction to any long-term Israeli military presence’.
Wong moved another inch forward at the United Nations on 15 November when Australia voted to recognise the ‘permanent sovereignty’ of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources –joining 159 states in favour. The seven against included the US, Canada and Israel, with eleven abstentions. This end a 20-year streak of Australia voting No or abstaining on the issue. The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) protested against the new Australian position.
Meanwhile, Wong has neither supported the global consensus to recognise Palestinian statehood – which is established ALP policy – nor placed an embargo on Australian exports to Israel. These include weapons or weapon components fabricated here, such as parts for F-35 fighter jets. Nor has anything been announced about recalling Australian military personnel from Israel, or restricting further deployments.Australian politicians’ ‘fact-finding’ trips to Israel, usually paid for by the Israel government, have not been suspended
Wong is making as many principled gestures as she can without going as far as imposing the sanctions or embargoes on Israel required by the International Court of Justice, which depends on member states to enforce its recommendations.
Contrast Wong’s pronouncements with those of Chris Sidoti, former Australian Law Reform Commissioner and current member of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
In its first report to the UN Human Rights Commission on 19 June 2024, Sidoti’s group affirmed that both Hamas and Israel had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Two leaders of Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Galant, and three Hamas leaders were cited by the International Criminal Court for war crimes requiring their arrest by member states. Netanyahu has since visited Washington without being detained. Two of the Hamas leaders have now been killed.
Despite the ICC’s attempt to balance the blame, Israel’s actions are disproportionally much greater and cover a wider spectrum against civilians than anything Hamas is capable of. Seven thousand pieces of evidence tendered to the International Courts included starvation as a method of warfare against civilians, their widespread murder, forcible transfer, sexual violence and torture, and gender persecution of men and boys.
In a separate report on 11 September 2024, Sidoti’s Commission described the treatment of detainees by Israel and attacks by the Israel Defence Force on medical facilities and personnel in Gaza from 7 October 2023 to August 2024.
At a press conference in New York on 31 October 2024, Sidoti confined himself to giving only one set of statistics about the horrific situation in Gaza and Israel, and that related to children. In the last 13 months 38 Israeli children had been killed in fighting in Israel, compared to 13,319 Palestinian children killed in Gaza, and 165 on the West Bank. ‘Kids’, he said, ‘are not terrorists’. With no end in sight to the hostilities, which were in fact spreading into Lebanon and Syria, none of four recent Security Council resolutions, nor numerous General Assembly Resolutions have resulted in a single child not being killed.
Israel’s leaders, past and present, have asserted their nation’s intention to take all the Palestinians’ territories for themselves, either by forcibly removing people whose ancestors have lived there for centuries, or by killing them. IDF General Giora Eiland has lately been a proponent in Israel of ‘The Generals Plan’ for the defeat of Hamas in Northern Gaza.
Eiland told the ABC he can save the lives of all the civilians there, and force the combatants either to surrender or to die. He can do this by encircling a third of Gaza, for about week. Civilians in the north will be ‘encouraged’ to leave, through two ‘safe’ corridors, before cutting off all food, water and energy supplies, as little as they are. Anyone left behind, including civilians, will be treated as an enemy combatant.
The General claims his plan doesn’t breach international law, despite conventions which say starvation and displacement cannot be used as weapons of war. Palestinians who leave can return home, he claims: but only if the Israeli hostages are returned.
In fact, Eiland’s plan for Northern Gaza was in action from the start. There and in the south, Palestinians were repeatedly ‘encouraged to leave’ their homes, shelters, and camps, by being fired at and bombed. The places to which they fled were then hit. The result is misery, terror, deprivation, injury and death from one end of Gaza to the other. Now they are accused of raiding the few aid trucks that reach Gaza, and shot by the IDF for doing so.
How much worse can it get before Australia takes a principled stand in support of Sidoti? The question is on our collective conscience.
Richard Broinowski AO is a former Australian diplomat, general manager of Radio Australia and adjunct professor at the Universities of Canberra and Sydney. He has published eight books, the latest being an expansion of his 2003 book Fact or Fission – the truth about Australia’ nuclear ambitions. The later edition includes extra chapters on Australia’s intention to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. (Scribe 2022).
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