
For most of the post-war years, there was bipartisan support for Israel in Australia, with the ALP especially proud of H.V. Evatt’s role in the establishment of the Jewish state at the United Nations. And there has always been an influential pro-Israel faction within the party. The Liberals were never hostile to Israel but, for most of this period, they were not the natural home for Australian Zionists.
It wasn’t that either major party was unaware of the dispossession of the Palestinians or the periodic bouts of state terror inflicted upon them by the Israel Defence Force. Nor were they ignorant about Israel’s territorial expansions into the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Like the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, they preferred silence whenever possible to avoid offending the Israeli Government and its local supporters.
In most instances, neither party strayed far from this minimalist strategy: incantations expressed “concern about the settlements and violence” and called for a two-state solution, but always privileged Israel’s security above everything else. Minimalist responses were bipartisan, and donations from a small, but well-resourced lobby helped to grease the electoral wheels of both parties to ensure policy continuity.
There were true believers in the ALP and the Liberal Party who didn’t need the junkets which the local Israel lobby used to reinforce the “small and vulnerable Israel in a hostile neighbourhood” narrative. Political undecideds and influential journalists were the real targets of this PR campaign, and most were — and remain — only too happy to be duchessed around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem at the lobby’s expense. The quid pro quo was favourable newspaper articles and sympathetic speeches in Parliament.
There were occasionally hiccups when silence wasn’t going to suffice.
In 2004, responding to the construction of the separation-apartheid wall in Jerusalem, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said he “would not want the barrier to become a de facto border and I have urged the Israeli Government to consider moving the barrier closer to the 1967 line”. This followed his earlier statement at the National Press Club that “we support the Green Line being the border, the pre-1967 border, as the national border”. No member of the Parliamentary Liberal Party would dare say this today.
In 2010, Mossad agents used forged Australian passports to assassinate Hamas arms dealer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room. According to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, this was not the first time Israel had stolen the identities of Australian joint nationals. In 2003 Mossad also forged Australian passports for its nefarious activities, although the Howard Government declined to make the matter public for fear of upsetting influential members of the local Israel lobby. For his troubles, Rudd was berated by Mark Leibler and other “Jewish community leaders” for airing Israel’s dirty linen in public, shortly before he was deposed by Julia Gillard, a more committed Zionist.
In October 2018, the LNP Government led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that it would consider following the United States and move the Australian Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem.
Morrison’s announcement was more than an attempt to court the Jewish vote during a by-election while pleasing the Trump and Netanyahu administrations which were internationally isolated on the issue. It was a breach of international law (UNGA Resolution 181) and prejudged a key plank of final status negotiations, which also include the right of return for refugees and the establishment of internationally-recognised borders.
Ultimately Morrison used the pretext of an internal review to backdown, recognising West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but declining to shift the Australian Embassy until a final status agreement had been achieved. To the concern of the Israeli Government and its lobbyists, Morrison forecast his intention to recognise East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, a move designed to quell growing anger in the Muslim world. For the political elite in Israel, which regards Jerusalem as the “undivided and eternal capital of the Jewish people”, Morrison’s flip-flopping took them from elation to confusion in only a few short days.
The growing electoral significance of Muslims in Western Sydney has more recently tempered the ALP’s strident support for Israel, though for months after Israel’s brutal response to the attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023, the Albanese Government defaulted to “Israel’s right to self-defence” as political cover for the growing slaughter.
Soon the massacres of women and children could no longer be either hidden from the public by a compliant media, nor justified in terms of Israel’s self-defence. Foreign Minister Penny Wong stuck with Washington’s unconditional support for the slaughter until calls for an immediate ceasefire could no longer be politically resisted. With the US and the LNP still opposed, Canberra broke ranks with Washington and grouped itself with New Zealand, Canada and the UK to avoid accusations that they had unilaterally abandoned support for Israel’s security. This policy shift away from Biden’s enthusiastic support for the Gaza genocide was then made easier by Trump’s re-election in November.
As the Dutton-led opposition insisted that Australia must always follow the lead of the United States on Middle East policy, the narrative also shifted to the domestic threat of antisemitism when it was no longer tenable for either Wong or Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to deny that Israel was perpetrating heinous crimes in Gaza on a scale described as plausibly genocidal by the International Court of Justice.
Israel’s backers, especially in the Murdoch media, were losing control of the narrative and the minimalist strategy was fracturing in two ways: bipartisanship collapsed, and the wider public was sourcing information about the slaughter from alternative media sources: they were increasingly horrified.
The ALP base was angry and split. Meanwhile, the LNP wrapped themselves in the Israeli flag, blaming the government for an increase in antisemitic graffiti, public abuse and one instance of arson where the culprits have yet to be apprehended, nor their motives established. In an extraordinary intervention, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed on X that the Australian Government’s support for a UN resolution calling for an end to Israel’s occupation of Gaza was to blame for the arson attack on a Melbourne synagogue: he called Australia’s vote “scandalous” and an “extreme anti-Israeli position”.
Despite Netanyahu’s intervention, any link between the increase in antisemitic “attacks” and public horror at Israel’s destruction of Gaza was explicitly denied by Jewish community “leaders” such as former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. This was an unconvincing argument given the rise in antisemitism around the world could be directly traced against Israel’s disproportionate slaughter of Palestinians, including many in the West Bank where Hamas’s presence was all but non-existent.
The minimalist strategy was no longer plausible for either party. The ALP was under increasing pressure to shift away from its uncritical support for Israel, and the LNP wanted to exploit any such movement for political advantage. Reflecting judgments and opinions from the ICC and the ICJ, Australia’s votes at the UN began to shift, in some instances rejoining the world consensus and leaving Israel and the United States globally isolated. This created near hysteria in the Murdoch media, and its political wing, the LNP.
To illustrate how far positions have changed, the Albanese Government came under pressure from the LNP to declare that it would not arrest Netanyahu if he visited Australia, following the issuing of a warrant by the International Criminal Court. So far it has declined to do so, despite threats from US Senator Lindsay Graham that Washington will sanction America’s allies if they sought to enforce the Court’s arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Ironically, it was the conservative Howard Government which in 2002 ratified the Rome Statute, committing Australia to the jurisdiction of the ICC.
Diplomatic silences and minimalist responses were no longer available to the Albanese Government given Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. An increasingly well-informed public made the old strategy untenable. It continues to hedge its bets (appointing a special envoy to combat antisemitism), but will please few for doing so, especially given her opposition to pro-Palestine marches and remarks conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism. It will acknowledge Palestine’s right to self-determination at the UN, but recoil from implementing its own policy of recognising Palestine as an independent state. Contradictions and confusions of this kind will continue.
Meanwhile the government will be assailed on the left for soft-peddling on Israel’s genocide, sending Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to Israel to mend bridges with accused war criminals, and selectively criticising Vladimir Putin’s incursions into Ukraine. On the right, it will be attacked for failing to crack down on antisemitism (ie banning pro-Palestine marches), abandoning our “democratic friend” in its darkest hour, and parting company with our great and powerful ally across the Pacific.
It is a small mercy that in Australia, until now, we have been spared the claim commonly projected by Israel to Europe and the United States, that Gaza, Lebanon and now Syria and Yemen are battlefields in the great war for Western civilisation. As Iran comes into focus, however, this call to arms may appear on our horizon soon enough.