Remember that declaration? It was a clear assertion from the Australian Government that the Israeli military response to the terrorist attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023 must have civilised limits.

At that time, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong gave an interview to the ABC as Israel’s war on the people of Gaza unfolded. She emphasised the primacy of international humanitarian law and the principles “that need to be followed by Israel”. She rightly stressed the distinction between combatants and civilians and the requirement for the proportional use of force. The killing of children “has to end”, she said in November 2023.

The carpet bombing and the deliberate starvation of the people of Gaza has now come to mainstream media attention, horrifying many Australians previously unmindful of Israel’s war of genocide. This 2025 holocaust will not be forgotten. The history of the occupation of Palestine aside, the case of the industrial scale murder of innocent Palestinians by the Israeli Defence Force demands explicit scrutiny. It is getting attention now because the world has finally gone cold on the shameless political doublespeak of Israel’s “allies”, including Australia.

Penny Wong often uses high-minded cautionary phrases and language that sounds principled. She is expert at constructing reassuring talking points – usually a mixture of moral rectitude and savvy rhetoric to embed her message in the political mainstream. Since the war on Gaza began, she has repeated soothing mantras about “restraint”, rather than responding authentically to mounting disgust about the ghastly mass murder conducted by the IDF. Her words have served to mask Australia’s complicity. Her party, of which I am a member, is profoundly restive. She is known to suppress use of the terms “apartheid” and “genocide” in relation to the state of Israel. 

Last month, Wong was less assured answering questions at a meeting of the South Australian Labor Friends of Palestine. On a cold winter night in Adelaide, after telling her audience she was under pressure from all sides over the war in Gaza, she declared she was with us to talk and answer questions. I opened proceedings and asked her the following:

“Minister, yesterday Mr James Elder from UNICEF described eye-witness accounts of attacks on the US/Israeli run aid distribution sites in Gaza. He described Israeli forces opening fire on civilians desperate for food. He also spoke about hospitals overwhelmed with children, women and old men suffering bullet and shrapnel wounds. The death toll for those seeking food is now in the many hundreds. 

“Can you help us understand why the Australian Government is not taking a stronger line on Israel’s aggressive war against Palestinian civilians?”

Wong took my question, and a second from the floor on the deliberate blocking of food aid, “on notice”. Later in the meeting, she returned to my question with a lame response about signing a statement with 23 other foreign ministers opposing the Israel/US “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” aid distribution effort. She did not respond to the obvious point about the daily killings of Palestinian civilians seeking food. As a decent woman with a known abhorrence of violence, I am inclined to believe she has chosen to rationalise the barbarity of slaughter in Gaza with her own contorted politics of disassociation. In short, she functions politically by denying the human reality of the situation. I later found, on her website, the May 2025 statement she referred to. It declared clearly that “humanitarian principles matter for every conflict around the world and should be applied consistently in every war zone”. Nice, meaningless words. 

Last week, the group of concerned Western foreign ministers grew to 28 in number, including Britain, France, Canada, Japan and New Zealand. In the face of mushrooming pro-Palestine and anti-Israel protests in every signatory country, the foreign ministers have elevated their rhetoric to insist that “the war in Gaza must end now”. After French President Macron announced his country would recognise the state of Palestine, British Prime Minister Starmer offered an angry condemnation of Israeli violence against civilians as “indefensible”.

Prime Minister Albanese followed with his own statement that “Israel’s denial of aid and the killing of civilians, including children, seeking access to water and food cannot be defended or ignored”. He called on Israel to immediately comply with its obligations under international law. Wong made that same call in 2023. It was then, and is now, too little too late and suggests a belated call to mollify Israel’s critics. It appears to be an attempt to look respectable by retrofitting statements of outrage and principle to the government’s politics of complicity. As António Guterres, the fearless secretary-general of the United Nations, put it bluntly last week: “Words don’t feed hungry children.”

The US, Israel’s accomplice in murder, did not sign the cautious 28-nation statement. Germany too declined, presumably unable to overcome its historical Nazi guilt to condemn the barbarism in Gaza for what it is. As our parliament convened in Canberra, the Liberal Opposition called the statement “an attack on Israel” and took their cue from the Murdoch media, shrieking that “blame for the nightmare lies squarely with the Hamas terrorists”. Netanyahu’s slick worldwide disinformation machine has dismissed the publicity about famine as “Hamas propaganda”. Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yariv Levin reacted to France’s commitment to recognise a Palestine state by immediately saying Israel’s response must be to annex the West Bank. And so the Israeli Knesset has now voted.

It is instructive to interrogate the nature of the so-called “war”. Despite the Israeli ban on journalists accessing Gaza, we have many eyewitness reports of the escalating orgy of killing and destruction by the IDF. Schools, hospitals, refugee camps, housing and infrastructure, mosques and Christian churches — even declared “safe zones” — have all been targeted. Only the attack on Christian churches has raised political concerns in the US. More latterly, United Nations aid stations, human rights and care organisations based in Gaza have been bombed and shelled. There have been only scattered reports since early 2024 of actual combat between Hamas militants and IDF forces. Supported by artillery from tanks and fire from armoured personnel carriers in Gaza’s residential areas, most of the killings result from cowardly attacks by the Israeli Air Force. The IAF is massive. It has an active fleet of 285 frontline combat, strike, stealth and multirole F-15, F-16 and F-35 warplanes, backed up by 48 AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, hundreds of assault drones and dozens of surveillance and support aircraft.

These warplanes give the Israelis total and uncontested control of the airspace over Gaza. They operate with impunity. Hamas has no anti-aircraft guns or SAM missiles to defend against the air attacks. The IAF daily bombs, strafes and launches guided missiles on the population below from these sophisticated warplanes, some of them built with components made in the UK and Australia. Last week, witnesses in Gaza described massive night airstrikes in Deir al-Balah, the last remaining area of Gaza that has not suffered significant war damage and which is packed with Gazans displaced from elsewhere in Palestine. IDF tanks supported the airstrikes, pummelling houses and mosques and killing and wounding dozens of civilians caught in the crossfire. Israeli tanks have been reported firing on tents housing displaced people at the al-Shati refugee camp in western Gaza city.

A report from Türkiye in May estimated that Israel has dropped 100,000 tonnes of explosives on the Gaza Strip since launching its attacks in October 2023. Israel’s bombardment has now led to more than 62,000 Palestinian deaths or disappearances, including more than 10,000 still trapped under rubble. The Israeli bombing campaign has used mostly American-made bombs. Investigative reports by The New York Times and CNN have shown that American MK-84 2000 pound bombs have been responsible to some of the deadliest attacks against Gaza civilians. We know that by October 2024, Israel said it had bombed 40,000 locations in the tiny Gaza Strip. A January 2025 analysis in the English medical journal _The Lancet c_oncluded that official figures significantly under-report mortality. Of the total casualties, the analysis estimated that 59.1% were women, children and the elderly. The UN estimates that approximately 92% of all residential buildings in Gaza — about 436,000 homes — have been damaged or destroyed since the start of the conflict. This is how Israel “defends” itself.

While the genocide of the Palestinian people accelerates and US President Trump greenlights Israel to “finish the job”, Australians are being told that the main issue with the conflict is antisemitism at home. Fortunately, the release of Jillian Segal’s report in July has now been exposed for the duplicity its scant 13 pages conceals. Instead of promoting social cohesion, Segal has instead manufactured proposals designed to shut down legitimate criticism of Israel’s war crimes. The Australian Government has questions to answer about the credibility of the report and the apparent lack of due diligence in appointing her to the role of antisemitism envoy. 

Segal has form. In November 2023, just nine months before she was appointed as envoy, she co-signed a statement condemning Wong and the Labor Party for calling for Israel to “cease the attacking of hospitals”, and its support for a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire. She represents the worst of Australia’s pro-war Zionist lobby. There is apparently some truth to Wong’s claim that she is under pressure from all sides on Gaza. 

But from the dismayed Labor Party membership, kudos to former Labor foreign affairs minister Bob Carr. He spoke out forcefully last week calling on the federal government to sanction the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and move quickly to recognise Palestinian statehood without waiting for Britain to do it first. He says it would send a message to Asia “that we are turned inside out with disgust by what appears the deliberate starvation of Gaza”. Carr said he believes the Labor party rank-and-file membership are “virtually unanimous on this”. He is right. Former minister Ed Husic told the ABC that Australia should recognise Palestinian statehood immediately. “Given our party has said we want to do this, it seems right that the time is now for us to step forward and say we will recognise the state of Palestine,” he said. Former Labor ministers Gareth Evans, Doug Cameron and Margaret Reynolds have long been urging Australia to take more action to stop the war and support the just cause of the Palestinian people. 

Guardian Australia has reported on growing outrage in Labor’s membership about the Gaza crisis. My own grouping, Labor Friends of Palestine, has written a motion, which has been adopted by 80 local ALP branches, calling for Australia to sanction the Israeli Government. “Labor members fought long and hard through the party’s democratic structures to establish in 2018 recognition as official policy that was to be delivered by the next Labor government,” spokesperson Peter Moss said. “We call on the Australian Government to implement offical platform policy and immediately and unconditionally recognise a Palestinian state on the pre-4 June 1967 borders. There has never been a more urgent time to assert the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, dignity, safety, and equal rights.”

Labor colleagues say a similar motion may be debated at the Victorian state conference in August. Albanese would be well advised to take heed and give meaningful effect to the justice of the Palestinian cause. He should know that his recent statement that he is open to eventually recognising a Palestinian state, “if there were appropriate guarantees about the viability of such a state”, will not be an acceptable proviso to frustrate Labor policy. He should also remember that Wong last year said Australia could recognise Palestine as “step along the way in the peace process, rather than at the endpoint”. The 2023 Platform calls for the Australian Government to “recognise Palestine as a state”, citing the issue an “important priority”. It’s time to drop the doublespeak and act in the cause of humanity and justice.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.