Two days after hundreds of thousands of Australians joined nationwide protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza, the Albanese Government abruptly announced that it would expel Iranian diplomats.

Officials said Tehran had orchestrated antisemitic “attacks” in Sydney and Melbourne months earlier, and that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would soon be listed as a terrorist organisation.

Why not expel Israel?

Just three days before the announcement, the United Nations confirmed that famine had officially taken hold in Gaza City. Human Rights experts agree: it is man-made. Since March 2025, Israel has imposed a total blockade, starving the population and blocking UN convoys. In their place, aid has been funnelled through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an US-Israeli initiative widely criticised as a means of controlling aid access while tightening Israel’s grip over the territory.

At the same time, the Israeli Government formalised plans to seize Gaza City and forcibly displace its remaining residents. Independent research now estimates that more than 100,000 Palestinians have been killed in nearly two years of bombardment, with 80% of those deaths civilian, the majority children. These acts meet legal thresholds of war crimes and genocide.

Yet, while evidence of Israeli atrocities accumulates daily, Canberra has not considered expelling Israeli diplomats. Instead, attention has been redirected towards Iran over what ASIO calls “ credible evidence”. Yet no documentation has been released linking Tehran to the alleged arson attacks in Australia.

That selectivity becomes starker still when set against Australia’s legal obligations under international law. The government has now repeatedly called out Israel’s breaches of international law, but is not doing anything about it, claiming that “ Australia is not a central player”. As a party to the Genocide Convention, Australia is legally bound to prevent genocide beyond rhetorical condemnation. The Arms Trade Treaty prohibits transferring weapons when there is a clear risk they will be used in war crimes. Yet, Declassified Australia revealed Australian-made parts for F-35 fighter jets are being exported to Israel, despite official denials. These components are essential to Israel’s bombing of Gaza. This is not neutrality; it is complicity.

If serious about security, the government would also investigate Australians fighting with Israel’s military in Gaza and the occupied territories. Domestic law allows prosecution for war crimes committed in such contexts. Yet the Department of Foreign Affairs refuses to track Australians in the IDF and has obstructed information requests from the Australian Centre for International Justice. Canberra shields Australians potentially implicated in international crimes while invoking terrorism elsewhere.

Meanwhile, more than 100,000 Australians protested nationwide demanding the government act to prevent genocide – yet Canberra looked away.

Canberra is following the script

Framing Iran as a threat while exempting Israel illustrates how the terrorism label functions as a flexible instrument of power rather than an objective descriptor of violence. Critical scholarship — from Chomsky to Richard Jackson — has shown the term is wielded selectively: resistance groups opposing Western or Israeli power are branded “terrorists,” while state violence by allies is reframed as “defence.” The result is consistent: Israel is shielded from accountability while its adversaries are criminalised.

This selective labelling manufactures public consent for extraordinary state violence. Its elasticity is evident in Britain’s recent decision to designate Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, effectively criminalising civil disobedience to protect Israel’s military supply chain.

The US branded the IRGC a foreign terrorist organisation in 2019 during Donald Trump’s first presidency. Canada followed in 2024, the EU and UK are signalling the same. Australia, it seems, has now been nudged into alignment, coinciding with peak domestic outrage over Gaza and following Israel’s unprovoked 12-day war on Iran, backed by Washington. Indeed, Canberra’s alignment with US and Israeli interests is neither new nor incidental, but habitual.

Fabrications are central to this script. Australian intelligence was complicit in the “ thin” intelligence that justified the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Israel, too, has repeatedly relied on lies and manufactured threats to advance its wars and justify the mass killing of Palestinians. As Chris Hedges argues, Israel’s destruction of Gaza rests on systematic lies.

The timing is especially telling: the expulsion was only a week after Benjamin Netanyahu sent a stern letter to Albanese demanding he act on alleged antisemitic incidents by 23 September, a remarkable intrusion that underscored Israel’s ability to set deadlines for Australian leaders. When Canberra complied, Israeli officials quickly claimed credit, boasting the move reflected its “close dialogue” with Canberra. While Australian politicians dismissed this as “ nonsense", the sequence of events tells a different story. Set against the absence of any publicly released evidence tying Tehran to the alleged arson attacks, the expulsion looks less like an independent security judgment and more like alignment with an ally’s preferences.

This capitulation aligns with Australia’s own record of domestic fabrications. The so-called “ antisemitic terror plot” of 2023, relentlessly amplified by politicians and media, collapsed under scrutiny, but still produced permanent hate crime laws. When Albanese now invokes Iranian-backed “antisemitic attacks” in Australia without providing a shred of evidence, he is reproducing this same pattern of baseless security claims used to justify draconian laws or foreign policy alignment.

Australia’s decision to expel Iranian diplomats is not an isolated act but the latest expression of a coherent and deeper pattern of selectively delegitimising certain groups to undermine sovereignty, bypass laws and control the public discourse to ensure the strategic priorities of empire are upheld. By expelling Iran’s envoy over unsubstantiated allegations while ignoring Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza, the Albanese Government shows Australian policy is not neutral, not independent, and not primarily about safeguarding its people.

It is about reproducing a hierarchy where Israeli security is privileged, Palestinian lives are disposable and Australia acts as a junior partner enforcing imperial rules. Until Canberra confronts this reality, it will remain complicit, not only in lies and fabrications but in the crimes it chooses to ignore.

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