Labor’s shifting views on Gaza leave a trail of mixed messages and abandoned tactics

Since 2023, Australia’s governing class has had to deal with the problem of what to do in response to the Netanyahu government’s increasingly outrageous actions against Palestinians.

While politicians and the media were happy to strongly denounce the depraved outrages of Hamas on October 7, criticising Israel is something most of them are reluctant to do, both because of strong support for Israel and out of fear of being denounced as antisemitic and attacked by influential and well-organised lobbyists for Israel.

But as it has become clearer that Benjamin Netanyahu is engaged in genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank — a program that accelerated dramatically in 2023, long before October 7 — in pursuit of his long-term aim of preventing a Palestinian state, politicians have had to pivot in how they respond.

That recalibration of tactics, and talking points, has accelerated in the face of clear evidence of deliberate mass starvation of Gazans and the rapidly expanding Israeli colonisation of the West Bank, prompting a shift in electoral mood that drove at least 100,000 people onto Sydney streets on the weekend, and in federal MPs, especially within Labor.

Anthony Albanese and his government have always regarded the issue as an unwanted distraction from domestic politics. His government carefully navigated the fallout from the Israeli Defense Forces’ execution of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom by officially accepting the IDF claim of her killing as an unfortunate accident, despite clear evidence proving otherwise. The “fog of war/most moral army in the world” narrative has been a key element in justifying non-criticism of Israel, even when civilians have been wantonly slaughtered.

And while the Greens attacked Labor from the left for being insufficiently pro-Palestine, and the Coalition from the right for being insufficiently pro-Israel, Albanese made a virtue of his relatively insipid response — and eventually turned it into a weapon. Anyone expressing dissatisfaction with the government’s position was, Labor argued, guilty of attempting to import a foreign conflict to Australia.

In its backgrounding of the media, both in relation to criticism by the Greens and by then Labor senator Fatima Payman, the government portrayed criticism as extremist, “divisive” and undermining of Australia’s social cohesion.

This was part of a broader Labor narrative, which the mainstream media helped disseminate: that there was something fundamentally illegitimate, and perhaps un-Australian, about being angry about a conflict in another country, while the “criticism of Israel is antisemitism” trope always lurked in the background.

A hardened and ultimately overcooked version of this was on display from NSW Labor. The aggressively pro-Israel Premier Chris Minns attacked his own MPs for criticising Israel, and waged a steady war against pro-Palestine protests, expanding hate speech laws and police powers to deal with them. But he then overplayed his hand by wildly hyping what he claimed was a threat of antisemitic terrorism, which proved to be a fabricated threat. What Minns knew about the fabrication and when he knew it remains unresolved. And it is unlikely that Albanese is grateful to Minns for dragging him into it as well.

Despite the Dural caravan blunder by Minns, Albanese’s tactics were, Labor thought, vindicated by the May 3 election, in which Labor triumphed over both the Greens and the pro-Israel Coalition. (The latter continues to deny Israel has any responsibility for mass starvation in Gaza. According to the party, either there is no starvation in Gaza — the formal Israeli position — or if there is, it’s the fault of Hamas.)

From the government’s point of view, its relative insouciance to atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank resonated with the electorate.

But as the evidence grew of genocide, ethnic cleansing and violations of international law, and the international mood began to shift, Albanese had to move as well. Initially the shift was to a position of condemnation of the situation in Gaza and the West Bank, and occasionally even of Israel, but with a resignation that the government could do nothing about it. It had little influence in the Middle East, and it had done what little it could do: sanction the most egregiously racist Israeli ministers and call for a ceasefire. Albanese couldn’t even implement his own party policy of recognition of a Palestinian state because such an act had to be linked to a peace process.

But with Australians clearly outraged by pictures from Gaza (the mainstream media is still slowly catching up with their international counterparts in covering the atrocities) and key international allies leaving Australia behind, Labor has had to shift again.

In the wake of the weekend protest, Minns dropped his pro-Israel act and began making noises of concern and sympathy for those angered by the unfolding genocide. In Canberra, the prime minister acknowledged the tens of thousands marching across Sydney Harbour Bridge: “It is not surprising so many Australians have been affected in order to want to show their concern at people being deprived of food and water and essential services. Demonstration and democracy; it is important people be able to express themselves.”

The government has moved from saying nothing can be done to saying nothing can be done quite yet: on recognition of a Palestinian state, it’s now a question of “when, not if”. But precisely what events have to occur for the government to fulfil its own policy is, as Albanese’s appearance on 7.30 last week illustrated, entirely unclear.

Today, Penny Wong made a point that French President Emmanuel Macron made weeks ago when he kickstarted the current push towards recognition of Palestine: “There is a risk there will be no Palestine left to recognise if the international community don’t move to create that pathway to a two-state solution.”

There’s nothing novel about this point; observers have been making it for well over a decade in response to Israel’s relentless expansion of its colonies in the West Bank. But it’s yet another shift by a government being reluctantly dragged to dealing with atrocities that it would prefer everyone stop complaining about.