The writer is in Australia
THE re-election of the Albanese government, with a dramatically increased majority, has only strengthened the Australian government’s alignment with those waging war on the West.
Predictably, Israel’s pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear programme prompted Foreign Minister Penny Wong not to express solidarity but to call on both Iran and Israel to exercise ‘restraint’ and ‘refrain from actions and rhetoric that will further exacerbate tensions’. Israel’s Ambassador to Australia, Amir Maimon, correctly described her comment as naive, pointing out that ‘Iran isn’t hiding its intent . . . it’s building the weapons to fulfil it . . . Yet some still urge diplomacy, as if words can stop warheads.’
‘As if words can stop warheads’ sums up Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s complacent attitude to Australia’s defence, arrogantly snubbing the request of our chief ally, the United States – on whom we shamelessly freeload – to increase our defence spending, claiming that ‘Australia should decide what we spend on Australia’s defence’.
That’s not good enough when, as former Defence Department deputy secretary Peter Jennings points out, our defence spending is manifestly inadequate given the strategic threats we face. Australia has had endless reviews that have determined the capabilities we need, but they aren’t being acquired because the government hasn’t allocated sufficient funds.
As well as hoping words can stop warheads, Albanese seems to hope that not saying words will ward off danger. Why else repeatedly avoid saying that China poses a national security threat, even though it is a cornerstone of our defence analysis? Instead, he warns against oversimplifying a ‘complex set of relationships’ and responses that he deems neither ‘diplomatic’ nor ‘mature’.
As Israel’s Ambassador to Australia said, ‘Israel cannot afford the illusion that existential threats are empty words’ because ‘history has shown what happens when the world ignores regimes that preach hatred, promise annihilation, and are left to build the means to carry it out’. That is why, as he says, ‘Israel has a duty to act, to protect our people.’
Not so the Albanese government, which spent the previous week currying favour with home-grown Hamas fans by issuing sanctions against the Israeli Minister for National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the Israeli Minister for Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, over comments they’d made. The legislation used to issue the sanctions was the initiative of the late Senator Kimberley Kitching and was modelled on America’s Global Magnitsky Act (2016). It was intended to punish extreme human rights violators guilty of torture, extrajudicial killings, corruption and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction when their home governments would not. It was opposed by Senator Penny Wong, who refused to allow Senator Kitching to table it as a private member’s bill, but readily misused it to insult a vibrant democracy.
There is a disgraceful asymmetry in sanctioning democratically elected Israeli ministers for their comments when no sanctions have been placed on Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), despite its long-standing ‘Pay-for-Slay’ policy which provides financial rewards to convicted terrorists and their families, public praise for Hamas’s October 7 massacre by members of Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction, the PA’s ongoing refusal to recognise Israel as a Jewish state or negotiate peace in good faith, or to hold elections for two decades.
For Australia to do this when Israel is fighting for survival against Hamas, a designated terrorist organisation that started the war in Gaza with the October 7 massacre, torturing, raping and murdering thousands of civilians, while Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis are attacking Israel on multiple fronts and Fatah officials cheer from the sidelines is morally repugnant, politically counterproductive, and strategically dangerous.
As US Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it, ‘These sanctions do not advance US-led efforts to achieve a ceasefire, bring all hostages home, and end the war.’ They reward Palestinian intransigence and violence and promote double standards, where democracies are punished harshly while tolerating those who sponsor terrorists.
Only a week earlier, a Jewish dual American-Israeli citizen was banned from visiting Australia to raise money for a new ambulance station built by the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross because he posted a tweet defending the Israeli Defence Forces’ account of a stampede in Gaza, backed up by video evidence, rather than accepting Hamas propaganda, backed up with no evidence, that was parroted by Western media. He was also accused of posting ‘Islamophobic rhetoric’ for a tweet that denounced the role of UN agencies and Qatar in inciting terrorism, argued that Hamas is responsible for the suffering and hunger of people in Gaza, and that far from engaging in genocide, Israel had put its own people at risk to reduce civilian casualties.
The net effect of the barbs launched at Israel by the Albanese government (and the Greens), coupled with official indifference to mobs on campuses and in city centres chanting ‘Gas the Jews’ and repeatedly calling for Israel’s annihilation, has been to make anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism not just acceptable but cool.
In June, Fahad Ali, a casual academic at Sydney University, who co-organised the Opera House mob on October 9, 2023, posted on X, ‘F*** sanctions, I want Zionists executed like we executed Nazis.’ Social media influencer Abbie Chatfield vowed she would never ‘platform a Zionist’ on her podcast, but rather than make her a pariah, Albanese gave her a 90-minute interview in the lead-up to the federal election.
Grace Tame, the 2021 Australian of the Year and until recently a brand ambassador for Nike, used her public profile to accuse supporters of Israel of participating in the ‘legitimisation of Jewish supremacist ethnonationalism’. Tame, a self-professed feminist, has shared a platform with writer Randa Abdel-Fattah, who celebrated the October 7 attacks and said supporters of Israel had ‘no claim or right to cultural safety’. After the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, Tame shared a message from Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd who accused the media of ‘scrambling to reframe the shooting that targeted two Israeli state officials as a random anti-Semitic attack, even though it was . . . a response to the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza’ and said those who called the murders ‘anti-Semitic’ were ‘complicit in this genocide and should be held to account’. What did El-Kurd mean by held to account? As one commentator wryly asked, ‘Put to the sword?’ observing, ‘He certainly wasn’t talking about a complaint to the Press Council.’
Feminist Clementine Ford also shared posts minimising the double murder compared with the ‘genocide’ in Gaza and said: ‘F*** Israel and f*** Zionism, for both would make the Nazis proud.’ According to Ford, Israelis are ‘irredeemable, psychopathic, violent monsters’ and Israel has embodied colonialism, imperialism, white supremacism and Nazism ‘for 76 years’.
The normalisation of anti-Semitism is such that the Australian Catholic University reportedly wants to remove the word ‘Jewish’ from an academic centre that it has discussed hosting to honour Millie Phillips, a Jewish Australian Holocaust survivor, businesswoman, and philanthropist who earmarked money for a Centre for Jewish Thought and History, intended to be a hub for the study of Jewish history and thought and to combat anti-Semitism and promote Jewish pride. The university, however, led by its vice-chancellor, reportedly wants to avoid mentioning Jewishness for fear of reputational risks, donor backlash, ‘the complex political sensitivities surrounding anti-Semitism’, and potential ‘perceptions of bias due to the centre’s focus, donor affiliations, and political protests or media scrutiny’. Phillips’s executor has said that even in Australia ‘many Jews have felt the need to hide their Jewish identity in public’, which the reported attitude of the university does nothing to dispel. Indeed, apparently it is proposing to expand the centre’s focus beyond Jewish studies to ‘systemic discrimination’. How long before it would be captured or targeted by those claiming to suffer from Islamophobia?
An exhibition of the artwork produced by the Dunera Boys, young Jewish refugees who fled the Nazis, sought sanctuary in Britain, and were deported to Australia as ‘enemy aliens’, was held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, closing in May. Extraordinarily, the curators made almost no mention of the fact that the Dunera Boys were persecuted by the Nazis because they were Jewish. Why was this omitted? Fear of protests? Donor backlash? The complex political sensitivities surrounding anti-Semitism?
One of the central themes of Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor, was the moral imperative to remember. He said: ‘To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.’
Amid a rising tide of hatred, denial and forgetting, Olympian Nova Peris was a voice of moral clarity. Speaking from a bomb shelter in Tel Aviv as Iranian missiles rained down in retaliation for Israel’s pre-emptive strikes, she told pro-Palestinian activists, ‘You need to learn your history.’ She had come to Israel to bear witness to the archaeological evidence of a continuous Jewish presence in the land for over 4,000 years. She recognised what the haters refuse to admit: that the Jewish people are indigenous to Israel, not colonial interlopers. And to those who chant for the destruction of the Jewish state, she offered her own quiet mantra: ‘From the river to the sea, Israel will always be.’
This article appeared in Quadrant on July 2, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
