Politics
How we talk about the Israel-Gaza conflict matters
If you criticise Hungary’s Viktor Orbán for his authoritarianism and illiberalism that doesn’t mean you’re mounting an attack on Christianity or on Hungarians. If you express your disgust at the behaviour of Hamas, a brutal, right-wing, misogynistic terrorist organization that slaughtered 1200 Israelis and others last year, that doesn’t mean you’re anti-Muslim.
But if you, or the government representing your interests, issues a mild rebuke to the government of Israel, a government with no qualms about bombing a school or a whole apartment block to kill one terrorist, and which subjects two million people to conditions resembling Hitler’s Warsaw Ghetto, you or your government are deemed to be anti-Semitic, and to have provoked anti-Semitic violence.
That’s the accusation made by Peter Dutton in response to Australia’s vote on a UN resolution.
The UN resolution in question titled “Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine”, can be read in full on the UN website. In true UN-style it’s rather wordy but the part that seems to have raised excitement is Clause 7, that demands Israel “bring an end to its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as rapidly as possible” and “to cease immediately all new settlement activities and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.
Australia joined with 156 other countries to support the resolution. Notably that list included Germany – a most important point, because Germany is particularly sensitive about anything that could be construed as anti-Semitic or questioning Israel’s right to defend itself. France, the UK, Canada, Japan and New Zealand were all among the resolution’s supporters.
Only 8 countries voted against the resolution. Israel and the US were opposed, as were Argentina and Hungary and the other four were all small Pacific states. There were also 7 abstentions (Cameroon, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Georgia, Paraguay, Ukraine, Uruguay). For some reason – possibly a fear of attacks from Dutton – the ABC has refrained from pointing out how isolated Australia would have been had our government joined with the US and Israel in opposing the resolution.
Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu linked the attack on the Adass Israel synagogue to our vote on the UN resolution, stating "Unfortunately, it is impossible to separate this reprehensible act from the extreme anti-Israeli position of the Labor government in Australia," That is extraordinary; so-called “friendly” nations do not enter into the partisan politics of other countries. And he overlooks the criticism others have levelled at our government for appearing to be too one-sided – that is, on Israel’s side.
Even more extraordinary has been Dutton’s response. He made the same accusation as Netanyahu, accusing the government of abandoning Jewish people in Australia, and he rushed to label the attack as terrorism. By convention leading politicians of different persuasion stand together when their country comes under attack from foreigners. So why has Dutton made such a departure from convention?
The short answer is that Dutton’s dominant political style is to set Australian against Australian whenever he gets the chance. This is simply a re-run of his campaign against the Voice referendum.
A slightly more speculative answer is to look at the two large countries outside the US-Israel relationship – Hungary and Argentina – that voted against the resolution. Both are ruled by strongmen on the hard right. Presumably Dutton would like Australia to be part of that select club.
Another possible answer involves electoral politics. The synagogue is in the Macnamara electorate, which stretches from Port Melbourne, through St Kilda, and a little to the east. It has a large number of Jewish Australians. Macnamara is solidly Labor (62:38 TPP), but the synagogue is on the southern edge of the electorate, less than one km from the northern edge of the Goldstein electorate, won by independent Zoe Daniel off Liberal Tim Wilson in 2022, with a 53:47 TPP margin. It is rumoured that Wilson will be contesting the seat again next year.
On Radio National last Tuesday Josh Burns, the member for Macnamara, who is Jewish, described how he and the Coalition’s Home Affairs spokesperson James Paterson planned to stand on the same platform to make statements about the attack. Because Burns had lost his voice (he hadn’t fully recovered on the Radio National interview), he and Paterson had agreed that Paterson would read Burns’ statement for him. But Dutton intervened to scuttle the arrangement, because he was determined to sustain the issue in terms of partisan politics. He claims that Labor is anti-Semitic, and suggests that they have provoked their supporters to attack Jewish establishments and places of worship.
Burns’ dignified forbearance against Dutton’s hatred and spite is impressive. Earlier this year his electorate office was targeted by activists, who smashed windows, painted anti-Semitic slogans, and set fires. Yet in that interview, he does not hit back at Dutton, choosing to celebrate Australia’s multiculturalism, and the part played by the Jewish people in his electorate enriching Australian life. We can read Burns’ reaction to the attack on the synagogue in his Guardian article: I don’t need Peter Dutton to tell me as a Jewish person how to respond to antisemitism.
It appears that Liberal members of Parliament are under instructions to sheet blame for raised tension on to the Albanese government.
It is revealing to listen to two interviews on Radio National on Wednesday morning following another anti-Semitic attack, involving vandalizing a number of homes and cars. Liberal finance spokesperson Jane Hume uses her airtime to warn Jewish Australians that they are in danger, because the Albanese government has neglected a rising tide of anti-Semitism. By contrast independent Member of Parliament Allegra Spender, whose seat of Wentworth includes the large Jewish community in eastern Sydney, in which this and a previous act of anti-Semitic vandalism occurred, uses her airtime to assure us that the law-enforcement authorities are on their job. The Coalition’s message is about fear and division, the message from other politicians is about confidence and unity.
There have been some pathetic defences of these attacks, arguing that they are against the Israeli government, not the Jewish people. (Do Putin’s critics go around vandalizing cars belong to Russians who emigrated to Australia?) The prime minister, in his condemnation of the perpetrators, called out this twisted logic. He was gracious enough to avoid pointing out that Dutton has indulged in the same twisted logic, conflating criticism of the Netanyahu government with denial of Israel’s right to combat terrorism and with anti-Semitism.
Another opportunity for Dutton to raise the temperature came when our government supported two UN resolutions, one calling for an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the other calling for Israel to overturn its ban on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from operating in the region. The voting patterns for these resolutions were almost identical to those on the earlier resolution, referred to above. Had we abstained, or voted against these resolutions, supported by almost all the world’s democracies, we would have been in a tiny minority. But on the evening news he asserted that all these countries made the wrong call. “It’s about western civilization and our values”, he said.
Really?
Fortunately there are prominent religious leaders who haven’t responded to Dutton’s call to take sides. On Pearls and Irritations is a joint statement – Attack on Ripponlea Synagogue: as faith leaders we stand together – by Dr Mohamed Mohideen, President, Islamic Council of Victoria and Rabbi Jonathan Keren-Black of the Leo Baeck Centre for Progressive Judaism.
As independent Senator David Pocock said in Parliament last year, a month after the Hamas terrorist attack, “how we talk about this matters”.
Was the attack on the synagogue “terrorism”?
There has been an undignified argument about whether the attack was “terrorism”, and whether the government should direct the Commonwealth Police to prioritize anti-Semitism over other offences.
An act is a “terrorist act” if it meets two conditions. It must include “the intention to coerce or influence the public or any government by intimidation to advance a political, religious or ideological cause” and it must cause harm of some sort.
That’s why a demonstration in support of a cause most people might find repulsive is not, in itself, “terrorism”. It’s also why recent deliberate damage to two Hindu temples in Canberra. although it was deeply unsettling, was not called “terrorism”, because it was almost certainly an act of idiocy.
Terrorism is serious, and when detected it should certainly mobilize intelligence, security and police resources. But that is, or should be, a matter for those authorities, not politicians, be they in government or other parties.
Peter Dutton should understand this: he was a police officer himself, and he would have become frustrated and annoyed when people broadcast speculation about crimes, compromising police work and possibly thwarting the chance of securing a conviction. But in politics he has no hesitation to engage in such behaviour himself. (Albanese too, jumped the gun on calling the act “terrorism”.)
It’s not just a matter of investigative convenience. It’s also about the separate functions of lawmakers and those who enforce the law. That’s governed by the basic principle of the separation of powers.
On Radio National, however, Coalition Home Affairs spokesperson James Paterson denounced the prime minister for not calling together the national security committee of cabinet and directing the Commonwealth Police to prioritize anti-Semitism offences.
On the question whether the police should prioritize anti-Semitism, that should be a matter for the police and others concerned with domestic security, not for lay people.
ASIO, presumably acting on sound intelligence, is particularly concerned about young people becoming radicalized and engaging in extremist activities. Their concern is with those prone to radicalization, rather than their specific causes, be they anti-Semitism, Australia for the White Man, attacks on Muslims, or damage to renewable energy infrastructure. When we are being attacked by terrorists our concern is more about their behaviour than their beliefs.
Greg Barton of Deakin University, writing in The Conversation – Rates of youth radicalisation are climbing in Australia and abroad. Here’s what to look out for – fills out the ASIO document by describing the process of youth radicalization and its early warning signs.
Independent member for Goldstein (the electorate just south of the Adass Israel Synagogue) Zoe Daniel has written to the Prime Minister urging the government to take additional measures to protect the community against anti-Semitism. Her concern, broadly in line with ASIO’s assessment, is about places of worship in general, and the measures she suggests are about bringing people together.
The Federal Police have responded to the attack, appointing a special taskforce to investigate anti-Semitism. But for Dutton that isn’t enough. He advocates allocating $32.5 million to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry "without any strings attached", including funding armed guards at schools and synagogues.
Imagine if the government handed over money to the Catholic Church to fund armed guards to fend off abortion reform activists!
It is hard not to conclude that Dutton’s political strategy is to use this incident as an excuse to promote as much political tension as possible, fomenting hatred where others are encouraging understanding, setting Jewish Australians against non-Jewish Australians, as he did when he set Aboriginal Australians against non-Aboriginal Australians. The presence of armed vigilantes outside schools and synagogues would ensure the tension is maintained, and it would be even better for Dutton if it were to promote a violent incident.
It’s a chilling reminder of the tactics used by the National Socialists 90 years ago.
Dutton’s proposed Liberal-One Nation merger
100 percent Australian
Ok – that’s just a scary headline, but Dutton, in an interview with Sky News host Peta Credlin, said that if he is elected he will remove the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags from official press conferences held by the Australian government.
“We are dividing our country unnecessarily”, he said. “We should stand up for who we are, for our values, what we believe in. We are united as a country when we gather under one flag.”
We’ve heard this message before, most stridently from One Nation politicians, using the language of inclusion to promote division – defining who’s in and who’s out.
This is not only about de-legitimizing the culture and interests of indigenous Australians. It’s also an assault on the idea of a multicultural Australia – a dog whistle to those who seek the dull comfort of a culturally impoverished “white” Australia.
Also it may be a move directed at bringing the One Nation vote “home” to the Coalition. In the 2022 election One Nation won 5.0 percent of first preference votes and they are now polling around 7 percent. In the 2022 election about a third of One Nation preferences went to Labor. If One Nation voters can switch to the Coalition that leakage would be avoided.
In any event Dutton should remember that to many Australians the present ensign is at best three quarters of an Australian flag, the other quarter being the flag of a distant foreign country.
Rupert Murdoch’s quest for immortality
It’s a pity the Murdoch family disputes about control of the family trust on Rupert Murdoch’s death is being heard in a closed court in Nevada: the case would make a great sequel to Succession.
The ABC has picked up the report from the New York Times that Rupert Murdoch has failed in his bid to change the family trust. At stake is not the distribution of financial assets, but control of the media empire after Rupert’s death. The “irrevocable” trust divides control of Newscorp and Fox among Rupert’s four oldest children – Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence, but Rupert has sought to pass that control to Lachlan. Lachlan would sustain the extreme right-wing bias of the Murdoch media, while James, with the support of his sisters, would take an approach that’s more centrist, but less profitable.
Matthew Ricketson of Deakin University and Andrew Dodd of the University of Melbourne go into details of the case in their Conversation contribution: Rupert Murdoch loses his legal battle, leaving future of media empire in the balance. They report that James “severed all ties with the company over its denialist coverage of climate change and its credulous reporting of baseless conspiracy theories about the result of the 2020 US presidential election”. They also describe the differences between the US and Australian audiences for Murdoch media. In Australia Murdoch dominates the far-right, but in the US the far-right media market is more contested.
You can also hear an 11-minute interview covering the case with Paddy Manning on Radio National Drive. Manning has a set of interviews on the Murdoch empire on Schwartz Media’s 7am podcasts, and three successive sessions on the ABC’s Background Briefing: Murdoch’s Endgame – Part 1, Blood, Part 2, Money, Part 3, Power.
Anyone hoping that The Australian and other Murdoch media in Australia may drop its opposition to renewable energy and its unqualified support for Peter Dutton in the near future will be disappointed. Rupert will almost certainly appeal the decision, and although Rupert is 93, his mother lived to 103.
According to Paul Sakkal of the Sydney Morning Herald – News Corp is working with Dutton to bring us down– Albanese has briefed his cabinet colleagues warning them that News Corp and the opposition are working together to defeat the government. “Labor sources say the intensity of the Murdoch papers’ criticism of the government’s agenda and the prime minister’s character has been more fierce”.