Following the ghastly Hamas raid and Israel’s immediate and immediately lethal response, there was never much doubt that the Albanese leadership was going to swing around behind the cause of Israel. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s total commitment to AUKUS set the agenda out of the gate — a dismal caving in to the Labor-right agenda. It would be convenient post-hoc cynicism to say that this was expected. One had thought that a nominally left government might find a way to triangulate between the demands of the permanent security establishment, the right, and setting a mildly independent agenda.
That was not to be, but the unswerving commitment to Israel — and implicitly, its right to act unilaterally and without limit in response to Hamas — was shocking beyond that. It may indeed have even shaken Albanese himself. He was once genuinely of the left; he was a co-founder of Parliamentary Friends of Palestine. He was no Trot — perish the thought — but there was an understanding of class and race/people solidarity across the borders.
To turn your back on a people you once supported at the very moment when they needed you most is not nothing. This is not said to garner any sympathy for Albanese or Penny Wong. Quite the contrary, it is to make clear just how willing they are to destroy the people they once were in order to be the people they are now to maintain the power that they have.
Indeed, when looked at fully, this situation is a small tragedy for the Palestinians arising from the cowardice of the Labor leadership. Finally, when disaster threatened, when the event occurred that Friends of Palestine had been set up for, there was a left-wing Labor prime minister at the heart of the Anglo/Five Eyes alliance who could say something, anything, to put a spanner in the Israeli PR war machine.
Look, if Albanese or Wong were any sort of leftists, this would be a moment they had literally fantasised about in the past, listening to Howard or Abbott line up behind the US or Israel to commit Australia to open-ended high-tech slaughter of the enemy of the day. “Jesus, what I’d say if I was at the podium” is something everyone thinks at 2am. And here it is! Anthony Albanese, inner-city left-wing shitkicker, fresh off a campaign to recognise Indigenous people, had a chance to rise above his short stature, to make the link, to stand for humanity. He didn’t need to start chanting “from the river to the sea”. He just needed to say that lo-fi barbarism does not license indiscriminate state killing and that the Palestinian homeland question remains unresolved.
He flubbed it, of course, keeping the discipline that Labor is not going to let itself get caught on the wrong side of “the mainstream” — i.e. the News Corp and Nine construction of the mainstream — more than it has to. Since that has occurred pretty substantially throughout the referendum, they must have been more keen than ever to toe the line. The threat for the Albanese leadership comes from within, of course, in the network of tunnels created beneath Labor by the right, through which a dizzying array of militia — Unity, the Shoppies, ASPI, etc — can move fighters and weapons between struggle sites to keep the left leadership under perpetual threat.
The leadership’s indifference to the killing of Palestinian civilians that was already beginning was reaffirmed by a one-sided kumbaya-ish letter circulated principally by Nick Dyrenfurth, head of Labor’s John Curtin Research Centre, which rounded up numerous Labor grandees as signatories to a communication whose lack of a call for restraint arguably licensed an unlimited violent response.
But let’s be clear about this. While Albanese’s failure falls short of occasional moments of independence from Labor, these have been few and far between, and the hope that it might be otherwise is the very last effusion of a remnant Whitlam-ism (no foreign policy radical himself). In fact, the total preference for the (largely) European-descended nation of Israel over the brown people of Gaza and the West Bank is very much in line with the heritage of both the Australian Labor Party — and Zionism itself — as initially socialist movements founded not on solidarity of class but the anchoring of race, or religion/race, to provide a “pre-political” solidarity on which a political movement can be based.
Yes, despite its multicultural recruitment and myriad branchings, the Australia Labor Party remains anchored by the White Australia Policy, in both the general sense of drawing on a solidarity that it does not create through politics alone and the specific sense that Anglos and European-Australians still run the joint. This was the point of, and opportunity for, Adem Somyurek’s bizarre factional insurgency, and the reason why he got so far. Groups like the SDA were giving so little back to the politically left but socially conservative suburban multicultural communities who were joining the Labor right that such groups could be detached, to create a new faction they might get more reward from.
The leadership’s immediate rush to defend a European-descended people, and to offer them unlimited support for whatever they might do to a population of colonially sequestered civilians, has surely shown such groups that they remain second-class citizens within the Labor Party.
But more than that, it should surely be clear that there are limits to how much they can ever get from Labor in this regard. Having neoliberalised itself, and become a party for the management of capital, Labor has more or less zero class solidarity to draw on. It must round up a majority at each election, and so the solidarity it relies upon will always lean towards the domestic, the Anglo, the majority. Labor is a party of the Western working class as beneficiaries of a global system of race-based capitalism run through systemic underdevelopment. Cross-regional and cultural solidarity is the exception rather than the norm.
This gives it a symmetry with the Zionist movement, which makes solidarity with it more than arbitrary. The ALP is a national socialist party, and so too was the Zionist movement at its inception. No Zionists before its founding ever thought Israel would be anything other than a socialist state. Why get out of the hell of Europe to re-establish capitalism in the promised land? But the term “national socialism” — which governs parties such as the Swedish Social Democrats as well — fell out of descriptive usefulness due to… erm, well, yes. So the specific character of these parties, and their affinity, became obscured.
That “national socialist” impulse is now coming to the fore. The automatic, unquestioned line-up with Israel, and the blank cheque for its actions — with de facto foreign minister Richard Marles notoriously claiming that whatever Israel did was, ipso facto, not a war crime — could not have occurred if there were white bodies beneath those bombs. They had to be brown or black bodies for the smooth and untroubled licensing of their slaughter.
Muslim and other community groups don’t need me to tell them how provisional their status in Labor is. But it is worth sometimes restating it in clear terms, which cut through the fog of consultation, discussion etc that Labor will now be laying on thick to the many angry communities and leaders that have given it their support.
That is, that Labor does not even begin to start listening until you tear them a new arsehole and make them wear it as a funny hat. The time to withdraw from Labor, to refuse your consent, is not after all talks have broken down but at the start — as the first move, before talks have begun. If Muslim and Middle-Eastern and, by now, many non-white community groups are angry that their support has been co-opted into authorising unlimited slaughter, then they need to start independent, division-based community political organisations right now to serve as a base for running independent community candidates.
In the divisions of Blaxland, Watson, Grayndler and surrounds in Sydney, and in Cooper and Wills in Melbourne, such independent committees would be enough to light a fire under Labor, now petrified of losing majority status in the next election due to further political fragmentation.
The threat of that has prompted the licensed dissent of Ed Husic and Tony Burke from the official Labor position. Their cris-de-couers may be honestly felt, but that is incidental. There is no doubt they have been gamed out in some wonk bunker somewhere to work out the angles. That’s exactly the reason to make a clear and early separation from Labor and talk to them from that independent position rather than from within the party.
Such groups could stand down if there is a sufficient shift in Labor’s position. But if not, they would run, scarf up community votes the Greens could never get, and then herd the second preferences to the Greens. Hopefully, the Greens themselves would choose candidates with some community roots, and prioritise cultural centrism that socially conservative suburbanites are willing to preference. Could candidates with stonking majorities, such as Jason Clare in Blaxland, be under threat from such a move? They could be if the majority in question came from the community, and an independent candidate would split that vote down the middle.
Clare, Husic and Burke are good members, but it’s not about that. Nor is it about targeting the most pro-Zionist members who will be safely ensconced in other electorates. It’s about targeting the machine itself, so it’s those most willing to offer dissenting words used for a party’s “repressive tolerance” that need to be contested.
There’s no doubt that these discussions are being had across these places. All that one is really adding here is a degree of encouragement, and a charm against Labor’s extraordinary ability to mollify and deter action. If you’re thinking of breaking from Labor because they have preferred white bodies to brown bodies, do it yesterday. Do it without hesitation. Do it as a starting point.
Really, this is a moment for regret at what might have been. Australia might have played some sort of independent role with more courageous leadership, possibly using our reconciled Gallipoli connection with Türkiye to advance some sort of dual call for a ceasefire. What sort of base for action might that serve if a prime minister who has spent his whole political life working for this opportunity to wield decent centre-left politics had the audacity to seize the moment, talk down the death-metal fanbase within and without the party, raise himself to his full height, and affirm the other side of social democracy — its willingness to stand with the suffering and oppressed? What would that look like? Will we ever know?
