There’s plenty of high dudgeon, long bows and confected outrage flying around in and out of Parliament, with the major parties lining up to denounce the Greens: “the party of antisemitism”, according to the Coalition; exploiting Palestinians to “harvest votes” according to Labor. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus went further and suggested Adam Bandt had “something to answer for” in encouraging violence directed at MPs. Bandt responded this morning by foolishly threatening legal action.
The Greens’ charge that Labor is “complicit in genocide” is a long bow. By any dictionary definition, what Israel is doing in Gaza is ethnic cleansing and war crimes, not genocide — although the latter term in recent decades has been expanded to the point of nebulousness by people looking to accord their causes with the highest possible status.
The Greens have made much of the fact that an Australian manufacturer contributes a part to the global “everyone gets a prize” supply chain for the F-35, part of the US military-industrial complex’s means of selling more of its garbage planes. To deem this “complicity in genocide” is far-fetched.
But where the Greens are closer to the mark is in the way the current government is handing nearly a billion dollars to Elbit Systems, an Israeli company that really is complicit in Israel’s atrocities and helped kill Zomi Frankcom. Frankcom’s murder by the Israeli Defence Forces appears to have slid into a convenient memory hole for both the government and most of the media since early April, with complete silence on any “investigations” into the deliberate targeting of Frankcom and her colleagues (Penny Wong was asked about the investigation by SBS two weeks ago and refused to say anything).
Labor would prefer that no-one knew about this handout to Elbit, with defence minister, Elbit spruiker and Labor village idiot Richard Marles stolidly refusing to address why taxpayers are funding companies engaged in helping slaughter Palestinians.
So, complicit in genocide? Certainly not. But supportive of companies that enable ethnic cleansing, war crimes and mass murder? Absolutely. And Labor’s silence on the issue makes it complicit.
Labor has its own long bows and confected outrage — indeed, much more so than the Greens. The charge that the Greens are inciting violence is without foundation. More offensive is the argument that the Greens are attempting to harvest votes at the expense of Palestinians. Decrying the mass slaughter of Palestinians is somehow, under that logic, harmful to Palestinians, whereas Labor’s approach of quietly expressing “concern” about each atrocity and calling for a ceasefire is beneficial to them.
What Labor is evidently concerned about is that the Greens are on the other side of a generational divide which sees younger Australians more sympathetic to Palestinians and more critical of Israel than the governing class, which has been duchessed by Israel and pro-Israeli lobby groups and friendly media outlets for decades and which reflexively supports Israel. The deliberate conflation of criticism of Israeli atrocities with antisemitism isn’t merely a tactic of Israeli apologists, but of establishment political figures unnerved by the tide of public anger at the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Reinforcing this is Labor’s treatment of its own Israel critics. Western Australian Senator Fatima Payman has been rebuked by the prime minister and left isolated for her support for Palestinians; pro-Israel NSW Labor leader Chris Minns sacked a frontbencher for entirely justified criticism of the role of NSW police in response to pro-Palestine protests. Federal Labor sided with pro-Israel online activists campaigning to destroy the careers of pro-Palestinian activists and, like Minns, has spoken about hardening “hate speech” laws in response to what is described as a surge in antisemitism (and with no substantial mention of the increase in Islamophobia).
You can’t seek to curb the voices of critics of Israel, stay quiet about an Australian murdered by the IDF, isolate and punish pro-Palestinian MPs, and preside over handing nearly a billion dollars to a company complicit in the slaughter of Palestinians, and then complain about the Greens attacking you. Labor would prefer that silence reigned over both Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and Australia’s links with Israeli companies. The Greens, rightly, want to yell about it.
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