Peter Dutton provided a new low point in the already barrel-bottom nature of the Coalition’s exploitation of the Israel-Hamas war yesterday, in his attack on Tony Burke for explaining what his own constituents have been telling him about the siege of Gaza. Dutton’s words:
Tony Burke, to his great shame, is playing to his constituency within his own electorate when he should be acting in the national interest. He’s just going after his own local political opportunity and putting our national interest at a second.
Apart from the standard hypocrisy of trying to score political points by accusing your opponent of playing politics with an issue, Dutton — who returned to attack Burke again and again during the course of an interview on Sky News — was engaging in something much darker. In rejecting Burke’s comments as illegitimate, and as parochial politics divorced from the national interest, Dutton was dismissing the grief and anxiety of Australians with friends and family in Gaza, who can only sit by and watch as loved ones are killed, or endure the developing humanitarian disaster created by the Israeli siege.
Recognising that grief and fear on the part of Australians isn’t in the national interest, Dutton is saying that only expressing outrage over the atrocities committed by Hamas, and grieving over the Israeli victims of those barbarities, is acceptable.
The opposition leader’s attack was endorsed by The Australian (which once upon a time, under Chris Mitchell, had an honourable history of fair-minded journalism on Israel) with multiple articles negatively portraying or misrepresenting Burke’s comments.
It’s the continuation of the long history in both Australian major party politics and in the mainstream media of erasing Palestinians, of denying their suffering and pretending the injustice inflicted on them doesn’t exist, or doesn’t matter. Here, you’re only allowed to mourn for Israeli victims of terrorism; Palestinian victims of Israel don’t count.
Grieving for and lamenting both the Israeli and Palestinian civilian dead and injured, as Burke urged us to do, are not, as Dutton would have it, fundamentally illegitimate acts disconnected from the national interest. They are crucial to any perspective that wants to see an end to the killing on both sides. If it wasn’t clear before the horrific events of October 7, it should be now — denying the suffering and grief of an entire people, denying even their existence, is not a permanent solution. All it does is create new generations of alienated people with nothing to lose and enough anger to delude themselves that committing unspeakable atrocities is warranted.
This cycle of delegitimisation, military suppression and fertilisation of new generations of terrorists is neither unfamiliar nor accidental. It was a pronounced characteristic of the West’s “War on Terror”, best summed up by then-CIA head John Brennan, who said some Western military actions against terrorists act as “stimulants to others joining their ranks” and that “we just have to not kill our way out of this because that’s not going to address it. We need to stop those attacks that are in train but we also have to address some of those underlying factors and conditions.”
Except, right-wing Western politicians and media benefited from not addressing underlying factors and conditions that generated terrorism. They benefited from having a continuing terrorism threat to exploit and hype, to extend state power, to attack progressive opponents as soft on terror, to rally voters behind the flag and the military. In turn, they provide terrorist groups with a constant source of new recruits through military actions directed solely at Muslims, and deny the legitimacy of the grief and anger that produces them.
It’s exactly the same with Israel: there’s a direct alliance of interests between the right and fundamentalist terrorists. The role of Israel, and the Netanyahu government in particular, in propping up Hamas is a matter of public record, though you’ll find little discussion of that in the Australian media, and certainly not from News Corp.
The Dutton/News Corp line on what is allowed to be said about Israel and Palestine here, the right-wing politically correct framing, is that Israel is automatically right, must be reflexively supported, and that Palestinians exist only as a security threat to “the Middle East’s only democracy”, and their suffering is trivial compared to that of Israelis.
What is being done to the people of Gaza — they may perhaps allow that it is “unfortunate” — is a necessary response to Hamas’ atrocities, and only someone soft on terrorism would say otherwise. Even grieving for the Palestinian dead, estimated to be as high as 8000, although independent verification is impossible, is unacceptable.
It’s a line that anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with Israeli-Palestinian history, or the failure of the war on terror over the past two decades, should know is a recipe for continued violence and death on both sides — which of course can be exploited by the right and by its media backers.
And it’s the expression of a direct alliance between the right and the fundamentalist murderers they denounce so shrilly.
