Labor’s hardened position on Israel – calling its settlements on the West Bank “illegal under international law” and referring to the West Bank and Gaza as “Occupied Palestinian Territories” – sparked predicable fury.
Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham accused the government of reacting to pressure from party activists on the left ahead of Labor’s national conference next week.
Colin Rubenstein, head of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, said Labor’s stance strained a longstanding bipartisan policy supporting a two-state negotiated peace settlement.
The claims of both are true.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong would not have gone public with such a dramatic escalation in rhetoric – except for her need to partially appease party hardliners.
Labor and the Coalition are now far apart in their expressed positions on Israel and the Palestinian territories, though both continue to support a negotiated two-state settlement.
There is another way to read what happened this week, however, as some of Labor’s most ardent supporters of Israel argue. Essentially nothing has changed, except for a hardening of language that reverts to the position of past Labor and even Coalition governments.
The Albanese government has been ruminating for months about how it would handle two issues above all that have caused internal dissent and threatened to blow out of control during debate on the floor of Labor’s three-day national conference in Brisbane, starting on Thursday.
Read the article by Brad Norington in The Australian.