The Guardian | Daniel Hurst | 20 January 2024

There was a moment at the beginning of Penny Wong’s trip to the Middle East this week when the foreign affairs minister seemed to admit Australia’s limited influence.

“Look, I don’t think Australia can come to the region demanding specific assurances,” Wong said when asked to spell out precisely what guarantees she would be seeking from her Israeli counterparts.

“What we can do is come to the region and add our voice to the cause of peace.”

To an extent, Wong’s comments are stating the obvious, but they probably also reflect frustration of a government that has faced mounting political pressure in Australia – from two starkly different perspectives – over its stance on the conflict.

Way back on 30 October, Wong urged Israel to “listen” when its longstanding friends such as Australia asked it to protect innocent lives in Gaza, while warning that the world “will not accept continuing civilian deaths”.

At that time, about 8,000 people in Gaza had been killed, including 3,300 children and 2,000 women, as Israel responded to Hamas’s 7 October attack on southern Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed and 240 others were taken hostage.

Fast forward to today and the death toll in Gaza stands close to 25,000 Palestinians. While the Palestinian death toll figures do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, it is utterly undeniable that there has been an immense loss of innocent life. Two-thirds of the deaths in Gaza are reported to be women and children, while 85% of the territory’s entire population has been displaced by Israeli evacuation orders, with many homes damaged or destroyed by Israeli strikes.

Israel states that Hamas – which has threatened to repeat the attacks – bears responsibility because it embeds itself among civilians, but alarm over the impact of the war is growing. Shortly before Christmas, an Australian doctor who coordinated medical aid to Gaza told me: “The volume of children killed or mutilated in this conflict is very extreme.”

Unicef said this week that Gaza was now “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”, with children in the besieged strip placed “at high risk of dying from malnutrition and disease”. Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of “using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare”.

Israeli families of hostages still held by Hamas are also at their wit’s end, hoping for their release but fearing the worst after more than 100 days of captivity. Many communities near Israel’s border with Lebanon remain evacuated amid cross-border clashes with Hezbollah. The risk of regional escalation is growing. So when Wong describes the situation as “dire”, it’s an understatement.

Against this real-world suffering, it seems almost perverse to analyse the situation through the lens of Australian domestic politics. But it must be done because the Labor government, more than halfway into its electoral term, is finding it increasingly difficult to please two constituencies with vastly different expectations.

On the one side, dozens of Labor party branches have passed motions urging the government to call for a full ceasefire, amid pressure from grassroots members and constituents to call out the Israeli government. Thousands of pro-Palestine demonstrators have rallied in cities every weekend since the outbreak of the latest war to show their solidarity with the people of Gaza and register their displeasure with the Australian government’s depiction of Israel’s bombardment of the territory as self-defence. To this constituency, the government’s declaration that it mourns every innocent life lost – Israeli and Palestinian – is wearing thin as the number of deaths in Gaza rises sharply. The Greens are campaigning for support from these dissatisfied voters at the next election.

On the other side, the Coalition is seeking to make the case that the Labor party’s internal politics are preventing the government from offering full-throated support for Israel, and has tried to connect this to a broader “weak on national security” narrative. Jewish community leaders – with exceptions – are increasingly complaining about the government’s messaging and decisions. They asked why Wong did not visit the sites of the 7 October Hamas massacres in southern Israel, saying it would have been an important show of solidarity to a community reeling from the worst loss of life of Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust.

The government was also criticised for providing $6m in humanitarian assistance through the UN Relief and Works Agency, which has previously faced accusations of including antisemitic content in textbooks used in its schools.

At the same time, News Corp has shown it is not averse to trying to wedge the government. From the beginning, the Australian newspaper has amplified claims that Labor was going soft on terrorism. More recently, it slammed the government for not sending a warship to the Red Sea to join US-led efforts to disrupt the Houthi rebels. And a front-page article in the Australian on Friday accused the government of being far too slow to officially designate the 7 October attacks a case of overseas terrorism. (While the government has unequivocally and repeatedly condemned those attacks as terrorism, a formal declaration does have practical significance because it opens the way for Australian relatives of victims to receive financial assistance.)

Against these competing political pressures, the government has appeared flat-footed at times.

Hence, when South Africa first lodged its 84-page submission to the international court of justice alleging Israel had breached the genocide convention, the government couldn’t bring itself to state a position, one way or the other, on the merits of the accusation.

Eventually, Wong stated that Australia’s respect for the ICJ “does not mean we accept the premise of South Africa’s case” – carefully worded language that still is fence-sitting. The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, ignored the legal question altogether by saying such court cases wouldn’t do anything to achieve peace in the region so his government would stay focused on the “main game”.

The government will, however, face more pressure to be definitive if the ICJ issues preliminary orders in coming weeks to suspend the Israeli military offensive or allow more humanitarian access – an interim ruling that experts say is possible given a precedent in a similar case against Myanmar.

Wong’s itinerary this week was another case in point on the balancing act. One day, Wong was meeting with the relatives of Hamas-held hostages or victims and affirming solidarity with Israel. On the next, she was visiting the occupied West Bank to hear from Palestinians affected by violence by Israeli settlers. Wong maintains there is no contradiction between being a friend of Israel and being a friend of the Palestinian people, saying they all deserve to live in “peace, security and dignity”.

Similarly, in a striking intervention this week, a former leader of Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security force said his country would not have security until Palestinians had their own state. “We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope,” Ami Ayalon told the Guardian. “To say the same in military language: you cannot deter anyone, a person or a group, if he believes he has nothing to lose.”

But it is increasingly obvious that the Australian government’s oft-stated support for a two-state solution is more of a slogan than an achievable reality, at least in the current environment.

That was laid bare on Thursday when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected US overtures to establish a Palestinian state when Israel ends its offensive against Gaza, and he declared that all territory west of the Jordan River must be under Israeli security control.

If Israel’s strongest backer, the US, can’t persuade Netanyahu, then it seems doubtful Australia would be able to do so. But it is also wrong to suggest Australia’s stance doesn’t matter.

Albanese – who wanted to start the political year promising action on the cost of living – will doubtless keep facing a political balancing act for as long as the Gaza conflict continues. For Albanese, the risk is that by trying to stay out of the political fray and find a “balanced” position on the conflict he ends up leaving everyone unhappy.

In the meantime, Albanese and Wong are particularly worried about fraying social cohesion in Australia. Since 7 October, community groups have documented sharp increases in antisemitism and also anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia.

Speaking in Jerusalem, Wong said one of the successes of Australian multiculturalism was that “we have understood that we might have differences of opinion, but we deal with them respectfully and inclusively”.

“I hope that we can hold on to that,” she said. “I know that this is a conflict that is so distressing for so many Australians, but we must hold on to that. We treat each other with respect.”

This is easier said than done at a time when entire communities in Australia feel under siege as they mourn loved ones and process intergenerational trauma.