PAUL MURRAY: Personal crusade with no solution leaves us exposed

There’s an old saying that if you lie down with dogs you get fleas.

Anthony Albanese’s decision to put his trust in Palestine Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — a notorious deal-breaker who has avoided elections for 20 years — over our established democratic allies Israel and the US will come back to bite him.

And us. Recognising Palestine in September is the worst sort of gesture politics.

It will not stop Israel’s offensive, it has given the Hamas terrorists an immoral PR victory and has further fractured Australia’s relationship with our closest security partner, America.

Quite some achievements for a feelgood moment in achieving a Trotskyite teenage dream.

No matter what people think of Benjamin Netanyahu’s tactics to secure Israel’s security against the existential threat from Hamas and its maniacal backers in Iran, nothing in Australia’s token recognition of a future Palestinian state will ease the suffering in Gaza now.

That is in Hamas’ hands and it is not interested. It only wants to obliterate Israel.

The push Albanese has joined increasingly looks like a concerted effort to isolate Israel and force regime change. Albanese’s direct verbal attacks on his Israeli counterpart expose it.

Albanese is now being cheered by terrorists. He’s become just another human shield for Hamas.

Our Prime Minister has learned nothing from his personal pursuit of the Voice debacle. The unwillingness of voters to punish Labor for wasting nearly two years focussed on that personal ideological crusade has emboldened him.

After one phone call with the corrupt head of the derided PA, Albanese turned his back on Australia’s long-standing bipartisan position on Palestine and trashed Labor’s proud history on the formation of Israel.

Albanese said he has accepted these undertakings from Abbas: a demilitarised Palestine; recognising Israel’s right to exist in peace and security; PA holding elections and undertaking governance reforms, including education system reforms to not promote further violence; no role for Hamas.

Both history and current Palestinian politics show Abbas has no power to deliver those commitments — if he ever intended to.

Abbas, a Marxist, gained the Soviet equivalent of a PhD in Moscow in 1982 with a doctoral dissertation arguing a “secret relationship between nazism and Zionism”.

He heads the Fatah political party which lost the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections to Hamas. After a year of unrest, they formed a national unity government that lasted three months amid escalating violence.

Hamas forcibly took control of Gaza and Abbas took over the West Bank. Attempts by Turkish president Recep Erdogan to reconcile them in July, 2023 failed.

The fighting since the October 7, 2023 Hamas outrages in Israel has grimly proved that the only way it will be disarmed is to rip a weapon from a corpse.

Recent polling by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, an independent think tank based in the West Bank, found 77 per cent of respondents opposed the disarmament of Hamas in Gaza in order to stop the war.

Albanese showed his ignorance of Palestinian affairs when asked about the polling: “I’m not sure how you poll in Gaza at the moment. It would be an interesting exercise.”

The Australian reported the centre has for decades conducted ­authoritative surveys across the Palestinian territories, including during the war. A poll in May had just 15 per cent of ­respondents satisfied with Abbas’s performance with 60 per cent saying the PA was a burden on ­Palestinians.

Albanese claims Palestinians had “clearly risen against Hamas”, but the poll found 57 per cent supported them, 67 per cent in the West Bank and 43 per cent in Gaza, down from a pre-war high of 70 per cent.

Worse still for Albanese, 74 per cent of respondents on the West Bank and 51 per cent in Gaza opposed the expulsion of Hamas’s military leaders from the Strip as a condition for stopping the war.

The pro-Palestine Guardian quoted Shahram Akbarzadeh, a professor of Middle East politics at Deakin University, saying the PA commitments raised “lots of challenges”.

“He describes the PA as “rife with corruption and nepotism” but says there is no other body which could begin processes towards Palestinian statehood,” the Guardian reported.

“It is vital then, that western nations – likely led by the EU, UN and ideally the US – help lead democratic and governance reforms in the PA,” Akbarzadeh said.

Which takes us again back to that informative interview of Albanese on July 27 on the ABC’s Insiders which was referenced in last week’s column. Albanese ruled out recognising Palestine in September, just a week before a mob marching over Sydney Harbour Bridge apparently changed his mind:

“Are we about to do that, no we are not,” Albanese said. “But we will engage constructively. I want, the United States as well, will have a critical role in this. They have to play a role.”

David Speers: “Would you be willing to do this without the United States?”

Albanese: “Australia will always make our decisions as a sovereign state. But the role of the United States is critical.”

However, Albanese again did not talk to President Donald Trump about his plans and the recognition move sets us against the US which has always vetoed it in the Security Council.

Another black mark for Australia with our former major ally.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed Australia’s move as largely meaningless and driven by domestic politics. Spot on, but he could have included ego.

Akbarzadeh said barring Hamas from a future governing role would be even harder than disarming it because of its time governing Gaza.

“Affiliation with Hamas during that time doesn’t mean necessarily they’re all terrorists,” he said. “Everyone in Gaza had some sort of affiliation with Hamas, as a necessity of life.”

And Amal Naser, of Australia’s Palestine Action Group, told Channel Nine: “I don’t think it’s very plausible” that Hamas could be blocked from a future Palestinian state.

Albanese’s government is so good at setting aspirational targets that it should have made recognition a prize after Abbas’ undertakings had been achieved, not before. Too logical.

Labor’s new stand is now diametrically opposed to its previous position on Israel. It shows how the Left, which controls the Albanese government, can’t be trusted because of the insidious influence of Marxism.

Labor luminary Herbert Vere “Doc” Evatt, a former High Court judge, Federal Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs, played a leading international role in Israel’s formation.

While Albanese name-checked Evatt in Monday’s announcement, he clearly has no idea of the betrayal of Labor’s history he has engineered.

Marx’s views on fighting for “the oppressed”, which he saw as rooted in the class system, manifests itself in modern politics through the prism of identity.

Modern marxists like Albanese see the fight against oppression as battling racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia which they regard as deeply ingrained in the capitalist society they want to change.

But back in the 1940s, Labor’s left was on the side of the new “oppressed” which was European Jews after the horrors of Hitler and the Holocaust.

According to an article written last year for socialist website Red Flag by Nick Everett, when Israel was established in 1948, it had the backing of not only the Labor Party, but also the Communist Party of Australia and the wider labour movement.

“Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, argued that antisemitism was inherent in non-Jews and could not be fought,” Everett wrote.

“By contrast, the socialist response to antisemitism was that it could be fought, along with other forms of oppression and racism, but that it would require a united struggle of the working class to overthrow capitalism and create a genuinely equal society.”

Everett writes that in 1943, Labor’s national conference voted to support “the continued growth of the Jewish national home in Palestine by immigration and settlement”.

“A widespread sentiment of humanitarian sympathy for Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and vocal and organised support for Israel within the labour movement, combined with a more independent and assertive foreign policy, contributed to the Chifley government’s support for Palestine’s partition and Israel’s creation,” Everett writes.

“Doc Evatt, the minister for external affairs in the Curtin and Chifley governments, was well placed to rally support behind the Zionist cause.”

Evatt helped establish the United Nations Committee on Palestine in May 1947. He then chaired the Ad Hoc Committee on “the Palestinian Question” appointed by the General Assembly. Both bodies recommended Palestine’s partition.

The Ad Hoc Committee presented a plan that allocated 56 percent of the mandated territory to a Jewish state, the rest to Palestinians.

Evatt lobbied hard for the general assembly — the same body Albanese will grandstand before in September — to have his plan accepted. When it came to the vote, Australia’s was the first recorded.

So Labor’s ideological fingerprints are all over the mess in Palestine, but what Albanese is offering is no solution.