It’s Simple: Rewarding Terrorism Will See Labor Stand Condemned

In voting yesterday to support the admission of Palestine to the United Nations, the Albanese government is rewarding terrorism and breaking almost eight decades of settled bipartisan support for Israel.

It was, after all, Labor’s greatest prime Minister Bob Hawke who declared that “if the bell tolls for Israel … it tolls for all mankind”.

On October 7, it did indeed toll. Yet the Australian government’s ultimate response to this barbarity has been to favour a terrorist statelet over the only democracy in the Middle East.

In voting yes, notwithstanding a no vote from the US and an abstention from the UK, the Albanese government claimed to be upholding Australia’s longstanding support for a two-state solution.

But this was always predicated on the Palestinians accepting Israel’s right to exist behind secure borders, something no Palestinian leader has ever really done and which is now implacably opposed by the dominant Hamas faction, which the PM should never forget is a listed terrorist organisation in this country.

The government’s dramatic departure from all previous practice (the Gillard government abstained when this last arose in 2012) shows three things: first, that Anthony Albanese has hardly grown up from the student radical who marched for Palestine 40 years back; second, that the dominant intellectual force in this government is Penny Wong, hence it’s weak on China and soft on national security generally; and third, Labor is terrified of the electoral potential of the Muslim vote, which in some Labor seats is over 25-30 per cent.

Around 4 per cent of our population is Muslim. And if they are prepared to vote in religious solidarity with a terrorist organisation rather than vote in Australia’s national interest, then we are in trouble.

And Labor stands condemned for torching years of sound foreign policy bipartisanship to buy their vote, and reward terrorism. It is as simple as that.