Wong’s Tightrope Middle East Tour

Penny Wong’s voice barely rises above a whisper, her words grave and slow and inaudible even with the help of a microphone. She’s just finished a 90-minute tour of the Yad Vashem Holocaust centre in Jerusalem, ending her visit with a walk-through of the children’s memorial, a shrine to 1.5 million kids murdered in the Shoah.

Few come out of this experience intact. You advance along a clean stone path down towards an underground cavern where the light gradually dissipates and a disorienting darkness consumes the senses.

Robbed of visibility, your footsteps are reduced to a shuffle here, and what flickerings of light remain are not supposed to guide you but rather glint at you from some place far off in the distance, like the pent-up bursts of dying stars. They’re Yahrzeit candles bouncing off unseen mirrors, arranged in limitless numbers in all directions, one for every child, their names read out for posterity as the procession continues.

In the cool morning glow outside, Senator Wong stumbles to find her words, but composes herself and settles on a theme. “What I want to speak about today is ­humanity,” she says. “Our common humanity. Not just a number. The humanity of each precious life lost.” Backlit by the events of October 7, and the rising civilian death toll in Gaza, the ­allusion isn’t lost on anyone.

Spanning five days in Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and the United Arab Emirates, the Foreign Minister’s tour of the Middle East was a tightrope walk over the currents and cross-currents of a region always on the verge of combustibility, but never so much as in recent history.

Allegiances matter here, and to inoculate herself against any allegation of betrayal or misstep, Senator Wong assumed the role of a consummate humanitarian, the peace-seeking politician taking no one’s side except that of the civilians whose lives have been ruined by terrorism and war.

It was a balancing act of delicate language and jarring discussions that lasted all week.

On Monday, she stood alongside Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi as he spoke of Israeli genocide and violations of international law, repeating the detestable phrase to reporters that the events of October 7 didn’t happen in a vacuum.

By Tuesday, her entourage had flown out of Amman and rolled into Jerusalem to meet the families of Israeli hostages, where she pledged absolute solidarity with the Jewish State and reiterated Australia’s position on Israel’s right to defend itself.

Senator Wong’s contortions to the politics, remaining a friend and ally to everyone at all times, is a tactic very unlikely to have pacified the energised diaspora communities watching on from Australia. Already suspicious of the Foreign Minister, and unhappy with the Albanese government, they would have watched every utterance, every shift in body language, seeking clues to the minister’s sincerity.

At Yad Vashem she wore a blue and white outfit, the colours of Israel’s national flag. Two hours later she appeared in completely different colours for a meeting with the Palestinian prime minister in Ramallah.

In the coded world of diplomatic messaging, this sort of signalling matters, but it didn’t help Senator Wong that her arrival in Israel came at a time of immensely confusing gestures from the Albanese government.

Among them was Senator Wong’s call not to visit the southern Israel communities massacred by Hamas on October 7, a decision that tends to achieve minimal politically and only undermines her messaging of solidarity with Israel. In the widening gulf between word and deed, this alone is likely to put at risk the sincerity of her friendship in the eyes of Australian Jews.

There’s no doubt the Albanese government was under pressure to dispatch an emissary to the Jewish State, with several Liberal politicians having already visited the country, and Australia appearing strikingly absent from the list of allied nations putting their dignitaries on flights.

And yet, there is still (outwardly) a great deal of love for the Australian government in Israel. President Isaac Herzog lavished praise on Anthony Albanese this week for his speech to parliament in the aftermath of October 7, one of the most moving, he said, of any given by a world leader.

And back at Yad Vashem there was one person in no doubt that Senator Wong’s sentiments were genuine. Memorial chair Dani Dayan, a man who’s seen any number of dignitaries visit the museum, spoke of his sixth sense at figuring out which leaders were faking their way through the emotional museum tour.

He must have seen the Foreign Minister crouching to take a close look at the piles of shoes amassed from Jewish victims, or walking through the exhibits with a hand over her heart, as she would later do in the West Bank.

“I developed this way to detect sincerity,” Mr Dayan said to ­Senator Wong, “and I saw it undoubtedly in your eyes.”