Following the lead of ousted Senator Fatima Payman, Prime Minister Albanese this week reversed his long-held position of ignoring the ALP’s platform, announcing Australia will recognise the statehood of Palestine at the UN in September.
The remnants of the glacial, melting western liberal order, Macron in France, Carney in Canada, and Starmer in the UK, are positioning themselves identically.
As tides shift and rhetoric hardens, it cannot be stressed enough just how transparent Israel’s genocidal intent and actions have been for a very long time now. You do not inhabit a world in which you are privy to more information than the Prime Minister because you have an Instagram account. Be clear in your understanding of this depravity: the western world is attempting to save face, not Palestine.
Speaking to Australia’s most renowned public intellectual, Karl Stefanovic, the Prime Minister planted his posterior so firmly on the fence he’ll need to wipe for splinters: “Look, there are people on both sides of this debate who want conflict to continue, who want to think that it’s like a football game between, you know, Souths and the Broncos and you’ve got to back in your team; you’ve got to back them in. What we need is a win-win.”
A “win-win” between the victims of genocide and the perpetrators? He said that. Why not a win-win between the scorched rubble of Hiroshima and the nuclear bomb?
In the days after the PM’s historic Stefanovic Address, meeting the seriousness of the moment in the most Morrison-esque way imaginable, Albanese’s social media followers were treated to back-to-back days of pie and beer posting. Swoon. He’s just like us!
That’s some mighty governance of a vassal state full of complicit dipshits, cheers!
“The fact that this decision is criticised by people on all sides of the debate,” Albanese hucked on Today, “I expected that to be the case. What this is about is a serious attempt to move forward. ”
Centrists commonly confuse being attacked by everyone for their craven bullshit with being correct. It is truly maddening. One day it might kill us all.
The broken logic, absent morality, and impracticality of the hasbaric “two-state solution” should be apparent to anyone cursed enough to own a mobile phone in 2025. Calling for two states while one of those states is inherently genocidal – and always has been – and stipulating that the other state, the victims of genocide, surrender weapons and the ability to resist, simply ensures the extermination continues until there is no more Palestine.
Australia’s position in the comfy suburbs of the imperial outer-rim is that we will recognise the statehood of the Alderaan asteroid belt, conditional on the Rebel Alliance handing over all of their X-Wings. In the meantime, the Empire gets to keep starving Luke Skywalker and all his kids to death, and we get to keep selling “non-lethal” Death Star parts while feeling morally superior about it, somehow, because everyone hates the idea.
I dunno!?
Nasser Mashni, head of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, spoke with me this week about the Prime Minister’s statements.
“I’ve spent 50 years at rallies and never in my life have I screamed ‘recognition now, recognition now’…. The absurdity, that they think the protests, the petitioners, the movement are going to be placated.
“Palestine exists. We don’t need some piece of paper from the United Nations, which bears a responsibility for the ills that have befallen the Palestinian people. We don’t need their recognition. We are who we are, our existence is our own recognition.
“What is particularly egregious in the Australian context is we continue to supply Israel with the impunity that it enjoys. The fact we are still part of the F-35 program. The fact we still trade with Elbit. The fact that the future fund and our superannuation funds all still have investments in companies the UN found complicit in the oppression and occupation of the Palestinian people. It’s absurd.”
Absurd, cognitively dissonant, and at odds with the horrors burned by blue-light into our brains. The narrative has fallen apart, and yet they cling to parts of it.
This week, indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu took to Israel’s i24 and openly acknowledged his “historic and spiritual mission” to the “Greater Israel” project, an inherently expansionist, genocidal “vision” he said he is “very” attached to. We’ve seen the map. Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Egypt will follow if the United States and its little bloodthirsty colony are not stopped. Millions will die if this Israeli “mission” is to be realised.
And the Prime Minister is both-sidesing, looking for a “win-win”? The moderate position on ethnic cleansing? Half a genocide? Half the Levant? I’ve seen plenty of half-kids the last two years, I wouldn’t put it past them.
Fahad Ali is a Palestinian Australian academic and activist. He spoke to me from London, where he helped run a science fair for refugee children arriving from Gaza. “It was phenomenal. The kids were so happy. It brought a lot of joy to a cohort of people who have escaped suffering and war, aided and abetted by our own government.”
In the UK, Palestine Action, a nonviolent activist group, has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation, giving it the same legal status as ISIS. This followed an incident in which a British death plane became inoperable after finding itself covered in paint (I can do the passive voice, too, New York Times!). Expressing support for the group now carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in jail. On the weekend, Ali witnessed hundreds of people arrested for doing this.
“I was at Parliament Square in front of Westminster at midday. I’ve never seen more police in my life in one place.
“All of a sudden I hear this roar of applause, and people start sitting down. They brought blank white cardboard, and they all start writing together: ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.’ They sit in silence together, hundreds of people at once taking this action.”
Ali notes the irony and symbolism of the park, adorned with statues of civil rights activists like Nelson Mandella and famous suffragettes.
“I was surprised by how many of the crowd were older and distinguished looking, too. Doctors, nurses, people using mobility aids, priests. The majority of arrests were people older than 60. There were students there too, everyone from all walks of life.
“I saw one blind person in a wheelchair; he was arrested by police. I’m overcome by the memory of it… People just stayed until they were arrested.”
522 people were arrested under terrorism charges that day in London, and more than 100 were over the age of 70. All of this is occurring under a UK Labour government now planning on recognising Palestine in September. Jillian Segal, Australian Special Envoy for Shut the Fuck Up About the Genocide, is working towards such a day here.
“I was crying like a baby on several occasions,” Ali says of witnessing the solidarity. “I think the PM wants this to go away. He thinks the problem is the protesters and not that there’s a rogue nation committing genocide.”
“That image of Australia’s most iconic landmark filled with hundreds of thousands of people caused the Prime Minister a headache. And in people like Bob Carr, he had some of the towering members of the Labor Party standing at the front of the thing.”
In response to these protests and accusations, the IDF says….
Psyche! You totally don’t have to do that!! That’s never been a thing. Never been best practice for journalism to give voice to lying psychopaths. It is in fact much better to understand things and then be honest about your understanding. I wouldn’t have quoted Hitler’s lies for context in a story on why Jews and socialists and gypsies were disappearing in the 1940s.
Protestors stood outside the ABC on Monday night after Anas al-Sharif, martyred colleague in journalism, was assassinated in Northern Gaza this week. The vigil mourned Anas and the 270 journalists Israel has murdered since 2023. ABC staff were told to leave the building by the other exit to avoid awkward moments with protesters and shame.
“Journalists are culpable,” Mashni says. “The fact that Anas can be assassinated and then they run articles that say ‘Al Jazeera reporter killed’. ‘Killed’? Not assassinated or murdered? ‘Killed’… And then in the same line they infer he was a Hamas operative. And even if he was! I can’t believe that after 22 months, the complete and utter devastation of a civilian captive population, 2 million hostages, that journalists aren’t pushing back. They aren’t using phrases like genocidal, racist or apartheid Israel. Indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu.”
“We’re affording space for these genocide apologists, these hasbarists. It beggars belief!”
“147 countries recognise Palestine today. It hasn’t stopped Israel from murdering, killing, raping, destroying, ecocide, genocide, scholasticide – these words that we never even knew the meanings of, never understood how they applied to us as human beings.
“We saw what happened on the Harbour Bridge a couple weeks ago. To think that we’ll all go back quietly into our boxes now because at some point in the future Australia will recognise Palestine… This is absurd.”
It is truly delusional; cynical politics while millions are starved to death. Ultimately, humanity’s betrayal of the Palestinians is not coming to an end, and will not unless all of these people are held to account. The rotten wound at the heart of the capitalist world lies in Palestine, this machine that habitually turns millions of brown bodies into squillions of dollars for a small handful of supremacist psychopaths.
“As Palestinians, we’re a little bit different. We’ve been betrayed by humanity. Betrayed by brethren. Betrayed by every system that is supposed to bring justice and equality to humanity. We got breastfed a different sort of resilience.”
“Look across the West: Starmer, Macron, all these blokes. None of them have a record on Palestine and understanding Palestinian politics. Albo has his own Keffiyah. He knows what [from the river to the sea] is. I’ve fist bumped him. He chaired the Parliamentary friends of Palestine way back when. He knows.
“And he also knows that this is nothing.”