Importing confrontation

Most of us care less about Palestine than what it's doing to our country

Anyone who has worked in a newsroom understands the hierarchy of suffering that determines the running order of a bulletin. A tragedy on our doorstep matters more than a larger tragedy on the other side of the world.

So we shouldn’t be surprised if most Australians care less about the conflict in Gaza than what it is doing to our country. The hatred on our streets breaks the unwritten rule that everyone who enters Australia leaves their troubles at the border.

That’s not to dismiss the distressing images emerging from Gaza, not all of which are faked. Nor are we downplaying the good fortune of living in the only permanently populated country untouched by civil war.

We want to keep it that way. Much as we wish for global peace, our greatest desire is to enjoy harmony at home.

Two years after his humiliating referendum defeat, the Prime Minister has once again been drawn into gesture politics with a promise that divides Australians and tests the strength of our social fabric.

Belatedly, the PM has adjusted his rhetoric in deference to the discomfort we felt at the sight of an angry mob flying the banners of jihad while burning the Australian flag.

“Australians overwhelmingly want to see the killing stop,” he told a TV host Tuesday. “They also, of course, don't want to see conflict brought here to our harmonious, multicultural society.”

His acknowledgment is almost certainly too little and too late. He was the one who picked sides by recognising the non-existent state of Palestine. It was his announcement that terrorists praised and the US has condemned.

The immediate consequence is that Albanese will be starved of the oxygen to talk about anything else, just as he would with the Voice. There’s no obvious way to subdue the hornets now that the nest has been stirred. Every press conference spent on this issue will add to the remorse of Australians who voted, thinking they were electing a prime minister, not an activist-in-chief.

Once again, he has failed to explain the point of the exercise, resorting to banal clichés.

He wants to “send a message” that he wants to see “the world move forward”. He tells us he wants to make “a practical contribution towards building momentum” and engage “in detailed dialogue” with the international community, “talking about what a peace looks like in the region.”

He should have begun engaging in a detailed dialogue with the Australian people about what this gesture will achieve, beyond rewarding bad behaviour, getting Australia offside with our most important ally. Polling suggested Australians were sympathetic to the idea of a Voice. By referendum day, however, they'd worked out that its purpose was merely symbolic and that the PM was winging it, hoping to get through on the vibe.

The hubris is astonishing. Having failed to find a solution to the problem of Aboriginal disadvantage, the PM has extended his ambition by promising to bring peace to the Middle East.

He says Australia can help broker a peace deal that defied the best efforts of Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter, King Hussein, Yitzhak Rabin, Henry Kissinger, George H. W. Bush, Shimon Peres, Bill Clinton, and a host of others better versed in the art of statesmanship than he.

The recognition of Palestine will be welcomed by many, just as millions of Australians were passionately in favour of the Voice. Yet if a plebiscite were held, it is not hard to guess the demographic profile that would vote in favour. They will be the same constituencies, more or less, that voted in favour of a Republic in 1999 and the Voice in 2023. They are the seats that recorded the most significant majorities in favour of same-sex marriage.

There would be variations of course in seats with large Muslim populations that were strongly opposed to same-sex marriage. The hypothetical plebiscite would be less well received in "woke" seats with large Jewish populations, such as Wentworth.

However, the people who marched over the bridge were, for the most part, the same inner-metropolitan elite who sign up to every fashionable cause. Some of them would have marched across the bridge a quarter of a century ago in the Walk for Reconciliation. Some may have even glued themselves to the tarmac during peak hour in April 2022 to raise awareness about the climate emergency.

They are members of the activist class, the people who wear their compassion on their sleeve, heavily invested in the cause of humanity, but less concerned about humans themselves, particularly their fellow citizens who have the humility not to advance an opinion about things they know little about.

For those people, the behaviour of the radical alliance between progressives and terrorists is a frightening development.

They are disturbed by the politics of identity that divides citizens according to race or religion. They find the assault on the Jewish community abhorrent, not just because it is antisemitic but because Australian multiculturalism is not meant to work like that. Our social fabric is held together by the twin instincts to live and let live and treat every citizen with equal respect.

The implication that Palestinians in Australia deserve special status for inherited suffering, and Jewish Australians must carry the collective guilt for the imagined sins of Israelis, is anathema to Australians who grew up understanding that character is infinitely more important than race.

The anti-colonial narrative that divided us between First Nation people and others, by implication, Second Nation people, was the deal breaker in the Voice referendum.

Albanese had made the same mistake over Palestine. He has embraced a decisive narrative that exacerbates the divide in Australia, incites hateful protests and leaves many of us wondering if we recognise the country in which we once lived.