Labor’s long embrace with apartheid Israel

When Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza last October, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong was quick to pick Israel’s side. “We stand with Israel and we always will”, Wong told the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce. Wong equated the State of Israel’s resolve to wage war on the Palestinians with the “resilience and courage [of Jewish people] in the face of thousands of years of persecution and many of the worst atrocities in human history”.^[1]

Wong boasted of the role played by “Australia’s most consequential foreign minister, Doc Evatt”, who “was a leading architect of the partition plan that laid the foundations for the creation of a new nation state”. Just as Evatt backed the partition of Palestine in 1947, Wong insisted that a new (or not so new) partition plan – the “two-state solution”, in which Palestinians are given “statehood” in a mere morsel of their homeland – is needed to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That the two-state solution has never eventuated has, according to Wong, nothing to do with Israel’s determination to maintain its 57-year-long occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem through settlement expansion and a brutal siege of Gaza. Instead, it’s the actions of Hamas that have “pushed that two-state solution further out of reach”, she asserted.^[2]

Labor’s rhetoric has shifted somewhat over the past year. With the International Court of Justice arguing that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal and that there is a plausible case Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians, the Albanese government has felt compelled to tone down its enthusiasm for Israel’s actions. However, it has steadfastly opposed implementing sanctions against the apartheid state. To date, Australian sanctions target just seven individual Israeli settlers, despite their violent attacks on West Bank Palestinians being actively encouraged by Israeli government ministers.

When former West Australian Labor Senator Fatima Payman put the case for wide-ranging sanctions against Israel, she faced scorn from across Labor’s front bench, leading to her resignation from the Labor parliamentary caucus. Labor senators joined with the opposition to condemn as “antisemitic” the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, which Payman had used to end her 15 May media statement.^[3] Seeking to reinforce the argument that Palestine supporters are violent antisemites, Labor member for Wills Peter Khalil accused protesters outside his office of “violence, intimidation, harassment, hate speech and damage of property”.^[4] Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has since appointed Khalil to the role of Special Envoy for Social Cohesion and arch-Zionist Jillian Segal AO^[5] to the role of Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism.

So why is Labor so pro-Israel?

A number of arguments have been advanced to explain Labor’s stance. One is that the Zionist lobby exercises an all-powerful influence within the corridors of federal parliament, to the extent that it can dictate Labor party policy. Another is that because Australia shares with Israel a common history of settler colonialism, successive Australian governments are compelled to back Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians. This article will address those arguments before presenting an alternative thesis. I will argue that Australia’s relationship with Israel is an extension of the US alliance, which has been a cornerstone of Australian foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War. Israel’s relationship to US imperial power can be likened to Australia’s “deputy sheriff” role in the South Pacific. Neither nation is simply a “lap dog” for US imperialism. Both nations’ ruling classes share a common interest in having the protection of a mightier imperial power while advancing their own interests in the region.

Following World War II, with the British Empire in rapid decline, the Chifley Labor government began to pursue a foreign policy more independent of Britain than that advocated by the conservative opposition leader, Robert Menzies. Both recognised the Middle East’s significance for global shipping and trade. However, whereas Australian conservatives looked to Britain and its client Arab regimes as key allies in the Middle East, Chifley and Evatt saw in the creation of Israel a potential new ally at the outset of the Cold War.

In the interwar years, Labor Zionism (or “Socialist Zionism”) had come to dominate the politics of Jewish settlers in Palestine. Labor Zionists employed socialist rhetoric to draw labour movement support behind their nationalist, colonial-settler project. In doing so, they galvanised support from both European social democratic parties and the labour parties in Britain and Australia. Thus, Labor could more readily sell the idea of Israel to its base than could Menzies’ Liberal Party. Before moving on to discuss Labor Zionism, this article will look at the Zionist lobby’s influence on Australian foreign policy and Australia and Israel’s shared history of settler colonialism.

An “all powerful” Zionist lobby?

Several former Labour politicians, such as Bob Carr, Kevin Rudd and Paul Keating, have argued that the Zionist lobby exercises such a powerful influence in the media that it can bring down governments too critical of Israel. Former foreign minister Bob Carr argues that the Zionist lobby is able to dictate Australia’s foreign policy to the detriment of Australia’s “national interest”.^[6] However, the “national interests” that Labor holds dear are not the interests of the Australian working class but the interests of big business. And Australian big business today overwhelmingly favours a close relationship with Washington as a protector of its interests in the Asia Pacific. It should therefore be no surprise that Israel – Washington’s most important ally in the Middle East – gains favourable media coverage and red-carpet treatment from Australian politicians.

Albanese and Wong both hail from the Labor Left. Albanese was a founding member of the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine and early in his parliamentary career spoke inside and outside parliament in opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine. However, his conversion to backing Israel follows in a long Labor tradition in which the US alliance is viewed as sacred. This conversion can’t simply be explained by him having been seduced by Zionist lobbyists.

Foreign policy is not and has never been shaped primarily by sectionalist lobby groups. While many nation states and interest groups lobby the Australian government, the positions the government adopts can’t be explained simply or primarily by them being at the bidding of a well-resourced team of lobbyists in Canberra. Australian foreign policy serves the collective, geopolitical interests of the Australian ruling class. To understand how support for Israel has become so central to Australian foreign policy, we need to examine the historical circumstances that have given rise to the Australia-Israel relationship, who benefits from it and how.

Settler colonialism

Australia shares with Israel settler-colonial origins. However, whereas the Australian nation state began as a federation of colonial outposts of the British Empire, Zionism’s claim to Israel was asserted on an entirely different basis. Zionists have always insisted they are not colonisers but rather derive their claim from a biblical connection with the Holy Land. With Israel having gained statehood at a time when the Great Powers were having to concede independence to powerful anti-colonial movements, it was untenable for mid-twentieth century Zionists to admit to being colonisers. However, they are colonisers and have never shied away from employing racism to advance their aims.

In his 1896 pamphlet, The State of Jews, the father of modern Zionism Theodor Herzl pursued the support of European colonial powers with his claim that a Jewish state in Palestine would form “a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation against barbarism”.^[7] Similarly, last July Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the US Congress that the current genocide in Gaza is “a clash between barbarism and civilisation, between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life”.^[8]

While Zionists’ violent usurpation of Palestinian land is an ongoing contemporary project, the question of who controls the land in Australia was resolved long ago in the British colonisers’ favour. A century-long frontier war across the entire continent ended when British soldiers crushed the last surviving Aboriginal resistance in the Kimberley region of Western Australia in the 1890s.

Britain’s imperial conquest reduced Australia’s Indigenous population to a tiny minority. Disease, loss of land and direct violence reduced the Aboriginal population by an estimated 90 percent by 1900. By the time of Federation, Aboriginal people numbered just 3 percent of Australia’s total population, and their numbers have never recovered. From the early twentieth century onwards, when it became apparent that Aboriginal people were not simply going to “die out”, Australian states and the Commonwealth government set about seeking to absorb surviving First Nations people into White Australia through a policy of assimilation; child removal (the Stolen Generations) was a key strategy. In contrast, Zionism has always sought to exclude indigenous Palestinians from residence and full citizenship rights in the State of Israel.

Israel is not, and has never been, simply an outpost of a grand imperial power. Though British Lord Balfour declared the Empire’s support for a Jewish state in Palestine in 1917, the Balfour Declaration fell short of the demands of Zionist leaders. It did not go as far as declaring support for an exclusively Jewish state, stipulating that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.^[9]

Balfour was hardly a man of his word. Indeed, various promises were made to Arab leaders and allied powers that were seemingly contradictory. The Balfour Declaration, which formed part of Britain’s colonial mandate in Palestine, formalised by the League of Nations in 1922, sought to balance the interests of Zionist settlers against those of Arabs. Prior to the Declaration, Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, wrote to Sharif Hussein bin Ali, Emir of Mecca, promising British support for an independent Arab state in exchange for Arab assistance in opposing the Ottoman Empire. Simultaneously, Britain undertook secret negotiations with France to dismember the Ottoman Empire and divide Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine between them, culminating in the Sykes Picot agreement, signed in 1916.

With British colonisers simultaneously seeking to curry favour with both Zionist settlers and Arab elites, the Zionist movement could little afford to be simply an appendage to British imperial designs. To succeed, Zionists needed to steer their own course, appealing to the Jewish diaspora in Europe to cultivate a new sense of nationhood based on a conquest of both Palestinian land and economy.

A Jewish nation?

The central founding myth of Zionism was the idea that the Jewish diaspora constituted a nation. Herzl argued that antisemitism was inherent in non-Jews, leaving Jews with no choice but to emigrate from Europe and establish a new Jewish homeland. Simultaneously, a radical tradition was developing among Yiddish-speaking workers in the Russian empire, who formed the Jewish Labour Bund in 1897. For these socialist Jews, the solution to combatting antisemitism was not emigration, but instead fighting for rights and autonomy within the tsarist empire through strikes, protest and working-class agitation.

The coming of World War I brought various competing nationalisms to the fore. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin synthesised an analysis of modern imperialism, which he described as “the highest stage of capitalism”, to explain how competing European powers were driven towards “an annexationist, predatory, plunderous war…a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies, ‘spheres of influence’ of finance capital, etc.” ^[10]

Lenin’s pamphlet served as a denunciation of the opportunist leaders of the Second International who had backed the belligerent nations in the war. It also served to develop further Lenin’s view that oppressed nations – those subjugated by imperialism – should have the right to self-determination. A 1913 pamphlet by Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, articulated what constituted a nation: “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture”.^[11]

The Bolsheviks argued that the Jewish diaspora did not constitute a nation as they lacked a common language or territory. Stalin polemicised against the much looser definition of a nation put forward by the Austrian socialist Otto Bauer: “a nation is an aggregate of people bound into a community of character by a common destiny”.^[12] Such a definition, according to Stalin, conceded ground to nationalism, of which Zionism was just one example. Zionism, he explained, is “a reactionary nationalist trend of the Jewish bourgeoisie…[that] endeavoured to isolate the Jewish working-class masses from the general struggle of the proletariat”.^[13]

There was nothing antisemitic in the argument that Jews were not a nation. Jews constituted an important part of the working classes (often the most militant element), as well as of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, across central and eastern Europe. Antisemitism had arisen in a specific historical juncture as competing nationalisms sought to define Russian, Polish, Hungarian and other identities as distinct from Jewish culture and religion. In contrast to Zionism, Bolshevism argued that the solution to Jewish oppression lay in the overthrow of capitalism and recognition of cultural autonomy of Jews within a federation of socialist republics.

However, within the Jewish Bund, a separate and distinct ideological current emerged that attempted to reconcile socialism with Jewish nationalism. As the revolutionary wave that engulfed Europe at the end of World War I receded, this Zionist current gained ground. Though Zionism remained a minority view among European Jewry, “socialist” Zionism dominated among the Russian and Polish Jews who migrated to Palestine after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution. Between 1904 and 1914, 35,000–45,000 Jews arrived in Palestine from Russia and Poland, collectively known as the Second Aliyah (migration). It should be emphasised, however, that the Zionist Jews who migrated to Palestine in this period were a tiny minority of the mass migration of Eastern European Jews. According to Zachary Lockman, of the approximately 2.4 million Jews who left eastern Europe between 1881 and the First World War, 85 percent went to the United States and just 3 percent migrated to Palestine.^[14]

Labor Zionism

Labor Zionism emerged as a political current in 1905, with the formation of Poale Zion (Workers of Zion). Poale Zion soon began to forge relationships with the social democratic parties organised within the Second International. Its emerging right faction, which openly espoused nationalism, had much in common ideologically with the social democratic and labour parties that lined up behind their own ruling classes during World War I. As we shall see, Labor Zionism’s growing hegemony within the settler Jewish population of Palestine in the interwar years contributed to the Australian Labor Party’s subsequent support for Israel’s creation following World War II.

Poale Zion’s most prominent intellectual was Dov Ber Borokhov, a self-described Marxist. Borokhov argued for Jewish colonisation of Palestine on the basis that the Jewish proletariat could take power through a common class struggle with the Arab proletariat. However, Borokhov had no doubt as to the supposed cultural and economic superiority of Jews:

It is the Jewish immigrants who will undertake the development of the forces of production of Eretz Yisra’el [Palestine], and the local population of Eretz Yisra’el [the Arabs] will soon assimilate economically and culturally to the Jews.^[15]

Poale Zion’s followers, mostly eastern European middle-class urban Jews, saw it their task to transform themselves into agricultural or industrial wage workers, thus creating a Jewish proletariat in Palestine that could advance the class struggle within Palestine’s developing capitalist economy. Another left-Zionist party, Hapo’el Hatza’ir (“The Young Worker”), influenced by Tolstoyan principles and rejecting Marxism and class struggle, sought to build a new society through physical labour, self-sacrifice and settlement on the land. Both used the term “conquest of labour” to describe the construction of Jewish proletariat in Palestine through the embrace of hard physical labour, especially in agriculture.^[16]

However, this schema soon collided with a contrasting reality on the ground. Neither Jewish nor non-Jewish capital rushed to invest in Palestine, an overwhelmingly rural economy. Nor were there bountiful jobs for newly arrived Jewish settlers. Farmers, especially citrus plantation owners, preferred Arab labour, which they considered cheaper, more experienced and more reliable. With Arab wages too low for subsistence for newly arrived Jewish settlers, many idealistic Jews returned home. For those who remained, the “conquest of labour” soon came to take on a new meaning: the creation of a Jewish labour market through the exclusion of Arab labour. This policy went hand-in hand with the “conquest of the land” (establishing Jewish ownership of as much of the land as possible, whether through purchase or expropriation) and “produce of the land” (boycotting Arab-made goods to grow a market for Jewish agriculture and industry).^[17]

Following World War I, Poale Zion split into left and right factions over the question of participation in bourgeois-led Zionist institutions. The nationalist, right faction formed Ahdut Ha’avoda (United Labor) under the leadership of future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, who had emigrated to Palestine in 1906. Whereas the First Aliyah had established settlements on a capitalist basis, with subordinate Arab labour, Ben-Gurion and his followers argued that cooperatives should be established that excluded Arab labour. This new policy, he argued, would have better prospects of success. Ben-Gurion emerged as a master of employing socialist rhetoric, while having an eye for a strategy that could enlist bourgeois Zionist support.

In 1920, 4,500 Jewish workers from the parties Ahdut Ha’avoda and Hapo’el Hatza’ir elected delegates to a labour congress, which formed Histadrut, the General Federation of Hebrew Workers in Eretz Israel. Ben-Gurion was elected Histadrut’s first secretary-general. A decade later, Ahdut Ha’avoda and Hapo’el Hatza’ir merged to form Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael (Workers Party of the Land of Israel, known by the acronym MAPAI), with Ben-Gurion the party’s secretary.

Both parties envisaged the Histadrut not as a trade union federation in the classic sense, but rather as an instrument to facilitate the colonisation of Palestine by Jewish workers and the establishment of a Jewish state. As its name suggests, the Histadrut was to be a union of Jewish workers only; Arab workers were to be excluded. The Histadrut was an instrument for state building and the class struggle could take a back seat. As historian Mitchel Cohen observes, Ben-Gurion “acted forcefully to centralize the Histadrut’s resources and power structure as a nascent workers’ state within the state of Mandate Palestine”.^[18]

The Histadrut built a whole array of institutions for this purpose, including a disability fund (Kupat Cholim), labour exchanges, building firms (Solel Boneh), a company for the sale of agricultural products (Tnuva), a wholesale cooperative (Hamashbir Hamerkazi), a labour schools’ network, housing and agricultural cooperatives (kibbutzim), and even a bank. “The bank is the true expression of the workers’ will”, declared Yosef Aharonowitz, co-director of the bank and a central leader of Hapo’el Hatza’ir, in 1922.^[19]

The Histadrut attempted to enact what it termed “constructive socialism”. In reality, this meant subordinating supposedly socialist goals to the nationalist goals of Zionism. A workers’ society (Hevrat ha-Ovdim), a collective holding company through which Histadrut enterprises operated, supposedly gave every Jewish worker in Palestine a stake in the workers’ economy. However, Hevrat ha-Ovdim’s secretary-general, Reiner, made clear what the institution’s real priorities were, stating: “We believe in socialist ownership but a capitalistic way of management; moreover, profit is not a ‘dirty word’ with us; it is a phrase which guides our general economic thinking”.^[20]

Expressing his condescension towards the working class, Reiner stated:

Frankly, [workers] are laymen; they do not grasp the wider implications of running a business; they can’t read a balance sheet; they are weak on long range planning; these workers have a dozen other weaknesses as members of the Board of Directors [of Histadrut-affiliated firms]. But they contribute mightily in another field: they understand management’s viewpoint much better and they pass this message on in one form or another, generally without even thinking about it, to their fellow workers. Secondly, management sees the workers’ viewpoint much, much better, and like the workers, we absorb this viewpoint without even concentrating on it. The result? Strikes in our enterprises are few and far between. Labor and management exist in much greater harmony.^[21]

Demonstrating Labor Zionism’s ability to subordinate and control Jewish workers, while excluding Arabs from Jewish economic life, proved key to its ascendency and decades-long hegemony within the Zionist movement. The Histadrut could exercise an iron discipline over its membership because so many members owed their employment to the Histadrut, whose enterprises were financed by Zionist capitalists abroad. Indeed, up until the 1980s, the Histadrut commanded the Israeli economy as union, boss and healthcare provider for the majority of Jewish workers in Israel.

Moreover, the Histadrut experienced spectacular growth, drawing large numbers of Jewish workers into its ranks and extolling the virtues of its project to entice other European Jewish workers to make Aliyah (migrate to Palestine). According to its executive committee, the Histadrut numbered 8,394 members in 1923, 22,538 in 1927, 35,389 by the beginning of 1933, and more than 100,000 by the outbreak of World War II. Its membership grew dramatically during and after World War II, with a new influx of Jewish migrants. At the end of 1949, eighteen months after Israel’s declaration of independence, the Histadrut numbered more than 250,000 and, a year later, 330,000 (46 percent of the adult Jewish population).^[22]

However, the massive growth of the ranks of the Histadrut during and after World War II had less to do with the pull factor of Jews being drawn to Labor Zionist ideology and more to do with the push factor of the devastating Nazi Holocaust in Europe. In contrast with the preceding waves of Jewish migration, European Jews now arrived in Palestine not because they were committed to the Zionist cause, but because they had nowhere else to go. Between 1925 and 1965, the United States sharply limited Eastern European migration via a quota system, closing its doors to large numbers of would-be Jewish immigrants. Similar immigration restrictions operated in Canada, Britain, Australia and South Africa, all of which favoured non-Jewish European immigration.^[23]

In 1933, soon after coming to power in Germany, the Nazi regime reached the Haavara agreement with the Labor Zionist leadership in Palestine, facilitating the Nazi takeover of Jewish property. Under this agreement, 60,000 German Jews were allowed to migrate to Palestine between 1933 and 1939. For those Jews who survived the Nazi Holocaust and arrived in the displaced persons camps, many would no doubt have preferred to migrate to the United States or other Western countries, but found Palestine their only option. In 1948 alone, more than 120,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine.^[24]

The Histadrut buttressed its economic power with military force from its inception. In 1920, the year of its foundation, the Histadrut established a militia known as the Haganah, later a key instrument for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the precursor to the Israeli Defence Forces. By the time of Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence, the Haganah numbered 20,000.^[25] It was a well-trained paramilitary force, having collaborated with the British to suppress the Palestinian revolt between 1936 and 1939, and after World War II was well placed to lead the insurgency against the British.

During the British Mandate period, Labor Zionism achieved unrivalled authority in the Yishuv (Jewish Palestine). In 1935, Ben-Gurion, leader of both the Histadrut and MAPAI, was elected chair of the Jewish Agency executive, the Yishuv political leadership. While MAPAI never attained a majority within the decision-making bodies of the Zionist Organisation (the umbrella organisation of the Zionist movement), or later in Israel’s parliament, it exercised effective political control of the Yishuv during the British Mandate period and led a succession of Israeli coalition governments until it merged into the Israeli Labor Party in 1968. The Labor Party remained dominant in Israeli politics for a further decade, until the coalition it led ceded power to the right-wing Likud party in 1977, ending three decades of Labor Zionist rule.

The evolution of Labor Zionism outlined above bears both similarities to and differences from other social democratic and labour parties. In the lead-up to World War I, European social democratic parties accommodated to capitalism and threw their support behind their own ruling classes in the carnage that followed. They advocated a parliamentary road to socialism, whereby the winning of reforms would ultimately legislate socialism into existence. Where they were able to shepherd once combative labour movements behind them, and bring about stable conditions for capitalist investment, they became increasingly entrusted by the bourgeoisie with the task of government.

Labor Zionism similarly subordinated its supposedly socialist goals to the immediate tasks of nation building, though its consolidation as a hegemonic ideological current in Palestine predates the formation of the state of Israel by some decades. In Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, Labor parties in each state cohered around a national platform of support for the White Australia policy, arbitration of industrial disputes and defence of Empire. Racial exclusion bound together Labor’s first federal caucus in 1901, which was otherwise divided between opposing camps of protectionists and free traders.

In Australia, it was non-white migrant labour, rather than Indigenous labour, that was the target of the White Australia Policy. However, Australian Labor leaders used similar justifications to their Labor Zionist comrades: to maintain high wages, cheap labour had to be excluded, they argued, and class peace enforced via a highly regulated labour market. In fact, Ben-Gurion and other Histadrut leaders gave more rhetorical support to the idea of organising Arab labour in Palestine than did Australian Workers Union leaders to organising Chinese labour in Australia. However, in reality, this rhetoric was employed as a means to deflect criticism by left Zionists and internationalists. During the period of the British Mandate, numerous opportunities for a united struggle between Jewish and Arab workers were studiously avoided and even undermined by Histadrut leaders.^[26]

Zionism and the international left

Whereas other nationalist movements that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to expel colonising powers, Zionism was itself from the outset a colonising movement, albeit one that claimed to be a national liberation movement. It could only succeed in creating an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine via the dispossession, expulsion and oppression of the Palestinian people. As Lockman has observed, the left in the Yishuv (and later in Israel) faced a dilemma:

Those parties which adhered to Zionism (whatever their particular brand of “synthesis” between Zionism and Marxism) were compelled, by the logic of their very presence and goals in Palestine, to compromise their socialist principles one by one when they came into conflict with the demands of Zionist colonization; but those parties which refused any compromise with Zionism found themselves relatively isolated, cut off from the great majority of the Jews of the Yishuv, and later the state, and this of course severely limited the possibilities of playing a prominent role in the class struggle.^[27]

From its inception in 1919, the Communist International (Comintern) took a strong stance against Zionism, reflecting the Bolsheviks’ opposition to all forms of nationalism outlined previously. The Comintern and its affiliate, the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP), strongly backed the 1929 Arab massacres of Jewish civilians in Hebron. In 1936, when the Palestinian revolt erupted, the PCP gave it full support, giving uncritical backing to the leadership of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni.^[28]

In the lead-up to and during World War II, Comintern policy under Stalin’s leadership followed a series of zig-zags driven by the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. From 1928, the Comintern adopted the ultraleft “Third Period” line, branding Labor and social democratic parties as “social fascist”. From the mid-1930s, under the “popular front” policy, working-class interests were to be subordinated to the needs of “progressive” capitalists who opposed fascism. After Stalin signed a peace treaty with Hitler in August 1939, a new line emerged. The Comintern denounced the “inter-imperialist war” until June 1941, when Hitler launched a major military offensive against the Soviet Union. Stalin then directed another U-turn: the “inter-imperialist war” now became a “people’s war” to defeat fascism. In 1943, the Comintern itself was dissolved as an act of appeasement to the Soviet Union’s World War II allies.

These zig-zags had a profoundly disorienting impact on rank-and-file communists worldwide. Over the course of the 1930s, revolutionaries who didn’t accept the line dictated by Stalin and his lieutenants found themselves marginalised or expelled from Comintern-affiliated communist parties. New party leaderships loyal to Moscow were installed and internal democracy was extinguished. However, it was undoubtedly a bitter pill to swallow for many communists when, in May 1947, the Soviet Union announced that it would support the UN plan for partitioning Palestine and creating a Jewish state.

The Soviet Union’s UN ambassador, Andrei Gromyko, told the United Nations General Assembly that Moscow favoured a bi-national state in Palestine, but that:

[if] such a solution proves unworkable because of the deteriorated relations between the Jews and the Arabs, it will be necessary to examine a second solution…namely, the partition of the country into two independent autonomous states, a Jewish one and an Arab one.^[29]

Five months later, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states voted in favour of UN Resolution 181, which called for Palestine’s partition and subsequently supported Israel’s May 1948 declaration of independence. According to historian Philip Mendes, Moscow’s support for Israel included:

vigorous diplomatic support whereby the Soviet Union defended Israel’s right to self-defence in United Nations debates, and condemned the “armed aggression” directed against the Jewish state. They also defended Israel’s right to retain strategically significant territory such as the Negev region captured in the war, and rejected any Israeli responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem.^[30]

The Soviet Union also channelled military supplies to Israel via Czechoslovakia and trained Haganah pilots and paratroopers. The military aid contributed to Israel’s rapid defeat of the Arab armies that had entered Palestine, leading Ben-Gurion to later conclude: “[The Soviet Union] saved the country, I have no doubt of that. The Czech arms deal was the greatest help, it saved us and without it I very much doubt if we could have survived the first month”.^[31]

Communist parties around the world quickly fell into line, with the US Communist Party describing Israel as “an organic part of the world struggle for peace and democracy” based on a “struggle against British and Anglo-American imperialist domination”.^[32] The French Communist Party likened the Haganah’s role in the Israel “war of independence” (in reality a campaign of ethnic cleansing) to the national liberation struggles and anti-fascist movements of the Chinese communists, the Viet Minh, the Greek partisans and the Spanish Republicans.^[33]

Stalin’s enthusiastic backing for the new Zionist state was based on the premise that Zionists, rather than Arabs, were more likely to succeed in hastening a British withdrawal from Palestine and weaken British imperialism’s grip on the Middle East. With the Cold War in its infancy, Stalin may have also hoped, naively, that the USSR could counter Washington’s growing influence in the Middle East by having the state of Israel on its side. That, however, was not to happen. The effect of Stalin’s capitulation to Zionism was to isolate Arab communist parties and bolster Arab nationalism. Additionally, when Labor and European social democratic parties voiced support for Palestine’s partition, they faced little left-wing dissent, either from inside or outside their ranks.

According to Mendes, the British Labour Party backed a Jewish state in Palestine as early as August 1917. British Labour parliamentarians had, in the preceding years, demonstrated their loyalty to King and Country by enthusiastically backing the British Empire’s sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of men on the blood-soaked battlefields of France and Belgium. Later, in 1944, a British Labour Party conference resolved that Jews should be admitted to Palestine “in such numbers as to become a majority” and that “the Arabs be encouraged to move out [to neighbouring countries] as the Jews move in”.^[34]

In the years 1945–48, the Attlee Labour government did not implement this position, reflecting the British ruling class’s animosity to a terror campaign directed at British troops in Palestine by Zionist militias that they considered a threat to ongoing British influence in the Middle East. However, the aspirations of Zionists to a Jewish homeland in Palestine continued to influence the ranks of the British Labour Party and other Western social democratic parties. The impact of the Nazi Holocaust, and its destruction of the Jewish labour movement in Europe, only served to accelerate this sentiment.

Zionism and the Australian left

In the aftermath of World War II, there was virtually universal support for Israel’s creation among the Australian left, spearheaded by the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism. Mendes cites two examples of CPA and union leaders expressing support for Zionist goals as early as 1945. In February that year, communist and Federated Iron Workers general secretary Ernie Thornton supported a resolution of the World Trade Union Congress in London calling for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.^[35] Six months later, Victorian CPA leader Ralph Gibson expressed support for Jews to enter “their historical homeland” and establish their “national home” in the CPA’s Victorian newspaper, The Voice.^[36]

In 1947, the CPA welcomed the United Nations partition plan for Palestine and, a year later, backed Israel’s declaration of statehood. Gibson led the campaign to rally CPA support behind Israel, authoring a pamphlet that equated Zionism’s efforts to conquer Palestine with anti-imperialist struggles in China, Vietnam and Greece.^[37] Gibson argued the war between Israel and Arab military forces was a “war on the Jews…being waged by ‘kings’ from outside the country” in concert with British imperialism. By suppressing Zionist terror attacks and imprisoning Zionist leaders, argued Gibson, the British occupation forces in Palestine had “fanned the anti-Jewish feeling of Arab reactionaries and strengthened the influence of the reactionary Jewish terrorist gangs”.^[38]

The CPA loyally followed directions from Moscow: Labor Zionists were supposedly a progressive force seeking to liberate Palestine from British colonial rule and unite Jewish and Arab workers around a common program, while the reactionary Irgun and Stern Gang^[39] were seeking to stoke the flames of sectarian division. However, it was the Labor Zionists, led by Ben-Gurion and constituting the leadership of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, who bore prime responsibility for the 1948 Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), a campaign of ethnic cleansing that drove large numbers of Palestinians into a permanent exile from their homeland. It was their militia, the Haganah, affiliated with the Histadrut and armed and trained by Britain in the preceding decade, that was most central to the Zionists’ terror campaign.

The CPA’s newspaper Tribune presented the state of Israel as the underdog, backed by the Soviet Union and confronting a more powerful enemy in the form of Arab regimes supported by British and American oil interests. In March 1948, two months before Israel’s declaration of statehood, Tribune published a letter by ten prominent left-wing Australians defending the UN partition plan, which they claimed, “shows a proper understanding of the sufferings which the Jewish people have undergone”, and condemned “pro-fascist Arab leaders” who opposed it.^[40]

Subsequent Tribune articles condemned what the paper claimed was an “Arab invasion of Palestine” made possible “with British and American planes and arms” and urged the Chifley government to maintain its support for Palestine’s partition.^[41]Tribune asserted that Jews in Palestine were “being sacrificed by both British and US imperialists for the sake of enormous oil profits which they hope to garner in alliance with Arab chieftains” and claimed that “atrocities by Jewish extremists are being featured in the British press, to the exclusion of similar Arab atrocities”.^[42]

Other prominent leftists also backed Israel. Journalist Wilfred Burchett equated the Jewish struggle for independence in Palestine with that of the Spanish Republicans confronting a common fascist enemy.^[43] Feminist Jessie Street was another strong supporter of a Jewish “national homeland” in Palestine.^[44] Labor politicians, including NSW premier William McKell, Marrickville MP Carlo Lazzarini and Bondi MP Abram (Abe) Landa, as well as ACTU president (and later Bendigo MP) Percy James Clarey, were also prominent supporters of Israel.^[45]

The Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism

The Melbourne-based Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism was significant in shaping left-wing opinion. The Council, established in 1942, was a coalition of Jewish social democrats, communists and liberals, including figures such as Norman Rothfield, Sam Goldbloom, Judah Waten and Sam Cohen.^[46] The Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies (VJBD) and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the peak Victorian and national bodies of Australian Jewry, delegated the Council with undertaking public relations and political lobbying activities on their behalf.^[47] In the years following World War II, the Council’s influence overshadowed that of the Jewish Bund in Melbourne, which had been the political home for anti-Zionist Eastern European Jews who had migrated to Australia in the interwar years.^[48]

The Council began to advocate for a Jewish state in Palestine from May 1945. Three years later, it campaigned for recognition and support for Israel, working with Zionist organisations, Jewish cultural organisations and the CPA-aligned Jewish Progressive Centre to organise pro-Israel public meetings, rallies, radio broadcasts and news articles.^[49] The Council also widely distributed two pamphlets by Evelyn Rothfield, the Council’s information officer and president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).^[50] In Whither Palestine (1947), Rothfield defends Jewish mass migration to Palestine (in opposition to then British policy) and asserts that the Arab-Jewish conflict was due to the malign influence of exploitative Arab landowners and the Mufti of Jerusalem, whom she branded a Nazi collaborator.^[51] In Israel Reborn (1948), Rothfield claims that only Arab feudal landlords opposed partition. In a similar vein to contemporaneous articles in Tribune, Rothfield asserts that “the large mass of Arabs inside Palestine have little quarrel with their Jewish neighbours”.^[52]

A May 1948 Council petition calling for immediate Australian recognition of Israel gained the support of leading ALP figures Jim Cairns (Snr), William Slater, Doris Blackburn and Frank Crean, as well as Communist trade union leaders Clarrie O’Shea and Jim Healy. According to Mendes, the Council distributed 55,000 copies of a pamphlet based on this petition. The CPA also actively promoted and distributed the Council’s literature.^[53]

The CPA and its fellow travellers on the left remained silent about the Palestinians’ own desire for liberation from colonial rule and their mass displacement by Zionist colonisers. Writing in 2004, former CPA member Max Watts recalls how the CPA turned its back on the plight of the Palestinians:

The Palestinians? They had been, early on, totally defeated, were now being expelled or were leaving. We lefties, to our shame, almost ignored their plight. For us, the Left, the invading Arab armies, even the Palestinian fighters, were but British puppets, colonial troops, fighting to maintain endangered parts of the failing empire.^[54]

Labor and the birth of Israel

The Australian Labor Party endorsed Israel’s creation as early as 1943, when its national conference resolved to support “the continued growth of the Jewish national home in Palestine by immigration and settlement”.^[55] This position was generally reflective of the views within the Australian left at the time, as outlined above. However, it did not align with the policy of the Curtin Labor government.

Between 1936 and 1939, the conservative Lyons government strongly backed Britain’s violent suppression of the Palestinian Revolt with no protest from the Labor opposition. During World War II, both Lyon’s successor, Robert Menzies, and Labor Prime Minister John Curtin continued to back British colonial rule in Palestine. Each shared Britain’s fear of an Arab backlash against the declaration of a Jewish state. It was not until 1947 that Curtin’s successor Ben Chifley and his external affairs minister Herbert “Doc” Evatt began to chart a different course, advocating for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Evatt was instrumental to the United Nations General Assembly vote in favour of Palestine’s partition. Firstly, he led the Australian UN delegation, which in May 1947 successfully moved to establish the UN Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). On 31 August 1947 UNSCOP released its report: it unanimously supported an end to the British mandate, while a majority of the committee recommended the partition of Palestine between Arab and Jewish states.

Secondly, Evatt chaired the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question, appointed by the UN General Assembly to provide it with recommendations. A majority of this committee similarly recommended Palestine’s partition, proposing to the UN General Assembly that 56 percent of Mandate Palestine be allocated to a Jewish state, even though Jewish settlers numbered less than one-third of Palestine’s population. Jerusalem was proposed to be an international zone, excluded from the territory of both states.

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly adopted UNSCOP’s partition plan, with 33 member nations voting in favour (including Australia), 13 voting against and 10 abstaining (including the United Kingdom). The vote marked a rare break with British foreign policy at the time. Evatt’s role in advocating for the UN partition plan led historian Chanan Reich to describe Evatt as “one of the godfathers of the present Israeli state”.^[56]

At midnight on 14 May 1948 Ben-Gurion, as head of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. US President Harry Truman recognised the provisional Zionist government as the de facto authority in Israel just eleven minutes after Ben-Gurion’s proclamation. The Soviet Union was the first state to give de jure recognition to Israel, doing so three days later. However, the Chifley Labor government waited until 27 January 1949 to formally recognise the State of Israel, doing so in concert with the British government.^[57]

The proclamation came amidst a wave of Zionist terror. Between late 1947 and early 1949, 530 Palestinian villages were ethnically cleansed, 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 750,000 more were forced into exile. Three neighbouring Arab states – Egypt, Transjordan and Syria – invaded Palestinian territories allocated for a future Arab state, ostensibly to defend Palestinians from a Zionist takeover. However, Transjordan’s King Abdullah I sent in troops, not to liberate Palestine, but to occupy the West Bank with the intention of annexing the territory. Poorly trained Egyptian and Syrian forces were soon overrun by the better trained Haganah, Palmach and Irgun. By the end of the war, in mid-1949, the new state of Israel controlled 78 percent of historic Palestine.

During the Arab-Israeli war, Evatt opposed a plan authored by the UN’s special mediator for Palestine (the Bernadotte Plan), which attempted to pressure Israel to cede the Negev region. Following the Australian government’s recognition of Israel, Evatt lobbied strongly for Israel’s admission to the UN, in May 1949.

Historians have put forward various arguments as to why the Chifley government strongly advocated for Israel. Rodney Gouttman claims that relations between Australia and Israel were not founded “because of strategic or economic necessity” but “on the personal beliefs of Dr Herbert Vere Evatt”.^[58]Philip Mendes argues that the Zionist movement’s lobbying of Evatt was “very significant in confirming Evatt’s pro-Israel sentiments”.^[59]He cites the support Evatt expressed for Israel’s creation in a 1943 meeting with the Jewish Advisory Board of New South Wales and his close relationship with Zionists such as Max Freilich, president of the State Zionist Council of New South Wales, and Labor parliamentarian Abram Landa.^[60] Mendes also observes that it was almost exclusively the conservative parties and the antisemitic far right who articulated anti-Zionist and pro-Arab views, often accusing Zionists of being associated with communism and seeking to undermine the British Empire.^[61]

Evatt was no doubt influenced by the strong pro-Israel sentiments expressed by Labor Party allies and the wider left. Evatt himself cited “a feeling of deep compassion for the Jews” in the aftermath of their “merciless persecution by the Germans under Hitler” as key to his desire “for a speedy settlement of the Palestine question”.^[62] However, Evatt’s own views and the influence of those around him don’t explain the significant shift in foreign policy enacted by the Chifley government as a whole. Instead, we need to explore the wider context of post-World War II geopolitics.

Forging the US alliance on the eve of the Cold War

At the end of World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s pre-eminent superpower, with the British Empire in terminal decline. The Middle East soon became a key battleground in the Cold War as the US sought to isolate and defeat its rival, the Soviet Union. Both powers vied for allies to protect strategic trade routes through the Suez Canal. The Middle East was especially important to US imperialism because of its vast oil reserves. And Israel, which had just won a decisive military victory, was viewed favourably for its potential to help safeguard US interests.

As Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon put it:

From the moment President Truman became the first world leader to recognize the new Jewish state, Israel has had no better friend than the United States of America, and the U.S. has had no more steadfast ally than the state of Israel.^[63]

In this new Cold War reality, Chifley began to reorient Australian foreign policy, shifting allegiance from a declining British Empire towards the United States. Of particular concern to the Australian ruling class was the growing strength of China under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, which defeated its nationalist rivals, the Guomindang in October 1949. An alliance with the US was viewed as the best means to safeguard Australian interests in the Asia Pacific. In exchange, Australia would play the role of deputy lieutenant, aiding US global expansionism. The ANZUS treaty, signed in 1951 by the Menzies government, formalised the pact. However, it was Chifley who laid the foundation for the Cold War policies pursued by his successor Robert Menzies.

A damaging split within Labor, resulting in the formation of the anti-communist Democratic Labor Party, kept Labor out of government for the next two decades. During the 1956 Suez crisis, when Israel invaded the Sinai with British and French military support, Menzies defended Israel’s actions, painting Egypt, whose territory had been invaded, as the villain. Evatt, Labor’s opposition leader, opposed Menzies’ trenchant support for British and French imperialism, declaring their Suez Canal invasion “a naked exercise of military power”.^[64]Evatt’s position aligned with the US, the Soviet Union and the UN, who together pressured Israel, the United Kingdom and France to withdraw troops from Egypt. Evatt’s stance foreshadowed that of the Whitlam government which espoused an “impartial” approach to conflict between Israel and its neighbours while arguing that Arab states should recognise Israel and make peace with the Zionist state.

Gough Whitlam succeeded Arthur Calwell as Labor opposition leader in February 1967. According to Zionist writers Colin Rubenstein and Tzvi Fleischer, “the opposition, under Gough Whitlam who had visited Israel in 1964 and again shortly after the war, was at least as pro-Israeli as the government”.^[65] Various Labor Party conferences passed resolutions urging Israel’s recognition by Arab states and in August 1964, Whitlam accused the Menzies government of having succumbed to Arab pressure, stating in parliament that it had not done enough to improve post and air communications with Israel.^[66]

The Whitlam Labor Government

When Labor returned to government in 1972, Israel had become the Middle East’s most powerful military state and a key pillar of US hegemony in the region. While Israel’s 1948 foundation faced no significant opposition within the Australian left, Israel’s 1967 invasion of the remainder of historic Palestine (the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza), as well as the Syrian Golan Heights, received a very different response. The 1967 Six Day War between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan coincided with a massive escalation in the US war in Vietnam and the introduction of conscription in Australia. By 1968, a powerful anti-war movement had developed, and its impact was being felt within Labor’s base as trade unionists became increasingly involved in anti-war protest. Labor’s left faction began to express its solidarity with Palestinians.

At the beginning of his term, Whitlam made his pro-Israel stance clear, telling a Sydney Town Hall meeting:

[While being neutral on the Middle East conflict] we are not neutral on the question of the sovereignty of Israel. The rights of Jews to a national homeland and to live there in peace are not to be denied. The right of Israel to defend her borders and preserve intact the great democracy which flourishes there is not a matter on which any Australian Government has been neutral.^[67]

The 1973 Yom Kippur War, however, proved to be a turning point. While the US backed Israel unconditionally, the Whitlam Labor government felt compelled to adopt a more cautious, independent approach. Australia did not condemn the Syrian and Egyptian attacks on Israel but did condemn US weapons being airlifted in to support Israel. While officially adopting a position of neutrality, Whitlam and most of his cabinet colleagues remained sympathetic to Israel.

In 1985, Whitlam wrote:

Australian Governments had always professed an even-handed attitude towards Israel and the Arab nations in international forums, while in practice they were thought to be favouring Israel in the 1948, 1956 and 1967 conflicts. When the 1973 conflict erupted it was expected that my Government would favour Israel… On this occasion Australia had to practise its profession of even-handedness.^[68]

Several factors influenced the Whitlam government’s position. The end of the White Australia policy meant that Arab voters, though still a small minority, now emerged as a lobby in support of Palestinian rights. Whitlam was also focused on building a relationship with Indonesia’s military regime, led by General Suharto, and newly independent Malaysia, both Muslim states. Additionally, Whitlam needed to retain support for his government from the party’s left faction.

Whitlam’s deputy Jim Cairns had been a prominent figure within the anti-Vietnam War movement. The elevation of Cairns and other prominent Victorian left party members into the cabinet was an attempt to co-opt anti-war and left-wing sentiment. Enlisting Cairns and other leading luminaries of the Labor left for Whitlam’s business-friendly agenda required making some concessions. This was reflected in a somewhat more critical stance towards US imperialism, both in the Middle East and in South East Asia.

In 1974, Australia’s UN ambassador announced that “if the Palestinians want to create a state of their own alongside Israel, we will accept this”,^[69] committing Australia for the first time to supporting a two-state solution. Before his dismissal, in November 1975, Whitlam even approved establishing a Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) liaison office in Canberra.

However, this more progressive approach was not without its critics inside the ALP. One of the most vocal Labor supporters of Israel was Bob Hawke, elected Labor president in 1974. As ACTU president Hawke visited Israel on two occasions in the early 1970s, seeking close relations with both the Histadrut and the Israeli Labor Party, which had governed Israel since its inception. Hawke attacked Whitlam’s stance on the Yom Kippur War and wrote a booklet arguing Israel’s case.^[70]

Hawke became Australia’s next Labor prime minister in 1983, having had a cosy relationship with the US embassy in Canberra in the preceding Fraser years.^[71]Once elected prime minister, Hawke embraced a neoliberal agenda and reasserted a close relationship with Washington. He also became the first Australian prime minister to visit Israel. At a press conference during his 1987 visit, Hawke rejected the idea of a Palestinian state in favour of Jordanian-Palestinian confederation (a position advocated also by the last Trump administration in 2018) and insisted that Israel couldn’t be expected to negotiate with the PLO until “there is a clear recognition by the PLO of Israel’s right to exist”.^[72]

In a speech in Sydney following his return, Hawke gushed praise for the Israeli state and its Labor Zionist founders:

As a social democrat, I could not fail to respect the way in which Israel had incarnated the vision of David Ben-Gurion of a working class building its own nation through its own physical and intellectual labour. What particularly impressed me, however, was the fundamental fact that Israel was a democracy, a remarkable democracy, incessantly engaged in democratic disputation about every aspect of national policy.^[73]

Labor since the Oslo Accords

Perhaps more attuned to realpolitik, Hawke’s successor Paul Keating threw his support behind the Oslo Accords and established Labor’s long-standing support for a two-state solution. The Accords, adopted by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat at a ceremony on the White House lawns in September 1993, were heralded as laying the foundation for Palestinian self-rule in the Occupied Territories, and a pathway towards a Palestinian state.

However, they proved to be a cul-de-sac for the Palestinian liberation struggle. Palestinian writer Edward Said accurately described the Accords as “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles”.^[74] Arafat renounced the claim of the Palestinian people to 80 percent of historic Palestine and agreed to postpone negotiations regarding the final status of Jerusalem, the Occupied Territories, water, sovereignty, security, the illegal Israeli settlements and the right of return for Palestinian refugees to the last stage of the “peace process”.^[75]

Israel gave no guarantee regarding the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, national independence and statehood. Israel did not renounce control over the Palestinian territories it had occupied since 1967, nor did it agree to withdraw troops or dismantle the settlements it had been building since the 1970s.

Since the Oslo Accords, settlements have nearly tripled. In 1993 there were approximately 110,000 Israeli settlers in 128 West Bank settlements and a further 140,000 settlers residing in East Jerusalem. Thirty years later, that number had soared to 465,000 settlers in 300 West Bank settlements and more than 230,000 settlers in East Jerusalem, according to Israeli NGO, Peace Now.^[76]Last year, the Israeli state approved 30,000 new settlement housing units, a 180 percent increase over the past five years.^[77] Settler violence has increased to unprecedented levels, encouraged by ministers within Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government.

During the past three decades, Labor, along with other social democratic parties, has repeated the mantra of a “two- state solution” ad nauseum, accompanied by the refrain “Israel has a right to defend itself”. In 2009, these words were used by deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard to defend Israel’s bombing of the defenceless and blockaded civilian population of Gaza. Today, Albanese and Wong use the same words to defend Israel’s genocide in Gaza and bombing of Lebanon.

Conclusion

Whether in opposition or in government, Labor has always been heavily committed to Israel. This policy began at the time of Israel’s bloody creation, at the outset of the Cold War. Recognition of and support for Israel formed part of the Chifley Labor government’s reorientation of Australian foreign policy away from its historic close relationship with Britain towards an alliance with US imperialism that continues to this day. That the Stalinist left at the time overwhelmingly supported Israel aided Chifley and Evatt in selling the idea of Israel to Labor’s base.

To the extent that the Whitlam Labor government embarked on a foreign policy more independent of Washington and critical of Israel, it proved to be the exception rather than the rule. Since Oslo, Labor has used rhetorical support for a “two-state solution” to feign support for a peaceful Middle East. However, Labor’s defence of Israel’s repeated bombings and invasions of Gaza and Lebanon, asserting “Israel has a right to defend itself”, as well as its support for the deployment of Australian troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, show this claim to be a farce.

The Albanese government – and Labor governments before it – could have done much more to pressure Israel to end its brutal siege of Gaza and the genocide of the past 12 months, as well as Israel’s suffocating military occupation in the West Bank. Imposing diplomatic, trade and military sanctions would have been a start. Instead, even implementing a national conference resolution committing Labor to recognise a Palestinian state at some point in the future has proven a step too far for the Albanese government, fearing that it would alienate Israel’s far-right government.

Labor backs Israel not because it has a powerful Zionist lobby in its ear, or because its politicians are (mostly) descended from a long line of settler colonists, but because backing Israel forms part of Canberra’s commitment to the US alliance. Since the end of World War II, the Australian ruling class has looked to the United States to protect its interests in the Asia Pacific in exchange for Australian government support, including military support, for US intervention abroad, especially in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Moreover, Labor’s insistence on a “two-state solution” is and always has been a capitulation to Zionism. It is premised on the idea that Jews cannot live side by side with Muslim and Christian Palestinians within the same state. Such a “solution” – if it were ever to be implemented – would hold Palestinians hostage in a fragmented territory surrounded by walls and checkpoints, leaving Israeli apartheid intact.

Genuine liberation requires tearing down the state structures of oppression and racism that Zionism has created, structures now intertwined with Israeli and regional capitalism. It will require a revolutionary struggle by the Arab masses to overthrow their corrupt and capitalist regimes and establish socialist states throughout the Middle East.

Such a solution may seem utopian while bombs rain down on Lebanon, and Egyptians, Jordanians and Arabs across the region fear brutal repression for displays of Palestinian solidarity. However, the Arab regimes, many of which owe their existence to US military aid, are more fragile than they may appear, as the 2010–11 Arab Spring demonstrated. Here in Australia, we must remain focused on the task of building a mass Palestine solidarity movement that unequivocally demands freedom for Palestine, from the river to the sea.

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