Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong (Image: AAP)
Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong (Image: AAP)

Penny Wong’s statement this week suggesting Australia might join a UN unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood is the surest sign yet that Labor has started to pay attention to the potential electoral fallout as a direct result of its position on Gaza. The establishment of two new Australian Muslim voting websites, which rate the positions of all federal politicians on Palestine/Israel and other matters, plus the death of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom along with six others, appears to have moved the dial.

Wong’s actual formulation is the usual gobbledegook on the issue, suggesting that the main purpose of a Palestinian state — however that would be assembled — would be to guarantee the security of Israel. It’s as much of a diversion from the real proximate issue — the need for an immediate ceasefire and stopping the foreign supply of arms to Israel — but also a sign that the pressure of the pro-Palestine movement is starting to be felt. 

The creation of such websites is a second part of a dual strategy in the pro-Palestine campaign, as a whole series of new tests for Labor appear on the horizon. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that the attack on Rafah will go ahead, despite international concern, using what he claims to be “the most moral army in the world”.

That comes as the full devastation of Khan Younis becomes visible; as hunger and disease become weapons of destruction; and as Israel has pushed a road through the Gaza strip, to cordon off northern Gaza, and turn it into a permanent buffer zone. And to eventually, perhaps, fill it with Israeli settlers. 

So, the destruction of Gaza will go on well into 2024 and the aftermath into 2025. The Albanese government will offer a few murmurs of protest — whatever is authorised by the party’s right and the permanent defence establishment it is entangled with. But there will be no breaking of ranks. So the manifestation of a first political challenge, to accompany street protests, is a way to open a new front in the struggle here.

But the political dimension will have to gear up fast and comprehensively in order to make an impact. As noted last year, Labor pays no attention until voters threaten to tear them a new one electorally. This has started, with Victorian Greens leader Sam Ratnam announcing for the federal seat of Wills, held by Peter Khalil, whose office has been besieged by protesters in recent months. Ratnam would only take the risk of this move if there was good polling on just how toxic this issue has become for Labor in “multicultural” seats. 

To the next level and fast

With local elections coming up in Victoria and NSW, the community endorsement of already announced candidates — or a visible process to create some, depending on the seat — should start. Such processes are fraught with risk, of splits, of ego, etc, and have to be done carefully, but they are as essential to the empowerment of the street protest, as to the political protest. The placard and the ballot box, to alter the formula of noted Irish political consultant Danny Morrison. 

Labor is at risk from such moves, and knows it. Everything the Albanese-Marles government has done since taking office has shown that it takes its non-Anglo-Celtic base for granted. AUKUS is an Anglo-Atlanticist extension (and adding Japan as a minor partner won’t change that). The government’s position on Gaza shows that it is willing to use the political capital of its non-Anglo base, and give it no consideration, secure in the knowledge that the Greens are, by and large, too culturally left for such communities to move to en masse.

But Gaza has sundered that. It has staged what happened inside Labor when Adem Somyurek improbably created a national faction out of non-Anglo branches in Melbourne. Realising that these socially conservative SDA-aligned groups were getting nothing from the SDA’s sclerotic and obsessive Irish and Protestant leadership, he drew on non-Anglo Labor’s greater residual collectivity and social solidarity to create a better machine.

That’s the task that now needs to be done to Labor, not within it. Labor will be worried about this because for decades it has been using non-Anglo cultural solidarity as a base “thickener” as class itself has been dissolved by atomisation. The Labor leadership can run the party largely as a client of sections of capital — that’s certainly the dream — but not wholly so. And such residual social solidarity creates a stickiness: such groups are reluctant to desert a mass party like Labor. 

Detaching the base

But Gaza is the deliquescent that makes it possible. In the seat of Melbourne, Adam Bandt has shown that you can switch “natural” non-Anglo Labor blocs across to rainbow-haired Greens, so long as you stand up for such communities in their daily struggles. But that usually requires winning power with a core knowledge class vote first. Gaza is a way to do this prior to that. It demands a relentless focus on Labor’s betrayal and making explicit the way in which such groups have been taken for granted, and their own power used against them in supporting the mass murder of a colonised people. 

That either swings support behind a Green or a viable socialist party, or, where that is insufficient, behind a candidate with a community base and visibility, politically centrist in economic matters, sufficient to get Liberal preferences or to tempt the Libs to sit it out altogether. The campaign, in seats like Jason Clare’s Blaxland, then works on the Tony Windsor principle: you defeat a hegemonic majority by splitting it right down the middle, and pitting your half against the remainder. 

In that circumstance, your opponent’s existing majority becomes the resource you draw on to destroy it. Jason Clare is a bright, committed and hardworking member and education minister. So knocking him off politically, and damaging his career, perhaps fatally, would be a triumph, on the Bakunin principle (“if you’re going to er, register your dissent with a judge, make it the most honest one you can find”) that you show you are attacking the system, not the individual. 

Party of death?

Were there sufficient groupings within Labor to make this an internal fight, that would be much preferable. Peter Dutton’s comment that pro-Palestine protests were akin to the Port Arthur massacre shows how unhinged the Coalition is becoming on these matters. The temptation is to give Labor a pass now they’ve opened up division. But that ain’t a real option, and nursing the illusion that it is will stymie clear-eyed action.

Labor has gone economically left, but only by wrapping an industry policy ’round a war policy. To re-centre manufacturing here, they propose to funnel billions to “defence” — really the extension of US imperial power — as its centrepiece. The social benefit thus becomes a secondary division. It’s a politics of death. 

In that respect, taking on Labor on Gaza ain’t just about Gaza. It’s about mounting a basic resistance to a government and party that pulled a swift one, surprising to even the most jaded and cynical progressive, substituting, post-election, a war party for even a vestigially social democratic one, the final conversion of Labor into a national corporatist one, locked into the US alliance, and characterising local debate and dissent as an “attack on social cohesion”. 

Penny Wong’s formulation will not long survive the scrutiny of cold, hard reality. But the fact that the killing of seven aid workers and the creation of a couple of websites can get this result tells us what can be achieved when Labor is besieged in every seat, every council ward. Create twenty, fifty, a thousand fronts in the fight against the destruction of a people. 

Will Labor’s position on Gaza influence how you vote? Does the party need to change direction? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.