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Meanwhile in Australia: Islam, Gaza, and Party Loyalty
Let's take a break from our regularly scheduled Trump-related programming to consider some drama in another country...
This is Fatima Payman. She's a Labor senator for Western Australia who's recently found herself in a spot of bother, which I found interesting enough to be worth comment. Let me set the stage with a bit of background first.
Australia has a Westminster system of government with a bicameral legislature. The lower house of parliament has MPs who are elected representing particular districts, but the upper house, or senate, has a different and convoluted method of electing its members. Each Australian state (there are six) gets twelve senators and each territory (there are two) gets two, for a total of seventy-six. Most of the time the way senators are elected is by political party. A senate ballot paper looks like this, and rather than number specific individual preferences, most voters merely vote for a single party, and then their votes are allocated according to that party's pre-selected preferences.
This is relevant because Fatima Payman, who's only 28, was third on the Labor list of preferences for the senate in Western Australia. She was not particularly expected to win - only six seats were up and Labor didn't expect to win three. So it's worth noting that neither the party nor Payman herself thought she'd get into the senate in 2022, and perhaps more importantly, almost nobody at the ballot box even knew who she was, much less expected her to win. How this affects her democracy legitimacy is for you to determine.
Labor, or in full the Australian Labor Party (ALP; note that the party is Labor even though the word 'labour' has a U in it in Australian English, it's because there was significant American influence on its foundation in the 19th century), is the centre-left party in Australia and is currently in government. Its traditional rival is the centre-right Liberal Party (in coalition with the National Party, hence Liberal/National Coalition, LNP, or just 'the Coalition'). Labor is traditionally a working-class, blue-collar party with a heavy base in the Australian union movement. In the 90s, like many labour parties in the West, it rebranded a bit to try to appeal more to the middle class and progressives, but the union heritage is still very much present.
Meanwhile, coming up on Labor's left flank is the Australian Greens. Australia has preferential, ranked-choice voting, so there's no spoiler effect, and this has allowed the Greens to rise without ruining the left's chances overall. The Greens were originally a one-issue environmentalist party in the 80s, but have since become a general progressive or far-left party. The Greens tend to take more idealistic, some might say extreme positions than Labor, and have been nibbling away at Labor's left flank for decades. The Greens tend to do best with middle-class or wealthy progressives and especially the young and students - stereotypically, they're the hipster, yuppie party.
One last thing is worth noting. Internally, Labor have traditionally had a strong emphasis on party discipline and solidarity. The norm for Labor has generally been that MPs and senators may voice disagreements in private, but once the party has come to a collective decision, everybody is expected to maintain discipline and stand by that decision, even if they disagree. Despite a few exceptions, Labor have generally stood by this in the past - one famous example was when the Labor party room agreed to oppose gay marriage, Penny Wong, a Labor MP and lesbian in a committed relationship (and obvious private supporter of same-sex marriage) voted against it and even argued against it in public, not changing her public view until the party as a whole came around.
So, time for the drama.
The Greens recently put forth a bill to recognise Palestinian statehood. This is a long-standing part of the Green platform. (The Labor platform includes something waffley about supporting a two-state solution in principle, but without committing to anything. They have been fending off criticism for this over the last few months.) Naturally it failed, with both Labor and the Coalition voting against. At the time, in May, Fatima Payman made some defiant pro-Palestinian speeches and was quietly censured.
Then last week, in the end of June, a motion in the senate to recognise Palestinian statehood came along. Again, Labor and the Coalition voted against it, but Payman crossed the floor to support the Greens.
Crossing the floor - voting against your own party - is a big deal in Australian politics.
Since then, Payman has been temporarily suspended from the Labor caucus, but not removed from the party; she may yet return to the caucus in good standing if she promises to follow the Labor party's rules. She has been criticised by some of her fellows, but supported by some authors, and the Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, seems to be struggling to find a middle path. The Greens are naturally praising Payman for her display of conscience, while the Coalition are mostly just pointing and laughing.
What's even more interesting is that local Islamic groups in Australia, which in the past have mostly been Labor voters (they don't like the Coalition for usual right-wing-party-related reasons, and they're not nearly socially progressive enough for the Greens) are strongly siding with Payman, and are flagging the possibility of an electoral revolt against Labor.
(The teals were a group of traditionally Coalition seats who cared a lot about environmental issues and climate change and revolted, electing independent MPs - so blue (the Coalition colour, conservatism) plus green (environment) equals teal. The possibility of a similar revolt against Labor would be terrifying for them.)
This rebellion may not come to anything and may not be very influential in the long run - there just aren't enough Australian Muslims, and most of them are in heavy Labor seats anyway - but with the next election rapidly approaching, Labor would really want to avoid any appearance of strife or disunity, especially with inflation, rising cost-of-living, energy policy, and the failed Voice referendum all making this government look a bit more ramshackle than they'd like - the Coalition are rapidly closing in on them in the polls.
As for Payman herself, it's not clear what she will do. She claims to have been bullied or intimidated, but at least from what's been seen in public so far, she appears to have been treated relatively gently. She could commit to abide by the Labor party's rules again and return to the caucus, or she could quit Labor entirely and become an independent senator, though this would make it extremely unlikely that she would ever get re-elected. Still, she's not up for re-election until 2028 anyway, so that might be worth it.
I don't have a conclusion to draw from this mess yet - but I think it's an interesting example of how Palestine and the Muslim vote are influencing centre-left politics in Western countries. Muslims aren't even a particularly large proportion of Australians (per the last census, 3.2% of Australians; compare 2.7% Hindus and 2.4% Buddhists), and yet they've got some influence here.
Of course, it's also possible that this is just a one-off - Labor screwed up the ticket in 2022 and by bad luck, a millennial who never should have been a senator in the first place got in there, and now she's grandstanding in a way that hurts her own party. Perhaps the only moral to draw from this is just "don't be stupid when selecting senate candidates". (A lesson the Greens might need to learn as well; this invites comparison to the saga of ex-Green independent senator Lidia Thorpe. But more on that some other time.)
Anyway, I offer the situation up for your reactions.
Muslims side with the ummah against the kuffar, but are happy to exploit the spoils and values of infidels until the time is right. This is yet another case of muslim revealed preferences, and parties which seek to leverage muslim constituents are surprisingly blind to how muslims constantly explicate their preferences.
This particular instance was of a muslim that revealed her power level for no discernible benefit, and that is because of her lack of political acumen. Payman is a modal muslim who managed to become as a politician due to ranked choice voting shenanigans, not a politician who happened to be muslim. The main difference being the requirements for an actual politician to play the game of masking ones preferences until the opportune time, instead of actually Standing Up For Ones Beliefs.
The specific maladaptation in western countries is a failure to differentiate politicians from modals, leading to presumptions that politicians are really representative of their communities values instead of acting as laundering vehicles for the communities reputation - note that often this laundering is not requested by the community and instead is the politician exploiting voter bases for their own gains. Muslim voters, like other communities, have their own preferences and globally western muslims explicate their preference for sharia and antisemitism.
That Paymans deviation from party line shocks pundits is itself shocking to anyone who has observed the muslim world post 79. As more muslim votes become a prize for parties to cater to and the number of politically adept muslims decreases relative to their population, fully expect to see more deviations from party lines, if not full out splinterings. When the first islamist party sinks its teeth in western democracies, we will see the REAL fun.
It had nothing to do with ranked choice voting shenanigans. Payman had a big primary vote lead in the race for the 6th seat.
The primary votes were 34.5% ALP, 31.7% LIB, 14.3% GRN, with no other group getting above 3.5%. How do you think the 6 seats should have been allocated?
The allocation for the ALP isn't the issue, the inclusion of a wild card in their roster is the problem. Better internal party vetting and discipline. The allocations and split meant Payman ended up as a politician even though her political viability as an individual candidate is stymied by personal preferences untempered by either party discipline or becoming visible to the ground. The point I make is more about modal muslims being thrust into unearned political station and exercising their personal preferences against organizational requirements.
This is the specific problem I was highlighting: entryism by activist entities can disrupt a local polity and a failure to control this is a specific blind spot on leftist parties currying favor with disparate elements. Paymans islamist loyalties leading her to support greens is objectionable simply on party discipline grounds and if a militant environmentalist crossed lines to support banning nuclear or an animal rights activist crossed to ban animal culling it'll be the same problem: uncooperative externals making their personal preferences take priority over the organization they are ostensibly supposed too work for.
Sure, I don't dispute that she should not have been pre-selected. Simply that it had anything to do with "ranked choice shenanigans".
Hyperbole on my part! Strictly speaking I don't quite understand why 35% gets 50% of the prize, but the nebulous magicks of politics is the worst combination of legacy, compromise and procedure. Fun fun fun.
The reason is that a quota to get elected is 14.3%. This is the smallest number that ensures that only 6 people can win, much like how in a single member election 50%+1 is the smallest number than ensures only one person can win.
So straight off the primaries you have 5 senators elected on full quotas. 2 Labor, 2 Liberal 1 Green. There's one seat left.
Once you take 2 quotas away from Labor and the Liberals they are left with 5.9% and 3.1% respectively. There's a bunch of small parties as well, the biggest being One Nation on 3.5%. So Payman has a clear lead here. But none of these parties are close to 14.3% so they start getting knocked out, starting with the smallest ones, and their votes get reallocated to their next preference.
If the preferences flowed strongly to the Liberals or to One Nation, they might have been able to overtake the lead that Payman had. But they didn't, and she ended up beating the One Nation candidate by 23,490 votes.
Now of course while this is the way that the senate counts votes, you can theoretically use all sorts of other methods. But just looking at the primary votes, and knowing that you have to elect 6 people, it's hard to see a combination that makes more intuitive sense. 2 ALP 2 LIB 2 GRN? 2 ALP 3 LIB 1 GRN? 2 ALP 2 LIB 1 GRN 1 ON? All alternatives are pretty hard to justify.
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As an interesting piece of political terminology geekery, in most Commonwealth countries "crossing the floor" means an elected office-holder leaving their party to join another party - a far more drastic step than just voting against your party on a single vote. In British parlance, voting against your party on a whipped vote is called "rebelling".
Interesting difference, then! In Australian media journalists have been describing Payman as 'crossing the floor' for a vote - I'm surprised to learn the phrase has a different meaning in the UK.
It has to do with our different procedures. In Australia MPs vote by literally sitting on one side of the chamber or the other. The British Commons doesn't work like that, they're packed in like sardines. So in the UK parliament you only (literally) cross the floor if you are changing parties.
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It baffles me how Israel-Palestine has blossomed into this defining political issue in so many countries with no real reason to have a vested interest in the matter.
I agree it seems strange, but not nearly as odd as BLM blowing up in countries with basically no black people.
This is not the first case of weird leftist obsessions crossing country boundaries in random ways.
I repeat myself, but yes, seeing BLM in a German context was baffling indeed. We didn't ship them here as slaves, they came on their own!
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In the Australian context, BLM was fascinating because we had copycat BLM marches... about a completely different issue.
BLM in the original context means 'African-American lives matter'. BLM marches in Australia were reinterpreted as 'Aboriginal lives matter', even though Australian Aboriginals have nothing whatsoever to do with African-Americans, and even by analogy, are much closer to Native Americans than they are to African-Americans. The relevant similarities are that some Aboriginals have dark skin, and that there's a perception of disproportionate police violence against them. That's it. It was strange to see the branding appropriated in real-time like that.
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Very hard to call it random when it's so consistent.
Trans hasn’t.
It very much has where I live in Scandinavia. It's barely even registers as a culture war issue. There's just 100% acceptance at every level. We even have smoother and more competent political navigators that have learned from the fires in the US with youth hormones, bathrooms, sports and such, solving those issues, to a degree, before they ever become a media thing.
It's almost embarrassing for the 'against' side, as they simply have no avenue to attack or resist. The imported 'against' narratives from America simply do not apply.
Wait, how’d they resolve those issues?
I dislike how much importance is afforded to that CW battlefront back here in the states. If there’s policy which skips over all the difficult bits, I want to know about it. We could defuse the whole awkward subject.
There's not really a resolution, just more media savviness, conflict aversion and less crazy people.
Everything is more behind the scenes. On the medical end everything is private. It's simply not made into a matter that the state is paying for breast augmentations for trans people. Most anti-trans activists can't even tell you how young the youngest person receiving HRT is.
Schools have genderless bathrooms and many public areas like pools are adding a third changing room.
At the same time there is a central LGBT organization that has a long history of 'fighting' for gay rights. So when there is a storm brewing they are very quick to get into action and quiet everything down if things don't look good for their side.
Basically, there is no big public battle. Everything that needs to happen happens behind the scenes. Everything that makes the rural townsfolk reach for their pitchforks is smothered down. That involves taking some L's, but in the long run it leaves the anti-trans side with nothing to fight against or rally around.
Yes, your(royal) solution to most of these problems was to stop looking, like explicitly not recording crime and rape stats by ethnicity, I wouldn't be surprised if gender affirmative care is not tracked/tabulated/stated up by age on purpose.
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What do you mean? I'm pretty sure it has, unless you're talking about Asia, Africa or the Middle East.
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Indeed. I rather suspect that high levels of foreign interest in the conflict is why it continues to be unresolved. Other countries keep intervening politically to "promote peace", but that actually leads to the underlying issues never actually being sorted out.
The west stayed uninvolved in Rwanda, and while that was a horrible and protracted conflict with a shocking death toll, in the end Kagame and the Tutsis won, and it came to an end. Sometimes one side just needs to definitively win and one side needs to definitively lose for the fighting to stop.
The current situation in Sudan is awful, much worse than what is happening in Gaza. But I'm much more optimistic about that conflict being over ten years in the future than I am about Israel/Palestine.
Yes, it’s become almost impossible to solve the conflict due to outside meddling. Probably the best example of this is the creation of UNRWA, and the special Palestinian refugee status. As opposed to the UNHCR which aims to resettle refugees, UNRWA keeps them in perpetual refugee camps and decrees descendants of refugees to be refugees themselves - thus the Palestinian refugee problem will never be solved. This is by design.
Why would we support mass ethnic cleansing and a giant refugee crisis next to Europe?
They have every right to stay and it is best for the world if we don't get millions of refugees.
This happened in 1949, and is literally the reason that Palestinian stateless refugees number in the millions. By now they would have mostly died out.
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I have bad news for you - there is already a giant refugee crisis next to Europe, hence the refugee camps.
Which is why we need to help them return and help the ones who are still there stay.
Return where? The lands they used to live in got conquered.
The nearest semi-stable company with conditions resembling the place that they took refuge from.
Or in Israel's case there's 2 million or so local Arabs who are largely prosperous compared to regional comparisons and aren't associated with Hamas. An Israeli Arab is generally healthier and wealthier than any other Arab aside from those privileged enough to have their hands in the till in Petrostates.
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I'm pretty sure he means to send them back to the lands they used to live in and send the conquerors...somewhere.
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This is not true, both France and the UN sent troops. UN troops didn't intervene militarily, but they did shelter thousands of people from the genocide.
As far as I understand, the UN (and the French peacekeepers in particular) were famously useless during the Rwandan Genocide, and their major contribution was in setting up refugee camps in DRC (then Zaire) for fleeing Hutu genocidaires after the Burundi invasion ended the genocide.
In other words, they did little to shelter people from the genocide, but mostly sheltered the people who had committed the genocide.
If that's wrong, I'd appreciate the fact-check. My opinion of the UN places them somewhere between people who talk in the theater and malaria, so I'd be delighted to find that they're not quite as contemptible as I had thought.
It's lucky that they're so ineffective.
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I don't think that's true but I'm not much of an expert. Certainly the UN sheltered many Tutsis in its mission's headquarters. Overall they did not do much though.
...The wiki article on the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda is tough reading.
The original UNAMIR mission was given a mandate under Chapter VI, meaning its role was exclusively to maintain a demilitarized zone and to negotiate peace after the earlier civil war. When the genocide began, the UN ignored the urgent requests of the force commander to expand its mandate (it waited 40 days before providing the go-ahead to "provide security" to refugees) but instead withdrew 90% of its local forces (drawing down from 2500 to 270) and ordered the remaining soldiers to prioritize the evacuation of foreign nationals.
The protection of Tutsi refugees in Amahoro Stadium seems almost entirely incidental to the UN soldiers defending their own HQ.
On the other hand, the UN Security Council did authorize a French army (officially a 'multilateral force' with 2468 French soldiers and 32 Senegalese soldiers) to set up a 'safe zone' in SW Rwanda under the name Operation Turquoise. This military mission was officially intended to stop the bloodshed, but mainly served to delay the advancing RPF (Tutsi) army from ending the genocide in the 'safe zone', as well as providing supplies for the mass migration of Hutus into eastern Zaire, which set up the humanitarian crisis (and ongoing border conflict) that resulted in 'Africa's World War' a few years later.
At some point I really need to write up an effortpost about France and the Rwandan Genocide. Where the UN and US can be shamed as merely feckless, France was astonishingly brazen in their embrace of villainy. It takes a special kind of moral monster to sit next to Tutsi refugees fleeing a genocide as you evacuate the country, only to kick them out at a Hutu border checkpoint so you can watch them be butchered mere yards away from freedom. Appalling is far too weak a word.
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They have Jewish (and now) Muslim populations, so they have reasons to care. Small numbers of dedicated people make a lot of noise.
It's also just...fun? A little geopolitical drama, a little proxy culture war to fill our days.
If you're a Westerner skeptical of Islam or the sorts of people who push for some cosmopolitan accommodation with it but are too cucked to just argue your own nationalism (or you don't have a nation) Israeli nationalism is something you can support.
If you're on the flip side you can inveigh about the brutality of Western imperialism and those who support it and believe you're like your parents opposing apartheid. And, of course, give voice to vicious instincts you're not brave enough to slake yourself.
Both sides get to pretend that they care about the world as such, and many smaller nations get to pretend they have a say in outcomes.
It's great for everyone but Israelis and Palestinians, tbh.
The role that Jews play in maintaining outside interest in the region is pretty much non-existent apart from in the US (which is the only country apart from Israel to have a large enough Jewish community to matter to anyone) and even the US is involved in the region for reasons that go far beyond AIPAC.
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As I understand it, voting against your party basically never happens in British politics, because the party leaders can just replace you instantly with someone who toes the line. Is that also the case in Australia? or how hard is it to replace a "faithless parliamentarian?"
No, quite the opposite? It's rare to vote against a governing party on a confidence vote, but that's because that could trigger the downfall of the government, and you have to REALLY be interested in rebelling to do that if your party is in government. It would be like a Democrat/Republican voting to remove a Democrat/Republican president, which AFAIK basically never happens in US politics.
I wouldn't say it's that uncommon – both Clinton and Trump (both times) got votes across party lines in their impeachments; Johnson didn't. So 3/4 impeachment attempts in US history were bipartisan.
Interesting, I didn't know that.
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It's actually significantly more common in British politics (though still much less common than in America). For example, in the UK 56 Labour MPs broke ranks with the party over the Gaza issue, as opposed to just one here.
In neither system can the party instantly replace you. They can kick you out of the party or deny you pre-selection though, and that functionally means you will not be re-elected in most cases.
Australian Labor Party discipline is very, very tight. Payman is only the 20th Labor MP to ever cross the floor. I think the last time it happened was back in the 90s.
The Conservative side of politics is less extreme. You won't be kicked out of the party and you probably won't be denied preselection. But you have to give up any ministry positions and generally it hurts your political career. So a few opinionated people decide it's worth it, for example Bridget Archer has crossed the floor dozens of times. But overall it's still pretty rare, and the vast majority of Liberal MPs have never crossed the floor.
The British parties actually have a system for telling MPs (and Lords) just how unacceptable a rebellion would be. The party whips produce a roughly weekly newsletter for their MPs (also called "The Whip") giving warning of forthcoming votes and telling them which way to vote. The preferred vote is underlined once for an important vote where MPs are expected to show up, twice for a vote where MPs are required to show up (unless "paired" with an absent opposition MP) but only habitual offenders will actually be punished for not showing, and three times for a vote where MPs are required to show up and unauthorised absence will be punished by default. Rebelling against a three-line whip will, in theory, get you kicked out of the party caucus (in British terminology, "having the Whip withdrawn" because caucus membership is de facto defined by the circulation of the newsletter) but in practice only happens where there is safety in numbers such that the Party leadership can't afford to kick all the rebels out.
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I understand that crossing the aisle is fairly common in American politics, because American political parties have very little way to punish it. A lot of factional politics in America therefore occurs within parties, rather than between them, as in Commonwealth countries.
It's pretty dangerous, but not necessarily suicidal - it depends on the particular party and your position in it. In Labor's case, it is usually suicidal, because Labor is unusually strict about party discipline. (They occasionally try to make hay of this by accusing the Coalition of being a disorganised rabble; the Coalition reply is usually that they have more respect for the consciences of individual members. This plays well with the perception of Labor as being more collectivist and focused on solidarity, with the Coalition as more individualist and focused on liberty.) There are a few statistics here - notice that every Coalition leader has faced MPs crossing the floor, while it is much more rare for Labor. Anthony Albanese is now only the second Labor PM since 1950 to have had a defection. As noted, your position in the party also matters - Barnaby Joyce did it a lot, but Joyce was popular in his own state, and he was a National. The Liberals have limited ability to punish a National member they don't like, due to the terms of the coalition agreement, which gave him more protection.
The Coalition also tends to be more vulnerable to it because the Coalition is more ideologically diverse than Labor - the Coalition has a moderate and a conservative wing, and both wings need the other in order to hold on to power. Sometimes MPs from one wing will defy the other, usually over a social issue, and remain within the party. (For example.) Labor in theory has factions as well - there's a Labor Left and Labor Right - but Labor's factions are less well-defined and tend to fight each other less as well. Same-sex marriage is a good example of the dynamic. As I mentioned in the top-level, Labor exercised very strong discipline on it, to the extent that even gay Labor MPs opposed it as long as the party opposed it, and then when the party supported it, everybody got on board. On the Coalition side, the moderates supported it and the conservatives opposed it, and there was much more outrage about whether or not the Coalition would allow a 'conscience vote' (i.e. every MP votes for what they think is right, party line be damned) on the issue. (There was a Labor discussion of a conscience vote - the pro-SSM side criticised the idea of a conscience vote there, because apaprently moral consistency is for suckers.) But I think that hit more strongly because the Coalition is known to be more divided than Labor on a range of issues.
At any rate, the answer is probably just "it depends". I think it is significantly more dangerous than in America, though, because in Australia the parties themselves have more direct control over their membership.
This is kind of the opposite of the truth. Labor's factions are much more defined and organised. For example, they have a longstanding rule that the deputy leader has to come from the opposite faction to the leader (e.g. Albanese is from the Left, Marles is from the Right). Cabinet positions are allocated by quota among the factions. Specific seats and senate ticket positions are allocated to specific factions. Their infighting has often been extremely bitter.
Conversely, while the Liberals have had some nasty factional warfare over the last few decades (though mostly calmed down at the moment), their factions are more ephemeral and fluid. E.g. it used to be just the wets and the dries, but then Scott Morrison effectively created a three faction system, with his own centre-right group operating distinctly from the Turnbull moderates and the Abbott conservatives.
It's a little out of date but this article provides a great explainer of the Labor factions.
You think? Where I'm coming from is the sense that it's very easy to tell at a glance the difference between a moderate Liberal and a conservative Liberal - most famously, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott were practically from different parties. By contrast, I find it hard to name the specific wedge issues that might separate the Labor Left and Labor Right? For instance, Bill Shorten was from the Right faction, and Albanese is from the Left, but I would struggle to clearly define the policy differences between them.
There's a couple of factors here. One is that Labor is much more disciplined about hashing out their policy differences behind closed doors and everyone singing from the same songsheet in public while the Liberals are more free about having their policy arguments in full view. E.g. the infamous interview where Bill Shorten supported Julia Gillard's position without knowing what it was. I assure you that policy differences are just as stark in the Labor caucus as in the Liberal partyroom, you just don't hear about it on the news as much. For example there's hardcore anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage social conservatives on the Labor benches - but you'd never know that from the media coverage.
Another is that factional divisions are often more about building personal fiefdoms and less about actual policy. You still have to sign up to a specific faction, and you vote in lockstep with your faction in internal deliberations, and you have to be loyal to that faction... but there's a certain amount of flexibility about what you can actually think.
And a final consideration is that Labor tends to give their leaders more license to take public positions for strategic reasons (currently at least). For example while Albanese is to the left of Shorten, he's also more ruthless about publicly moderating for electoral advantage. Whereas a Liberal who tries that tends to run into serious and usually public pressure from the backbench.
That's a fair point - Albanese ran a relatively centrist, small-target campaign for election, and then in government he hasn't been particularly radical either.
Still, I am prepared to accept your correction here as completely reasonable, and would offer only that, as you say, the perception of division may be different. Labor minimise the appearance of disunity more effectively than the Coalition, so, fair enough.
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Cool thanks. Yeah it's definitely different in America, where the congressmen are independantly elected and the parties have very little direct control over them. Sounds like in Australia they're... mostly under the thumb of the parties, but not completely?
Pretty much. I also reckon that's the main reason why America has such a strong two party system - individual politicians can just take whatever policy view they want and vote how they want and as long as they have local support the party can't do anything about it. Whereas our stricter party control leads to more discontent with the rigid party line and consequently more people splitting off to start their own parties and more space for independents and minor parties to exploit gaps left by the one-size-fits-all approach of the major parties.
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The only reason why labour would be pro Israel is because of the incredible ethnic activism by jews. Historically, Australians have had little reason to care about Israel/Palestine while a rich, influential and rabid minority have been aggressively pushing their ethnic agenda. Israel is a lot less popular with the population at large than with politicians who get free trips to the wailing wall. Causing a conflict over an issue where only 21% of Australians support the parties position is not a smart move. Clearly their voters are more pro Palestine than the politicians swayed by the lobby.
I’ve never been given a free trip or even been to a Holocaust museum, but I still think Israel looks better. Perhaps the same is true for most English-speaking countries?
Yeah, like one seems like a functioning democratic affluent society and the other feels like... Lebanon/Syria'd be best case scenario for a free Palestine.
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I think that statistic is very misleading.
The YouGov headline there - "More Australians are in favour than in opposition of recognising Palestine as an independent state" - is practically designed to mislead. What the poll results say is that 35% say Australia should recognise an independent Palestine, 21% say it shouldn't, and 44% don't know. "I don't know" is far and away the plurality winner. Moreover, I'd suggest that no specific proposal is given, and "recognise Palestine as an independent state" covers quite a lot of ground, so it's unlikely that all of that 35% want the same thing. Recognising Palestine as an independent state could mean a number of different types of two-state solution, it could mean totally destroying Israel, or something else. If a real proposal for an independent Palestinian state were on the table and being considered, approval for it would be likely to fall (cf. the Voice; it polled tremendously well when it was a vague proposal, but as specifics began to be mooted, support fell further and further).
Moreover, this is the current Labor platform on Palestine (p. 132):
The explicitly stated Labor position is to recognise Palestine as a state.
Why, then, did Labor vote against the Greens proposal to recognise Palestine as a state?
Well, it's what I said just above about details - the question is the way in which that recognition can or should happen. In the SBS piece I linked about the Greens bill in May, the Assistant Foreign Minister says:
It seems coherent that one could support recognising Palestinian statehood in the abstract while opposing a particular bill to do it at a particular time, if one judges that the time is not right.
On Israel in general, my sense is that a lot of this is unfortunately imported culture war from abroad. Historically, Australia really has very little connection to Israel or Palestine and no reason to care. Anti-semitism, fortunately, has never been a potent force in Australian history or culture (no doubt helped also by prominent Jewish-Australian heroes like John Monash), so it's largely just not been an issue. In the last year I've actually been particularly concerned by what seems like the importing of American-style activism over Israel/Palestine, with disturbing effects.
So most voters don't care and don't have an interest in the issue. Those who do lean pro Palestine and there are few of their voters that are actually pro Israel. No reason to cause conflict over such an issue.
Israel is a great threat to Palestine and the lack of a Palestinian state is a direct threat to the Palestinians. There is no reason except the donors to value Israel higher than Palestine.
Israel is diversifying its support from the US and investing a lot more in lobbying in Europe and other places. They don't want to be dependent on one state. Unfortunately that is having an impact in other parts of the world when more politicians are going on paid trips to Israel and more Israeli lobbying money enters politics.
Well I can think of a few, the israelis are culturally much closer to the west than the palestinians, which breeds sympathy. Frankly I don't think Palestine would enjoy any western support were it not for general ignorance of most westerners to palestinian culture and a certain knee jerk reaction among some westerners to support any underdog or group that opposes the west.
To western sensibilities the palestinians are barbarous and generally unpleasant. I personally find their combination of weakness and belligerence to be particularly repellant, demanding humane treatment that they themselves would never even consider granting their enemies were the situations reversed.
A lot of Palestinians are christians. Israelis on the other hand are a middle eastern group that is down right hostile group to European culture. There is no group that has had a more difficult time historically getting along with Europeans than jews and that includes Roma people. Genetically Palestinians and jews are similar. Both speak semetic languages, refuse to eat pork and circumcise boys. Unless they are Christian, in which case they are more similar to us. Jews are more ethnocentric and have a religion that doesn't see others as potential converts.
According to wiki, only 0.2% of Gaza are Christian, and somewhere between 1% and 2.5% of the West Bank, in contrast to 1.9% of Israelis. It doesn't seem like Palestine is significantly more Christian than Israel, and in the case of Gaza specifically, it is much less - Al Jazeera claims that as of November 2023, there are barely a thousand Christians left in Gaza. The number of Christians in Palestine has significantly declined over time, which Christianity Today claims is primarily due to economic migration, rather than persecution.
As far as I'm aware neither Palestine nor Israel are particularly good places to be Christian. In both states Christians are a small minority, and are, I believe, second class citizens. It's interesting to note that most of them favour a one-state solution, I'd speculate perceiving that either an explicitly Jewish state or an explicitly Islamic state would be bad for them?
At any rate, I'm not sure that siding with Christians is a heuristic that would naturally get you to siding with Palestine against Israel. Palestine doesn't seem noticeably more Christian than Israel.
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A lot of Palestinians who are not in Gaza or the West Bank (e.g. in parts of Paterson, NJ) are Christian. In the West Bank, very few. In Gaza, vanishingly few.
The Moorish Invasion, Reconquista, Siege of Vienna and the Crusades say otherwise.
Well, Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews. Ashkenazi are rather different having significant European admixture.
They managed to live there for over a millenia of muslim rule. A few decades with Jewish rule and they became refugees. Israel has been a disaster for the natural allies of Europeans in the middle east while creating a refugee crisis.
Which the jews of Spain happily supported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews_in_Israel
Abuout 45% of jews in Israel. Another 14% are Hasedic jews who aren't especially similar to Europeans culturally at all.
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Israel's lack of cultural proximity is also the prime reason people don't like Israel. Zionists and philosemites make claims of Israel being very culturally 'western' whilst at the same time Israel is getting itself into all sorts of trouble relating to the conflict precisely because they are not acting 'western'.
The response to a muslim terror attack, as demonstrated by the many European nations that have suffered them, is not to bomb civilians into oblivion. In fact, the preferred response is to venerate the outgroup that hurt you and seek reconciliation even harder. Israel does not do this. Israel should be taking in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. Possibly millions. Israel does not do this. Instead they bomb women and children. You could not be any less western.
By the same token, many people do not know how some jews view the outside world and have no concept of how ethnocentric semites are.
I think many zionists and philosemites need to understand that the 'rooting for the underdog' mentality that drives some support for Palestine is the same one that drives tolerance for semites around the world. You can not have it both ways. Either the culturally foreign, which includes both muslims and jews, is not tolerated or they both are. Trying to have it both ways because you love yourself so much more than anyone else is not going to cut it for fair minded westerners. In fact, trying to employ classic dehumanizing rhetoric like you do in your post is not going to work precisely because of jewish anti-prejudice propaganda driven into every westerners head.
I would point out that in no small part due to the European elites taking this stance, anti-muslim anti-immigration parties have grown enormously in power across Europe. Meloni is in charge in Italy, Wilders is in charge in the Netherlands, the National Rally is about to win the French election, AfD is rising in Germany, etc, etc.
This comes off the back of a decade of mass immigration, terror attacks that have left hundreds dead, thousands of children raped etc, etc.
I think it's fair to say Israel has a fair amount of catching up to do before they can justify putting forth a moderate right winger to lead their country, as is happening in Europe. Forget about the actual ethnonationalist zionism that underlines the Likud party. I mean, would such a thing even be allowed in Germany? You know, Zionism... but for Germans...
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Ah, but the US is not a European country. And the US response to a muslim terror attack was to take over by force not just one but two Muslim countries -- one of them not even involved -- including lots of bombing which necessarily killed civilians. So the Israelis may be closer to the US than the Europeans, culturally.
The US response to a muslim terror attack was to follow a plan laid out by philosemitic neoconservative zionists in the American government. I see that more as a self reinforcing circle of zionist influence than anything else.
But aside from that, yeah, most Americans supported the war effort at the time. Many European nations joined in, a lot of muslims got annihilated in the name of women in the workplace, NATO, burgers and freedom. But how does the 'west' look at that effort today? Positive or negative? I'd say overwhelmingly negative.
To that end Israel might be western by an older standard that was defined a fair bit by zionism in American politics, but I would not say that this standard would cut it today.
Whether the US responded that way because The Jews made us or not, the US did indeed respond that way. Perhaps Philosemitic neoconservative zionists (whether in Israel or the US) are the real Westerners and Europe is just a shadow of itself, poisoned by postmodern European liberalism.
Maybe the Europeans. I'm pretty sure US voters are still pretty happy about taking out Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's buddies, even if both wars dragged on far too long.
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Bombing women and children has been a totally acceptable tactic utilized by Western militaries since at least World War 2, as you know. Was the United States not a Western country when it annihilated dozens of Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians? Or in Vietnam, or Cambodia, or Iraq, or Yugoslavia? And to be clear, this isn’t an “America Bad, therefore Israel also Bad” comparison. It’s just demonstrably true, as far as I can tell, that nothing Israel has done since October 7th is beyond the bounds of what any major Western military has done within our lifetimes, or would do if given a reason to.
Far from being a sign of how different and alien Israelis are compared to us, I think it actually just demonstrates that Israel is having to conquer its indigenous population in the age of social media and ubiquitous video cameras, whereas the United States had the luxury of having finished off the Amerindians long before anyone could have posted our atrocities on Twitter. (The Indians also didn’t have proper schools and hospitals to bomb, so the scale and optics of the destruction of their civilization was less photogenic.) Israel is the only significant modern example of a settler colonial state, which is a geopolitical model intimately familiar to the history of nearly every major Western country.
And the general western sentiment of bombing civilians today is that it is bad.
I'm not taking this comparison seriously. If you think Israel is acting western by repeating what every other western countries now count as dark periods of their respective histories I can only throw my hands in the air.
Western powers said: No more endless conquest, no more slavery, no more colonialism, no more bombing. We live in the present day and Israel needs to get with the program if they want to call themselves western. As I said before, the western response to a terror attack is not bombing but veneration for the outgroup that did it. Yes, in the past there would have been bombs, but we are not talking about acting western as the west was 100 years ago. These are moderns western standards being applied to Israel and Israel fails to meet them. By that token Israel is not acting western at all since you are not allowed to terrorize the defenseless little brownfolk anymore.
If the commancheria was a going concern, I guarantee you we would be doing it and not feeling guilty.
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Who in those countries thinks this? Shitlibs! Progs! Why are you echoing and reifying their moral framework? The periods you’re referring to were, by any measure I care about, the civilizational peak for the European diaspora. You get to live comfortably in the shadow of that era today, enjoying all of its myriad fruits and consequences, and you simultaneously get to be sanctimonious and squeamish about it because it happened before you were alive to have to watch the sausage get made in real time.
They were able to say that because they’d already gotten everything they needed out of those things. (Except for the times when they actually still needed to make exceptions - like, again, the many times the American military has reverted to the old civilian-bombing, city-leveling model within my lifetime.) Meanwhile, as I said, Israel is in a position where the old model is still the only realistic option for them, given their geopolitical position and what they’re trying to do. (i.e. secure and expand their settler-colonial ethnostate)
Look, I share your squeamishness about bombing women and children! I visited Japan just a few months ago, and I spent a couple of days in Hiroshima, including a visit to the Peace Memorial Museum. When I ponder what the Americans did not only to that city, but to dozens of other Japanese cities during the closing stages of the war, I too feel strongly the pull of the peacenik instinct. Once upon a time I would have happily declared myself a pacifist.
However, I eventually had to reckon with what the world would look like today if the Americans had just let the Indians share the continent, or if Japan had fought the U.S. to a stalemate as a result of the Americans deciding to only have “fair fights” where civilians weren’t targeted. Is that actually a better world? Surely for the people who ended up dead and maimed in our timeline, yes, that would have been preferable. Would it be better for their posterity today, though? I think it’s a pretty tough argument.
Certainly the Israelis seem to believe that the current spasm of barbarity is ultimately necessary to secure the prosperity of future Israeli generations, who will certainly look back on their grandparents’ generation with the same level of sanctimonious disgust you’re demonstrating now. Such is the inexorable cycle of progress.
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I personally have no particular interest in the conflict and agree that what Israel is doing isn't particularly ethically sound, but I believe that if a one-state solution was to occur that that it'd likely be a far more successful and pleasant place to be if it was under Israeli administration instead of being yet another semi-failed Islamic state without meaningful oil wealth.
And where would all the Christians in the holy land be?
Also that means millions of arab refugees a few hundred km from Europe.
There are far more Israeli Arabs living in peace and harmony than Palestinian Jews.
Also why would the Israelis remove the Christians? For the most part so long as you're not fomenting direct revolt they're generally not arbitrarily targeting religious minorities that are productive and peaceful.
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Israeli Christians are a model minority to the extent of Israeli officials pretending Maronites aren’t Arab.
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Which donors? AIJAC is the main pro-Israeli lobby group and I haven't been able to find any record of political donations from them.
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The statistics in the linked poll seem to me to indicate that a plurality of Australians don't know about and probably don't care that much about this specific issue, with smaller camps that are either pro-Palestine or pro-Israel, though the intensity of each camp remains unclear.
Anecdotally - as an Australian who unfortunately comes into contact with activist groups, and who has links to both local Jewish and Islamic communities - my sense is that only small, loud minorities have strong opinions on Israel/Palestine either way, and that those minorities are disproportionately dominated by the relevant religious groups and by immigrants. Jews are smaller in number but generally have been in Australia longer, are richer, and have more access to existing institutions of power; Muslims are greater in number (about six times as many), but are more recently come to Australia and are less embedded in civic and political institutions. The anti-colonial left, significantly influenced by American cultural and political exports, also tends to be very pro-Palestine, but more seasoned politicians tend to be more sympathetic to Israel. So the result is what we see here - an insurgent youth politician and Muslim defecting from her party and likely self-destructing, but representing a change or potential risk that the Labor party will have to deal with.
At any rate, I notice you're being quite vague - 'the donors', 'Israeli lobbying money', and so on. I'm not sure that's helpful. I think you're trying to paint a picture where the Australian public as a whole is pro-Palestine and it's shadowy Jewish influence that subverts this. That doesn't seem to track with other figures. Sky in 2023 have a figure suggesting 31% support for Israel versus 7% for Palestine, which seems to fit with the majority of Australians not caring very much, but there being division between the combatants. (I grant that Sky, a conservative channel, likely have a pro-Israel bias.) Roy Morgan, also in 2023, shows similar divisions - 49% say we shouldn't take sides, 17% say we should help Israel more, and 19% say we should help Palestine more. Oxfam via the Canberra Times says that most support a ceasefire, but that's woolly enough that I'm not sure how to interpret it. For what it's worth, data from before October 7 generally seems similar - this report from 2021 suggests that most Australians are ignorant of the conflict, and most (62%) say that their sympathies are equally with both parties, with only 19% favouring Palestine and 11% favouring Israel.
My sense from on the ground is that this is probably correct. Most Australians don't care, and those who do vaguely want everybody in the region to live in peace and security and wish the violence would stop without taking a partisan perspective. When Palestinians do something awful (e.g. October 7), there's a bump in support for Israel and decline in support for Palestine, and when Israelis do something awful (e.g. much of the subsequent bombing), there's a bump in support for Israel and decline for Palestine. I would guess that these are likely to return to the average over time, as people forget or as different atrocities fall out of the forefront of people's minds. The most reliable partisans one way or the other are Jews and Muslims, for obvious reasons, but I think the bulk of Australians aren't strongly exercised about it.
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I think it would be a safer assumption to just say that the supporting public wants to recognize Palestine as an independent state in the same way many other nations have. To invoke the total destruction of Israel as a potential reason why someone would want to do that seems rather silly.
The matter really isn't that complicated. From your post it seems like the main complication is politicians who are unwilling to do it unless it somehow serves Israels security interest. Which pretty much gels with what functor said.
Well, realistically I'd guess that the reason no one wants to do that now is that recognising Palestinian statehood comes off as "I am taking the Palestinian side against Israel".
That infuriates everybody who likes Israel, and it's also distressingly close to "I support Hamas", and no one in Labor wants to give the Coalition the opportunity to accuse them of being Hamas-loving anti-semitic terrorist-sympathisers. Nor, in fact, the Australian Jewish community, which retains significant public sympathy.
It would be much safer to say at a time when Israel and Palestine aren't at war after a brutal and horrifying Palestinian terror attack - at a time when any indication of support for Palestine wouldn't come off as hostile to Israel. But that is the time at present.
I recognize that this is largely true in practice, but I have been surprised at the complete lack of a middle ground internationally on this. One could imagine a hypothetical "we recognize a Palestinian state, with borders that explicitly do not span from the Jordan to the Mediterranean," which isn't exactly accepting maximalist Palestinian territorial claims.
There may well be good reasons this hasn't been done, but it's not like there aren't historical examples of this: Germany's post-1945 borders were effectively drawn by everyone else at the table, and they've pretty universally accepted this.
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I feel those reasons are motivated more by philosemitism than an objective political eye.
Supporting Palestine after it committed a terror attack would be a bad move. So why is the topic and support for Palestine popping up? Maybe because the Israel response was particularly bad and poorly thought out? There has been no lack of support on the world stage for Palestine. The reasons you list make Palestine out to be a hot potato no one wants to hold but the reality is that it's not. No one is afraid of being branded a "Hamas-loving anti-semitic terrorist-sympathiser". The self victimizing cries of Israeli officials at the UN fall on deaf ears. People vote in favor of ending Israel's war effort. No one likes the bombing of women and children.
I think you could much more easily just take the Australians politicians on their word and say that they are withholding state recognition of Palestine as a bargaining chip for the future. Which would mean they are no closer to recognizing Palestine now than at any time prior regardless of whatever scuffles happen between Israel and Palestine.
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Israel is the terrorist supporter. Israel has actively backed all sorts of jihadist in Syria as well as giving them air support.
Rather, a small loud and extremely vocal and ethnocentric minority lobbying for their ethnic interest.
Unlike Israels bombing of Gaza?
Israel was engaging in acts of war against Palestine and Hamas were well within their rights to attack military installations. If they are under blockade they are fully within their rights to attack installations imposing that blockade. Israel is engaging in genocide and there is not strong support for Israel in Australia.
I'm not making a moral claim. I'm being descriptive, not normative - speaking to why I think Labor are acting the way they are.
In addition to the optics element I noted, I wouldn't be surprised if there's also an element of geopolitics. America likes Israel, and Australia needs to keep America on side as much as possible, for our regional security as regards China. From that perspective, visibly siding with Palestine annoys the Americans for zero material benefit to Australia. The move doesn't make sense.
To reiterate, I'm not myself arguing that Israel is good or Palestine is bad. Neither am I arguing that Israel is bad. That's not an argument that I think is likely to be interesting or constructive. I'm interested in why Australian poltiical parties behave the way they do.
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I'm of the view that Payman will go independent. There's 0 chance she gets given a winnable spot on the Senate ticket after her antics, she's frozen out of the caucus and has no ability to influence the government internally, there's just no benefit from her perspective for her to stay within the Labor fold.
Most likely she forms her own party to try to get re-elected and fails miserably, following a long tradition of party defectors who have done just that. As you say, there's not enough Muslims in Australia to sustain an Islamic party, and there will be precious little crossover appeal to non-muslims. But she still gets 4 more years as a senator, and Senate numbers are always finely balanced. As an independent it's likely she would get to be a pivotal vote in some circumstances, and potentially be able to use that leverage to extract some sort of concessions on issues she cares about.
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