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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.
I'd appreciate if you didn't restate what I wrote in a way that's infantile and inaccurate.
I refer to the west as the sum total of actions and expression made by the relevant groups that compose it, not what I can define it as being in wordplay land. When Europe got hit with terror attacks it didn't go out bombing, it didn't condemn muslims. In fact, no amount of rape and murder even put a dent in their immigration rhetoric. That's what the west is today. It may have been different in a different time, but I was pretty clear in referring to the west of today. It may change tomorrow, but that doesn't change what it is today and recently has been.
And they're pretty unhappy about the loss of life of their own. From what I can gather its 50/50 on whether or not using force in Iraq was the right choice. With how negatively the war is seen in Europe I'll stand by my words and say that the war in Iraq and war on terror in general is seen as an overwhelming negative as far as the 'west' goes.
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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.
We don't bomb the drug cartels, and it's not obvious to me that they're less awful than the Commanche.
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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.
Don't do that.
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The ruling class thinks this way. I am not reifying their moral framework, I'm describing it. If you want to play as a man against time do go ahead. Though I'd appreciate it if you did so relating to any other topic than this one. As it only serves to carve out an exception for a people who do not deserve it.
The same impulse that guides the west today guided the colonial powers away from properly settling the lands and pushing the locals away. There is still plenty of resource to be had in every one of these places. And gathering it is still being hindered by the people who occupy the areas. To imagine that the decision to abandon fertile lands was taken because no one needed these resources anymore is silly. There was plenty of need and plenty of poverty to go around in the homelands. But that was also the case for the colonies. Which is why the people there weren't robbed and slaughtered but aided.
You're still playing with the same piece of yarn regardless of how far you drag its thread.
I don't look back at the past with rose tinted glasses, imagining that the complete and utter failure of the past is somehow venerated by the same failure in the present, just because I happen to be alive. As if the two aren't holding hands. The moments in time you see as highs are the moments in time everything was fated to this point. If you don't like how things are today I'd ask you to take a more critical look at the past.
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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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