The silence and cowardice on Gaza continues from the federal government

The Australian government, through its silence and inaction, is becoming increasingly complicit in the suffering of Gaza through its do-nothing approach.

If there were any doubts about how the Labor government would respond to Israel’s continuing actions in Gaza and the broader question of Palestine, those doubts have been removed: it just doesn’t care. The government’s re-election on May 3 came without very much engagement on the Gaza crisis, and the weeks since have only confirmed the reality of this domestic situation: the Labor government has remained indifferent to what is one of the biggest humanitarian catastrophes of this generation. Despite international outcry and the overwhelming civilian death toll – over 55,000 killed, the majority of them women and children – the Australian government has taken no meaningful steps to condemn, confront, or even question Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza.

Initially – and to give the Labor Party just the small and slightest benefit of the doubt – their silence since 2023 could have been interpreted as a calculated wait-and-see approach – another flashpoint in the long, brutal history of Gaza since 1948 that might briefly dominate the news cycle, then dissipate from the public view. This tactic of performative indifference relied on well-worn scripts: Israel’s right to defend itself (but not for Palestine), expressions of concern for civilian lives, calls for restraint – while avoiding the language that might antagonise pro-Israel voices in Australia. That might have been the case in the past brutal actions by Israel against Palestine but this time, the conflict didn’t end in just a matter of weeks. It dragged on and on, and so, it has continued for 19 months. The bloodshed continued, and still, the Labor government remained silent for most of that time, occasionally offering flaccid words and platitudes.

As the months wore on and the federal election go closer, the platitudes took on another political step: avoidance. The government, perhaps correctly on the politics, calculated that any serious engagement with the Gaza issue would open it to attacks from the media and the right, particularly from Peter Dutton’s Coalition, which was already weaponising anti-Semitism for political gain, as well as from Israel lobbyists and Zionist groups. In this light, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s decision to steer clear of the issue became not just an act of cowardice but a strategic suppression – Gaza was a powder keg best left untouched until after the votes were counted. While this might have been the best political decision at the time, it was the morally repugnant decision.

In this context, the government’s courting and appeasement of pro-Israel lobby groups – including the Zionist Federation of Australia, the Australian Jewish Association, and other influential players – can be seen as a hard and cold political calculation. Albanese, the foreign minister Senator Penny Wong, and the broader Cabinet went out of their way to placate these groups, while offering only the most lukewarm and weak acknowledgement of the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian and broader Islamic communities, so often ignored or marginalised in Australian politics, were again pushed to the fringes. Politically, it was a risk-averse and morally inept government clearly acting in its own interests.

The strategy paid off, politically. The Labor Party not only avoided any electoral blowback – it achieved a historic win, securing 94 seats. In electorates in western Sydney, where the Muslim communities are large in number and politically engaged – in the seat of Blaxland, the Islamic community makes up around 30 per cent of the electorate – candidates running under the Muslim Vote banner made an impact on primary votes, but not enough to change the outcome. Labor held these seats in Blaxland and Watson, and even increased its two-party preferred margins. Meanwhile, in the inner-Melbourne seat of Macnamara – with a significant Jewish population – the sitting Labor MP, Josh Burns increased his vote. The much-anticipated backlash from both Islamic and Jewish constituencies failed to materialise.

And this what lies at the heart of Australia’s Gaza dilemma – silence, as it turned out, is electorally safe: the government didn’t suffer for its inaction and weasel words on Palestine. The Liberal Party, which tried to elevate the issue with inflammatory rhetoric and culture war tactics, was comprehensive rejected, losing 15 seats. The message received by Labor was not one of moral urgency, but of political vindication: voters didn’t punish them for their indifference, and it’s evident that not enough people in the electorate felt that Gaza and Palestine are significant issues. But that’s not really the point.

With a commanding parliamentary majority – 38 seats – and no immediate electoral threat from a hopelessly splintered Liberal and National parties, the Labor government has no excuses left to just do the right thing about Palestine. And yet, it still chooses inaction. The genocide continues, and the Australia government remains silent. The question now is no longer about why they stayed silent before the election; it’s about what will it take to finally break that silence.

Selective outrage and the politics of moral evasion

While the Labor government might have been hesitant about how the Israel–Gaza conflict and genocide might influence the outcome of the election, that caution isn’t just now unnecessary, it’s morally indefensible. The political risk for Labor to have a stronger voice during the election turned out to be negligible. The moral consequences, however, are profound. For well over a year, the world has watched the livestreamed horrors from Gaza: emaciated children starved to death; hospitals bombed into rubble; doctors, nurses and journalists executed in the streets, and families burned alive in tents. These are not ambiguous tragedies, they’re crimes against humanity, visible to anyone with a screen and half-a-brain, and undeniable to anyone with a conscience.

Yet since securing one of the most decisive electoral victories in Australian history, the Labor government has doubled-down and put out even more words of diplomatic irrelevance. Senator Wong, once framed herself as a principled and thoughtful voice in international affairs but on Gaza, her responses have grown increasingly detached, bureaucratic, and hollow – a piss-weak tactic that says nothing, evades accountability and obscures human morality.

When Israel blocked vital humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza, causing further death by starvation and dehydration, Wong’s response on May 20 was the perfunctory impersonal appeal for procedural normality:

“Australia is part of the international call on Israel to allow the full and immediate resumption of aid into Gaza. Israel must enable UN and humanitarian organisations to do their life saving work. We urge all parties to return to a ceasefire and hostage deal.”

It’s like a Year 6 school assignment or an inane comment at a beauty pageant hoping for world peace: what does it actually mean? There’s no condemnation. No urgency. Just a held-back appeal to all parties – as though both sides equally share blame for mass famine, displacement, and the deliberate targeting of aid workers. How would Wong feel if she was watching the images of her own children decapitated by the rogue and out-of-control Israel Defence Forces? Maybe then she might change her tune?

Contrast this with her response following the killing of two Israeli Embassy staff in Washington DC on May 22, where Wong issued an immediate and emotionally charged statement:

“The Australian Government is shocked and appalled by the killing of two Israeli Embassy staff in Washington DC. Our thoughts go out to their families, loved ones, and colleagues. There is no place for antisemitism in the world. It must be denounced and condemned.”

There was no hedging, no ambiguity, no calls for calm from “all parties.” Just swift, decisive moral judgement. Certainly, the actions of Elias Rodriguez – the perpetrator of the killing of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim in Washington DC – are reprehensible and must be called out and condemned.

Wong was right to harshly condemn these actions but it’s not the expression of sympathy that is troubling. All innocent life deserves defence, and all acts of violence demand scrutiny. But there’s an obvious discrepancy: why is Wong so quick to condemn violence against Israeli citizens – but struggles to denounce the far more systematic and large-scale extermination of Palestinians? Why is clarity possible when it involves Washington, but not when it involves the Palestinian cities of Rafah, Khan Younis or Jabalia?

Wong has previously justified her soft handling of Gaza by saying that “it’s always very difficult from over here to make judgements”, but Washington is thousands of kilometres further from Canberra than Gaza is. Distance, clearly, is not the issue and it never was.

This selective outrage is a failure in Australian foreign policy to uphold consistent principles, and a willingness to swap moral clarity for political comfort. When atrocities are met with euphemisms and when genocidal violence is framed as a matter of ‘restraint’ or ‘urgency’ rather than condemnation and calling for strong action, Australia doesn’t just lose credibility, it loses a part of its humanity.

What will it take?

So, how to explain the enduring silence and weakness from the Australian government on Palestine? The election is over, and Labor has achieved a historic majority. The government is free of the usual constraints – political, electoral and even diplomatic shackles – that might once have justified caution. The Israel–Palestine conflict, for all its moral weight, has proven electorally irrelevant in Australia, and the candidates who openly aligned with the Palestinian cause made some gains, but they didn’t swing any seats. The pro-Israel lobby in Australia, while loud, has shown itself to be politically ineffective, the smallest of paper tigers. So, with the path clear, why does the Albanese government still refuse to act? What is it so afraid of? A fear of losing donations from Israeli interests in Australia? A fear of losing the 2028 election? Afraid of Mossad? What is it?

The facts clearly favour any actions the Australian government would like to take against the state of Israel. The International Court of Justice has found Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories to be unlawful, its settlements in the West Bank are in violation of international law and has acknowledged that the racial segregation and systemic discrimination is a policy of apartheid. In a 2024 advisory opinion, the Court also reaffirmed the illegality of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the pattern of conduct that disregards international law.

Israel has also been formally accused by credible international bodies and human rights organisations of using starvation as a weapon of war. The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, Plan International, and even senior UN officials have all condemned Israel’s blockade and manipulation of humanitarian aid as a tactic of war. This consensus is pretty obvious: these are war crimes. It’s not the vague language or the usual diplomatic ambiguity that comes from these kinds of bodies: these are legal determinations, supported by mounting evidence and affirmed by global institutions.

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, holding them personally accountable for war crimes, including the use of starvation as a weapon of war and the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure.

Still, Australia has nothing to way.

What can Australian actually do? It’s a question many people in Australia ask, especially in the context of Palestine – in the words of Senator Wong – being too far way “to make judgements”. But South Africa was also too far away to make judgements, but the Australian government lead by Malcolm Fraser in the 1980s did make judgements about the behaviour of that country and pushed for actions and sanctions under the Gleneagles Agreement in 1977. Thirteen years later in 1990, apartheid ended in South Africa: Palestine can’t wait another 13 years, but firm action does have to start somewhere.

Like it did on South Africa, the Australian government can actually do a great deal, if it chooses to act. It could begin by expelling the Israeli ambassador and recalling its own from Tel Aviv. It could review trade and military agreements, as some European states have begun to do. It could impose, or even threaten, targeted sanctions – economic, diplomatic, or travel-based – on senior Israeli officials. It could cancel cultural exchanges with the state of Israel. None of these measures are radical or unprecedented: they’re actively being discussed or implemented by allies such as the UK, France, and Canada. Australia is not an outlier in taking action – it is an outlier in failing to do so.

The question is not about how to implement these actions, but getting the will to do it. Israel is behaving like an unhinged psychopathic state – not just in its military conduct, but in its defiance of international law, its disregard for human life in Palestine, and its impunity in the face of global criticism. And like all tin-pot rogue states, it will continue to behave in this way and continue with the genocide in Gaza until it’s confronted not just with niceties of diplomacy, but with real, serious and long-lasting consequences.

What will it take for Australia to stop looking away? How many more babies and young children need to starve or lose limbs, how many more hospitals and intensive care units need to be turned into smouldering ruins and dust; how many more entire families need to be buried beneath the rubble before Canberra finally admits that something is seriously wrong with the state of Israel and its leadership?

This isn’t just about the present genocide in Gaza, it’s also about what happens next. Starvation, displacement, the trauma of war – these leave scars on children that linger for decades. Children who survive today might end up dying from the medical trauma tomorrow. The damage being done is not just physical – it’s generational.

And still, Australia does nothing. It’s just so sickening that the best the Australian government can do is offer up weasel words, even at a time when it doesn’t have anything to lose politically or electorally. It’s outright cowardice – there’s just no other word for it. Pusillanimity, weakness, timidity, patheticness – all of these terms could apply as well, but cowardice will do for the time being: moral cowardice disguised in the whimpy language of diplomacy. It’s a refusal to risk even a fraction of carefully banked-up political capital in order to stand for something greater than re-election; a fear of offending Israeli lobbyists and Zionist interests in Australia, while entire communities in Palestine are being erased.

So again: what will it take? That’s the only question that remains. Perhaps 100,000 deaths? Will that be the red line, the threshold for action by the Australian government? How many more emaciated children does the government need to see before it can say enough is enough? Or will they wait until it’s too late – until Israel has removed all Palestinian people from Gaza and the West Bank – before finally condemning and acting against these atrocities? Is that what it will take?

And with each day that goes on without an answer, the blood is not just on Israel’s hands. The Australia government, through its silence and inaction, is becoming increasingly complicit in the suffering of Gaza. And why it has decided to do this will also take a long time to answer.