Amid the nauseating deluge of congratulations to Donald Trump over his so-called Gaza ceasefire, the Australian Labor government has stood out in its fawning over the fascistic US president.
Labor leaders have presented Trump’s actions as a masterstroke and a path to “peace.” In reality, as they well know, it is the latest stage in a campaign of ethnic-cleansing aimed at securing unbridled Israeli-imperialist control over occupied Palestine.
The basic reality of the plan has been not only covered up by Labor, but its contents completely inverted. What Labor presents as “peace” is in fact a permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza, which will mean continuing oppression, violence and mass killing.
Labor’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong has, for the past two years, expressed a particularly cold contempt towards any anger and opposition to the mass killing of Palestinians or any challenge to her government’s complicity in the historic war crimes.
Wong’s general attitude was perhaps summed up in the beginning of the genocide, when she declared on behalf of the Labor government that Israel’s complete blockade of food, water and essentials to Gaza was “difficult to judge from afar.”
On this occasion, she has been positively gushing. Interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation yesterday, Wong could scarcely contain herself, declaring: “This is a singular achievement by President Trump. Only, only the president of the United States could bring this about.”
Wong insisted that Trump “deserves enormous congratulations and enormous—it is an enormous achievement.” Trump, Wong insisted, “has a pathway to peace that he’s been so critical in articulating. So, it’s a great achievement by the US president.”
The statements are so at odds with reality, as to be beyond parody. It would be as if someone claimed in the 1930s or 40s that Hitler’s deranged statements about establishing a thousand-year Reich were the “critical articulation” of a “pathway to peace” for Europe.
The basic premise is no different. “Peace,” in this instance, means the total subjugation of the Palestinians, at least 70,000 of whom have been murdered over the past two years and the denial of all of their basic rights to sovereignty and self-determination.
The interviewer did not ask and Wong said nothing about the possibility of Gaza being ruled by an international authority, headed by Trump and British war criminal Tony Blair, which would mark a return to the most blatant forms of neo-colonialism practiced in the 19th century.
Nor was there any mention of the fact that Trump, who has armed the Israeli Defence Forces to the hilt, has declared his complete support for the Netanyahu regime, which has not only massacred the population of Gaza but is rapidly expanding its ethnic-cleansing operation in the West Bank.
The interviewer obscenely noted that the plan gestures in the vaguest terms to the possibility of Palestinian statehood at some entirely undefined point in the future, as though this meaningless sub-clause were a beneficent gift by Trump to the Palestinian people.
Wong enthusiastically latched onto this, declaring that Labor had always insisted on the need for such a state, with its pablum about two people “living side by side” in “peace.”
In his own effusive responses to the plan, Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has taken a similar tack. While claiming that Australia is not a “major player” in the Middle East, he has touted the “recognition” of Palestine by his government and several others including the UK and France last month as having been a step on the road to the current “ceasefire.”
Albanese told the press: “You then have a recognition by now 157 countries saying that Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations for their own state must be realised, but that Hamas cannot play a role. And you have now US leadership under President Trump intervening here, basically knocking heads together.”
The comment was more revealing than Albanese intended. The recognition pledges were never about the creation of a Palestinian state, which in any case has always been unviable. Instead, it was political cover for the Arab regimes, providing them with a groundless basis to claim progress of the Palestinian cause, while they helped to broker Trump’s plan by blocking any further Palestinian resistance and securing Hamas’ capitulation.
While the prospect of a Palestinian state held out by Albanese and the European leaders was a fairy tale, the immediate conditions they demanded from the Arab states and the Palestinians were real.
That included the insistence that all accept the “right” of Israel, an inherently expansionist ethno-state and base of imperialism in the Middle East, to exist. That Hamas be pressured to surrender and to disarm. And that the Palestinian Authority become an even more subservient vassal of imperialism and Zionism than it already is.
Recognition was a fraud and a cynical maneuver that went hand in hand with ongoing support for the genocide. In the case of Australia, that has included exports of military components to Israel, particularly for its fleet of F-35 fighter jets, that have been used to drop bombs on Gaza. As exposed by Declassified Australia, such exports have continued including with a shipment this very month.
Labor’s complicity in the genocide and its hailing of Trump is one component of its backing for the eruption of American imperialism globally. Labor has supported the expansion of the genocide into a regionwide offensive by Israel and the US, including their criminal attacks on Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran.
In Europe, Labor backs the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
And in the Indo-Pacific, Labor is completing Australia’s transformation into a frontline state for war against China, with a vast expansion of US basing arrangements and the acquisition of strike capabilities. Albanese is travelling to the US for a meeting with Trump on October 20, the central focus of which will be deepening this war drive, including Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS pact.
The eruption of imperialist war is incompatible with basic democratic rights. In fawning over Trump, the Labor leaders are legitimising his unfolding coup against the US Constitution, including his deployment of the military against American cities, his mass roundups of immigrants and ever more explicit targeting of left-wing opposition.
Domestically, Labor is carrying out its own offensive against civil liberties. Its leaders, in hailing the ceasefire, have insisted that now, efforts to “import the conflict” in the Middle East to Australia must end. What they mean is that the mass opposition to the genocide and to imperialist war must be suppressed.
That was seen last week, when the New South Wales Court of Appeal banned a rally against the genocide at the Sydney Opera House, and going beyond any previous ruling, declared that anyone who defied the order could be found “in contempt of court” and potentially thrown in jail.
The Australian Federal Police, acting in concert with the Labor government, also announced last week the creation of National Security Investigations (NSI) teams, which would target those who threaten “social cohesion.” That is a declaration of war on social and political opposition, which parallels Trump’s offensive in the US.
It underscores the reality that the fight against militarism, authoritarianism and austerity requires a political struggle against the Labor government and the entire capitalist system, which, as has been demonstrated so horrifically in the genocide, is hurtling towards barbarism.