For weeks, the pressure has been building – both within the Labor party and from increasingly frustrated constituents – for the Albanese government to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
That came to a head on Wednesday with Australia’s decision to support a UN general assembly resolution demanding an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” and the unconditional release of hostages.
It was obvious the foreign minister, Penny Wong, was seeking to insulate the Albanese government from inevitable accusations from the Coalition that it was hanging Israel out to dry.
Wong noted Australia wasn’t out on its own. She emphasised Australia, in backing the resolution, had voted identically to some of Australia’s closest allies and partners, including fellow Five Eyes members Canada and New Zealand, fellow Quad partners Japan and India, and France.
True to the “safety in numbers” approach, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, signed a joint statement with his counterparts from Canada and New Zealand hours earlier saying that the price of defeating Hamas “cannot be the continuous suffering of all Palestinian civilians”.
Exceptions included Israel and the US, who were among just 10 countries to vote against the resolution, while the UK abstained. The US president, Joe Biden, wasn’t lying when he said earlier in the day that Israel was “starting to lose” international support in the scale of the military response to the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel.
The Australian government will probably deny internal Labor party politics influenced the decision, but there is no doubt it has been coming under increasing political pressure, with dozens of ALP branches backing a ceasefire.
Labor MPs report fielding a deluge of calls and messages from constituents urging them to stand on “the right side of history” and ensure they give voice to the suffering the Palestinian people are experiencing.
Up to now, the Australian government has been seeking to stick to what it describes a “principled position” of unequivocally condemning the Hamas attacks and backing Israel’s right to self-defence, but saying “how it defends itself matters”. That approach has included making public and private pleas for Israel to comply with the laws of war and to protect civilians in Gaza.
That is why the government has repeatedly said any calls for a ceasefire must not be “one-sided” and that Hamas must release all of the hostages that it holds in Gaza. At a time when concerns about social cohesion in Australia are growing – including increases in antisemitic, Islamophobic and anti-Arab incidents – the government has been trying to find a “balanced” position to avoid alienating any part of the community.
But that position has become increasingly difficult to hold to in light of the reports of the increasingly catastrophic situation in Gaza.
The UN’s top aid official, Martin Griffiths, warned of “apocalyptic” conditions that were making meaningful humanitarian operations impossible; latest estimates suggest up to 85% of the 2.3 million people in Gaza have been internally displaced, many homes have been destroyed and hospitals are overwhelmed.
Israel states that this displacement has occurred because it has issued evacuation warnings to try to protect civilians and that Hamas is using innocent people as “human shields”. But aid agencies say residents crammed into increasingly crowded and unsanitary conditions in the south are not safe from bombing either.
The Hamas-run ministry of health has reported that more than 18,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its military operations in Gaza after the 7 October attacks by Hamas. The UN has stated most of the deaths are women and children. As the Labor cabinet minister Ed Husic said emphatically on Tuesday: “Those kids are not Hamas and they should not have had to have borne the brunt of that military action.”
Australia abstained in late October when the UN general assembly last voted on a “truce”; at the time the government said the resolution was unbalanced because it did not condemn Hamas for the 7 October attacks.
Sources familiar with the negotiations noted that the drafters of the latest resolution appear to have learned from that debate, and had stripped back the language to remove potential objections. That has seen the number of UN member states voting in favour increase from 121 to 153.
The proposition before the UN general assembly this time around was tightly focused on humanitarian concerns. Importantly, the call for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” was paired with a demand for “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, as well as ensuring humanitarian access”.
Incidentally, the length of this proposed ceasefire is not defined and it doesn’t go as far as the “permanent” ceasefire requested by many of the Australians attending weekly pro-Palestine protests.
While it doesn’t mention Hamas by name, the resolution emphasises both “the Palestinian and Israeli civilian populations must be protected in accordance with international humanitarian law”.
The Australian government will be able to point to the fact it voted for proposed amendments with the aim of “unequivocally condemning Hamas as the perpetrators of the 7 October attack on innocent Israeli civilians”. But the failure of those amendments weren’t enough to stop Australia voting in favour.
The Israeli ambassador to Australia, Amir Maimon, expressed disappointment, saying a ceasefire would only “embolden Hamas and enable it to resume its attacks on Israelis” and that the war “can only end with Hamas being totally defeated and the liberation of all our hostages”.
Izzat Abdulhadi, the head of the Palestinian delegation in Canberra, had earlier implored the government back a ceasefire, citing “huge anger and fury and criticism in the Palestinian community, Muslim community, Arab community” on Australia’s stance to date.
UN general assembly resolutions are non-binding, but they do carry political weight as a sign of the global temperature on any given issue.
While it may be an incremental step, Australia has decided to stand with the majority of countries in saying the status quo in Gaza isn’t tenable.
