This past week has shown once again that elections have consequences—not least in the Antipodes, and not least for Jews and for Israel.
Take New Zealand, whose trendy progressive government under Jacinda Ardern came to an end when she resigned in January 2023. In the October 2023 general election, her Labor Party suffered the widest defeat of a sitting government in several decades: there was a 23 point swing against Labor.
Lo and behold, the new National Party government announced in February of this year that it was designating Hamas in its entirety as a terrorist organization, dispensing with the fiction that there is a Hamas “political wing” uninvolved in terrorism. Then this week it designated Hezbollah in its entirety as a terrorist organization, again junking the ridiculous notion of a “political wing.” New Zealand also designated the Houthis as a terrorist organization this week.
But Australia has moved in the other direction, increasingly anti-Israel since the Labor Party won the 2022 general election. The previous (conservative) government had been a reliable friend of Israel, and Australia’s votes in the United Nations more and more frequently sided with the United States on Israel-related matters. Those days are gone.
This past week, that Labor government refused to allow former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked to enter Austraia. She was to attend a conference sponsored by AIJAC, the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council, which is Australia’s AIPAC. This was apparently just too dangerous for the current government in Canberra to permit; it said she might “incite discord.” So much for freedom of speech; so much for allowing Australians to hear a defense of Israel from an official of its previous multi-party, centrist government. To what other democratic country has this approach been applied? It seems the answer is none; this is just one piece of the Albanese government’s hostility to Israel and its catering to anti-Israel extremist opinion.
The other pieces have been evident since Albanese came to power. After the Hamas attacks, President Biden was just one of the many world leaders (including the French president and UK prime minister) who visited Israel in a show of
