How to win the war for Israel
AS a famous Jewish broadcaster might have said, let’s tell it like it is. The war for Israel is being lost. It’s being lost in branch meetings and conferences and membership numbers and political parties across the world; it’s being lost on cable news and in university classrooms and in Facebook threads and on Twitter posts and in arguments around a million tables in a million cities.
AS a famous Jewish broadcaster might have said, let’s tell it like it is. The war for Israel is being lost.
It’s being lost in branch meetings and conferences and membership numbers and political parties across the world; it’s being lost on cable news and in university classrooms and in Facebook threads and on Twitter posts and in arguments around a million tables in a million cities.
The war for Israel is not being lost because those of us who believe in and support and know the truth of Israel are somehow wrong. It’s being lost because we are so focused on being right, we forget that arguments don’t win debates but that numbers do. It’s being lost because we are allowing it to be lost.
We might not like it, but let’s tell it like it is.
In NSW this month and WA next month, those state Labor Parties will vote on recognising the state of Palestine at their annual conferences. They will hear speeches blaming Israel for all the ills of the Middle East, for the state of the people in the Palestinian areas, blame Israel for death and destruction and seek to further isolate it from the community of accepted nations.
Will this be wrong? Of course it will, but it’ll happen – just like it has been happening, brick by brick, step by step, inch by inch, branch by branch, vote by vote, member by member for years and decades now.
It’s easy to say we care about bipartisan support for Israel, but it’s often not understood why it matters. Or if it is, the actions of many pro-
Israel people speak otherwise.
Commitment to bipartisanship on Israel requires not words alone, but action.
If the Jewish community is truly committed to ensuring the continuation of bipartisan support for Israel, in its absolute best interest, it needs to get involved and get organised, within the Labor Party.
The anti-Israel forces are not winning this war because they have a better position or a more cogent argument.
They are winning for one reason and one simple reason only – they are engaged with, organised in and most critically they are actively recruiting members to the Labor Party, particularly in the most politically influential state in Australia. They are led by Bob Carr and his parliamentary lieutenants, but don’t imagine for a moment that he is alone.
They are joining the Labor Party in dozens and scores and hundreds, they are winning votes with the overwhelming tide of new recruits, they are passing motions and adopting positions and they are about to achieve the changing of ALP policy on Palestinian recognition, no small feat.
Do we delude ourselves that they will stop there?
There is only one way to confront an army of recruits, and that is to recruit your own army. There is only one way to confront people who are organised and engaged in political movements, and that is to be organised and engaged ourselves.
It no longer matters what each of us thinks about one party or another, about Labor’s policy on tax or equal marriage or refugee arrivals.
Do we imagine that every new recruit to the ALP branches in Lakemba or Punchbowl or Canterbury or any one of Shaoquett Moselmane’s Labor meetings agrees with Labor on gay rights? Negative gearing? Mandatory detention of asylum seekers?
The truth is that right now, Israel’s opponents in Australia are more committed to its destruction than we are to its defence.
They work harder, sacrifice more and will go further than we will. They are being smarter. And they are winning.
No security wall, no stuxnet worm, no checkpoint is the ultimate guarantor of Israel’s safety, of its very existence.
The only thing that can guarantee Israel’s ongoing viability as a Jewish state, safe from annihilation, is the support of the world community – including Australia – for Israel.
None of this is to denigrate the good and dedicated work of many men and women who work to combat the lies of the anti-Israel lobby, in public and in private. And none of this is to say that there aren’t good men and women within the Labor Party who’ve been fighting the good fight for a very long time.
But they can no longer do it without the rest of us.
The best thing any person who cares about Australian support for Israel can do is join the Labor Party, go to a branch meeting, propose a motion, argue the case with Labor activists, run for a position at a state conference or on a policy committee. These are the “tachlis” steps that those who hate Israel are engaging in every day, but those who support Israel aren’t. That’s what our side is missing.
We do not have time to waste or margin for error. We simply may not sit back and let Australian politics be taken over by a pernicious lobby group, just because they were willing to get involved and we were not.
LUKE WALLADGE is a former senior Labor staffer and the director of consultancy firm Western Industrial.
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