Votes at the UN are not for the home gallery

It flies in the face of Australia’s long-standing policy of supporting a two-state solution to end the impasse in Palestine, not the one-state solution of eliminating Israel favoured by Hamas – the combatant that would be aided by a ceasefire while Israeli hostages go unmentioned.

Backing a resolution that ignores October 7 flies in the face of the carefully weighed statement by Anthony Albanese and five former prime ministers in October calling for solidarity with both Jews and Palestinians, and for Israel to defeat Hamas while protecting Palestinian lives.

Trying to walk down both sides of the street is not possible

The only explanation for this shambles is the need to placate the ALP’s left and fend off Green challenges in inner-city seats. It’s hard not to agree with Liberal MP Julian Leeser that this is more about Grayndler than Gaza.

The vote seems to have been sprung as a surprise by Mr Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong in the hope that the issue would then quickly go away.

Instead the government has fallen into the wedge. By pandering to domestic politics it has squandered both foreign policy principles and any practical effect Australia might have.

Whatever moral voice we had to restrain Israel after Australia’s political elders stood with them in October must be vanishing now.

US President Joe Biden is now putting serious pressure on Israel to end its campaign quickly, but Senator Wong will now have far less clout to add to that pressure when she visits Israel early in the new year.

Nor is the domestic reward that great. It is hard to balance noisy minorities with their social media warriors, flags and mass rallies who are basically irreconcilable.

And the mass of voters, as British Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn found out, dislike other peoples’ fights being brought into their domestic politics and recoil from the whiff of extremism that comes with it.

Trying to walk down both sides of the street is not possible. Boris Johnson, who for all his other failings led from the front on Ukraine, told The Australian Financial Review Business Person of the Year Award dinner on Thursday that moral clarity around the attack on Israel is being lost.

There is no equivalence between the bloodthirsty Hamas terrorist attack on the Jewish nation it seeks to eliminate and what the Israeli armed forces are doing in preventing it happening again, he says.

“If we lose that moral clarity, then we are all in trouble”, he says.

A point will come where it is hard to balance the horrendous suffering of Palestinian civilians with even the best of Israeli intentions. But Hamas could end this by giving up the Israeli hostages, dropping its aim of eliminating the Israeli nation, and negotiating.

But players like Hamas and the extremist Israeli settler movement have no interest in ending this conflict, and – as the joint Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand statement usefully reminds – no place in a peaceful future on the same land.

Grappling with them, and putting a two-state solution back on the table, rather than pandering to one-sided symbolic resolutions in the UN, is how this must finish.