From 'deep' to 'grave' on the Gaza Concern-o-meter

Yesterday Anthony Albanese released a joint statement with Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and New Zealand PM Chris Luxon about Israel’s planned “military operation” in Rafah.

The statement’s highlight is that we’ve finally unlocked a new level on the Gaza Concern-o-meter. We’re no longer just “concerned” or even “deeply concerned” — we’re now officially “gravely concerned” and it only took 30,000 murdered Palestinians to get there. At this rate we’ll be at “unacceptable” by the time Israel is driving people into Sinai.

The joint statement is getting almost as much media coverage as Albo’s wedding proposal, most of it of roughly equal quality. 9 News called it a “stern warning” despite the fact it mentions nothing about consequences when it is inevitably ignored. Matthew Knott at the Herald called it “a significant strengthening of language from a December joint statement by the leaders”. I didn’t even know there was a December joint statement but presumably it was a roaring success.

Penny Wong has also upped her concern from “deep” to “grave,” telling a Senate committee yesterday that “large-scale military operations in densely populated areas risk extensive civilian casualties”. I’m glad someone finally pointed this out! Israel are going to be so embarrassed when they realise.

The performative expression of “concern” is probably the government’s most-used tool in its response to Gaza and a whole range of other issues. Expressing concern or its variants generates coverage from credulous media outlets that gives the superficial impression that something is Being Done. By the time it becomes apparent the problem hasn’t gone away the media and its goldfish memory have moved on to something else. Rinse, repeat.

A variant of expressing concern that’s become very popular recently is writing a letter to a major corporate donor politely asking them to do something and posting the letter on social media as evidence of being a doer.

The next step up from expressing concern is announcing a review or even, if people are really angry, a royal commission. Reviews and royal commissions take at least a year to report, use up an enormous amount of money and working hours, force advocates to endlessly restate their arguments in submissions and statements to hearings, and eventually generate recommendations that can be rejected, ignored or “accepted in principle,” which is the same thing.

By the time the recommendations come out people have forgotten what the problem was in the first place. When the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody published its final report I was three months old. I’ve got a kid now myself and most of its recommendations are still gathering dust.

This is now the default approach by Labor and Liberal governments of all kinds to problems that would require challenging some form of institutional power to resolve. Applying genuine pressure on the Israeli government to stop its genocide would require standing up to quite a lot of institutional power, not least the United States. Caught between the objective horror of the situation and its self-imposed helplessness to do anything about it, all the government can do is release statement after statement, responding to each new atrocity by minutely tweaking the wording.

This is why the government’s public statements on Gaza sound like they were assembled by throwing the same handful of word magnets at a fridge. Penny Wong was “deeply concerned by the humanitarian crisis in Gaza” after Israel bombed al-Ahli Arab Hospital in October. A month later, as Israel bombed Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital and the Indonesia Hospital, she managed to be “deeply concerned by attacks in and around hospitals in Gaza”.

In December, as the IDF and Israeli settlers increased their rampages against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, Australia “joined with more than a dozen partners to express our grave concern”. On Wong’s trip to Israel in January she expressed “our deep concern over the conflict’s civilian toll and Gaza’s dire humanitarian situation” during a meeting with Israeli National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi, who once warned Palestinians not to “bring a third Nakba on themselves”. Israel killed another 172 Palestinians on the day of that meeting.

Now, as Israel bombs the tent cities of Rafah, Wong has managed to express Australia’s “grave concern” without needing to run it by the foreign ministers of another twelve countries first.

It’s becoming repetitive to say that Australia’s ongoing failure to protect innocent life and the rule of law in Gaza has exposed a deep and fundamental weakness in our institutions of governance — a willingness to allow immense suffering and injustice rather than challenge entrenched power. It’s becoming repetitive to say that but that doesn’t make it any less true.

What I’m looking at

• From the cities to the countryside, armed resistance is spreading in the West Bank

• In a London borough home to many Muslims, Labour loses appeal over Gaza

• The five-star reviews for Kibbutz Albanese