Australia’s foreign policy on Israel and Palestine is increasingly indefensible. The Albanese government talks the language of international law, yet its actions fall far short of what the scale of the bloodshed and destruction demands, leaving Australia aligned with an Israeli war machine that many international bodies confirm has deliberately committed genocide in Gaza.
A potent symbol of expansionist policy now visible is the “Greater Israel” imagery — a map displayed on IDF soldiers’ uniform patches that includes Palestine and territory of neighbouring Arab countries well beyond Israel’s internationally recognised borders.
Senior Israeli politicians and ministers have repeatedly trafficked in rhetoric that embraces maximalist territorial claims and elevates settlement expansion as a state priority, while government policy toward the Palestinian West Bank and annexation steps materially advanced that agenda.
The visible iconography in the military, statements of influential leaders, and the concrete policy of settlement and annexation show that Greater Israel is an influential illegal expansionist current with real political traction inside Israeli politics. It requires perpetual warfare as seen currently in Lebanon.
The central problem is not rhetoric alone, but what Australia continues not to do.
Even after the UN Commission of Inquiry found Israel committed genocide in Gaza, Canberra has not imposed a sweeping arms embargo, broad sanctions, or serious economic pressure proportionate to the scale of the massacres perpetrated, as required under international law.
That gap between words and consequences is what makes the government’s posture so damaging.
This is especially troubling because public reporting has raised persistent concerns about Australia’s connection to the broader military apparatus feeding the Gaza campaign.
Reports point to Australian participation in the F‑35 supply chain, and other reporting questions whether Australian intelligence infrastructure, including Pine Gap, have materially assisted operations linked to the destruction in Gaza. The Albanese government awarded $78 million grants to Australian companies that make parts for F-35 jets used in the Gaza genocide.
Even if the government does not openly describe this as support, the practical effect is that Australia remains actively entangled in systems enabling ongoing Israeli military atrocities.
The hypocrisy becomes even clearer when the government’s treatment of different returnees is compared. Australians associated with ex-ISIS families in Syria face intense political hostility, surveillance, and prosecution on return, with government messaging emphasizing deterrence and “full force of the law.”
Yet when questions arise about dual Australian‑Israeli citizens who serve in the IDF and return home, the government response has been absent, with no equivalent political crackdown or aggressive policy response.
That disparity sends a message: some forms of foreign militant association trigger alarm, while others are treated as politically untouchable and even protected!
Australia’s limited sanctions response reinforces the same pattern. The government has imposed targeted measures on certain Israeli settlers and associated individuals, but critics argue these steps are far too narrow given the scale of government-supported terrorist settler expansion and increasing deliberate violence in the occupied territories.
If the government truly believed that occupation, annexation by force, collective and capital punishment for those resisting land forfeiture are unacceptable, then it would be using broader sanctions and tighter export controls rather than just symbolic restraint.
The same applies to public money. The government’s sovereign Future Fund’s investments in weapons firms, technology companies, and banks draw criticism because these companies are tied, directly or indirectly, to the military, surveillance, and financial systems sustaining Greater Israel’s illegal occupation and war economy. The Future Fund doubled down drastically increasing these investments contributing to the Gaza genocide in 2025.
A government that claims to care about human rights cannot credibly continue to allow public capital to profit from the immoral machinery of destruction while insisting its hands are clean.
The government also has a record of forceful words not matched by forceful policy. Albanese was plainly outraged by the killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom and demanded accountability from Israel. But outrage without consequences is not a foreign policy.
When Australia later avoids serious retaliation, the message to Israel is that Australia will object, protest, and then continue business as usual.
PM Albanese and his government officially adopted and endorsed the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, while Holocaust scholars highlighted its flaws and proposed alternative definitions that allow criticism of Israel. The purpose of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition is “to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.”
John Menadue writes: “After the Bondi massacre, the PM urged Australians to ‘lower the temperature’ in the interests of social cohesion. That urging was directed at those Australians who had expressed serious concerns about the Gaza genocide. It was not directed at the Israeli lobby whose campaign was to suppress pro-Palestinian voices. The PM’s appeal was selective.”
The most honest criticism is therefore this: Albanese is not openly announcing support for territorial expansion, but his government is actively helping preserve the conditions that allow Israel to continue its illegal expansionary campaign with virtually no effective Australian counter-response.
That includes no prosecution of returning Australian IDF citizens, weak sanctions, no comprehensive arms embargo, continued active entanglement and profiting in military supply chains, and immoral public investment that remains exposed to the war economy.
The shame is not just in what Australia says. It is in what it refuses to do.
When a government can condemn atrocity while declining the measures needed to stop enabling its illegal expansion, it joins hands with the perpetrator – the burgeoning Greater Israel state.
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