IN THE MEDIA
Greens’ wild turn on Israel cost them
May 9, 2025 | Colin Rubenstein
An edited version of this article appeared in the Daily Telegraph – 9 May 2025
The Greens party’s dismal election results, which may see them all but ejected from the lower house, show that Australia has largely rejected and is punishing its hatred and inflammatory, divisive rhetoric.
The Greens were unable to capture any of the general swing to the left. In recent years, the Greens have shifted from primarily focusing on the environment to a preoccupation with hard-left politics. Its obsession with Israel is just one facet of this transformation. The Greens thus create distance between themselves and most mainstream Australians. They might consider themselves the third force in Australian politics but the election results prove that the main contest of ideas remains primarily between Labor and the Coalition.
The Greens had been shifting to an extreme anti-Israel position before the barbaric Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023 ignited the Gaza war. But that hostility gained momentum when they voted against bipartisan motions of support for Israel in parliament in the wake of those attacks, citing objections to a paragraph that acknowledged Israel had the right to self-defence.
Most Australians regard the constant anti-Israel rallies in our cities as a disruptive, aggressive nuisance and the chanting of extremist slogans calling for the end of Israel and labelling all Zionists as terrorists as immoral anti-Semitism.
The Greens, however, embraced and promoted these demonstrations. Most Australians can tell the obvious difference between a genocide, which is a concerted campaign to exterminate a people, and what Israel is doing in Gaza – targeting the terrorists who use their own civilians as human shields and sacrifices.
The fact that Israel makes huge effort to warn and evacuate civilians to avoid civilian casualties – the exact opposite of what a genocidal regime would do – seemingly makes no difference to the Greens.
One Greens candidate accused Israel of poisoning Palestinian wells and stealing Palestinian organs. Another called the Australian Prime Minister a traitor and the Opposition Leader a fascist and, despite the fact she was seeking election, said that Australia was only a “pseudo democracy”.
Because of their poor record in dealing with antisemitism and their increasing divisiveness, it is certainly positive for maintaining Australian social and political cohesion that they were dealt a substantial blow at this election.
