Australia’s West Bank Abdication: The Comfort of Complicity

Twelve nations put a price on Israel’s illegal settlements. Canberra sat at the table for months, then remembered it had a Security Council seat to win.

URBAM WRONSKI WRITES, 29 Sept 26

Do we have principles?

Strutting what it sees as the high moral ground of the world stage, Australia is wont to pose as the honest broker, champion of the underdog and even warden of the mystical rules-based order, a form of words that rivals the Nicene Creed for opacity and is chanted with the same glazed piety, loudest by those least inclined to live by it.

Hypocrisy? If we don’t like our principles, as Groucho almost said, we have others.

This month twelve nations put their names to trade sanctions on Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank: the UK, France, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

Four diplomatic sources told the ABC that Australia stayed in the talks until close to the end. One EU official had seen an earlier draft with Australia written in.

Whether Canberra ever agreed to be there, nobody will say.

Then the pens came out and Australia remembered a pressing engagement elsewhere.

Two EU officials were “surprised”. Another was “disappointed”. A Nordic official said Canberra had “missed an opportunity”.

That is how you talk about a mate who didn’t show.

We are not so much walking back our stance against illegal settlements as not walking the talk at all.

Before we go there, let’s look at what hides behind the benign euphemism of the word settlement.

What the word hides

The settlements are Israeli civilian towns built on land Israel captured in 1967.

Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power to move its own civilians into the territory it occupies. In July 2024 the International Court of Justice found the occupation itself unlawful and said the settlements must be evacuated.

Some settlements are cities with shopping malls and council rates. Others are one caravan, one flag and a flock of sheep on a hilltop.

Both do the same job.

Take Ras Ein al-Auja, a Bedouin village in the Jordan Valley. This is innovation. Who needs a bulldozer?

In late December 2025 settlers set up an outpost beside it. They ploughed the village land, tore up the road and cut the power cables. They blocked the canal and the grazing grounds.

They drove their herds to people’s doorsteps and gathered in groups at night.

On 8 January, 26 households, more than 100 people, left in a single day, +972 Magazine reports.

“They threatened to kill us, chased us, beat us,” said Abu Taleb al-Omari, 75. “In the end, they said they would slaughter us here if we didn’t leave.”

Muhammad Eshaq Rashid, 55: “I’ve never cried in my life until today.”

The settlers’ parting words, as one resident recalls them: “You lost. Wherever you go, we’ll come.”

Ras Ein al-Auja is not an aberration.

Amnesty International counts 117 herding and Bedouin communities fully or partly driven out between January 2023 and April 2026. That is 5,910 people. Of 363 unauthorised outposts, 212 went up under the present government………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Penny Wong told the Senate that Australia would pursue “further targeted measures in coordination with international partners.”

Which measures. Against whom. By when. The Senate was not told. Neither were we.

A touch of the reverse Robin Hood. We won’t tax the people taking Palestinian land, out of tender concern for the Palestinians whose land is being taken.

No-one’s buying the government guff………………………………………………………………….

Targeted measures. The very thing Canberra says it prefers. They were on the table. Canberra left them there.

And the targeted measures we already have?

In June 2025 Australia joined Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Norway in sanctioning Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Good.

Now look at what that leaves. We sanction the man who runs the settlement project, then decline to touch the project.

The foreign policy equivalent of thoughts and prayers.

Wong is not confused about the stakes. She has said that settlement growth, E1 and “flagrant settler violence” are “extinguishing the possibility of a two-state solution.”

The Foreign Minister has read the death notice. She is still deciding on flowers.

Nor is the law in doubt. The ICJ told every state to refrain from aid or assistance in maintaining the occupation, and to take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that help keep it going.

Trade relations. The Court named the lever. Twelve nations have pulled it.

The domestic alibi

So why walk? The ABC’s sources point home.

On 14 December 2025, gunmen killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach. That was antisemitic terror and the grief is real.

A royal commission followed. Its report is due on 18 December.

Several diplomats told the ABC that the pressure on Albanese since Bondi may have shaped Canberra’s decision.

Here is what the government will not say.

Jewish Australians are not the Israeli cabinet. A Hanukkah gathering on Bondi Beach is not a caravan on a hilltop in the Jordan Valley. A tariff on settlement goods is not an act against a faith.

Treat it as one and you accept the settlers’ own case: that the settlements belong to every Jew, everywhere.

Plenty of Jewish Australians see the difference. The Jewish Council of Australia, a progressive group sharply critical of Israeli government policy, wants settlement goods banned.

“Once again,” said its executive officer Bart Shteinman, “Australia is at the back of the pack when it comes to upholding our international law obligations.”

Jewish Australians call for the ban. The government cites Jewish Australians as its reason to refuse it.

Canberra is choosing which Jews to hear.

In London, Ed Miliband announced Britain’s measures and was promptly called antisemitic. Miliband is Jewish, as Rachel Withers notes in Crikey.

A charge that fits everyone is no guide to policy………………………………………………… https://urbanwronski.com/2026/09/29/australia-west-bank-abdication-comfort-of-complicity/