The most revealing feature of the ALP’s new platform on Israel and Palestine is not simply the platform itself.
It is the capitulation of Josh Burns — the federal Labor MP who once appeared to understand that there are some principles a political party should not surrender merely because its activists are demanding that it do so.
Burns was once one of the clearest Labor voices on the need to confront antisemitism, defend the IHRA working definition and recognise that Jewish security and Israel’s legitimacy were not optional extras to be traded away in the interests of internal party harmony.
He understood that the massacre of October 7 wasn’t just another unfortunate episode in a symmetrical conflict. He understood that Hamas was a terrorist organisation committed to Israel’s destruction. He understood that the Jewish community was watching keenly as the political language of anti-Zionism increasingly became a vehicle for the demonisation of Israel — and, too often, of Jews.
Which makes his apparent role in the ALP’s latest retreat so deeply disturbing.
The defence will be familiar. Burns will have supposedly acted pragmatically. He will have restrained more extreme amendments. He will have ensured that the final wording was less damaging than the wording demanded by the party’s most strident anti-Israel activists.
But this is the oldest excuse in politics: the claim that surrender is actually a form of influence.
The issue is not whether Burns stopped the ALP from adopting the very worst possible language. The issue is whether he helped legitimise the language that was adopted.
And the answer appears to be yes.
The ALP’s new approach is not simply a compassionate appeal for Palestinian civilians. It is part of a serious political reorientation in which Israel is increasingly placed in the dock, while Hamas’s responsibility is reduced to a footnote. Israel’s security concerns become caveats. Hamas’s ideology becomes background noise. Palestinian suffering is treated as the beginning and end of the political argument.
The moral asymmetry is breathtaking.
Israel is expected to satisfy standards that no democratic state confronting a terrorist organisation would be expected to meet. In contrast, Hamas — the organisation that initiated the present war, murdered civilians, took hostages and has repeatedly rejected Israel’s existence — is progressively removed from the centre of the story.
This is not balance. It is political laundering.
And Josh Burns has now apparently helped launder it.
No one seriously argues that Israel should be immune from criticism. Israeli governments can and should be criticised. A genuine two-state solution requires political courage on both sides. But there is a notable difference between criticising the policies of an Israeli government and allowing the Labor Party to absorb a political vocabulary that increasingly portrays the Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate, uniquely criminal and uniquely responsible for a conflict that has been sustained for decades by Palestinian rejectionism, terrorism and political failure.
Burns formerly appeared to understand that distinction.
The tragedy is that the Labor movement has not had to defeat him in a public argument. It has not had to silence him. It has not had to drive him from the political field.
It has simply required him to negotiate the terms of retreat.
That is where the symbolism of Burns’ role becomes so corrosive. His presence enables the ALP to suggest that its transformation on Israel is somehow compatible with the concerns of the Jewish community. His participation provides reassurance while the political ground beneath Israel and Australian Jews continues to shift.
A Jewish MP at the negotiating table is not necessarily a Jewish voice being heard. Sometimes it is merely a Jewish voice being used.
The fundamental question is therefore not whether Josh Burns remains personally sympathetic to Israel. It is whether he was prepared to defend, at the moment of political danger, the principles he once claimed to represent.
The evidence suggests that he was not prepared to do so.
That is the real significance of the ALP platform debate. Burns may have moderated the extremists. But if the result is still a platform that moves Labour substantially closer to the worldview of those extremists, then the moderation is largely cosmetic.
The ground has still been surrendered.
And political history is not written by asking whether a retreat could have been worse. It is written by asking who stood their ground — and who moved.
Josh Burns once appeared to understand that Israel’s legitimacy was not negotiable, that Hamas was not simply one side in a conventional dispute, and that antisemitism did not become less poisonous when dressed up in the language of colonialism, apartheid or genocide.
Now, when those principles have been tested, he appears to have chosen party accommodation over political courage.
That is not leadership. It is capitulation with a respectable label.
The Labor Party did not need to expel its Jewish voice. It did not need to silence Josh Burns. It merely needed him to remain in the room while the party moved the goalposts — and then to describe the retreat as compromise.
For the Jewish community, the lesson is stark. The presence of a Jewish MP inside the Labor Party is no guarantee that Jewish concerns will prevail. It may simply provide political cover for their abandonment.
A Jewish voice in the room is worthless if, when the moment of decision arrives, it is used to decorate the surrender.
Sam Salcman is a Honorary Life Member of ECAJ and former Honorary Secretary of ZFA.