By refusing to name genocide in Gaza, the Labor government avoids the legal and moral obligations that would follow – but not the shame of complicity.

To utter the word “genocide" means that governments must act. And our government has chosen not to act on the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and now on the West Bank.

We can be confident that the word “genocide" will not appear in the revised platform at the ALP Conference in Adelaide this week. Albanese and Wong will see to that. There will be a lot of weasel words about a two-state solution being the main game. With hand on heart, they will tell us about the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the need for a ceasefire and the indefensible killing of civilians. They will continue to dismiss labels like genocide as “empty slogans" in order to avoid committing to the legal obligations that come with the genocide label.

If I am wrong about the National Conference, I will be agreeably surprised.

In Ece Temelkuran’s book, Nation of Strangers she describes Gaza “as a long bleeding thick scar on the world map, widening to become a fatal gangrene, swallowing up the entire body of humanity”. She suggests there will be no explicit agreement needed on the vocabulary “but gradually people will avoid that one word that is deemed ‘problematic’. It is the word ‘genocide’…" Instead, discourse will be filled with other words such as “war" or “atrocities”. Or it is all too complicated. And the algorithms tell us that “genocide” is contested.

We are conditioned by our legacy media to accept that there is no genocide. It is all about self defence.

The clear consensus around the world is that we are witnessing genocide in Gaza. The key countries refusing to call it genocide........

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