Ever since the bloodcurdling Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023, that shocked the world, the job of governing Australia has come with an added and unwelcome foreign policy burden for Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

This fraught management was not only of foreign policy but also of the wider moral perception of governmental legitimacy.

In the weeks and months following October 7, his government found itself presiding over a surge in antisemitism that has left a deep and lasting mark on the country’s international standing—and, more troublingly, on its sense of itself and, not to mention, Australia’s increasingly nervous Jewish community.

Canberra’s posture on the Israel–Gaza conflict appeared, at times, less like a coherent doctrine than a series of political accommodations to Australia’s various minority groups.

There was an evident sensitivity to domestic electoral geography since a significant Muslim minority, concentrated in Labor-held seats in the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, loomed large in the government’s increasingly cynical calculations.

The government’s response to rising antisemitism was marked by a cognitive dissonance between rhetoric and action. Official condemnations were issued but were often perfunctory, as violent incidents accumulated with disquieting regularity. The sense that the government was observing events rather than shaping them became more difficult to ignore as time went on.

That perception hardened in the aftermath of the Bondi Hanukkah attack last December on the sands of Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach, when two Islamist extremists carried out an act of violence that not only left 15 Australians – mainly of the Jewish faith – dead but also shocked the nation to its very core.

For weeks, Albanese appeared politically stunned—slow to meet the seemingly inconsolable grief of Australia’s Jewish community and totally unprepared for the intensity of the anger directed at him.

The estrangement was palpable: in some cases, he was unwelcome even at the funerals of victims.

His initial unwillingness to launch a Royal Commission into the massacre only hardened attitudes against him.

His eventual response—tightening hate-speech laws and moving to proscribe Islamist extremist groups, including Hizb ut-Tahrir, and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)