There’s plenty of high dudgeon, long bows and confected outrage flying around in and out of Parliament, with the major parties lining up to denounce the Greens: “the party of antisemitism”, according to the Coalition; exploiting Palestinians to “harvest votes” according to Labor. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus went further and suggested Adam Bandt had “something to answer for” in encouraging violence directed at MPs. Bandt responded this morning by foolishly threatening legal action.
The Greens’ charge that Labor is “complicit in genocide” is a long bow. By any dictionary definition, what Israel is doing in Gaza is ethnic cleansing and war crimes, not genocide — although the latter term in recent decades has been expanded to the point of nebulousness by people looking to accord their causes with the highest possible status.
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