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 have a history of genocide and ethnic cleansing of their own indigenous peoples: the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, described as the most authoritative UN filing to date, said Israel has “committed genocidal acts, including killing Palestinians causing serious body and mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”. An Australian, Chris Sidoti, is a member of this UN Commission.
The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese – the other Albanese – describes Israel as “enabling genocidal acts”.
The most authoritative collective academic findings were in September 2025 when the largest professional organisation of genocide scholars, The International Association of Genocide Scholars, with 500 members worldwide, overwhelmingly agreed “that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide”. Leading individual scholars such Segal, Bartov, Lederman, Goldberg and O’Brien all expressed a clear view that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza
Public polling around the world tells the same story. In Australia a You Gov poll in September 2025 found that 58 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement “there is a genocide happening in Gaza”.
A recent Quinnipiac University poll in the US revealed that 77 per cent of Democrats and 51 per cent of independents believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
In the UK, a YouGov poll found that 55 per cent of Britons are against Israel’s aggression. Of those, 82 per cent said that “Israel’s actions amount to genocide”.
In Canada a recent Angus Reid study revealed that more than half of Canadians believe that Israel is committing genocide.
Latin America shows even stronger views on Israel ‘s genocide. Governments in Cuba, Bolivia, Brazil Colombia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Guyana, Belize, Chile and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have all made declarations describing Israel’s actions as genocide. Argentina is the exception; it supports Israel. No wonder the excluded around the world supported Spain in the World Cup.
In February 2024, the African Union’s 38th summit issued a communique stating that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians and calling for international prosecution. Even before that, in December 2023, South Africa filed the ICJ case accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention.
It is impossible to measure eight billion people’s attitudes across the world to genocide in Gaza. However, the multi-country Pew Research Centre survey across 36 countries showed that 67 per cent of adults viewed Israel unfavourably, with only 25 per cent holding favourable views of Israel.
The Visual Capitalist survey across 85 countries ranked Israel’s favourability the lowest globally, below North Korea and Afghanistan.
With a few exceptions by the settler colonial states that have practised genocide – Australia, US, Canada and New Zealand – most citizens and governments in the world have named the barbarity in Gaza as genocide. For that is what it is.
Shakespeare warned us about using words to deceive, to empty them of meaning, to hide the truth, to avoid responsibility. A modern Shakespeare could have a field day over our omission and misuse of “genocide”.
If the government was prepared to name “genocide”, it carries with it not only moral and political implications. Legal and other responses would be required – sanctions, arms embargoes and cooperation with the ICJ. Our Labor government will not do that for fear of offending the Zionist lobby. The Government listens more to that lobby than the Labor heartland.
Over 70,000, possibly 200,000, Palestinians, mainly women and children, have been murdered by Israel. Babies are killed in incubators. Israeli snipers target children. Close to 200,000 Palestinians have been injured. More than 50,000 children in Gaza have lost one or both parents, with UNICEF and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimating that at least 17,000 of these children have lost both parents since the conflict began in October 2023. This devastating toll has created what aid agencies and experts describe as the largest orphan crisis in modern history. These children face catastrophic conditions, including extreme trauma, homelessness, malnutrition, and a near-total collapse of child protection and family support systems. Suffer the little children…!
The bravery of the Palestinian people must be remembered for ever. Largely friendless they have survived, somehow. A new holocaust has been inflicted upon them.
And a Labor Government is complicit in all this. Playing with words won’t avoid the shame that complicity in genocide brings to all of us.
Does our common humanity, embracing Jews and non-Jews, count anymore? Apparently not.
And this Labor Government will sanctimoniously lecture other countries, not white countries of course, about human rights abuses.
God forgive us.
John Menadue is the Founder of Pearls and Irritations and a board member. He was formerly the Editor-in-Chief. John was the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.