This article first appeared in The Australian on 4 February 2024.

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The Labor government’s diplomacy in the Middle East is in complete disarray. A mere 10 days after Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced an additional $6m in Australian aid to the UN Relief and Works Agency, she was forced into a humiliating backflip.

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After credible information came to light that UNRWA staff in Gaza were actively involved in the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, most of the UNRWA’s major donors immediately suspended their assistance. Australia had no choice but to follow.

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According to intelligence, at least six UNRWA staff were part of the Hamas onslaught that murdered 1200 civilians, Arabs and Jews, in the single deadliest day for the state of Israel. Two helped kidnap Israeli civilians, more than 100 of whom are still being held hostage. Others procured weapons and co-ordinated logistics for the assault. Most of these terrorists were employed by the UNRWA as school teachers. One can only imagine what they were teaching their pupils. The UNRWA immediately fired many of those identified in the documents, prior to any investigation, suggesting the agency considered the allegations highly credible.

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Australia should not have been surprised. Anyone who has any familiarity with the issues knows the UNRWA is a deeply compromised and problematic organisation. In Gaza, the UNRWA has been infiltrated and co-opted by Hamas. Many of its employees are members of Hamas. Its schools and hospitals are repurposed by Hamas as military facilities. Its aid is diverted to support Hamas military aims. These are ingrained structural features of the UNRWA in Gaza, not anomalies.

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When I finished as Australia’s ambassador to Israel in 2017, one of my parting messages was that we should reassess our support for the UNRWA, given its obvious vulnerabilities. Senior Jewish community and business leaders wrote to Wong in December, urging her to use alternatives to the UNRWA to provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza. But this warning went unheeded, and instead the signature announcement of Wong’s trip has turned into a humiliation.

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Beyond its complicity in Hamas terrorism, the UNRWA as an organisation is part of the problem in the Middle East, rather than part of the solution. Created in 1949 as a temporary mechanism to deal with those displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, it instead turned into a multi-generational welfare and dependency agency that perpetuates the original conflict. Rather than helping resettle refugees from 1948, as happens after most conflicts, the UNRWA has kept the grievances of that era alive. The Jews displaced and expelled from their ancestral homes across the Middle East after the 1948 war, who were originally part of the UNRWA’s mandate, were predominantly resettled in Israel. But the Palestinians displaced by this conflict remain in UNRWA refugee camps, scattered across the region, several generations later.

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What was an initial caseload of several hundred thousand has instead become several million. This suits many Arab states, who remain adamantly opposed to resettling the Palestinian population themselves, despite millions having lived within their borders for several generations.

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It suits Hamas, which can leave the provision of basic health and education services for the Gazan population to the UNRWA, and instead focus on destroying Israel. And it has suited the rejectionist camp in Israel, those opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state, by deflecting the pressure to negotiate an enduring settlement. Far from its original purpose, the UNRWA today foments Palestinian extremism and rejectionism, allows Israel’s neighbouring Arab states to dodge their historic responsibilities, and prolongs a frozen conflict that should have been settled decades ago.

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Wong’s decision to increase funding to the UNRWA while the Israel-Hamas conflict was still raging was an amateurish mistake, and always likely to be rendered inoperative. But our continued support for the UNRWA, beyond this conflict, must

also be addressed. There are myriad other aid agencies capable of providing humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population that have not been corrupted by Hamas, and that have no organisational interest in prolonging this conflict. This is where Australian assistance should be directed.

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This whole episode reveals the Albanese government’s diplomacy in the Middle East, during one of its most testing periods, to be entirely dysfunctional. Anthony Albanese ducked and weaved to avoid making a meaningful Australian contribution to a multinational maritime security operation in the Red Sea, letting down our allies and abandoning a core Australian interest in supporting open shipping lanes. He signed on to a joint statement with the leaders of Canada and New Zealand demanding no future role for Hamas in Gaza, and then hours later instructed Australia to vote for a UN General Assembly resolution that would leave Hamas in place.

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Wong was alone among foreign ministers in demanding “restraint” from Israel while the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack was still under way, with Israel seeking to rescue civilians besieged in their communities.

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And the astonishing lack of leadership shown by Albanese and his senior ministers in calling out and condemning anti-Semitism has allowed a foreign conflict to take root in Australian soil, damaging social cohesion and undermining a pillar of our multiculturalism.

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The Albanese government hopes the Middle East will simply just go away. Its poor handling of the numerous security issues emerging from the region betray lazy thinking and lack of focus. Albanese is irritated whenever questioned on the topic. Wong had to be pressured into making her first visit as Foreign Minister to the Middle East, and then made her trip as short as possible. Australia’s interests remain deeply engaged and impacted by developments in the Middle East. It is the job of the Labor government to properly address these, not wish them away