Muslim Vote and antisemitism envoy are both artefacts of identity politics

The defection of Senator Fatima Payman from the Labor party has been painted as an issue of identity politics. It is not.

Senator Payman is seen by many as a young Muslim woman tortured by what is happening in Gaza and unable to remain in a party that refuses to call out Israel’s Gaza genocide. In fact, Senator Payman is a Labor rat — tortured and conscience stricken though she clearly is by the war in Gaza. 

This is so because she will continue to sit in the senate, though the voters of Western Australia who voted for her did so because she was on the Labor senate ticket and they were voting Labor.

Rather than remain in the senate for the next five years as an independent, Senator Payman should have resigned from the Labor Party and from the senate. That would be truly honouring the wishes of the people who voted for her. And truly living with the consequences of following your conscience in politics.

This is not about identity politics, despite the furious efforts by some politicians and journalists to portray Payman — a young, hijab wearing Muslim woman — as a victim of islamophobia.

But identity politics is playing out in the rise of the Muslim Vote movement, and indeed in the recent appointment of a special envoy to combat antisemitism.

I had hoped that there would be a consensus across the moderate left and right, that any ethnic or religious based political party in which priests or rabbis or imams have a significant influence, is not a great development for Australian democracy or multiculturalism.

There was no such consensus. Instead, in much of the mainstream media, the Muslim Vote movement is treated as a response to Muslim Australian pain and to Muslim Australian disadvantage, generally on the basis that Muslim Australians are a vulnerable and oppressed minority.

But down that path — in which ethnic and religious communities form political parties and people are asked to vote on the basis of the ethnic or religious group to which they belong — lies the end of multiculturalism, the sort of multiculturalism that Australians in the main have come to know and more or less support.

It was in this context — the Labor government’s Fatima Payman crisis and the challenges for Labor with the creation of the Muslim Vote movement — that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the appointment of Jillian Segal as the special envoy to combat antisemitism.

It was an announcement widely welcomed by Australian Jews and by major Jewish organisations like the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Zionist Federation of Australia. 

Not so welcoming of the appointment was the Jewish Council of Australia, the militantly pro-Palestinian group of Jews who — though they never really spell this out — essentially do not believe there is a problem of  antisemitism on the left, including among anti-Zionist activists. Indeed, they believe that Zionists use false accusations of antisemitism to shut down criticism of Israel.

The appointment of Segal then is an example of the way powerful identity groups — Zionist Jews in this instance — can get governments to privilege their concerns over the concerns of the rest of the community.

What is left out in all this, what is left out by the spokespeople for the Council, is the fact that the government is also desperately trying to find someone to take on the role of special envoy for Islamophobia. The trouble is that so far, they have been unable to find someone willing to take up the position. It isn’t just politically powerful Zionist Jews who can force governments to appoint special envoys.

I think the spokespeople for the Council are not entirely honest about the fact that calling themselves the Jewish Council of Australia is designed to mislead gullible — and in some cases biased — journalists into believing that the Council is a significant organisation in the Jewish community.

I disagree with much of what the Council has to say about antisemitism. And for that matter, about anti-Zionism. They are part of a long, left-wing Jewish history of denying the existence of left-wing antisemitism, including, most terribly, in the Soviet Union.

Still, I do not wholeheartedly support the appointment of an antisemitism envoy. Nor an envoy for Islamophobia for that matter. In the end, these appointments are the result of the government’s weakness and confusion and cowardice for that matter, that has characterised its response to the war in Gaza and in particular its wholly inadequate response to the impact that the conflict has had on the Jewish and Muslim communities. 

The appointment of these envoys is in part a sort of abdication of responsibility by the government to deal with the obvious and frightening rise in antisemitism, some of it violent and much of it expressed as threatening hate speech, since October 7 last year. It is a recognition that the major institutions like the Human Rights Commission have failed to deal with this rise in Jew hatred.

I do wonder what most Australians — if they think about this at all — think of the appointment of Jillian Segal? What will she do? Why do the Jews, they might wonder, need a special envoy? What powers will she have? And really, given the fact that even the Jews can’t agree about what constitutes antisemitism, what’s the point of having an antisemitism envoy? I think these are reasonable questions. And reasonable responses to the appointment of an antisemitism envoy.

And some of the same questions can be asked about an Islamophobia envoy, though in my view antisemitism is a far greater threat to communal safety than anti-Muslim sentiment.

These envoys are a sort of political sop to a Jewish community that feels threatened and abandoned, and to Muslim communities that are traumatised and grieving because of the war in Gaza. These envoys will not bring these communities closer together, closer to something approaching reconciliation. 

Fatima Payman’s political reincarnation as an independent (Muslim) senator, the birth of the Muslim Vote movement and the appointment of the antisemitism envoy and the soon to be appointed — the government must be praying — Islamophobia envoy, is in part about government and institutional failure.

So, what is the point of these special envoys? Until the Prime Minister can answer that question — beyond the cliches about the dangers of antisemitism and Islamophobia — the appointment of these envoys is not a cause for celebration.

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