Labor Sanctions Faruqi for Raising Gaza Genocide, Not Israel for Its Commission of It

Federal Labor has expressed regrets but no real action on the Gaza genocide that Israel has been perpetrating over the last 21 months, yet the moment that marked a step too far was when Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi produced a sign, during the Australian governor general’s opening speech for the 48th parliament, which read, “Gaza is starving. Words won’t feed them. Sanction Israel”.

This standing order busting behaviour amounted to the Greens senator playing the same kind of “grievance politics that have been so destructive in other countries”, foreign minister Penny Wong told the chamber on 23 July 2025, the day following Faruqi’s silent outburst. The Labor senator added that it was all about Dr Faruqi proving how “hardline” she is to her supporter base.

Wong made the comments during Wednesday’s parliamentary sitting, as she was moving a motion to censure Faruqi in relation to having held up a sign during the speech, but this was no Labor-centred issue as the Coalition got stuck into the Greens member as well, with Liberal Nationals Senator Paul Scarr outlining that the standing orders, or the rules of parliament, act as “guardrails” to abide by.

The irony was lost upon no one, except, it would seem the major party members, to hear Labor Senator Katy Gallagher agree with Wong in sanctioning Faruqui as suggested in the motion, which sees her banned from taking part in any Senate delegation during this term of parliament, yet Labor has failed to take any substantive action against Israel’s genocide and instead, it has backed it in.

Fifty senators, or 81 percent of the parliamentarians that were in the upper house chamber, voted to sanction Faruqi for raising the commission of the most serious of all criminal offences, and they did so, it would seem, without the ability to conceive how callous an act this would appear before the constituency, and indeed, in front of the entire planet in this time of genocide.

Five years, give or take

Wong explained that Australians know that this country is not responsible for the “deaths of so many civilians” in Gaza, however she added that the Greens won’t listen to Australians. The minister said that the Greens keep raising Gaza and the sanctioning of Israel as it suits “their political agenda”. And she also explained that the minor party ignores that our government has already sanctioned Israel.

The foreign minister did issue sanctions against Israel on 10 June 2025, and as a large portion of the community had been calling for the sanctioning of Israel since October 2023, this act did appear to satisfy those calls. Yet, once the reality of merely sanctioning two extremist Israeli ministers sunk in, it was well understood these sanctions would have a distinct lack of impact on the mass slaughter.

The Greens are well aware that these sanctions have been issued, and they too know that much stronger sanctions are needed to have any impact. And this is especially so as Declassified Australia has not only uncovered that this country is involved supplying parts and weapons to Israel via third parties, but it’s only just revealed that weapons parts are being directly exported to Tel Aviv.

Indeed, while the revelations surrounding the direct exports of F-35 parts to Israel are fresh, what is not is the refrain that Senator Wong had been relying upon over and over again in the late 2023 and long into 2024, which was that she’d been advised that Australia had not exported weapons or ammunition to Israel for the past five years.

And while Wong accused the Greens of “ignoring the facts”, closer to the truth is that it’s hard to ascertain the truth when ministers are disseminating misinformation regarding false ideas around this nation having no involvement in Gaza, and she too suggested that calls for sanctions on Israel have been satisfied, yet protesters converged on parliament calling for just that last Sunday.

Never again

A growing number of genocide scholars, including Israeli-American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov writing in The New York Times, have deemed the killing in Gaza a genocide. And this is significant as genocide, or the attempt to destroy a specific group in whole or in part, whilst being the worst crime, it also has very particular elements, so such scholars don’t make such designations easily.

But many other commentators have been calling Gaza a genocide since the early days of its onset in October 2023, due to the ferocity of the industrial-scale military onslaught Israel had unleashed upon the Strip.

Al Jazeera right now puts the official death toll at around 62,000 Palestinians, but these figures are understood to grossly underestimate how many people have actually lost their lives at the site of the genocide.

Israel completely cut off all aid into the Gaza Strip on 2 March this year, leaving the 2 million Palestinians in the walled-in region to starve. This marks the longest stretch of a complete block on aid entering into the Strip since Israel commenced applying such blockades in October 2023.

So, when Faruqui drew the nation’s attention to Gaza “starving” on Tuesday, this was no exaggeration.

The further situation that has developed is that Israel expelled UN aid agency UNRWA from Gaza and replaced it in May with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is a US-Israeli-run aid organisation that is offering minimal amounts of food to those without any, whilst Israeli troops are shooting the starving people turning up at the food distribution sites to get something to eat.

As of early last week, over 670 Gazans had been killed as a result of turning up to a GHF site seeking food and being shot dead.

A loss of humanity

Al Jazeera reported to the planet on Wednesday that the Australian Senate had just voted to “discipline Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi after she held a sign in the Senate chamber saying ‘Gaza is starving, words won’t feed them, sanction Israel,’”, at the same time as the Israeli state is luring starving Palestinians to food stations and then shooting them dead one-by-one.

The crimes against humanity, the war crimes and the different forms of the crime of genocide that are currently being perpetrated in the Gaza Strip are serving to destroy the edifice of international law established in the wake of the Holocaust of World War II.

So, not only are these rights abuses being perpetrated upon Palestinians via a systematic campaign of dehumanisation that the Israeli state is propagating in regard to their fellow Semites, but international law is being torn down, which means that in all coming conflicts for the foreseeable future the bombing of hospitals and killing of civilians and journalists will be the norm.

So, it is at this point in time, as the nation of Australia faces down this sort of future, that the major party politicians governing the country are more concerned about the breach of a parliamentary standing order and the holding up of an A4 piece of paper, than they are in their own roles in perpetuating the Gaza genocide, as to remain silent during such a mass killing is to be complicit in it.