Albanese’s Gaza Recipe: Add a Bit of Recognition and Continue with the Two-Way Arms Trade

The prime minister of Australia Anthony Albanese announcing on Monday, 11 August 2025 that this country will be recognising “the right of the Palestinian people to a state of their own” at the UN General Assembly meeting in September, produced a moment of collective relief prior to the inconvenient truth that Canberra is not ceasing the two-way arms trade with genocidal Israel springing back to mind.

Not only has federal Labor’s long promised recognition of Palestine come 22 months into the Gaza genocide, as the Netanyahu government is readying to occupy the entire Strip and has aired its aspirations on annexing the West Bank, but the Albanese government’s long term denials of this nation’s continuing two-way trade in arms with Tel Aviv is coming unstuck at the seams.

The latest revelations come after two years of digging by Greens Senator David Shoebridge, which has involved “weapons export permits” to Israel, 65 of which were active in June 2024, and due to public pressure, Defence announced a review last October. And he’s just discovered that 31 of the permits that are still active are either for “inherently lethal” goods or those used “by armed forces”.

The permits pose an issue for the Albanese government as its official line, since Israel commenced genociding the Palestinians of Gaza in October 2023, has been that no weapons or ammunition have been supplied to Israel since the mass murder began or over the past five years in general, and deputy PM Richard Marles said in mid-2024 that he was confident the permits didn’t cover weapons.

So, as Australia and other nations have resolved to recognise Palestine next month, at a point when the scenes of starving Palestinians in Gaza have recently brought a much broader global consensus against the entrenched barbarism at play, federal Labor, as it makes these recognitional moves, has let the thin veil hiding its complicit arms trading slip down and start flapping about in the wind.

“An F-35 country”

“The short story is the Albanese government has been lying,” said Shoebridge on social media on 14 August 2025. “I got my hands on the documents showing that at the start of this year, 16 permits had been cancelled, 13 were still under review, while 35 were still on track. Out of the 35 that were kept, 31 were for… something inherently lethal or only for military purposes.”

“Now that is shocking” the Austarlian Greens defence and foreign affairs spokesperson continued, and he then pointed to the defence minister having said on 11 June last year that Defence had taken a look at all of those licenses, the 65 weapons export permits, “and we continue, I might say, to scrutinise those, but we are confident that those licenses are dual use technology”.

As Shoebridge explained weapons export permits fall into two categories. Category 1 covers “goods and technologies designed or adapted for use by armed forces or goods that are inherently lethal”, while category 2 goods are “dual-use goods”, which comprise of “equipment and technologies developed to meet commercial needs, but which may be used” for military and civilian use.

Shoebridge put the question to Defence during Senate estimates in February this year, as to what the remaining 35 active weapons permits covered, and he was only just informed by government, via questions on notice, that 31, or 90 percent, of the active permits are lethal or for the use of the armed forces. This is all that can be ascertained about the content of what the permits cover publicly.

Breaking midweek this week, the revelations come on the back of Marles’ appearing on Insiders last Sunday, which saw host David Speers drilling the minister on “the armoured steel from Bisalloy” and “the F-35 components” that are too known to be exported for use as part of larger weapons in Israel, to which Marles squirmed that “we don’t supply weapons to Israel” and “we are an F-35 country”.

“Many of us know about the F-35 fighter parts Australia sends to Israel, but it is more than that. Lethal and military equipment, like armoured steel,” Shoebridge further made clear. “At a time when we are all seeing with our own eyes a geocide in real time, the Albanese government has decided not to take the action but to mislead the public instead.”

“Enough of the gaslighting, end the two way arms trade with Israel.”

Two states: an occupier and the occupied

The Australian Labor Party has had the recognition of Palestine as part of its policy platform since 2021. Then opposition senator Penny Wong was the force behind a 2018 resolution adopted at a national party conference, which determined to make this change. This position continued to be a current talking point in the months prior to commencement of the wholesale slaughter in Gaza.

Since the outbreak of the genocide, however, Australia and all of its western allies, with the United States taking the lead, have rushed to shield Tel Aviv in its commission of the worst atrocity since the Holocaust against the Jewish people of Europe in World War II, via the use of the phrase, “Israel has the right to defend itself”, which is terribly successful as the mass killing continues 22 months on.

So keen were Albanese and Wong in their protection of Israel in late 2023, that Birchgrove Legal was able to produce a brief of evidence detailing their actions in respect of the Gaza genocide that reflect complicity. Genocide is regarded the most serious crime of all, and as Australia is a party to the 1948 Genocide Convention, the state is required to do all that it can to prevent the massacre in Gaza.

Albanese explained during his 11 August Canberra presser that his government has been contemplating recognising Palestine since April this year, and it had resolved to do so “when it would best contribute momentum to peace”. But many consider western nations are now moving to recognise Palestine in a cynical exercise to appease domestic constituencies upset by the starvation.

A local campaign calling on Australia to apply sanctions against Israel in a similar manner to the way this nation has rolled them out against Russia over Ukraine has been raging recently, and the act of recognition is considered will partially appease these demands and dispel the public pressure for them, despite the fact that robust sanctions could actually stymie Israel’s war crimes.

“A dystopian, post-apocalyptic wasteland”

The scenes emerging out of Gaza since October 2023 have been horrific. Yet, the recent images of severely emaciated Palestinians purposefully denied food amongst a scorched earth backdrop have shifted western nations into partial action, with another attitude changing factor being the removal of UN humanitarian aid for starving Palestinians, which has been replaced by US mercenaries.

Israel placed a complete block on humanitarian aid entering the Strip on 2 March 2025. However, since mid-July a trickle of independent goods have entered due to outcry over the replacement aid program that the US and Israel have implemented in Gaza since 26 May, which involves a shady organisation known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that’s partially staffed by former soldiers.

GHF staff and active Israeli soldiers at the sites of aid distribution have been shooting at starving Palestinians arriving and leaving, and they’ve killed over 1,400 starving Gazans who’ve come to source food from the GHF, which is the only source of sustenance in the Strip right now.

Retired US Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel Anthony Aguilar volunteered to be part of the GHF distribution initiative in Gaza and appeared on Democracy Now on Wednesday, to explain why, after 41 days, he quit in disgust.

The ex-Green Beret outlined that the GHF food distribution sites were “designed to be death traps”, as they’ve been “intentionally” located “in the middle of an active combat zone”, and he adds that this violates international law, as does the razor wire being used at the sites, while US subcontractors working for UG Solutions and Israeli soldiers have been shooting at unarmed civilians.

“The actions on the sites: escalation of force, no standard operating procedures to dictate that, no rules of engagement provided to the armed contractors on the ground, the indiscriminate use of force, lethal and nonlethal, against unarmed civilians,” Aguilar listed the issues with GHF operations.

“I want to make that clear, we aren’t there on the distribution sites defending ourselves against Hamas,” the ex-US special forces soldier clarified. “We are using indiscriminate force, targeting civilians, escalation of force that goes far beyond the measures appropriate against an unarmed, starving population.”

Aguilar further set out to host Amy Goodman that he is a proud “patriotic American”, who “stands with Israel against Hamas”, and he made clear that he doesn’t consider himself a “whistleblower”, but rather he doesn’t want the country he loves to continue standing on “the wrong side of history”.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has links to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and US president Donald Trump and the desire of these men goes a long way to explain why Albanese has been sullying the idea of applying sanctions to Israel as mere slogans, even while Declassified Australia had just published evidence that this country has recently been directly couriering F-35 parts to Israel.