The gentle, lispy tones of Tony Burke, Minister for the Arts and Workplace relations in the Albanese government, belie the instincts of a hardened political street fighter. Burke was on the radio this week softly and compassionately eliciting sympathy with Palestinians in his electorate of Watson, in South-Western Sydney. Asked to declare his support for or against Canterbury-Bankstown council’s decision to raise the Palestinian Flag until a ceasefire is declared in Gaza, Burke was unequivocal: ‘I support the decision completely.’

At face value, Burke is merely playing to his electorate. Approximately one-quarter of the seat of Watson’s population is Islamic. Who could blame Burke for aligning with the views of his constituents? Democracy is working well when an MP fears the wrath of a sizable minority of his or her constituents. Burke’s political sense is shrewd – he also knows that aside from his one-quarter Islamic constituency, getting offside with the diaspora of local Western Sydney councils can devalue his national political capital.

Unambiguous support for the Palestinian flag taken, the Minister’s answer rambled into shrewd and, in my opinion, dishonest equivocation. Said Burke:

‘Until the council made that decision, there was nowhere in Australia where those colours were being acknowledged as worthy of grieving.’

In the space of a single sentence, he obfuscates what I believe to be the real import of the council’s decision – to goad Israel and its supporters into stopping a justified retaliatory action after suffering a heinous unprovoked attack – and reframes it as an act of compassion and human decency. If mere care for the dead were the object of raising the flag, then why on Earth would the condition of ceasefire be attached to the raising?

The game Burke – and others – play, is to conflate the morality of a carefully executed retaliation (albeit one that will always yield civilian casualties) with that of a barbaric, unprovoked surprise attack (one that makes such a mockery of any pretence to the rules of war, it ought not be regarded as anything more than the most vile, subhuman species of terrorist attack).

The claim that ‘nowhere in Australia’ was the Palestinian flag being honoured in grievance for the dead is also not entirely true. Palestinian flags have adorned Australia’s public spaces since October 7. Whilst it is true they have not flown ‘officially’ from public buildings, the Pan-Arab tricolours have been acknowledged, nay, celebrated on our streets, in our town squares, and all over our online spaces. Hundreds of them were waved on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, when – on a day that shall rightly live in shame and infamy in our country – shouts of ‘Gas the Jews!’ rang out as a sea of angry men called for the total annihilation of Israel. That went far beyond the acknowledgement of grieving. Australia tolerated the Palestinian flag being waved in triumphant glory as its standard-bearers rejoiced in the still-warm blood of slaughtered innocents.

The symbolism of a flag is a peculiar thing. The flag speaks to the state. Its flying implies conspicuous acknowledgement of the relationship between nations. The dishonesty in the pro-flag, pro-ceasefire position in the context of a two-sided war is that it implies the opposing state – Israel – is the generative source of Palestinian suffering, both in general and in particular in this conflict.

Even when taken as a generality, Israel’s existence is not the generative source of Palestinian suffering. It may be that radical Islamic theology holds it so. It may also be that it remains fashionable on University campuses to believe it so, and it may also be that it remains pertinent to one’s membership of the left-wing intelligentsia to believe it so. But show me where it says in Jewish thought or action that the only way for the nation of Israel to find security and prosperity is by the total spiritual and material eradication of its near-neighbours.

But what of this particular conflict? Is Israel the generative source of Palestinian suffering? This is a patent absurdity, and everyone with eyes and ears knows it so. Hamas fired the rockets, Hamas launched the paragliders, Hamas murdered festival goers, Hamas raped the women, Hamas abducted the grandmothers, Hamas tortured civilians. Hamas did it all.

In light of this, the equivocation of Tony Burke (and indeed, a large proportion of the Western world’s so-called thinking classes) becomes even more transparently ridiculous. The invocation of flag and ceasefire is a tawdry bit of geopolitical grandstanding, dressed up as earnest moral righteousness.

What, precisely, would our latter-day pacifists have Israel do under the present circumstances? Just lay down and take it?

Elizabeth Anscombe, perhaps the greatest of Cambridge University’s analytical philosophers, and the most important ethicist of the 20th Century, spent decades qualifying the conditions for a just conflict. Anscombe was no warmonger. She denounced Harry Truman as a mass murderer for his use of the atomic bomb, and decried the slaughter of innocents – even under extreme provocation. In her essay ‘War and Murder’, she writes:

‘The same authority which puts down internal dissension [i.e. crime], which promulgates laws and restrains those who break them if it can, must equally oppose external enemies. These do not merely comprise those who attack the borders of the people ruled by the authority; but also, for example, pirates and desert bandits, and, generally those beyond the confines of the country ruled whose activities are viciously harmful to it.’

Is this not the situation Israel faces? Should the world not be condemning Hamas unequivocally, calling for its eradication, throwing its support behind its dismantling and refusing to breathe a word of support, implicit or otherwise, for any calls for Israel to ‘go easy’ on the terrorists who left unchecked, will rape their way to the entire destruction of the Jewish people?

Put another way, Douglas Murray had this to say about the equivocation of fashionable thought when asked on British Television about the prospects of a ‘proportional’ Israeli response to the terror:

‘There is some deep perversion in Britain whenever Israel is involved in a conflict… If we were to decide that we should have this fetish about proportionality, then that would mean that in retaliation for what Hamas did in Israel on Saturday, Israel should try to locate a music festival in Gaza and rape precisely the number of women that Hamas raped on Saturday, kill precisely the number of young people that Hamas killed on Saturday. They should find a town of exactly the same size as a town like Sderot and make sure they go door to door and kill precisely the correct number of babies that Hamas killed in Sderot on Saturday, and shooting precisely the same number of old age pensioners as was shot on Saturday, proportionality in conflict is a joke. It’s a very strange British concept which [we expect of] only the Israelis in a conflict when they are attacked are expected to have precisely the proportionate response.’

Murray’s acerbic wit highlights not the virtue of ‘proportionalism’ but rather the heinous vice of double standards. It took mere days for weak-kneed politicians to buckle under the strain of electoral pressure. Now, weeks later, they have begun to memory-hole the fundamental cause of the present bloodshed in the Middle East.

Being on the right side of history has been all the rage for Labor politicians this year. Perhaps they’re worn out – now they seem to have forgotten that history exists at all.

Ben Crocker is Director of Special Programs at the University of Austin, and a Senior Fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington DC.