Australia and Israel:  Birds of a colonial feather and how ABC just spent $2 Million to prove It

When award-winning journalist Antoinette Lattouf won her unfair dismissal case against the ABC, it wasn’t just a personal victory. It was a piercing indictment of the national broadcaster’s complicity in policing speech on Palestine. It was also $2 million wake-up call for the Australian public, whose taxpayer money was used not to uphold press freedom, but to appease Zionist lobby groups. And in the end, the ABC lost.

The broadcaster’s decision to dismiss Lattouf for a simple repost in December 2023, where she shared a Human Rights Watch article claiming that Israel is using starvation as a tool of war in relation to Gaza, was never solely about social media policy. It was about silencing a political position that dared challenge Israel’s military campaign. The Fair Work Commission found that the ABC breached sections 50 and 772(1) of the Fair Work Act—laws that protect workers from dismissal due to political opinion. And yet, the ABC caved to external pressure from pro-Israel lobbying, sacked her anyway, and now has nothing but legal embarrassment and a $70k payout to show for it.

This is not an  isolated case. In February, a veteran freelance cricket commentator and journalist Peter Lalor was also axed from the radio station SEN’s cricket coverage for sharing videos of Palestinians suffering under the Israeli occupation. The weaponisation of antisemitism claims, especially against people of colour and even Jewish dissenters, is not about ending bigotry; it’s about controlling the narrative.

Settler Colonialism: A Shared DNA with Israel

What lies beneath these story of wrongful termination and media cowardice is something far older and more insidious: the deep colonial kinship between Australia and Israel. Both are settler-colonial states built on dispossession, forged by British imperialism in the white supremacist logic of “terra nullius” and the displacement of Indigenous peoples.

Just as Israel justifies its apartheid through the myth of divine entitlement, Australia conceals its genocide through a myth of peaceful settlement and multicultural nationalism. Both nations are built on the denial of Indigenous existence; and both rely on performative reconciliation to pacify resistance.

Australia celebrates “Harmony Day” while failing to negotiate a single treaty with its First Nations peoples. It offers symbolic gestures, like the $200 million for Indigenous housing while avoiding any real discussion of land rights or reparations. It is not reconciliation. It’s revisionism.

And like many other nations founded through colonial settlement, they grapple with a selective amnesia and a denial of their history. This often involves downplaying and sanitising historical injustices in order to uphold a positive national image. Such selective memory is perpetuated by educational systems, media portrayals, and political messaging that highlight certain narratives while conveniently overlooking others. The repercussions of this amnesia are significant: it not only skews public comprehension of history but also obstructs progress toward justice and reconciliation for the communities affected by these past wrongs.

Australia has managed to bury the bones of its own colonial past under a carpet of multicultural slogans and national pride. The descendants of colonial settlers are now regarded as the de facto natives, while Indigenous sovereignty is often merely tokenized rather than genuinely restored. Israel, meanwhile, is still working to fully erase the Palestinian people—they are doing so under the guise of security and ancient rights; using a language of “self-defence” that much of the Western world, including Australia, uncritically accepts.

Elevated view of Aboriginal Australian men linked together by chains around their necks, wearing only European style rough trousers, some carrying hats, scarification visible on their chests, Date
1898-1906. [State Library Victoria]

Complicity masked as neutrality

Today, they are not only just birds of the same colonial feather, but also flocking together through shared technologies of occupation, surveillance, and border violence. Through its military and defence ties that include contracts with Elbit Systems and Boeing; companies known for supplying the Israeli military, Australia directly contributes to the machinery of occupation. Military systems tested on Palestinians are integrated into our border control and defence architecture. Australia’s military alliance with Israel is not just symbolic, it’s strategic, technological, and deeply complicit.

And yet, Anthony Albanese’s neoliberal government refuses to call for a ceasefire. Labor maintains a carefully worded, centrist silence, all while continuing joint defence agreements and refusing to reconsider weapons deals. A quiet endorsement disguised as a foreign policy.

Australia cannot claim a progressive legacy at home while assisting a military campaign that has left tens of thousands dead in Gaza, most of them civilians. Australia cannot claim to want to “Close the Gap” while maintaining ties with a state that has turned displacement into a doctrine.

Manufacturing consent for genocide: The legacy of colonialism

The media in the Global North plays a crucial role in manufacturing consent for war and shaping its silence. Australia’s mainstream outlets continue to frame Israel’s assault on Gaza as a “conflict” rather than the one-sided, state-led campaign of ethnic cleansing it is. Critics of Israel, like Antoinette Lattouf, are painted as threats to social cohesion or antisemitism, while arms manufacturers are painted as allies of national defence. Palestinian resistance is equated with terrorism, while Israeli apartheid is recast as security.

Colonisation is not just history, it is a system. The political matrix that sustains it through defence deals, media complicity, and the silencing of dissent is alive and well in 2025. As Australia deepens its alliance with the US and UK through the AUKUS pact, as it supports bombing campaigns in Iran and remains silent on Gaza, we must ask: who benefits? Are these defensive alliances or another imperial projects? Are these designed to keep Australians safe or just another structure to keep global imperial order intact?

A reckoning is overdue

What Antoinette Lattouf’s case reveals is that the issue is not just ABC’s cowardice. It’s the broader system of colonial complicity: political, military, and media—that connects Australia to Israeli apartheid. It is about how settler colonies police speech, criminalise solidarity, and erase indigenous resistance.

As long as Australia (and any other imperialist) continues to invest in the infrastructure of colonial violence, both domestically and abroad, it will remain a bird of the same feather as Israel—unapologetically imperial, self-righteous in its silence, and lethal in its duplicity.

Antoinette Lattouf’s victory in court is a small but significant act of resistance. But the system that punished her still remains intact. Until we reckon with our own complicity—in Gaza, in media, and in the stories we tell ourselves about our place in the world—colonialism will remain not a chapter in our past, but the architecture of our present.

The reckoning is long overdue. And it starts by naming things for what they are: not conflict, but genocide. Not impartiality, but complicity.

We cannot claim peace while investing in war and whitewashing genocide. We cannot claim justice while criminalising solidarity. And we cannot claim truth while silencing those who speak it.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.