Israeli leader claims Australian prime minister’s legacy ‘tarnished’ by decision to recognise a Palestinian state.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stepped up his government’s bitter diplomatic dispute with Australia, claiming that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s legacy has been irrevocably blackened by his “weakness” towards Hamas.
In an interview with Sky News Australia scheduled to air on Thursday night, Netanyahu said Albanese’s record would “forever be tarnished” by his decision to recognise a Palestinian state.
“When the worst terrorist organisation on earth, these savages who murdered women, raped them, beheaded men, burnt babies alive in front of their parents, took hundreds of hostages, when these people congratulate the Prime Minister of Australia, you know something is wrong,” Netanyahu said in the interview, portions of which were posted online by Sky News before the broadcast.
Netanyahu’s accusation appeared to refer to a disputed statement that appeared last week in the Sydney Morning Herald, in which Hamas cofounder Sheikh Hassan Yousef was quoted praising Albanese for his “political courage”.
Following the report, Hamas publicly denied that any statement had been issued by Yousef. The Palestinian armed group, which governs Gaza, said Yousef had been in Israeli custody for nearly two years without means of communicating with the outside world.
Netanyahu’s broadside against Albanese follows an extraordinary missive earlier this week in which he claimed the Australian leader would be remembered by history as a “weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews”.
On Wednesday, Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke hit back at the Israeli leader, saying strength was “not measured by how many people you can blow up or how many children you can leave hungry”, though Albanese attempted to play down the spat by saying he did not take it personally.
Relations between Australia and Israel, traditionally close allies, have sunk to their lowest ebb in decades following Canberra’s decision to recognise Palestine.
On Monday, Australia said it had cancelled a visa for Simcha Rothman, a far-right member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, amid concerns that a speaking tour he had scheduled in the country aimed to “spread division”.
Hours after that decision, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Gideon Saar said he had revoked the visas of Australian diplomats to the Palestinian Authority.
Expressing dismay at the tensions, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry said on Wednesday that it had written to both prime ministers to urge them to address their differences “in the usual way through diplomacy rather than public posturing”.
“The sum total of human wisdom would not have been diminished in the slightest if none of these public comments had been made,” the peak body for Jewish Australians said in its letter to Albanese.
“The Australian Jewish community will not be left to deal with the fallout of a spat between two leaders who are playing to their respective domestic audiences.”
Israel has come under mounting international pressure, including from some of its closest allies, over the scale of human suffering being inflicted by its war in Gaza.
More than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since it launched its war on Gaza following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took 251 people captive during its incursion into southern Israel, according to Israeli authorities.