Even before his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump is a casebook study in everything Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is not. Mr Trump’s decisive declaration that there will be hell to pay if the Israeli hostages aren’t freed before he returns to the White House has, at last, forced the terrorists in Gaza to move to their hideous endgame in which innocent civilians – alive or dead – are traded for brutal criminals and mass murderers ensuring that this will not be the last chapter in this blood-soaked saga.

Albanese and his contemptible Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong have spent the 15 months since Hamas launched its mass terror attack on Israel doing everything they can to turn a blind eye to its culpability and reward its atrocities with a fast track to statehood despite the obvious absence of any Palestinian leader who would create anything other than a hellhole. Make no mistake, Hamas will use any state, territory, or part thereof that it controls to wage a war of annihilation on Israel while brutalising its own people.

Labor’s foreign policy has been a textbook example of victim-blaming, heaping open condemnation on Israel after Hamas’ unprovoked act of war, and rewarding the perpetrator with obsessive calls for Palestinian statehood at all costs.

Thus, Australia voted in favour of a UN resolution calling for an ‘immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire’ in Gaza, even if Hamas refuses to release the hostages and begins preparations for its next October 7-style attack, which it has repeatedly stated is its goal. Australia has also voted in favour of a resolution demanding Israel unilaterally withdraw from all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem without requiring any reciprocal action on the part of the Palestinians.

Adding insult to injury, on December 9, Wong equated Israel with Russia and China – horrific and serial human rights violators – while ignoring the appalling serial abuses of human rights perpetrated by the Palestinian leadership.

The reality that Albanese and Wong steadfastly ignore is that the only reason there isn’t already a Palestinian state is that the Palestinian leadership has turned down every offer they have received starting with the Peel partition plan in 1937, the UN partition plan in 1948, and offers of statehood in 1967, 2000-2001, and 2007. As Israeli diplomat Abba Eban said in 1973, ‘The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ The Palestinians aren’t about to change now. The reason for their rejectionism is simple: they don’t want a two-state solution, they want a one-state solution that they control and they want to ethnically cleanse it of all Jews.

On the home front, Labor’s foreign policy shift in favour of Palestinian jihadis has been interpreted as giving carte blanche to Israel- and Jew-haters to terrorise peace-loving Australians in general and Jewish Australians in particular. As a result, there has been a four fold increase in antisemitic attacks in the year following October 7, 2023. That’s 2062 attacks in a year, almost 40 a week, up from 495 attacks the year before. These figures don’t even include the firebombing of the Adass synagogue – Australia’s first homegrown taste of Kristallnacht – and all the graffiti attacks and property damage over the last two months.

That’s a shocking descent into intolerance for a nation that was once one of the most successful multicultural countries in the world. Yet Albanese was so unmoved by the terrorist firebombing of a synagogue that he didn’t even bother to call a press conference to express his horror and sympathy or visit the devastated community for days, preferring to play tennis, sip champagne, and burble on about his scheduled public relations exercise.

Labor’s disgraceful lack of moral clarity and shameless dog-whistling has emboldened Jew-haters of every stripe – neo-Nazis, hard-left ideologues, and old-fashioned religious antisemites, both Christian and Arab/Islamist.

The problem is bigger than just the deliberately equivocal and limp-wristed response of the Prime Minister and the state premiers.  It has been the appalling failure of the police to enforce the law. On the few occasions that people have been prosecuted, the judiciary has spectacularly failed to impose sentences. Instead, the police have repeatedly told Jewish Australians or anyone who supports them or Israel to stay away from public areas ‘for their own safety’ rather than prosecute those who are making the streets unsafe.

Thanks to this disgraceful failure to enforce the law, less than a fortnight ago, Ice Hockey Australia welshed on its commitment to host a major international tournament because it could not guarantee the safety of the Israeli team. That’s not the first time this has happened. Last March, an internationally acclaimed Israeli trauma expert was removed as a speaker from a medical conference to be held in Australia, after threats from Hamas supporters.

Shame on the police and the judiciary.  Is the intention to turn Australia into a no-go zone for anyone who objects to jihadis dictating what law-abiding Australians can do? Why do the police protect the right of terrorist sympathisers to gather in public, wave their flags, burn the flags of law-abiding states, launch flares, and shout antisemitic threats and obscenities, yet they can’t keep a rink safe for an ice hockey tournament?

These are not random incidents, as Jillian Segal, Labor’s special envoy on antisemitism, pointed out this week, but organised attacks that are part of an international campaign to ostracise Jews and delegitimise Israel and which started decades ago with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS falsely accuses Israel of being an ‘apartheid’, ’colonialist’ state that is guilty of ‘ethnic cleansing’, when it is Israel that protects the rights of all its citizens regardless of their religion or race, and the Palestinian leaders that call for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Jews.

Had the Prime Minister shown strength and leadership from the outset he would have won the respect not just of Australia’s Jewish community but of all fair-minded Australians. Too late for that but enough is enough. Albanese must convene a national cabinet and insist that the law is enforced. If the patchwork of state laws is inadequate, new laws must be legislated. All Australians must be able to participate fully in society, regardless of race or creed. Only race-baiters, Jew-haters, and lawbreakers should be prevented from pursuing their odious ends.