Has the Australian Labor Party turned?

By ANY conventional measure, the Victorian ALP State Conference should have been a disaster for the Jewish community.

The conference passed motions condemning Israel as an apartheid state. It endorsed calls for the release of Marwan Barghouti, a convicted terrorist responsible for the murder of civilians. And perhaps most revealingly of all, delegates voted down an amendment proposed by Iranian women from within Labor’s own ranks that sought to condemn the Iranian regime’s repression of women and dissidents.

That last point matters enormously. Because it revealed something deeper than factional theatre. A section of the contemporary activist left now appears so locked into an ideological framework of “anti-imperialism” and anti-

Israel politics that even condemning one of the most misogynistic and repressive regimes on Earth became politically inconvenient.

And yet – despite all this –something important may nevertheless have shifted inside Labor.