If you want to understand the dismal state of Australian politics, consider the phrase “social cohesion”.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock (and, honestly, who could blame you), you’ll have heard politicians deploy the slogan repeatedly against protests in solidarity with Palestine. “It is not a time to raise the temperature,” explained Anthony Albanese. “It’s a time to try to make sure that social cohesion in Australia is valued.”

In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King took on precisely this argument.

Today, the establishment reveres King as a secular saint, through the recitation of a few out-of-context, saccharine lines from his more famous speeches. When he was alive, however, conservatives loathed him, because his activism so thoroughly polarised America. The last Gallop poll taken before his murder showed King’s unfavorability rating at an astonishing 63 per cent.

MLK was, after all, what they today call a “serial protester”:  arrested some twenty-nine times for acts of civil disobedience, he was the kind of figure Chris Minns would condemn as a “huge drain on the public purse.”

Many within the Baptist church fretted about the disruption caused by the civil rights movement, too. King’s Letter addressed such people directly.

“You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham,” he wrote.

But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. … It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

Substitute “Sydney” for “Birmingham” and “Palestinian” for “Negro” and the argument retains all its force today.

Mind you, the conservative churchmen King addressed in the Letter paid at least lip service to the need for social change, whereas today the Labor Party identifies more with Birmingham’s jailers. Its argument about “social cohesion” rests, after all, upon an immense legal infrastructure designed not just to deter civil disobedience but to criminalise almost every form of popular politics.

“Over the past two decades,” explains the Human Rights Law Centre in a recent report,

49 laws affecting protest have been introduced in federal, state and territory parliaments. New South Wales has introduced the most anti-protest laws, while South Australia has the toughest financial penalties with fines of up to $50,000 for common protests.

In New South Wales, for instance, demonstrators must ask the police commissioner to sign a “Form 1” or a “Notice of intention to hold a public assembly”, in a system that gives the police (an institution not known for its sympathy with progressive causes) tremendous power to decide who can and cannot rally. Minns also wants the commissioner to consider the financial burden of protests before approving them.

Labor cannot take sole credit for the anti-protest regime, which has been constructed as a bipartisan effort over many years. At the federal level, both parties have complemented the laws directed at street marches by erecting one of the most repressive industrial relations systems in the developed world. If the right to rally has been massively curtailed, the right to strike has been all but completely abolished, with unionists only permitted to take industrial action under very limited circumstances.

Almost by definition, Labor’s identification of social cohesion — defined by our dictionaries as “the action or fact of forming a united whole” — as an end in and of itself corresponds with abandoning even the mildest reform agenda. Any movement for change must begin with an acknowledgement of inequality, of division, of struggle. As Terry Eagleton has noted in a review of the collected interviews of Edward Said, “in all the most pressing political conflicts which confront us, someone is going to have to win and someone to lose.” If you don’t recognise an opposition between oppressor and oppressed, progress becomes not only unnecessary but also impossible, since without contradiction there can be no change.

Hence the complete inability of the Albanese government to deliver anything at all.

A hundred or so years before Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech commemorating the efforts by West Indian slaves to win their liberty. In it, he too, confronted the “social cohesion” types.

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform,” he told them.

… If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters … Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

As Bernard Keane has noted, “Labor tries to make a virtue of supporting “social cohesion”, even while demonising pro-Palestinian protesters, cutting immigration, refusing entry to Gazans, and denouncing political organisation by Muslim voters.” To that end, in July, the Albanese government appointed Peter Khalil as the nation’s first Special Envoy for Social Cohesion. Khalil, of course, faces a challenge in his seat of Wills by former state Greens leader Samantha Ratnam, who will campaign, in part, over Palestine.

The ridiculous title bestowed on the hapless Khalil illustrates Labor’s strategy against those to its left. But the same rhetoric plays an even more central role in the ALP’s manoeuvres against Peter Dutton. By positioning itself as the party of “social cohesion”, Labor weaponises its own conservatism, portraying itself as safely moderate alongside a divisively radical Liberal leader.

Or, at least, that’s the plan. Like so many too-clever-by-half Labor schemes, the strategy actually paves the way not just for Dutton but for the far right more generally.

Fantasies about Australia as a society without divisions necessarily positions social conflict as external, as Chris Minns illustrated in response to the Palestine solidarity movement.  “We can’t stop the violence in the Middle East from Sydney,” he explained, “and we can’t import the violence from the Middle East to Sydney. That’s a fundamental but basic principle in NSW.”

Minns spoke more truthfully than he knew. The defence of national unity against foreign disruption indeed constituted a “fundamental principle” not just for NSW but for a White Australia that understood itself as an outpost of Britishness beleaguered by a tide of otherness.

Hence the similarity between Minns’ remarks on Palestine and the notorious comments by Thomas White, the Australian representative at the 1938 Evian conference on Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.

“Australia has no real racial problems,” White said, as he refused to provide safety to the victims of fascism, “and we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging foreign immigration on a large scale.”

The echoes today are not coincidental. The “social cohesion” that Minns seeks to  protect against protest centres explicitly on support for Israel as the centrepiece of American strategy in the Middle East. Every major human rights body – Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Yesh Din etc – describes Israel as implementing apartheid. His efforts to cohere public backing for such a system abroad produces certain political outcomes at home.

The campaign to de-legitimise the South African ethno-state took decades, not least because Western leaders backed the white regime well into the 1980s (famously Nelson Mandela remained on the US terrorist watch list until 2008).

In Australia, the anti-apartheid struggle necessarily became entwined with the fight against homegrown racism. Charles Perkins, who would go on to lead the Freedom Ride to desegregate northern NSW, explained:

We rightly protest against the racial discrimination in South Africa and the U.S.A., but we also have the same problem in Australia.

We’re now seeing a similar process, but in reverse.

In Europe, ethno-nationalist organisations, often with historic links to the fascists of the 1930s, advance steadily. In Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia, the parties of the far right play a role in government. In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National became the largest party by vote share in June elections. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland polls higher than each of the three parties in government. In Austria, the Freedom Party – an outfit launched by former SS officers – just got more votes than either than the Social Democrats or the conservative Austrian People’s Party.

No single explanation accounts for the resurgence of the far right. But the extraordinary efforts by world leaders to normalise Israeli apartheid surely plays a role. Most of the European far right parties have roots in twentieth century antisemitic movements — including, in many cases, overt fascism. Today, however, almost all of them offer support for Israel.

In part, this is because the European far right is primarily fuelled by Islamophobia, as a more publicly acceptable form of racism. But it’s also because Israeli apartheid — and the backing it receives from the West — legitimises ethno-chauvinism elsewhere. The central claim of Zionism — that Jews belong in their own homeland and will never be integrated elsewhere — is entirely compatible with the tradition of the European far right, it’s difficult to tell where new-style philosemitism begins and old-style anti-semitism ends.

To put it another way, the far-right populists and the neo-fascists see in Israel a functioning illustration of the societies they want to create in Europe. Since taking over the site formerly known as Twitter, Elon Musk has assiduously courted white nationalist edgelords, so much so that any user of X inevitably encounters explicitly Nazi accounts. Again and again, you find them making the same argument: if Israel can maintain an ethno-state, why should my country allow open immigration?

The Palestinian health authority puts the death toll in Gaza at over 40 000 – and that’s almost certainly an underestimate. In July, a letter in the medical journal the Lancet suggested the figure might rise to something like 186 000. Since the war began, the US has provided $17.9bn in military aid to Israel. Together, these statistics show the immense significance accorded by the most powerful nation in the world to the protection of Israeli apartheid.

That effort necessarily produces effects elsewhere. Again, if the defence of Israeli ethnonationalism is of such moral importance as to necessitate the killing of so many children, why shouldn’t it be defended here, too? For various historical reasons, Australia hasn’t yet given rise to a contemporary far-right movement akin to those burgeoning in most industrial countries. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a constituency for racial populism.

Recently, Crikey published a dossier on Peter Dutton’s attitude to race. In an accompanying piece, Keane explained that Dutton

criticised the Fraser government for allowing Lebanese refugees into Australia, described refugees as illiterate, innumerate and simultaneously taking jobs from Australians and “languish[ing] in unemployment queues and on Medicare and the rest of it”, argued (conversely) that people found to be refugees in fact were wealthy economic migrants, claimed that African gangs (the alleged product of Sudanese refugees) were terrifying Melburnians — and, most recently, argued all Palestinian refugees fleeing the onslaught in Gaza are potential national security threats.

But there’s one group of refugees Dutton is very welcoming of: white people. In 2018, Dutton ordered the Home Affairs Department to examine ways to help white South African farmers flee to a “civilized” country like Australia. White South Africans “work hard, they integrate well into Australian society, they contribute to make us a better country and they’re the sorts of migrants that we want to bring into our country.”

You might think that such attitudes make Dutton’s yesterday’s man — an old-fashioned racist yearning for the politics of the past. But you would be wrong. The Labor Party, along with most of the political class, campaigns for an acceptance of (even an enthusiasm for) Israeli apartheid — and by so doing, legitimises Dutton’s predilection for policies favouring those migrants who, wink-wink, “integrate well into Australian society.” In the current context, racialised populism can present itself, not as impotent nostalgia, but as a radical alternative to the impotence of social democracy. Dutton now can say: look, both parties agree about the legitimacy of ethnonationalism – but I am the only leader prepared to implement here what we’re supporting overseas. Furthermore, as Dutton— or someone like him — introduces a more explicitly racialised set of policies, he can rely on an already existing set of mechanisms to counter any protests or resistance.

Martin Luther King warned of all of this. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he said in his Birmingham letter.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea.

Again, he might have been directly addressing contemporary Australia.

In a recent interview promoting his new book, The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates drew on the example of MLK when comparing Israeli ethnonationalism to the old American Jim Crow system. He explained:

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to the fight against segregation. His was a segregated society. The Occupied Territories are segregated, de jure segregated. It’s not, you know, hard to understand. There are different signs for where different people can go. There are different license plates forbidding different people from going different places. Now, what the authorities will tell you is that this is a security measure. But if you go back to the history of Jim Crow in this country, they would tell you the exact same thing.

That’s why solidarity with Palestine matters so much. In the midst of a genocide, calls for “social cohesion” are obscene. We don’t need cohesion. We need the killing to stop.