Foreign Conflicts and Domestic Fissures: The Australian Far Right and the War in Gaza

As foreign conflicts cross national borders and become de-territorialised, they mobilise a diverse array of domestic actors, influencing domestic public spheres in complex and variable ways. This paper analyses the Australian far right’s strategic communicative engagement with the war in Gaza. Far-right actors, including radical-right parties like Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and extreme-right movements like the National Socialist Network, have seized on the conflict as a means of legitimising and normalising far-right positions on immigration and multiculturalism. Yet, the response to the war and ensuing humanitarian crisis is not uniform across the Australian far right, exposing tensions between antisemitic extreme-right movements, and philosemitic radical-right parties. Through a critical discourse analysis of Austrlaian far-right social media users (X, Telegram) and parliamentary discourse, we analyse the fissures that have emerged within the far right on the issue of Israel and Palestine, and how the conflict has been instrumentalised for complementary antisemitic and Islamophobic agendas. As scholarship notes the increasing interconnections between radical and extreme right movements, our paper highlights key fissures within the far right while advancing our understanding of how foreign conflicts are used to mobilise domestic support for exclusionary and supremacist politics. This paper is part of an Australian Research Council supported Discovery Project Foreign Conflicts, Domestic Divides: Advancing a Deliberative Response.