Recognition of Palestine is only a beginning

Prime Minister Albanese’s announcement today that Australia will recognise the state of Palestine is a dramatic break with the past. Australia’s decades-long approach was to put formal recognition of a Palestinian state as the end point for negotiations. Last May, however, former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans said that by far the strongest message Australia could send would be to announce “we are immediately recognising Palestinian statehood: not just as the final outcome of a political settlement but as a way of kick-starting it”.

Evans warned of the nightmarishly difficult task of creating a viable physical entity out of the settlement-decimated West Bank and shattered Gaza but argued that conferring on Palestinians the extra legitimacy, leverage and bargaining power inherent in recognised statehood, “would help ensure for both Palestinians and Israelis a future that is better than the awful status quo”. 

Australian recognition of a Palestinian state will do little to ease the horror of daily life in Gaza. It will not shift the dial on what once was optimistically described as a “peace process”. But further delay by Australia in joining the near 150 or states who have recognised Palestine flew in the face of Australia’s rhetorical support for a two-state solution.

Worse, it rewarded an Israeli government seemingly intent on genocidal violence in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. This is evidenced most recently by Netanyahu’s stated intention to conquer Gaza City, which the UN has warned will have “catastrophic consequences”.