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”.

There is good legal, moral and political justification for the government’s decision. Writing  in The Sydney Morning Herald in early August, Ben Saul, Professor of Law at the University of Sydney argued that Palestine largely met the criteria for international recognition as a state: a defined territory, a permanent population, an effective government and an ability to enter into foreign relations.

Saul noted that Palestine’s territory was presumptively defined as the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza. The precise borders remained to be agreed but this had “never been fatal to the existence of states, many of whom disagree with their neighbours about borders”.

Saul acknowledged there were doubt about the effectiveness and independence of Palestine’s government, in control of only parts of the West Bank, none of Gaza and subject to a near 60-year Israeli military occupation. But international law, he added, “sometimes flexibly applies the classical criteria in hard cases”.

On the issue of “effective governance”, Victor Kattan,  Assistant Professor in the School of Law at the  University of Nottingham,  commented recently that, if diligently applied, would result in Australia not having diplomatic relations with much of the world.

Saul’s article appeared as French President, Emmanuel Macron, revealed that France would formally “recognise the state of Palestine’’ at the UN General Assembly in September and the British and Canadian prime ministers announced qualified recognition.

The UK demanded that Israel take “substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza,” revive prospects for a two-state solution and forgo annexations in the West Bank. Agreeing to such to such conditions would destroy Netanyahu’s Government so his was reaction was predictably ferocious. There was also sharp criticism of recognition from the opposite end of the Israeli political spectrum targeted at what recognition would not do.

Writing in Ha’aretz, Gideon Levy decried recognition as “an erroneous substitute to boycotts and punitive measures that should be taken against a country perpetuating genocide”.

But a UK-based Middle East expert, Dr Julie Norman, from University College, London, has argued that even symbolic recognition matters. At the very least, she said, it demonstrates both a moral and diplomatic commitment to Palestinian self-determination at a moment when that vision has never been more threatened.

“Instead of debating steps that may or may not lead to a Palestinian state, negotiations would take statehood as a given, with discussions focusing instead on how the state would be constituted to ensure the dignity and security of both peoples,” she wrote. 

So are we really entering a new phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? There’s certainly no proof of that yet and the two-state solution is very shop-worn. But if it is not two-states, then what? Possible alternatives are:  

A lethally-armed Israel imposing its will from the river to the sea. To a large extent, that is the situation today. It means one half of the approximately 15 million inhabitants in the region ruling over the other half.

One state in which those 15 million inhabitants, Jewish and Palestinian, enjoy equal rights. An appealing, though utterly fanciful idea.

A supra-state solution? A paper prepared by the Australia Institute in February 2025, titled Beyond the Two-State Solution, suggested that what was needed most of all was a “a supra-national forum, across the entire Middle East, along the lines of the processes that led eventually to the creation of the European Union”. While conceding this was “most unlikely” to happen, the authors asked: “if Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat could bring about a rapprochement between Israel and Egypt, and Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat could agree to the Oslo Accords, there is at least a partial precedent for an Israeli and Arab or Palestinian leader to employ diplomacy rather than airstrikes.” An interesting idea which challenges the mould of the conflict. But can Palestine wait?

In responding to the Gaza war, which a former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has described as one of “indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and indiscriminate killing of civilians” in which “Israel is committing war crimes,” too often the Albanese Government has favoured announcement over action. That needs to change, now.