Diplomatic recognition of Palestinian statehood is a political dead-end. In Australia, political debate on recognition has taken place primarily within the center-left Australian Labor Party. In 2002, former Labor member of parliament Julia Irwin put forward a motion calling for the “recognition of the State of Palestine based on the pre-1967 borders of the West Bank and Gaza.”
While the motion contained all the usual Zionist “insurance” platitudes, including support for “the right of Israel to exist within secure borders,” it was seen as an extreme position for the time. In introducing the motion, Irwin acknowledged something that was obvious to Palestinians but underappreciated in progressive circles of the day:
“Given the current political climate in Israel, no Israeli leader will allow the creation of a truly independent state of Palestine with continuous and secure international borders. That path to peace has come to a dead end.”
She closed by recognizing the support of five other Labor parliamentarians. Of these, three remain in parliament, and only one, Maria Vamvakinou, remains an ardent supporter of Palestine. The other two were Anthony Albanese, currently Prime Minister, and Tanya Plibersek, now a senior member of cabinet.
Albanese has followed a rightward trajectory during his time in parliament. As Prime Minister, he may claim sympathy with the Palestinian cause, but outwardly, his speech and actions have placed him in lockstep with the Zionist camp. In 2021, in a meeting with the Zionist lobby, he pledged his opposition to BDS and declared that the charge of apartheid in relation to Israel was offensive, simplistic, and inappropriate. He dismissed the prospect of Palestinian recognition — which is official party policy — as something that would only come about in consultation with “organizations and other nations across the board,” including Israel.
Irwin deserves credit for being the first Australian parliamentarian to bring the issue to the fore, which of course followed Arafat’s unsuccessful play for full Palestinian recognition at the UN in 2000. It was not until 2015 that the issue rose to prominence once again, where Labor’s national conference endorsed the following position:
“The state of Palestine should be based on 1967 borders with agreed land swaps and with security guarantees for itself and Israel. If, however, there is no progress to a two-state solution, and Israel continues to build and expand settlements, a future Labor government will consult like-minded nations towards recognition of the Palestinian state."
In Labor’s subsequent national conferences, in 2018 and 2021, similar resolutions were adopted, but with slightly more urgent language:
“National Conference:
- Supports the recognition and right of Israel and Palestine to exist as two states within secure and recognized borders;
- Calls on the next Labor Government to recognize Palestine as a state; and
- Expects that this issue will be an important priority for the next Labor Government.”
Of course, none of this means that Albanese and the present Labor government will do as instructed by their own national conference. But there are mutterings of pressure building on the back of a rank-and-file revolt. Last month, Victorian Labor, a state division of the party, passed a resolution demanding recognition within the term of the current parliament, which expires on 25 July 2025, at the latest.
Labor’s next national conference will be held this month (August), and Zionists are openly organizing against the possibility of a more direct endorsement of Palestinian recognition, flooding Australian opinion columns with droning, barely coherent propaganda pieces. For their part, the Australian media establishment has been happy to acquiesce, and to date not a single article on the topic from a Palestinian author has been accepted for publication or actively commissioned.
But I find this all quite strange. I’m not at all worried about whether Labor commits to diplomatic recognition of Palestinian statehood.
Palestinians already recognize our territorial sovereignty over all of historic Palestine as an essential truth, no matter how we may differ in political outlook. It is not legitimized nor jeopardized by foreign recognition or lack thereof. As Jamal Nablusi writes, our indigenous sovereignty is “the embodied political claim to the land of Palestine, in its entirety,” which forms “the unshakeable nucleus of Palestinian political being that cannot be crushed.” In that sense, whatever Labor chooses to do has no bearing on our political claims nor the course of our liberation movement.
Our aspirations cannot and should not be tethered to the whims and wiles of foreign powers, especially ones like Australia, itself a settler-colonial regime that continues to enact violence on sovereign Indigenous peoples. And even should Australia move towards recognition of Palestine, how would that serve us?
The view I have come to — which has evolved since I established the campaign group Labor Friends of Palestine as a young party activist in 2014 — is that diplomatic recognition is a distraction. It uncouples Palestine solidarity action from the organized Palestinian movement (in that it is not directed nor responsive to us), and it makes invisible Zionist state violence through lack of any reference to Occupation, settler-colonialism, militarism, or apartheid. Recognition of a fragmented Palestinian state, as Edward Said noted, "can be made to happen” but can’t “be made to work”.
Even within the confines of the parliamentary space, there are much more pressing goals to pursue — sanctions, embargoes, suspension of arms trade. If we must recognize something, let that be recognition of settler-colonialism and apartheid, which Labor continues to insist is not applicable to the Zionist state.
Recognition of Palestinian statehood is much less of a threat to the Zionist regime than even the Zionists are making it out to be. But this is precisely the point — by generating so much fuss here, they direct attention away from conversations that actually matter. So, when Labor meets this month to determine policy change, I’ll be paying much more attention to events in Birzeit than in Brisbane.