Former foreign minister Bob Carr claims Labor Party members who have voted to recognise Palestine are simply reacting to recent interactions between the country and neighbouring Israel.
The party is poised to abandon almost 40 years of explicit ideological support for Israel with a resolution which is expected to be passed at this month’s NSW state conference.
The move would ultimately bind Opposition Leader Bill Shorten to an unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state should he become prime minister, and is expected to force the ALP national conference to adopt the same position next year.
Mr Carr, a former NSW premier who has long advocated for Palestine, claimed people in the Labor Party and general community were simply following what was happening between Israel and Palestine.
“They’ve seen Israel say, ‘we believe in a two-state solution’, but every time they hear an Israeli minister, 65 per cent of them in Netanyahu’s Cabinet, they hear them saying, ‘we’ll never have a Palestinian state’, and then of course they look up on the hillsides of the West Bank and they see new settlements appearing all the time, a raft of them just approved since Trump’s election, that are really devouring the land that would otherwise be a Palestinian state,” Mr Carr told Sky News.
Read the full article by Rachel Baxendale at The Australian (subscription only).