The Australian Labor Party recently passed a motion at its national conference that “calls on the next Labor government to recognise Palestine as a state”. Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong, who introduced the motion, said: “We, in Labor, not only deal with the world as it is, we seek to change it for the better.”
The proposed policy neither recognises “the world as it is” nor changes that reality “for the better”.
Instead, the motion provides much-coveted Western legitimacy for the Palestinian Authority, a non-state entity whose value system is at odds with that of Australia and indeed the entire liberal democratic world. As the international community marks the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the PA’s state-in-waiting is a brazen violator of the declaration’s most basic principles yet is being pre-emptively endorsed by Labor.
The PA should not be excused for being “flawed”. All states have flawed records, falling short of their declared principles to varying degrees. But the PA has not fallen short of its principles. It has acted with impressive ideological consistency in its promotion of terrorism and the promulgation of the most egregious forms of anti-Semitism.
These behaviours cannot be deemed even by foreign policy realists as “internal” matters of minimal consequence to Western interests. The events that charred humanity during the past century have amply demonstrated that the promotion of genocidal hatreds and terrorism is never exclusively a local concern.
Read the article by Danny Eisen and Sheryl Saperia in The Australian.