Those in the ALP campaigning for the party to “recognise Palestine as a state” have learned nothing from the electoral fate of British Labour under far-left former leader Jeremy Corbyn. His commitment to immediately recognise Palestinian statehood if he won government was far from the only reason British Labour suffered its worst defeat in almost 100 years in December 2019. But it contributed to the cataclysmic result. Michael Danby, the former Labor MP for Melbourne Ports, is correct when he says those seeking to put the Palestinian issue in the party platform ahead of China’s persecution of Tibetans, Uighurs, Hongkongers and Taiwan are “in cuckoo land”. Prioritising pro-Palestine references in the platform, he warned, would be “a step towards making Labor unelectable”. The misfocus, he said, in a provocative statement, is “not surprising when many of these elements behind this manoeuvre sing for Beijing’s supper’’.
Former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr has a different view: “Polls have consistently shown recognition of Palestine (is) supported by a majority of Australians.” Even if that were so, it would not alter the reality, as most major Western nations have concluded, that to recognise Palestine statehood at this time would be to affirm a fiction. Criteria for statehood set out in the 1933 Montevideo Convention for the Rights and Duties of States are clear. They are the minimum requirement in international law for recognition of a new state. “Palestine”, as presently constituted, does not have fixed, internationally accepted borders. Neither, crucially, does it have another vital criteria — a single, centralised government with the capacity to enter into relations with other states. There is a deep divide, and frequent serious armed conflict, between the secular Palestinian nationalist movement that nominally controls parts of the West Bank (represented by the PLO and Palestinian Authority) and the Hamas terrorist movement in Gaza. Without a Palestinian election since 2006, there is little prospect of a government emerging that could claim to exercise effective control over both the West Bank and Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, the claimant to recognition, is demonstrably not such a government. Hence the refusal of the US, UK and Australia to accede to demands for recognition of Palestinian statehood. The ALP would be unwise to ignore reality.
Read the editorial in The Australian.