Last weekend, the Victorian state Labor conference passed a resolution calling on the Albanese government to recognise Palestinian statehood. This came a couple of days after former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans published his case for doing the same.
The last few Labor national conferences have passed resolutions calling on the Labor government to make recognition a priority. There are those that want to include stronger language in the next national conference, this August.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong correctly maintain that a decision as to whether and when to recognise Palestine is up to the government, not national conference, and certainly not a state conference. Senator Wong also repeatedly says the government doesn’t support unilateral decisions on Israeli-Palestinian affairs; a call for recognition is inconsistent with this policy.
Given Evans’ standing, and that his opinion piece claimed to present a moral, legal and political case for recognising Palestine, it’s worth examining his arguments.
Notwithstanding rhetorical over-reach, the occasional clanging error (Egypt started the 1967 war, not Israel) and some obfuscation, he makes a compelling case for the right to Palestinian statehood, but not at all for recognition of statehood now.
Read the article by Bren Carlill in The Canberra Times.