Ahead of Labor’s national conference, the Albanese government has cut Australian foreign policy loose from its historic policy moorings regarding Israel, the Palestinians and the peace process. Our national policy now seems to have been devised primarily to please the Labor Left’s most unhinged virtue-signallers.
Unveiling the new policy, Foreign Minister Penny Wong claimed that the decision for the government to refer to all the lands Israel captured from Jordan and Egypt in the 1967 war, including Gaza and all of east Jerusalem, as “occupied Palestinian territory” was only restoring terminology used by previous Australian governments.
Unfortunately, you’d be hard pressed to find any evidence to support this claim.
Australian officials have referred to “occupied territories” – but that’s not the same thing. In international diplomacy, entire conflicts can hang on a single word, which is one reason why key international peacemakers – outside the grossly politicised UN – have rejected this specific phrasing as not only one-sided, but contrary to the signed agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
In March 1994, shortly after the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, then-US ambassador to the UN, and soon to be secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, put it well at a Security Council debate.
“We simply do not support the description of the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war as ‘occupied Palestinian territory’,” Albright explained, astutely noting “this language could be taken to indicate sovereignty, a matter which both Israel and the PLO have agreed must be decided in negotiations on the final status of the territories”.
Read the article by Ahron Shapiro in The Australian.