Foreign Minister Penny Wong has delivered an emotionally manipulative, substantially dishonest speech implying, without quite stating, that the Albanese government is on the brink of extending formal diplomatic recognition to a state of Palestine.
Her reasoning inverts reality, her facts are dubious if not outright wrong, her logic is missing, but the politics is compelling. That is the internal Labor politics and the broader politics of the left.
The political bottom line is this. If the government officially recognises a Palestinian state, Labor will go to the election with the enthusiastic support of Muslim voters in key western Sydney and Melbourne electorates.
Not only that, Labor thinks it will have a better chance of fending off its most deadly enemy, the Greens, in inner-city electorates in every big Australian city.
But a lot can go wrong here. The Albanese government made a similar political calculation about the voice. If it delivered the voice it would be the immortal champion of the left. But it didn’t work. This might not work either.
Wong claims that recognition of a Palestinian state is necessary to advance a two-state solution – Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace. This is almost exactly the opposite of the truth.
Israel has on three separate occasions offered the absolute maximum that could conceivably be achieved in a Palestinian state. And of course the Palestinians and their Arab allies also violently rejected the initial partition of the territory in 1947.
Senior officials from Bill Clinton’s administration, in exhaustive memoirs, document how the Palestinian leadership, which lives splendidly well while its people suffer, rejected every such offer and constructed absurd demands that made it impossible.
There were several reasons for this. The Palestinian leaders know that any one of them who makes peace with Israel will certainly be assassinated by extremists.
More relevantly for Wong’s speech, they also believe that the international community is so hostile to Israel that eventually it will deliver major benefits to the Palestinians without any need for compromise, concession or even real negotiation on their part.
Wong’s speech will help confirm them in this view.
Not only that, no Israeli government could accede to the formation of a Palestinian state – or indeed two, one in the West Bank, one in Gaza – that did not guarantee it would not be a base for continuing attacks on Israel like October 7. Yet no Palestinian leadership could, or even would, offer such a guarantee today or in the conceivable future.
If the Israeli leadership has for the moment abandoned the idea of a two-state solution that’s because it is, for the moment, impossible. Of course it remains the long-term solution. But pressing for it today, with the implication only Israeli intransigence is preventing it, is dishonest, unrealistic, designed to hurt Israel or is simply all about cynical sectarian politics on the left.
What is Wong’s position, for example, on the Palestinian insistence on the “right of return”. This means that all the millions of descendants, and part descendants, of Palestinians anywhere in the world must be granted automatic right of residence in Israel proper, not in the West Bank or Gaza? That’s millions of people, and plainly an intentionally deal-breaking demand. Will Wong denounce that with the same vigour with which she denounces Israel?
That’s not even to consider the countless ways in which Palestine doesn’t constitute a diplomatically recognisable state – lacking complete control of its territory, a coherent national government, effective institutions, not claiming disputed territory etc.
In truth, the last uncontested sovereignty over the Palestinian territories was exercised by the Ottoman Empire.
Does Wong care about any of this? Her speech constitutes another episode in the Albanese government turning against Israel and seeking support on the sectarian left.
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