Strike up the band

 On 25 June, Australian Labor Party (ALP) Senator for Western Australia (WA), Fatima Payman, crossed the floor in a historic move, to vote with the Greens for their motion:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the Senate to recognise the State of Palestine.

The ALP tried and failed to amend the motion to append the words, ‘as a part of a peace process in support of a two-state solution and a just and enduring peace’. That would have aligned the sentiment more closely with ALP policy, which:

Supports the recognition and right of Israel and Palestine to exist as two states within secure and recognised borders [and] Calls on the Australian Government to recognise Palestine as a state.

Prime Minister Albanese suspended her from caucus for violating caucus ‘solidarity’, and when she later averred that she was prepared to repeat the performance should the matter come up again, felt obliged to resign from the party and now sits on the crossbench. For what it’s worth, I favour caucus solidarity in a parliamentary ‘democracy’, provided caucus adopts positions consistent with the policies members establish at conference, as were both versions of the Greens motion.

Omission of the reference to the so-called ‘Two State Solution’ might appear to comprise a substantive difference between the amended and unamended motions. But Australia recognised Israel in January 1949 and has full diplomatic and economic relations with the Zionist state. As a matter of fact, Australia is one of the few countries that has consistently supported Israel against critical resolutions in the UN.

Under the circumstances, a call for recognition of ‘The State of Palestine’ can only mean a rump entity, comprising at most all of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. In any case, Payman has explicitly avowed that ‘she supported a two-state solution and that she believed Israel had a right to exist’.

Calls for the UN to recognise the State of Palestine by admitting it as a member face the same problem. The 2012 General Assembly resolution (A/RES/67/19) that decided ‘to accord to Palestine non-member observer State status’ explicitly embraced ‘the vision of two States: an independent, sovereign, democratic, contiguous and viable State of Palestine living side by side in peace and security with Israel on the basis of the pre-1967 borders’, alarmingly not only endorsing ethnic partition, but overlooking the incontiguity of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and mistaking the 1949 armistice line for a border.

Similarly, just this past May, the General Assembly (ES-10/23), in calling on the Security Council to reconsider admitting the State of Palestine to UN membership, reaffirmed ‘its unwavering support...for the two-State solution of Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security within recognized borders, based on the pre-1967 borders’.

So all the relevant calls for recognition of the State of Palestine explicitly recognise Israel, as well. But even if they didn’t, it is implicit, either in prior recognition of Israel or in accepting ethnic partition.

And there lies the crux of the issue. As a human being, I stand for human solidarity; as a socialist, I stand for class solidarity. So of course I oppose divisive ideologies like racism and nationalism. The conceit that Jews can’t make common cause with everyone else to fight the scourge of racism together is racist. The idea that Jews need to corral ourselves off in a ghetto where Jews are in charge is racist. Partitioning territory to create ethnically homogeneous countries is racist – it’s actually apartheid. Establishing a state where ‘The right to exercise national self-determination...is unique to the Jewish people’ is racist, all the moreso when it entails dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants. That leads me, as a Jew, to reject the legitimacy of a Jewish state anywhere and I try to eschew any expression that might imply recognition of anything beyond the actual existence of Israel.

It’s important to note that it is possible to envisage a situation where partition of Palestine could result in two democratic, secular states, in some imaginary universe. Ali Abunimah makes this point as a rhetorical device to illustrate that the whole point of The Two State Solution™, has always been to ensure that one of the two states was to be a Jewish ethnocracy, from the Peel Commission of 1937, through the UN General Assembly’s 1947 partition plan, to the Quartet’s ‘Performance-based Road Map to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ and the Geneva Accord in 2003.

So any two state ‘solution’ anybody is talking about is racist and I can’t see any room for agnosticism or silence on the issue. As I’ve argued before, recognition of a State of Palestine entails partition and therefore recognition of Israel, unless it’s explicitly ‘from the river to the sea’, which still raises issues about representation, etc. So calls for such recognition implicitly endorse the Zionist state, which is racist.

Another problem with calls for recognition of ‘Palestine’ or ‘The State of Palestine’ is identifying where it is, who is going to represent ‘Palestine’, and which Palestinians they are going to represent. Palestinian citizens of Israel, now numbering over 2 million, have the franchise, so if you believe in the myth of democracy, the Israeli government can represent their interests with as much credibility as any other colonial government purporting to represent the interests of the colonised. Calls for recognition are not talking about them.

A 2013 estimate placed the number of Palestinian refugees in the diaspora, many of them stateless, at 6 million, a number that has certainly increased since then. There is nobody who can make a plausible claim to represent their interests. Nor is anyone calling for their recognition as The State of Palestine.

What all calls for recognition of the State of Palestine really mean is recognition of the quisling Palestinian Authority, which poses as representative of the stateless residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Although Hamas won the last election to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006, it is Fatah that managed to wrest control in the West Bank, while failing to do so in Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas, commonly denominated ‘President’, and whose term expired in January 2009, boasted an approval rating of 16% in March, and 84% of those polled want him to resign.

Among the reasons the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) has adduced in its call for recognition is, ‘The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan resolution, which Australia had a strong hand in drafting, stipulated there would be two-states established: Israel and Palestine’. So their position is explicitly and unequivocally in favour of ethnic partition. Some have justified supporting calls for recognition on the grounds that they are following APAN’s lead, as if they had no responsibility to think for themselves and some Palestinian voices were incapable of error. Desperate people resort to desperate measures, and the PLO, you will recall, accordingly embraced the Oslo Accords in 1993, even though Palestinians like Edward Said recognised it as a grave error at the time. And so it has proven to be.

In the here and now, other Palestinian voices are articulating strong opposition to recognition.

Last year, Fahad Ali opined,

Palestinians already recognize our territorial sovereignty over all of historic Palestine...It is not legitimized nor jeopardized by foreign recognition or lack thereof...diplomatic recognition is a distraction...and it makes invisible Zionist state violence...Recognition of Palestinian statehood is much less of a threat to the Zionist regime than even the Zionists are making it out to be.

Columbia University’s Joseph Massad, for example, writes,

the outright racists are those who recognise Israel's right to exist as a Jewish supremacist state...When UN member states recognise a phantasmic Palestinian state, all they are doing is buttressing Israel's illegality as an institutionally racist state. What they need to do is not recognise a Palestinian state but withdraw their recognition of Israel.

Yara Hawari of the Palestinian Policy Network, agrees,

...it is difficult to envision how recognition of a state that does not exist would change the reality on the ground for Palestinians facing systematic erasure...the crux of the recognition argument is that it will revive the “two-state solution”...premised on the partition of the land of historic Palestine...and effectively accepts Israeli apartheid. Indeed the two-state solution demands that Palestinians world over forgo their rights to their lands and properties in historic Palestine and accept a truncated state in the 1967 occupied lands instead. Further, it demands that Palestinians accept Zionism as a legitimate ideology rather than one of settler-colonial domination...partition will never be a sustainable or long-term solution and the international community needs to come to terms with this.

‘Recognition is meant’, writes Lana Tatour of the University of New South Wales,

among other things, to rehabilitate Israel’s legitimacy and overturn the demise of the two-state solution by preventing the possibilities for new political formations and narrowing (yet again) the question of Palestine to the 1967 occupied territories...What these powers are planning for the Palestinians is the further solidification of the Palestinian Authority—a corrupt, authoritarian, and oppressive ruling power and a de facto subcontractor of Israeli occupation, which has no legitimacy among Palestinians. Core issues remain unaddressed, such as the status of East Jerusalem; questions of land, territory, and sovereignty; the control of borders, sea, and air; a population registry; the right of return; and more. The proposal thus offers a façade of progress, when in practice Palestinians will remain under Israeli colonization and occupation and the oppressive rule of the Palestinian Authority.

With Palestinian opinion apparently divided on the issue, it is curious, to say the least, that even those who explicitly claim to reject Jewish colonisation would choose to side with those who ‘recognise Israel's right to exist as a Jewish supremacist state’.

To sum up then, to call for recognition of The State of Palestine, either bilaterally or by the UN, ends up:

• endorsing the racist ethnic partition of Palestine,

• accepting Israel’s existence as an apartheid Jewish ethnocracy on at least 78% of the territory of historic Palestine, and

• legitimising the quisling Palestinian Authority.

The Greens’s motion, with or without the ALP amendment, buys into these noxious implications, as does the New South Wales Labor conference just this past weekend (27-28 July 2024). Senator Payman’s gesture, however courageous and wellmeaning, was therefore essentially empty.

Those who support decolonisation of Palestine on a principled, antiracist basis need to call for severing relations with apartheid Israel. We keep reading that 145 governments have recognised The State of Palestine, but it’s a mistake to clamber aboard every passing bandwagon whatever tune they play.