Australia Takes Step Backwards on Middle East Peace, Encourages Terror

On August 8, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced that the Australian government would henceforth classify the West Bank and East Jerusalem as “Occupied Palestinian Territories” and would further declare all settlements as “illegal under international law and a significant obstacle to peace.” In doing so, Australia sets the clock back on peace, misstates international law, fans the flames of terrorism, aligns Australia with the rejectionist bloc’s anti-Israel mob mentality, and creates a dangerous precedent that plays into the hands of both China and irredentist dictators in Russia

It is clear why there is no independent Palestinian state. Put aside the original Arab rejection of the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In 2000, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat walked away from a deal his own negotiators had hashed out, without any counter offer. In 2008, history repeated when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas more than 100 percent of the land area Palestinians declare occupied. Abbas rejected the deal. There are only two reasons why the Palestinian leadership walked away from peace: They cannot accept any peace that recognizes Israel as a Jewish state and they find the process and welfare offered by states like Australia more rewarding than independence itself.

The West Bank is disputed rather than occupied for a simple reason: There never was a Palestinian state and its previous rulers of the past 500 years—the Ottoman Empire, United Kingdom, and Jordan—foreswore sovereignty. Indeed, Palestinian national identity is a recent concept that grew alongside and in opposition to Zionism. The basis of the peace process—and the Oslo Accords—is peaceful negotiation of the land dispute. To argue the Oslo Accords no long apply is to suggest that, in Wong’s vision, binding agreements have a lifespan of 30 years. To make an end run around negotiations encourages recalcitrance, not peace. Add into the mix the 2002 UN Human Rights Commission decision to endorse “all available means, including armed struggle” to establish a Palestinian state, and Wong puts Australia on the path to rationalizing suicide bombing.

Wong should stand up to the Apartheid canard. While Israel welcomes its Arab citizens as equals, the Palestinian Authority demands its territory be judenrein. Wong sides not with democracy, liberalism, or plurality, but instead with religious apartheid. This is a tragedy for Australia’s international brand. If adults like Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Wong do not stand up to Australian Labor Party radicals, they risk aligning Australia diplomatically more with rejectionist states like Iran and Syria than with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and even Sudan and Saudi Arabia.

Wong also gratuitously throws a wrench into the gears of decades-old, bipartisan Australian diplomacy to encourage normalization between majority Muslim Southeast Asian states and Israel. Indeed, consider the progress made by signaling to Palestinian leaders that they will not hold hostage peace and normalization to their own corruption and refusal to compromise. In just the past five years, Israel has doubled the Arab states with which it has diplomatic relations, with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states in the queue.

What happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East. There is little difference between Australia’s position on Palestinian sovereignty and Russia’s arguments for awarding after-the-fact sovereignty to states like the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute Executive Director Justin Bassi may dismiss and even censor discussion of precedent, but he is simply wrong and does Australia a disservice by pretending its actions do not matter. Nor, for that matter, can Canberra now say that Communist China cannot lay claim to the entirety of Taiwan, a country it has never truly controlled, when it allows Palestinian representatives absent any electoral mandate to do the same with regard to West Bank. The Australian Labor precedent can be pursued ad nauseum, even transforming Australia’s virtue signaling acknowledgments of native custodianship into something more.

As Albanese and Wong head into Labor’s national conference in Brisbane, they may soon understand what Israel does: Appeasing radicals and maximalists does not bring peace, but only demands for more. Such a tragic waste of Australia’s moral capital.