Recognising Palestine now only rewards Hamas, the side with clear genocidal intent

Amid the furore of the public debate about the war in Gaza, and whether Australia should now recognise Palestine, it is too often forgotten that recognition of a Palestinian state is the outcome preferred by both sides of politics. Since the first Oslo Accord, which created the Palestinian Authority and set in train the long-since interrupted peace process, the ultimate goal has been to achieve a “two-state solution”.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since that sunny day in the White House Rose Garden in September 1993 when Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Palestinian Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat, under the benign gaze of US president Bill Clinton. Today, peace between Israelis and Palestinians is much further away than it seemed then. Nevertheless, the two-state solution remains the objective; the question is not whether Palestinian statehood should be recognised, but when and on what conditions.

As with most other democracies, Australia has long taken the view that that should not happen until Israel’s right to exist is acknowledged – as it was by the Oslo Accords – and its security credibly assured by the Palestinians.

Since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, the Palestinian Authority has been unable to give that assurance. The consequences for Israel of Hamas’ control of Gaza – against which Israeli leaders long before Benjamin Netanyahu warned – were made horrifyingly clear on October 7, 2023.

However critical one might be of Israel’s response in the nearly two years of warfare since, nothing can alter what happened that day, and the intent those events revealed: the elimination of the people of Israel. That had always been the explicit objective of Hamas, declared in its foundational documents. The Nova Music Festival massacre merely made it manifest. Notwithstanding the destruction of Hamas’ senior leadership and killing of many of its fighters, its objective remains unchanged.

The chilling irony of the debate about the Gaza War – in Australia, as elsewhere – is that those who most volubly condemn Israel for genocide are acting, wittingly or unwittingly, as apologists for Hamas, whose very raison d’etre is genocide.

Like “fascist” before it, “genocide” has become the go-to word of abuse for the left, a denunciation invoked with such indiscriminate carelessness that it has become unmoored from its true meaning. International law defines “genocide” in the 1948 Genocide Convention as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group”.

The forcible occupation of territory may be a violation of international law, but it is not genocide. Israel’s announcement last week that it intends to deploy armed personnel to secure Gaza City is not a threat of genocide.

The elimination of the state of Israel would, however, undoubtedly be an act of genocide. Every protester accusing Israel of genocide, while mindlessly chanting the mantra “From the river to the sea …” , is either too stupid to understand this truth or too hypocritical to admit it. (I suspect few of those marching on the Harbour Bridge last week could tell you what sea – let alone what river – this undergraduate slogan refers to, let alone the implications of its demand.)

The current pressure for the recognition of a Palestinian state began last month when President Emmanuel Macron announced France’s intention to do so. He was swiftly joined by Britain and Canada. (Germany’s position – so far – has been more nuanced.) The rationale was condemnation of Israel’s interference with the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza – including shocking evidence of starvation among Palestinian children, and instances of the killing both of aid workers delivering food supplies, and those needing them.

The UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was explicit in linking the two. On 29 July, he said: “[T]he UK will recognise the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.”

As Starmer’s statement makes clear, he, Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney are using the immediate recognition of Palestine as a threat, to pressure Israel to desist from its current policy in Gaza.

This is appallingly ill-judged diplomacy. Condemnation of Israel’s actions – however justified – is no basis for reversing those nations’ long-held position that it is a precondition of recognition – a necessary ingredient of the two-state solution – that a Palestine state must accept Israel’s right to exist and agree not to threaten its security.

The profound inconsistency in the French, British and Canadian positions is revealed in Starmer’s choice of the word “unless”. According to this logic, if Israel were to accede to the demand, Palestinian recognition would continue to be withheld. If it does not, it would be granted. Yet on either scenario, the inability of the Palestinian Authority to give the guarantees upon which the two-state solution depends – and the continuation of Hamas’ genocidal intentions – remain exactly as before.

The change of policy, couched in terms of support for the two-state solution, in reality undermines its rationale. Two states may be recognised, but the “solution” element – the use of recognition as a tool to leverage a solution to the conflict – will have been effectively abandoned. It may linger as a rhetorical trope, but nothing more – undercut by the very leaders by whom it was invoked as cover for a diplomatic demarche that already looks to have failed.

And it also means that those who perpetrated the massacre of innocents on October 7, 2023 will have succeeded.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.