I am an Australian Palestinian. My parents were born in Gaza and made stateless in 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. All my grandparents for more than seven generations were born and died in Gaza — Palestine. I have never lived in the region, but much of my extended family resides there today. Due to Israel’s ongoing occupation, they are now displaced in tents and some have been killed.
Recognising Palestine is key to safeguarding some of the legitimate rights of Palestinians, but as bombs continue to drop and genocide, starvation and displacement persist, there will soon be no Palestinians left for which to carve out a state. Recognising Palestine must be accompanied with immediate full sanctions on Israel, to enforce an end to the occupation and hold all perpetrators of this genocide to account.
In crossing the floor to support the Greens’ Senate motion to recognise Palestine as a state, WA Senator Fatima Payman — now an independent having quit the party — was the only Labor member for nearly three decades to defy her caucus. This act showed she was willing to put principles and humanity before politics, as did her comments promising to cross the floor again if required, which resulted in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expelling Payman from the Labor caucus entirely.
The Greens’ motion, which failed, was a commendable shift in Australia and consistent with the party’s long-standing moral position aligned with international law and the majority of the international community. However, Labor’s watered-down version would have made Palestinian’s basic right of self-determination contingent on the agreement of their occupier to a two-state solution and “peace process”.
Meanwhile, with the genocide case at the International Court of Justice, arrest warrants sought against leaders of the Israeli state, and unprecedented land theft and expansion of settlements, the world is waking up to the grave injustice inflected on the Palestinians — and the diminishing viability of a two-state solution. Palestinians no longer have inhabitable land to establish a state on. Gaza has been destroyed and set back decades, with the West Bank and East Jerusalem having been decimated. All governance institutions and capabilities in the Gaza and West Bank have been eroded.
Therefore one can’t help but treat the increased willingness to discuss recognition of Palestine as a state among governments like France, the UK, Germany, the United States and Australia, which have been traditional backers of the Israeli occupation, with suspicion. For the Israeli government’s sponsors and supporters, recognising a Palestinian state aims to defuse public anger, distract from its complicity in genocide and limit exposure to the refugee crisis.
Palestinians have faced multiple conspiracies and betrayals over decades, from the Sykes-Picot Agreement to the Balfour Declaration, the failed Oslo Accords and the long history of American and European support for Israel’s financial and political expansion. Out of 193 UN member states, 138 recognised Palestine as a non-member observer state before this recent genocide, representing more than 80% of the world’s population. Countries that did not recognise Palestine were predominantly those in Europe and North America who orchestrated and/or supported the occupation of Palestine and the establishment of Israel.
Why are those countries suddenly considering recognising Palestine as a state? Why now, after Gaza has been annihilated by the West’s weapons and made uninhabitable for the next 20 years? After the West Bank and East Jerusalem have been disintegrated into hundreds of isolated cantons, surrounded by radical militant settler populations that increased from 110,000 to over 700,000 since the so-called “peace process”?
All of these are valid questions for the ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, West Bank and Jerusalem, as well as those in refugee camps and among the diaspora.
There is a global unease with the erosion of international law, and a concern that equity and human rights are being ignored without the recognition of Palestinian rights to their land, to self-determination, to a right of return and to self-defence.
But recognising a Palestinian state now without immediate full sanctions on Israel and enforcement of international law creates a parking spot for Palestinians until they are farmed out around the world, and is a pretext to reframe the genocides, colonisation and illegal occupation into a humanitarian problem. It also safeguards Israel against the only immediate and viable way forward: a one-state solution, where Palestinians and Israelis live together under one evenly represented government, and where everyone has equal rights.
Like what happened during the Nakba expulsion in 1948, whatever place is left for the Palestinians will be unviable and uninhabitable. There is similar destruction of road infrastructure, hospitals, schools and governance systems taking place in the West Bank under the cover of the attacks on Gaza, albeit on a smaller scale — for now.
Those who are educated or have enough money and survive the massacres will find their way outside. In Gaza, close to 100,000 have already been allowed into Egypt. The poor and less fortunate will be left to the mercy of a failed state and the thuggery of a Western/Israeli-installed leadership. Egypt has received billions in financial assistance since October 2023, and will likely play a bigger role in managing the post-genocide crises and resettling Palestinians in the Sinai Desert.
Gaza has proven to be the final nail in the coffin of the world’s civil order. A token recognition of statehood, such as the watered-down version recommended by Labor, would only help to hammer in the final nail in the coffin of Palestine.
