In the Media

An edited version of this article appeared in the Daily Telegraph – 24 September 2024

The Australian Government’s deplorable decision to abstain, and not oppose, last week’s UN General Assembly resolution demanding Israel completely pull out of the West Bank and Gaza within one year, completely undermines Australia’s long-standing bipartisan policy of supporting a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian two-state peace.

This Palestinian-written resolution stands in complete contradiction to not only long-standing Australian bipartisan policy, but also to numerous binding UN Security Council resolutions calling for a “land for peace” process. Worse still, by passing this resolution, the UN has endorsed the wild and false accusations it contains, encouraged continued Palestinian rejectionism and rewarded Hamas’ barbaric atrocities of October 7.

This resolution is the latest and worst examples of recent attempts by the Palestinian leadership to bypass direct negotiations and make the international community impose a resolution on Israel without any obligation on their part whatsoever. It not only effectively calls for “land for no peace,” but also a global arms embargo against Israel, global boycotts on almost all Israeli companies, Israeli reparations to the Palestinians, and declares Israel an ‘apartheid state’ while setting up an ‘an international commission of inquiry’ to effectively dismantle Israel as a Jewish national home. The US Biden Administration described it as ‘one-sided’ and ‘inflammatory’ – if anything, a gross understatement.

Apart from overturning the Oslo Accords by ostensibly granting all Palestinian maximalist demands without any obligation for them to actually end their conflict with Israel, this resolution amounts to the ultimate reward for terrorism, turning October 7 into a total victory for Hamas. Mass murder, rape and torture would not be punished, but instead will have become the successful Palestinian tactics that prompted the international community to attempt to impose via coercion all the extremist demands of the Palestinian leadership.

Palestinian statehood could have been achieved by negotiating peace – Israel has made several generous two-state peace offers which were rejected – and still should be. Yet now Palestinians are being taught that mass terrorism offers them much greater rewards.

Following the vote, Hamas told media it “welcomes the adoption”, which says volumes about how the passage of this resolution has been interpreted by the Palestinian public.

Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong’s comments that Australia was “disappointed” it could not support the resolution, but wished to support one that was consistent with the non-binding advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Israel-Palestine earlier this year was also highly disturbing.

That ICJ finding was itself part of the same Palestinian campaign of lawfare designed to avoid negotiating peace. It was based on a UN General Assembly resolution which gave the Court terms of reference that basically instructed it to say that Israel has no right to be in any part of the West Bank, East Jerusalem or Gaza.

The latest UN resolution was a direct and predictable result of the failed policy of providing Palestinians with diplomatic largesse in the hope they will moderate, as exemplified by Australia’s May 2024 vote to upgrade the ‘State of Palestine’s’ status at the UN.

At the time, Foreign Minister Wong changed Australia’s long-standing policy by declaring that “Australia no longer believes that recognition can only come at the end of a peace process. It could occur as part of a peace process.”

Senator Wong has not demonstrated how this wrongheaded approach progresses peace, yet we have seen plenty of evidence that it does the opposite – encourages Palestinians to pursue zero-sum goals in the conflict by focussing its efforts on attempting to isolate Israel, rather than negotiate or deal with the urgent need to improve governance in Palestinian Authority-ruled areas to prepare for eventual statehood.

Moreover, this betrayal comes at a time when Israel is fighting a war of attrition for its existence against a number of Iran’s proxies – Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank, Yemen’s Houthis, Iraq’s Kata’ib Hezbollah and others.

Indeed, Iran’s declared goal of eradicating Israel “by no later than 2027”, as we have been helpfully informed by its Ambassador to Australia Ahmad Sadeghi, looms behind the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as the Iranian effort to provide arms and finance to encourage violence and bloodshed in the West Bank.

Australia’s abstention ignores Iran’s central role as the puppeteer of global terror and instability, which not only stokes the fires of antisemitism within the Muslim world, but has negatively impacted both the cost of oil and cut off global shipping through the Suez Canal.

The promoters of this resolution may not care, but for Australia, this was a clear own-goal.

Australia’s long-standing policy and national interests demand that we support a process leading to actual Israeli-Palestinian peace and push back against Iranian efforts to destabilise the whole region. For whatever reason, in both this deplorable UN vote and other recent policy revisions, this Government appears to be doing the opposite.

Dr Colin Rubenstein AM is Executive Director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).