Australia / Israel Review

On November 6, the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s Age published an opinion piece by Foreign Minister Penny Wong titled “Australians are traumatised and deserve facts on Middle East horrors”.

The piece, which chiefly recounted the various ways in which the Albanese Government has steered Australian foreign policy away from previous bipartisan support for Israel, included a lot of questionable “facts”. For instance, it cited as fact a Gaza death toll based on numbers served up by the Hamas-run ‘Gaza Health Ministry’ – numbers that are not only unverified, but that also make no differentiation between armed jihadists and non-combatants.

However, perhaps the most egregious non-fact offered by Senator Wong was her casual historical revisionism regarding the reason why the UN Partition Plan of 1947 (also known as UN General Assembly Resolution 181) failed to produce an Arab or Palestinian state alongside Israel (The plan recommended establishing a new ‘Arab’ state, Palestinians were not mentioned. This did not happen because Jordan and Egypt grabbed the West Bank and Gaza).

The Foreign Minister wrote: 

The Middle East’s contested history helps explain these divergent perspectives. Those who know the imperative of Israel for the Jewish people’s survival. Who feel October 7 as part of the long shadow of antisemitism; the abomination of the Holocaust and millennia of Jewish persecution. And those who know the dispossession of the Palestinian people; the failure of the international community to honour the 1947 promise made for a Palestinian state when Israel was established. Who feel that the loss of Muslim and Arab lives has been too easily dismissed.

Senator Wong’s understanding of the “contested history” in the Holy Land deserves to itself be contested. Her claim that the Palestinians were “promised” a state in 1947 but were somehow thwarted is fiction.

No such international “promise” was made to Palestinian Arabs in 1947 – or at any other time. Rather, the Palestinian Arabs and their Arab state allies placed the goal of preventing the Jews from having their own state far ahead of any national aspirations for self-determination. They did so before the partition plan, they did so immediately afterwards, and they have continued to do so ever since. 

The Foreign Minister should not take my word for it. She should instead open up parliamentary Hansard to April 28, 1948, and read what Australia’s legendary ALP Foreign Minister of the time, H.V. “Doc” Evatt, said on the current events of the day.

Harold Holt (Lib., Fawkner) asked Evatt, in light of the civil war that had erupted after the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine violently rejected the Partition Plan, “Is it still the policy of the Australian Government to support the Partition Plan for Palestine? Will he advise the House by what means it is proposed to enforce this policy?”

Evatt reminded Holt:

The [General] Assembly is only a recommending body. It cannot order anything and it has no enforcement power of its own. By an overwhelming majority, the Assembly recommended the scheme known as partition.

John McEwen of the Australian Country Party then asked Evatt if, before Australia’s vote in favour of Partition, the cabinet had been informed of “the announced intention of the Arab armies to commence war in such circumstances and of the concurrently announced intention of the Jewish armies also to fight?” 

Evatt replied: 

It is perfectly true that when the United Nations was actually considering the problem of Palestine, the representative of what was called the Arab Higher Committee, that is the Palestinian Arabs, did publicly threaten the United Nations that if any solution was offered of which that Committee did not approve, it would attempt to overthrow its opponents by force… What has happened since [passage of the Partition Plan] is simply that the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states surrounding Palestine have threatened to defeat the settlement plan by force. The method of enforcement that the United Nations General Assembly recommended to the Security Council was that the Jewish state within Palestine should be entitled to form its own militia and its own force.

Even Mahmoud Abbas has said of the Palestinian rejection of the 1947 Partition Plan that “it was our mistake.” The facts are clear: Palestinians have only themselves to blame for rejecting repeated offers of statehood, not only from the UN in 1948, but from Israel in 2000, 2001 and 2008. And no “promise” was ever made to Palestinians that they could have a state even if they refuse to make peace.

Wong may be right that Australians, Israelis and Palestinians are all traumatised. Yet Palestinian leaders have the agency to end the cycle of trauma – by saying yes to making peace with Israel, and ending more than 80 years of prioritising Israel’s destruction over their own self-determination.