Australia/Israel Review

This September, as Jews around the world dip our apples in honey and wish each other a sweet new year, the UN General Assembly will meet in New York

France, Britain, Canada, Australia and Malta all say they are preparing to recognise a “State of Palestine” at that gathering. They would join another 147 UN countries that already do so. 

It will not change the realities on the ground, at least not in the short term. So why do it? 

There are two answers to this question. Perhaps the most telling one is the first. It was recently articulated by French President Emmanuel Macron when he met German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in late July to discuss the Gaza crisis. 

At that meeting, Macron acknowledged he was under “enormous domestic pressure” to do so. This pressure – from my vantage point in Brussels – is shared across most Western countries with significant migrant populations from the Middle East and North Africa. 

To give you a sense of this “pressure” is not so easy. Not every European country regularly holds a census, and, in questionnaires or focus groups, you cannot simply ask someone’s religious orientation. But there are indications.

Let’s look at the recent growth in the proportion of Muslim children among school-aged populations across the principal European capitals. 

In Brussels’ schools, the number of Muslim pupils now sits at 52%. In London it is 37.5%; in Paris, 29%. 

And if you don’t trust the numbers, you can just trust your eyes. 

This northern summer saw me visiting three different capitals – Prague, Lisbon and London – before returning to my hometown of Brussels. 

London and Brussels were visibly different than Lisbon and Prague. Not only in the number of people that were identifiable as Muslim, but also in the numbers of Palestinian flags and amounts of anti-Israel graffiti on the streets. In fact, in downtown Lisbon and Prague, I didn’t see any. 

With a rapidly changing demographic in large capitals, and with shrinking or static Jewish communities that rarely make up a single percentage point in terms of population, you don’t need to be a cynic to understand that “domestic pressure” is often shorthand for “votes” in a changing electorate.

The second answer lies in politics and influence. Confronted with altered demographics and changing activist demands in many countries, politicians and political parties are finding it increasingly difficult to – no matter the rights or wrongs of Israeli politics (more on this in a minute) – continue taking a nuanced or pragmatic position. To survive politically, and to capitalise on the growing demographics, they must follow, not lead. 

Of course, most of these countries have little to no leverage over the State of Israel.

The Netanyahu Government, composed as it is mostly of hawkish hardliners, doesn’t appear to care very much what Europe, Australia or Canada think. As far as they are concerned, there’s only one world leader who can meaningfully constrain Israeli action in Gaza or the West Bank: US President Donald Trump. 

And if there is one thing a political leader fears more than being loathed, it is feeling irrelevant. Macron, Starmer, Carney, Albanese and – you go to the top of class if you know the Maltese Prime Minister’s name – Abela, collectively share this fear. 

Which leaves them all in a bit of an embarrassing political pickle every time they are asked at a press conference what they can do to change the situation on the ground in Gaza. They can’t very well say “erm, nothing really”. 

They hate the Israeli Government, not necessarily because of its policies and rhetoric, but because it refuses to listen to the concerns of political leaders reflecting the wishes of domestic demographics that are largely implacably opposed to Israel anyway. 

You don’t have to be a supporter of the Netanyahu Government to sympathise with the Israeli position. And it also certainly doesn’t help that in the French and UK cases – the places with the two largest Jewish communities in Europe – these countries are suffering from some of the worst levels of antisemitism in decades, weekly marches of hate, and a significant exodus of Jewish families preferring to live in an Israel at war than a supposedly peaceful Europe. 

Netanyahu certainly hit a nerve with Macron, as did America’s ambassador to France, when they had the temerity to point out that antisemitism, already rampant in La Republique, is not completely unrelated to the moves to recognise a Palestinian state. Cue much vaudevillian outrage from the French.

Starmer is facing the same domestic pressure as Macron at home, aided and abetted by a record number of Labour MPs whose general position towards Jews and Israel for decades could be generously termed “creatively ambiguous”, at best. 

I am no expert on Australian politics, but I do know that, from an Israeli perspective, there is little impetus to listen to or placate Albanese, because he is seen as someone who met with Yasser Arafat just before the Second Intifada and whom sources said was starry-eyed and fawning at the time. 

As for Canadian PM Carney, is it a coincidence that, since 2001, the Muslim population in Canada has doubled, representing today the second largest religious group in the country? 

For the sake of space – and of relevance – I won’t go into Malta but hopefully the fact that the Prime Minister agreed to pay for repairs at sea for the recent Gaza “Freedom Flotilla” tells you all you need to know. 

So, we have established the ‘why now?’ Yet, when you dig down deeper, beyond the “domestic pressure” that leads to this spate of recognition, there is little real thought about what a Palestinian state actually means.

Let us remember that the establishment of a Palestinian state was always envisioned as the end goal of a process in which Israelis agree to swap land for peace.

And recognition was envisioned to be conditions-based – not an end to itself. 

What are these conditions? Simply put, any future Palestinian state must recognise Israel’s right to exist, renounce violence and terrorism, and agree to arrangements to make this renunciation more than words. 

That means disallowing any government role for groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose raison d’etre is the elimination of the Jewish state. And indeed, so far the countries that are set to recognise a Palestinian state in September have been pretty consistent in verbally rejecting any future Hamas involvement. But, even if there was any serious thought given to how this exclusion can be achieved – and there is little evidence that there has been – not having terrorists in government is a very low bar for statehood. 

Statehood must also mean undoing the education of young Palestinians in schools and mosques with deep-rooted and insidious hatred of Israel and the Jewish people. And it must mean establishing a meaningful governing authority with the credibility and resources to govern the new entity without the endemic corruption and nepotism that typify the current Palestinian Authority, and to also stop radical groups from developing into armed militias outside state control. 

Making this state a reality, if it ever happens, will take much more effort than facile recognition based on the demands of “domestic pressure”. 

It will require the eradication of Hamas, proper security guarantees for Israel and internationally agreed-upon borders. 

All that can only possibly come through painstaking negotiations that win buy-in from Israelis and Palestinians. And we are a million miles away from any of that. There are still up to 20 living hostages who haven’t been released. This was, disgustingly, not a condition in the recent calls for recognition.

In the absence of any of this painstaking work, and within the obvious shorthand meaning of ‘enormous domestic pressure’, the recognition of statehood is not only hollow, but insulting to the only country that can actually bring such statehood about: Israel. It won’t happen even under a government led by any of the current leaders of the Israeli opposition – never mind a Netanyahu-led one – without first achieving these pre-conditions. Nor should it. And “enormous domestic pressure” cannot change these basic realities.