The prospect of a separate Palestinian state has been a ploy used to accelerate the dispossession of Palestinians and entrench Israel’s apartheid, argues James Supple
Anthony Albanese’s decision to recognise a separate Palestinian state was a piece of useless symbolism. Australian Palestine Action Network’s Nasser Mashni rightly described it as “a cynical political smokescreen” covering the government’s refusal to sanction weapons exports and trade.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be enraged at Albanese and other leaders such as France’s Emmanuel Macron over their moves towards recognition. The UK, France and Canada have all announced plans to recognise a Palestinian state in September at the meeting of the UN General Assembly.
But the move is actually designed to strengthen Israel, not end its terror and apartheid against Palestinians.
Albanese says it is meant to revive the push for a two-state solution, claiming this is the “best hope to break the cycle of violence in the Middle East”.
For decades Western leaders have presented this as the pathway to peace. But it has always been a fraud. The two-state solution has been an effort to entrench Israel’s apartheid state and Palestinian surrender.
Macron has argued that a two-state solution would benefit Israel, saying, “A lasting peace is essential to the State of Israel’s security … and to a shift towards normalisation” where the apartheid state is accepted as legitimate across the Middle East.
Albanese says he hopes it “isolates Hamas, disarms it, and drives it out of the region once and for all”.
The idea behind this is that Hamas is somehow the obstacle to peace. This is nonsense.
Israel’s actions over the last two years have unmasked the reality that it’s a genocidal state. It has deliberated starved millions of Palestinians in Gaza, systematically bombed hospitals, universities and basic infrastructure and razed entire cities to the ground.
It is currently setting out to re-occupy Gaza City, forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into the south in preparation for expelling them from Gaza altogether.
Netanyahu has declared his determination to “carry out the Trump plan” for total ethnic cleansing of the population. Israel’s actions show it has no intention of allowing any peaceful settlement with the Palestinians.
Hamas has been offering a ceasefire deal to release all its remaining hostages since February—as long as it leads to a permanent end to the war. Netanyahu has continually sabotaged this because he refuses to end the killing.
Hamas rejected the initial peace process in the 1990s because it delivered nothing for the Palestinians. It has continued to resist Israel ever since.
But since 2006 it has made numerous approaches about negotiating a long-term peace and in 2017 even issued a new manifesto stating it would accept Israel’s 1967 borders as the basis for a separate Palestinian state, the supposed goal of the peace process.
Oslo Accords
In reality Israel has never been willing to accept a viable Palestinian state. Instead the promise of a separate state has been used for over 30 years to demand concession after concession from the Palestinians while Israel has continued to deepen their dispossession.
This began in 1988 when the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) agreed to recognise Israel’s “right to exist” as a Jewish Zionist state and renounce the use of armed struggle. The US imposed these as conditions before there were any steps towards negotiations.
This meant giving up the hope of Palestinians recovering the 78 per cent of their land Israel had stolen in 1948. Any Palestinian state would be limited to the illegally Occupied Territories of Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank that Israel seized in the 1967 war.
In 1993 formal talks between Israel and the PLO began the official “peace process”. But Israel was never prepared to offer a genuine Palestinian state and demanded the PLO give up both the right to return of Palestinian refugees expelled in 1948 and much of East Jerusalem.
Life for the Palestinians became even worse as Israel stepped up its oppression.
Over the seven years of negotiations Israel continued to expand settlements, with their population almost doubling.
They were deliberately positioned to divide up the West Bank so that Israel could cut off Palestinian communities from each other and control movement between them.
Settlers routinely unleashed terror against Palestinian civilians, as they still do today, carrying guns and setting fire to Palestinian homes, businesses and farms to drive them off their land.
Behind them stood the Israeli army, a military occupation force that oppressed and humiliated Palestinians.
The PLO was allowed to establish a Palestinian Authority (PA) and given limited control over small areas of the Occupied Territories. But this was on the condition that it acted as a police force for Israel to stamp out Palestinian activism and resistance to the occupying forces.
In 2000 negotiations collapsed and a spontaneous Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada began.
When the “peace process” started there were 110,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Today there are almost 750,000 living in 150 settlements, some of them small cities with tens of thousands of residents, as well as another 120 outposts.
Israel directly controls over 60 per cent of land in the West Bank, through settlements, military bases and infrastructure including Israeli-only highways, as well as the 700-kilometre concrete apartheid wall.
New concessions
Albanese’s push to recognise a Palestinian state is just another effort to force capitulations from the Palestinians.
Albanese says that the PA has to accept new conditions including demilitarising so any state would have no army. Israel, however, is not expected to disarm. The PA has also been told to end payments to Palestinian prisoners (many of them held in Israeli military prisons without charge for the crime of protesting Israeli occupation) and to hold new elections.
Western leaders like Albanese want to keep control of the Palestinian Territories in the hands of the collaborationist PA.
But its rampant corruption, repression of any dissent and collaboration with Israel against any resistance means it has little credibility left among Palestinians.
The PA routinely jails and beats its opponents, like Nizar Banat, a critic of the PA’s corruption and co-operation with Israel who it murdered in 2021.
Earlier this year it even shut down Al Jazeera’s media operations in the West Bank, raiding its office and banning its websites and TV broadcasts following criticism of a PA armed siege against the Jenin refugee camp.
Just 19 per cent of Palestinians in the West Bank approve of the PA’s performance, according to a May poll for the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.
Hamas remains far more popular than the PA. Whatever its faults, it has rightly rejected the PA’s capitulations and insisted on the need to continue resisting Israeli occupation.
The Palestinians are an occupied people who suffer daily humiliations and murderous onslaughts from the brutal Israeli state. They have every right to resist Israel’s apartheid and military occupation.
Israeli apartheid state
Israel is a racist Zionist state that privileges Jewish people above others, discriminating even against Palestinians inside its 1948 borders who are citizens of Israel.
Its origins are in the Jewish settlements in Palestine that were encouraged under British colonial rule after 1917.
It is a European settler-colonial project that from the beginning set out to carry out genocide against the Palestinians and dispossess them of their land.
It has become a watchdog state for Western imperialist interests in the Middle East, armed to the teeth by the US and its allies like Australia and reliant on their support.
Its efforts to dispossess the Palestinians and wipe out resistance to this process continue.
In May Israel announced a sweeping plan for 22 new settlements in the West Bank, in what Defence Minister Israel Katz described as “a strategic move that prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state”.
Since the genocide in Gaza began in October 2023, violent Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians have escalated, through vandalising and setting fire to businesses, homes and fields. Almost 1000 Palestinians have been murdered in near-daily attacks.
Any Palestinian state in this context would not deliver peace but only continued Israeli domination and oppression. Foreign Minister Penny Wong let the truth slip when she declared that soon “there will be no Palestine left to recognise”.
But a separate Palestinian state is already essentially impossible.
Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, overwhelmingly voted to reject any Palestinian state by 68 votes to nine a year ago, claiming that it was “an existential danger”.
Donald Trump has backed Israel. A Palestinian state is no longer an aim of US policy, its ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said in June.
Israel is not willing to concede any return of Palestinian land and intends to continue escalating its murderous campaign against the Palestinian people.
Diplomatic support for a separate Palestinian state is one sign of Israel’s growing pariah status globally. But justice for Palestine requires an end to the West’s arming of Israel and serious sanctions.
It means an end to the apartheid state of Israel and requires a single democratic secular state from the river to the sea, with equal rights for both Jews and Palestinians.
This is only possible through a wider revolutionary wave across the region that sweeps away Western imperialist domination.
The Arab revolutions of 2011 showed how this is possible. The regimes in states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia that collaborate with Israel and the US must fall.
Continued Palestinian resistance can help ignite such a movement. And the movement for Palestine here can play its own role through supporting that resistance and fighting to end our own government’s complicity.
