Albanese has outsourced Australian foreign policy to Netanyahu

Missing from most of the coverage of Anthony Albanese’s tepid reaction to Emmanuel Macron’s commitment to recognise a Palestinian state is the logic behind Macron’s change in policy.

That logic is clear from the letter Macron sent to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, in which he states, “The prospect of a negotiated solution to the conflict in the Middle East seems increasingly distant. It is urgent to implement the only viable solution to fulfil the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, end all forms of terrorism and violence, and enable Israel and all the region’s countries to live in peace and security.”

That is, recognition cannot come after a negotiated solution that may never happen. That approach is no longer viable. Or, as Macron put it in his tweet, “There is no alternative.”

Albanese believes there is an alternative. In his interview on Insiders yesterday, he offered several reasons why he wouldn’t be implementing Labor’s policy of recognition of Palestine any time soon. One was “there’s been no elections in the Palestinian Authority for a long period of time”, a statement relying on the fact that few people had read the Macron-Abbas letter that refers to Abbas’ commitment to elections as a condition for recognition.

But Albanese’s main objection is that recognition must be part of a broader process. “You need to recognise a Palestinian state as part of moving forward. How do you exclude Hamas from any involvement there? How do you ensure that a Palestinian state operates in an appropriate way which does not threaten the existence of Israel? And so we won’t do any decision as a gesture. We will do it as a way forward if the circumstances are met.”

Problem is, the circumstances will never be met. Much was made last year of a shift in the government’s rhetoric on recognition, from saying recognition would only happen at the end of a Middle East peace process to forming part of that process.

But at the moment, that’s a distinction without a difference. What peace process? Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly demonstrated he wants to keep the war going for as long as possible. This isn’t merely because this protects him politically; he has never been interested in peace with the Palestinians (something even Donald Trump understood), and has a long-term commitment to thwarting the creation of a Palestinian state. Indeed, October 7, 2023, had its origins in Netanyahu propping up Hamas in order to forestall any moves to Palestinian statehood.

Making recognition of Palestine contingent on a peace process while Netanyahu is in power is no different to making it contingent on a successful peace process. Albanese and Penny Wong may as well make it conditional on Netanyahu publicly kneeling in front of Abbas to apologise for his atrocities. Either way, they have outsourced their own party’s formal policy of recognition to the whims of a genocidal autocrat leading a coalition of extremists.

It goes beyond an issue of timing. Netanyahu’s resistance to any peace deal or recognition of Palestine was never just a delaying tactic: it was predicated on a slow but steady alteration of the “facts on the ground” in the occupied West Bank, in which Israeli colonists, backed by the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces, stole Palestinian land, expanded settlements “legal” and illegal, with the aim — many said before the present stage of the conflict — of rendering a Palestinian state impossible, because it would be a Swiss cheese-like entity with no territorial contiguity.

That tactic had already accelerated in 2023 before October 7 supercharged it and brought onto the agenda the outright, and wholly illegal, annexation of the occupied West Bank, which Netanyahu is pursuing and which his ministry wants to accelerate. (Staggeringly, Albanese yesterday said “it will need the issue of settlements to resolve as well”, as though Netanyahu will ever resile from his relentless expansion of “facts on the ground”.)

Every week that goes by, as a new settlement appears in the West Bank, or another Palestinian family is displaced or murdered by Israeli colonists, the “facts on the ground” shift a little more in Israel’s favour and against the Palestinians.

Making recognition of Palestine contingent on Israel entering a peace process, making it conditional on whether “the circumstances are met”, as Albanese wants — let alone making it depend on fantasies like “resolving the issue of settlements” — is to cooperate with Netanyahu’s strategy. If left to his own devices, Albanese would wait until there was no longer any possibility that a Palestinian state could functionally exist, delivering a historic victory to the most extreme, racist Israeli leader in history.

Foreign policy and international relations are complex, of course. All the more so when you add the emotive, moral issue of genocide and ethnic cleansing to it. But Macron’s argument has a mathematical logic to it: further delay to the recognition of Palestine merely makes the much-vaunted two-state solution advocated by Western countries but rejected by Netanyahu ever less likely.

Whether deliberately or not, Albanese is doing Netanyahu’s work in conjuring yet more reasons why there can be no recognition now. But, there is no alternative.