Australia has joined Britain and Canada in recognising a Palestinian state.
Recognition without any real responsibility for what happens next.
The choreography by Anthony Albanese was deliberate: a set-piece announcement on the eve of leaders’ week at the UN, with allies moving in lockstep to spread the accountability.
There is safety in numbers, and that is precisely the political comfort this decision seeks.
I’m not opposed to recognising Palestine in principle, I never have been.
A durable two-state outcome remains the only plausible end to a conflict that has brutalised Israelis and Palestinians alike.
But timing matters and statecraft without adequate sequencing is performative.
Doing it before all the hostages are released and before Hamas is properly dismantled, and it risks turning recognition into a reward for terrorism.
Dozens of hostages remain in Gaza. Labor insists Hamas will have no role in a future Palestinian state, and points to undertakings secured from the Palestinian Authority. But there are no guarantees.
To what extent is Albanese driven by domestic politics, using recognition as a values-based win after the Voice referendum defeat, asks Peter Van Onseln
How will this decision affect Australia’s relationships with Israel and the United States, particularly with Republicans already threatening consequences
Aspirations aren’t guarantees, and this announcement has been made absent of any enforceable triggers, beyond good intentions and future ‘considerations’ about embassies.
Predictably Israel has condemned the move. We shouldn’t kid ourselves how this will be read in Tel Aviv.
Australia doing this when the US disagrees will be seen in Washington through an alliance lens as much as a moral one.
And senior Republicans are already threatening ‘punitive measures’.
That bluster might not translate into policy – although in the Donald Trump era you never know – but it makes the politics of AUKUS even harder than it’s already becoming.
Why pick that fight right now? Shortly before Albo hopes to have his first meeting with Trump.
So what does explain the haste? Partly, the herd effect: London moves, Ottawa follows, Canberra comes in behind them.
France had already moved. Spread the risk, share the headlines, minimise the potential fallout being directed at any one nation for its decision.
ro-Palestine demonstrators march in Sydney
But domestic politics is in the mix, too.
Albo has long felt this issue in his bones, a political career built around such social justice issues.
After the Voice referendum defeat, recognising Palestine offers up a values affirming win for the Labor base, without immediate domestic costs.
That, at least, is the calculation. It also fills a political void left within Albo after the voice was so comprehensively lost. Evidence his inner activist hasn’t been completely snuffed out by 30 years in parliament.
The security reality is that Hamas may well be degraded right now, but it is not destroyed. Its capacity to terrorise physically and politically remains, and it will try to claim this moment as vindication of its strategy.
Here in Australia antisemitism has surged since the October 2023 attacks, measured not just anecdotally but in documented incidents. The symbolism of recognition now, in the absence of hostages being released or Hamas disarmed, risks being read by bad actors as licence for further intimidation of Jewish Australians.
If Labor wants to do this now, it must match its words with a muscular plan to protect Jewish communities and prosecute hate.
I know that some state Labor Premiers worry that their federal colleagues aren’t taking such needs seriously enough.
There’s also an honesty test here. If recognition is largely symbolic until reforms occur and Hamas is excluded, then symbolism is all that this really is.
But if symbolism is the strategy, level with Australians about the trade-offs, especially the alliance friction.
In Trump-land, where the two-state orthodoxy has cooled, Australia’s move cuts against the grain. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it does make it risky.
Pretending otherwise is rubbish.
