BEN HARVEY: Palestinian recognition might make us feel warm and fuzzy, but it won’t help end the wretched war

Anthony Albanese thinks the answer to the Gaza question — the most pressingly urgent emergency facing the world — is recognising a theoretical Palestinian state that for the long distance foreseeable future is never going to exist.

My goodness, how did Australian foreign policy get this muddled?

To answer that, we need to go back to the basics.

Not “why do the Jews and Arabs hate each other so much” basics, for that would require us to trace history back to the story of Isaac and Ishmael.

The Nightly doesn’t have enough sub-editors to check all that so let’s first settle the question of what constitutes a state.

Don’t worry about national interest; this play is in Albanese’s interest.

When does a bunch of people who live in the same area actually become one?

This was the question pondered in 1933 when the international community framed the Montevideo Convention.

Said convention dictates (in round terms) that a sovereign state must have clear boundaries occupied by a non-transitory population which is governed effectively by officials who are able to engage in international relations.

The Australian Government, like 147 others around the world, believes Palestine meets those four pre-requisites.

The “governed effectively” clause is a bit of a stretch (the Palestinian Authority’s self-evident lack of control makes its title a contradiction in terms) but let’s not waste our breath debating the matter because a Palestinian state is not going to happen for a very, very long time, if ever.

That’s because any new “state” must be endorsed by the United Nations. Any country which sits on the UN Security Council can veto any resolution and one of the countries on the council is and will forever be the United States of America, which (spoiler alert) is completely opposed to the idea.

Albanese knows this is a dead end but he’s still strutting around acting like the world’s moral compass. He’s clearly been bingeing season five of The West Wing.

Albo knows his “solution” is little more than diplomatic virtue signalling but is happy to continue the charade because Gaza, he says, needs a circuit-breaker. Even a crappy one.

The PM laboured the point this week on Sunrise.

“You can’t just keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome,” he told Natalie Barr.

Fearing Nat wasn’t paying attention, he then drove the point home.

“To continue to do the same thing is not enough,” he thundered.

“We just can’t keep going the same way. Let’s stop this and create a system where it won’t just we won’t keep going back to this over and over again.”

We all know the saying about the definition of insanity but the “different” thing that Albo’s proposing to break the cycle is a mirage — he may as well try to solve this with magic beans.

Washington simply will not recognise Palestine in anything like its current form.

So, why is Albanese flapping his gums in the wind this way?

Don’t worry about national interest; this play is in Albanese’s interest.

The PM’s holding his party room together with snot and dental floss at the moment.

The only reason the pro-Palestinian factions within the ALP haven’t broken solidarity and raised hell publicly is the promise that Australia will eventually recognise Palestine.

They haven’t had to press Albo too hard to get there; this is the bloke who created the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine. He’s wanted this moment since he was a twenty-something Trot at university.

In all that time he’s failed to come up with an answer to this most fundamental question: how will recognising Palestine as a state act as a salve to the eight decades of mindless hate that started when Israel planted its flag after World War II?

Could you, dear reader, forgive and forget if you saw your sister kidnapped and raped, or your father executed in front of you, as happened on October 7?

Would anyone let bygones be bygones if they watched their grandmother get mutilated by an Israeli frag grenade thrown through a lounge room window?

We here in Australia can’t comprehend the level of distrust and animosity over there.

“We will face these challenges together,” Penny Wong told us on her first day as Foreign Minister.

Sorry Penny, we aren’t going to hug the hate out of this situation.

The Government says Australia will recognise Palestine only if the PA reins in Hamas, something the Authority hasn’t been able to do for at least two generations.

A Palestinian state must also be de-militarised, Australia says.

Good luck with that — there is more hidden munition in Gaza and the West Bank than anywhere else on earth.

We will also insist that there is a stop to extremism. There will be no room for teaching Jew-hate in the new Palestinian school curriculum.

Sorry, Albo, did you see the footage of Palestinians cheering Hamas as they brought those screaming, terrified hostages over the border on October 7?

Do you seriously reckon statehood is going to usher in a new era of tolerance for those people?

The final thing Australia wants to see in Palestine is a free and fair election.

This is the biggest joke of all. They had free and fair elections in Gaza in 2006 and guess who they voted for?

Hamas.

But don’t worry, Albo’s got a plan for that

“We need to disarm Hamas,” he implored to Nat Barr.

“We need to get rid of them once and for all.”

Well, derrr.

“We’re opposed to Hamas,” he said. “Hamas can play no role. Hamas can have no role whatsoever in a future Palestinian state.”

Hear, hear, Albo! But one question before you go the full Jed Bartlett: how?

We can’t wish Hamas away any more than we could wish the IRA away during The Troubles.

We are about to deliver a Muslim version of Sinn Fein. The lunatics will again swap ski masks for suits.

We might not have Hamas on the ballot during those first free and fair elections in the new State of Palestine but you can bet that their proxies will be on the ticket.

Don’t worry though, when those Hamas sympathisers take their seats in the Palestinian parliament their generational instinct to annihilate Jews will be tempered by the burden of responsibility that comes from being a signatory to Article 8 of the Montevideo Convention, which dictates that “no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another”.

Phew. The Jews will finally be able to sleep easy.