Australia's recognition of Palestinian statehood goes beyond symbolism

Australia Broadcast Center

3 days ago

Australia's decision to recognise the state of Palestine has been a very long time coming and, compared to the announcements by other countries in recent weeks, may seem to have been late out of the blocks.
But it is in the very way Australia has come to the announcement that we can get a better understanding of the seismic shift in the broader international position on Palestinian statehood that has occurred in recent months.
And it also gives us a path through understanding what the political, and practical, implications of the decision might be.
It is easy to reduce an assessment of the recognition of Palestine to claims that it is nothing more than symbolic, or that it will have little practical impact on the ground.
But the tectonic shifts underlying the decision are profound.
The announcement by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong may have been a decision for the Australian government, but it is entirely a part of a coordinated international movement that has been building since at least the beginning of the year.
And it has been a much more complex process than a simple shift from not recognising Palestine to recognising it.
In the course of 2025 alone, the position of Israel in the Western world has profoundly changed; the position of the United States in international affairs has profoundly changed; and (often overlooked) the positions of the Arab world and the Middle Eastern region in general have also changed.
For years, the international community's position has been driven by a long held weighting of interests in favour of Israel as a democratic state, compared to the two organisations who might claim government status of a Palestinian state: Hamas, designated as a terrorist organisation or the Palestinian Authority, which has increasingly been seen to be incompetent, corrupt, unrepresentative or powerless.
Israel's brutal and relentless war on Gaza — with its massive civilian death toll and now the spectre of mass starvation — has robbed the nation of its previous moral authority and left it exposed to allegations of war crimes, breaches of international law and even genocidal intent.
Israel's position has always been protected by its greatest backer: the United States. Other countries have tended to either hide behind, or shrug in surrender, at their incapacity to really influence events in Israel, on the basis that they would have little effect while ever it had unstinting US support.
But the increasingly erratic international diplomacy of Donald Trump has shaken the rest of the world's leaders into a realisation that, just as they could not wait for a "peace process" to establish the basis for recognition of Palestine, they cannot rely on leadership of the United States to put pressure on Israel on either Gaza or the ever-accelerating expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank.
The disabling of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the humbling of Iran, by Israel has, if anything helped clear the path, or pressure, Arab states feel they can or should take against Hamas.
Many of these disparate changing forces have started to be threaded together in a coordinated way in recent months, particularly via the dialogue established and led by France and Saudi Arabia.
But the international community — operating in this new world outside the leadership of the United States — has few levers to pull to affect change.
Recognition of Palestinian statehood is one of the few at this point. So for the past month or so we have watched as the international community has tried to maximise the impact it can have with that lever.
As Albanese and Wong once again made clear today, the shift in strategic considerations now for Australia — as is the case in the positions of France, the UK and Canada — was that the actions of Israel were actually making a two-state solution impossible because it was literally obliterating the physical basis for a Palestinian state: both by its physical demolition of Gaza and incursions via more illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Just as the very spectre of a physical state of Palestine is disappearing, the international community is confronted with little choice but to prop up and develop the Palestine Authority — which has been diminishing in its credibility and authority — as a viable body of governance.
This will be potentially the most important practical aspect of the decision — not by Australia but by the international community as a whole: that whatever Israel might do, the international community will be supporting the Palestinian Authority's recognition as a legitimate body of government.
The state of Palestine is currently recognised by 147 of the United Nations' 193 member states.
The prime minister has made an unconditional offer of support for recognition of Palestine at next month's meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
But he has made clear that the Palestinian Authority has much to do if it wishes the international community to expand on the support it can give the Palestinian people, and that the international community will be taking a very hands-on role to ensure that its wider goals are met.
"There is much more work to do in building a Palestinian state," Wong said today.
"We will help build the capacity of the Palestinian Authority, and with the international community, Australia will hold the Palestinian Authority to its commitments. The practical implementation of our recognition will be tied to progress on these commitments. We will continue to provide humanitarian aid with our partners to try to help vulnerable civilians to get basic supplies they needle in a practical sense."
The crucial difference here is that, in recognising Palestine, the international community will be upping its demands on being able to get aid into Gaza.
Instead of just humanitarian bodies complaining about access, there is the spectre of an international force, peacekeeping or otherwise, both being obliged and committed to supporting those efforts.
How that plays on the ground is yet to be seen. But recognition is about a lot more than just setting up embassies. It obliges members of the UN to support a state's right to exist.
The growing certainty that the overwhelming majority of countries — and all the permanent members of the UN Security council other than the United States — will now recognise Palestine will keep the pressure on the Trump administration.
That might not result in the US recognising Palestine, but it will maximise pressure on the US to intervene with Israel to provide aid to the residents of Gaza.
It also raises the bar on the questions of international law involved in Israel's actions.
For example, Israel's prosecution of the war in Gaza becomes an attack on another country, not just an assault on what is for all intents and purposes an occupied territory within Israel.
While the US is expected to veto the statehood call, the expanded recognition of Palestine will also increase the authority of the United Nations to act, even as its legitimacy is undermined by the Trump administration.
Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.