The last decade has seen Australia sliding further and further away from its century-long mateship with Israel.
Since the election of Malcolm Turnbull, both Liberal- and Labor-led governments have degraded the bond.
Under the present administration, and especially— perversely—since 7 October, Australia has moved closer to Israel’s arch-foe, the invented (but in actuality still non-existent) ‘Palestine’, whose raison d’être is to erase the Jewish state.
Last year, things deteriorated so badly that Israel’s prime minister labelled the Albanese government as antisemitic.
From what I know, Australians who love both their nation and Israel are simultaneously pained and riled at this abandonment; at Penny Wong’s joining of Australia’s voice to the chorus of Israel condemners in the UN and indicters in the World Criminal Court, and at the failure to forcefully quash the Jew-hatred on Australian campuses and city streets.
Today, as I write this, some are clutching at a hope: that the confluence of Donald Trump’s return to the White House on the one hand, and Australia’s upcoming federal election on other, could presage Australia turning back towards Israel and, in the words of prospective prime minister Peter Dutton, mending the breach.
But there is no way the next government will be able to restore this relationship as long as it supports the Two- State Solution—which all the political parties do.
It’ll not be easy, but it is possible to reverse course on this, and right now there’s a fleeting opportunity to do so—especially if Aussies can be shown that supporting this ‘solution’ strengthens those who are dedicated to destroying Israel.
Previously, for as long as Israel countenanced the possibility of ‘Palestine’, the US and Australia quite reasonably felt obliged to support the process “as worked out by the parties”.
Then October 7 happened.
After 30 bloody years of fruitless effort to bring about the Two-State Solution, what little Israeli hope remained in that process evaporated when, after Gaza had been wholly handed over to the Palestinian Authority to start their statehood—the strip was instead turned into a platform from which to rocket and invade Israel, and butcher and kidnap its Jews.
What is the Two-State Solution?
While the term was only coined in 2002 (by George W. Bush), the ‘Two-State Solution’ is only the latest in a string of names given to the violent, century-long Islam- driven effort, first to abort Israel’s rebirth and, since that failed, to reverse it.
Time and space won’t allow me to trace the thread of the Two-State Solution that runs unbroken from 1918 to 2002. This summary can be fact-checked and researched by the reader.
I think it is imperative to note that Australia’s positive interaction with the land and people that became independent Israel began precisely as the Arab animus was taking hold.
It was during World War 1 that the seeds of Arab nationalism were sown. Ascendant America had execrated colonialism and instated a new world order, ‘self-determination’, which enabled people sharing similar political ambitions to create their own states.
Australia paved the way for the Jews to realise their age- old hope in this new dispensation. The legendary Light Horse charges helped secure the liberation of Beersheba, Judea, Jerusalem, Samaria and the Galilee, ending 700 years of Islamic control over Israel’s ancestral land.
But the publicising in 1920 of the Balfour Declaration endorsing the Jewish national home, and the subsequent League of Nations’ directive that Britain implement it, ignited Arab pogroms in Palestine.
Utilising his religion to orchestrate riots and massacres was the leading Muslim cleric in the land, Amin al- Husseini—the grandfather of Palestinian Nationalism. His violence, and a progressively Arab-appeasing Britain, successfully shut the door on Jewish immigration just as the Nazis were coming to power.
Husseini allied himself and his movement with Adolf Hitler and urged him to drive the British out of Palestine and exterminate its Jews.
Consciously or not, Australia played a vital part in thwarting this threat. Together with the British and others, the thousands of Aussies who fought (and the 3000 who died fighting) the Nazis in North Africa, deprived Hitler and Husseini of their goal.
After newly-reborn Israel defeated six invading Arab armies in 1948, Husseini’s nationalism was channelled by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser—in partnership with the Soviet KGB—into a new entity positioned to spearhead Israel’s annihilation.
From Husseini to the PLO
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was launched in 1964, not to ‘liberate’ the ‘West Bank’ (as Israel wouldn’t ‘occupy’ that land until three years later), but, according to its Founding Charter, to wholly exterminate the Jewish state and replace it with a new State of Palestine ‘from the river to the sea.’
Led by Yasser Arafat from 1968, the PLO introduced the world to international terror, awaking and generating widespread popular support for the ‘Palestinian cause’, primarily through murderous action: hijacking and blowing up airplanes (over a 12-year period from 1968), massacring Olympic athletes (1972), bombing European restaurants (1982) and assassinating Israeli diplomats abroad (1973; 1982).
It was during this bloody period that the fantasy took root from which has spread the universal conviction that the Palestinians were a nation whose land had been stolen; that the Israelis are colonisers/invaders/settlers.
After six years of escalating violence effected some Western pushback, the PLO adopted its ‘Phased Plan’. Promulgated in 1974 by the Palestinian National Council (PNC), it ruled it permissible to moderate the terrorism and use negotiations as a first phase for gaining a foothold in the targeted territory. During this stage, a massive propaganda effort would take place to strengthen international solidarity with ‘Palestine’.
When talks stalled because Israel refused to relinquish more land, the terror would return.
Later that year, Arafat ‘renounced’ the use of violence at the United Nations, and extended a hand for ‘peace’.
Duplicitously, he had recognised ‘Israel’ but refused absolutely to recognise it as a Jewish state. This remains the PLO’s position until today.
In March 1977, Newsweek quoted then PLO ‘Foreign Minister’ Farouk Kaddoumi: “There are two phases to our return: the first phase to the 1967 lines [the ‘West Bank’, ‘East Jerusalem’ and Gaza] and the second to the 1948 lines … the third stage is the democratic State of Palestine.”
Speaking on Europe 1 Radio the following September, PLO representative Ibrahim Sousse said: “The PLO will acknowledge or accept the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as one of the stages towards an envisaged Palestinian state in all of Palestine.”
After his UN appearance, Arafat continued wielding terror, often through divers terrorist groups under the PLO umbrella, groups he denied were his. Not only did the violence not lessen support for a two-state solution; it made ‘Palestine’ the cause celebre of the world.
Backing for this fraudulent cause was stoked by unending UN resolutions—with near-universal news media collusion—that consistently condemned and delegitimised Israel, while validating the counterfeit ‘Palestinian’ claim.
Simple, completely indisputable, facts include:
- That the Jewish people alone have a verifiable national tie to this land—particularly to ‘the West Bank’—going back at least 3500 years.
- That the Arabs who are today called ‘Palestinians’ have never been a national entity with a state—anywhere.
- That according to the criteria defining a political nation state, there never has been, and up until today there is no, State of Palestine. This reality is not altered by the preponderance of politicians, international organisations, journalists and even jurists who declare, rule and proclaim that there is a Palestine.
And then there is this: The PLO is unchanged; its charter is unchanged; its goal is unchanged.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is the PLO
In 1991, the international community led by the US invited the Arabs and Israel to an ‘International Middle East Peace Conference’ in Madrid. I was flown to the Spanish capital to cover it. This conference launched the diplomatic effort known since then as the ‘Land-for- Peace’ process.
Two years later, Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat signed the Oslo Accords in which the PLO was given a secondary designation—the ‘Palestinian Authority’ (PA).
But the PA is not a new entity. The name has served— very effectively—as a cover behind which to conceal the 60-year-old PLO. In actual, official fact, ‘Oslo’—and every ensuing agreement between Israel and Arafat (and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas) is signed under the legal appellation of the PLO, and not the PA.
Speaking on Radio Monte Carlo 13 days before signing ‘Oslo’, Arafat insisted that the agreement “would be a basis for an independent Palestinian state in accordance with the PNC resolution of 1974”—the Phased Plan.
On the day after that signing, Arafat flew to South Africa
where he reassured Muslims in a Johannesburg mosque that ‘Oslo’ was only a means to facilitate the unchanged goal: the end of Israel. (I hold a recording of this speech).
Conclusion
Today, more than three—Jewish-blood soaked—decades after the 1993 agreement, everyone except for Israel and Trump’s US supports the Two-State Solution. The international community insists it’s the only way to end the conflict, and demands that Israel concur and comply. And it maintains that the Palestinian Authority is a real, standalone, ‘moderate’ entity with which Israel can, and must, make peace.
But the PA is the PLO, and the PLO has not embraced peace. It pays its people when they murder Jews; incentivising their violence. It has indoctrinated generations of its children with Jew-hatred. Its members participated in, and celebrated, 7 October, which its officials refuse to condemn. The basically unaltered PLO Charter remains in force. In only faintly less- extreme language, it replicates Hamas’s.
While Hamas rejects the Two-State Solution in lieu of going straight for the Jewish jugular, the PLO, as we have seen, grasps it as a sure step towards the same, genocidal goal.
Amin el-Husseini’s vision is within reach. The Two-State Solution has achieved wall-to-wall support around the world.
Almost.
Shortly before this writing, when newly-appointed US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee was asked whether he or President Trump agreed “that the Two-State Solution is the future,” he responded with an emphatic “No”.
“There was a Palestinian state,” he said, “it was called Gaza. Look how that turned out. The Palestinians don’t believe in a Two-State solution. They believe in a one state solution, and their solution is that Israel disappears.”
The truth is that 7 October, and the global tsunami of antisemitism it triggered, has confirmed in their minds what multitudes of Israelis have long feared: That this ‘solution’ is an existential threat to their state; the latest in over 2000 years of determinations to render their nation extinct.
Increasingly, it is understood to be a 21st Century version of the ‘Final Solution’.
Thankfully, if belatedly, Israel has repudiated it. The United States under Trump is moving away from it. It is the moral, just and right thing to do.
To restore, repair and firmly establish a meaningful, enduring friendship with Israel, a friendship that will only bring prosperity and great blessing to Australia, Canberra should disavow the Two-State Solution. Permanently.
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