The useful contribution Australia can make in New York

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will be travelling to New York soon to participate in a High Level Meeting to Commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the United Nations on 22 September. One of those sessions will be dedicated to the “Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two State Solution”.

This follows the UN General Assembly Resolution on 10 September endorsing the “New York Declaration” on this subject that emerged from an international conference in August, co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia. This document is largely a lengthy grab bag of subheadings with no detailed substance of how the peace process can be moved forward and the two-state solution achieved.

Ironically there are important statements about disinformation, misinformation, radicalisation, hate speech in general and in education and yet the Declaration recycles large slabs of this very material. If this task is taken seriously, it could actually make the biggest single contribution to peace. For example, our government announced a joint initiative with Indonesia recently proposing to address the heinous education system that has existed under the PA and Hamas. This is very welcome considering the multiple EU reports on just how bad this situation is and how it serves as a precursor to the sort of savagery committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023.

There are several references to engaging and negotiating with the Palestinian Authority but there is not a single reference to getting the sides together around the table to negotiate key outcomes flagged in the document or registering the right of Israel as a sovereign state to be engaged in the key processes as an equal partner. Most critically the document refers to peace being based on the “1967 lines” but asserts the objective of ensuring the Gaza strip and the West Bank are “geographically contiguous”. In other words Israel would be required to surrender sovereign territory beyond the “1967 lines”!

Ironically the “Olmert Plan” in 2008 did offer an arrangement in this respect but it was based on an exchange of land so that the Palestinians would get the same scale of land as the 1967 lines represented, in exchange for major Jewish settlements being incorporated into Israel and a transit corridor linking the Palestinian territories. This was rejected by Mahmoud Abbas at the time.