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.

There is no mention of the systemic corruption in the PA and Hamas and the criticality of this to creating a viable state and managing the reconstruction effort. There is reference to Israel and human rights but no mention of the systematic violation of human rights by the PA and Hamas. There is a mention of gender equality and “prioritising” the rights of women and girls, not spelled out but clearly aimed at the PA and Hamas, but no mention of the rights of LGBTQI people, free trade unions or non-Muslims. There is talk of regional security but not one mention of the major threat to this posed by Iran and the extensive network of terror proxies it controls, its open aggression and genocidal objectives, let alone how this is to be addressed.

Disturbingly there are detailed paragraphs doubling down on empowering UNRWA, despite its corruption and facilitation of terror. The irony is that, in addition to the fact that UNRWA operates on a false refugee premise in the territories, if a Palestinian State is recognised then there will certainly be no such thing as “refugees” of any kind residing in Palestinian territory.

The declaration talks of empowering the Palestinian Authority in “leading” the implementation of the recovery and reconstruction plan, ensuring that all recovery and reconstruction efforts are fully coordinated with and “through the Palestinian Government”. There is no reference or support for the reconstruction effort in Israel for the extensive damage consequent on the Hamas offensive in 2023, or the Iranian proxy and direct assaults on Israel for nearly two years during the illegal war of aggression that has been waged against it. Reparations have traditionally been required in such a situation. There is no reference to monitoring and accountability measures for the funding that will flow to this effort to avoid the massive diversion of aid funding that has been a feature of Hamas and the PA.

It does talk of ending the role of Hamas in Gaza and the handing over of its weapons but does not provide any details as to how this is to be achieved.

There are elements of the Declaration, lacking in details as they are, that our Government should emphasise and offer assistance in developing. These include the establishment of a Transitional Administrative Committee, which we should insist is not “under the umbrella” of the PA as the Declaration requires, but operates under an independent mandate for a time with a consultative mechanism to the PA and Israel. It calls for a UN Stabilisation Mission security force for Gaza which we should support and offer practical assistance with, if not boots on the ground. We could offer to assist with the flagged building of governance capacity and the security sector.

We should demand the dis-establishment of UNRWA and the creation of a temporary, non-UN, international mechanism to support displaced persons, Palestinian and Israeli, manage the reconstruction effort and provide technical assistance to prevent corruption, possibly drawing on the expertise of AUSTRAC.

Instead of the Declaration’s call for States to join the South African ICJ genocide case we should oppose this, based on the legally deeply flawed nature of the claims, as highlighted by some Judges on the ICJ and the UK Government, and call for the abandonment of the case as a show of goodwill to incentivise Israeli constructive involvement in the peace process. We need to have spelled out that the so-called “right of return” of displaced Palestinians from Israeli territory, which was in effect a population exchange for the around 1 million Jews expelled from Arab lands, has been abandoned once and for all. Finally we should emphasise the need to get the PA and Israel back to the negotiating table to resolve final status issues and offer to facilitate this. To underpin this we should insist that acceptance of the “Quartet Principles” of recognition, renunciation of violence and acceptance of all agreements entered into to date be enshrined in the Palestinian political framework. At an appropriate time when free and fair elections can be held in the Palestinian territories Australia could offer the services of the AEC.

Mike Kelly is a former ADF soldier, Labor government minister and the co-convenor of Labor Friends of Israel.