At the National Press Club this week with Ben Saul, Chris Sidoti argues that recognition of Palestine is important, but that Australia must also comply with international law obligations, including acting on arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court.

A repost from 3 October 2025

Ben Saul has outlined why recognition was necessary. I want to describe why it is insufficient.

To begin with, recognition addresses a consistent pattern of inconsistency in the way in which the Australian Government has approached Israel and Palestine since the very beginning. It is a long way away, as the prime minister is fond of saying, but we have had engagement on this issue from the start.

Australia was a member of the UN Committee in 1947 that came up with the idea of two states living in peace and security side by side, a Jewish state and an Arab state, he said in the UN resolution that Ben referred to. We were a member of the committee that came up with that proposal. We were the first state in the General Assembly vote conducted alphabetically to vote yes to the adoption of the proposal.

And very quickly, we recognised the state of Israel. Doing so not entirely in implementation of the resolution because the resolution did not anticipate a unilateral declaration of independence by the state of Israel, and yet that’s what occurred. Nonetheless, we proceeded to recognise the state of Israel. And when Doc Evatt was president of the General Assembly, Australia supported Israeli membership of the General Assembly and of the United Nations.

So we were there at the time of those critical events, and we played a central role in relation to them. We recognised the state of Israel very quickly, but it’s only now, 75 years later, that we have got round to recognising the state of Palestine. And even now, there are continuing inconsistencies.

Ben has well outlined the Montevideo Convention provisions relating to recognition and about how the state of Palestine, in the acceptable international discourse of international lawyers, meets the four principal criteria under the Montevideo Convention. Having met those criteria, any additional conditions placed upon recognition become political matters rather than legal matters.

I have no problem with the political conditions that the prime minister and the foreign minister set some months ago, conditions that have now been translated into commitments by the Palestinian Authority, their political conditions, but Hamas should not be a member of a future government. There should be demilitarisation. There should be a restructuring of the Palestinian Authority. There should be elections. I have no trouble with those political conditions at all.

But they’re not being applied to the state of Israel. Why is there not a political condition that Likud, the Jewish power party, and religious parties should play no part in a future government of the state of Israel because they are parties that have been responsible for the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity and genocide in Gaza?

Why should there not be similar provisions for full or partial demilitarisation of the state of Israel to ensure the security and peace within the region? Why should we not require truly democratic elections in the state of Israel rather than partially democratic elections that see the Palestinian citizens of Israel experiencing discrimination?

Two days ago, the Israel Country Brief and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade started out very early in the statement, “The state of Israel is a robust parliamentary democracy.” Well, it’s not. So recognition as a legal act has occurred, but it needs to be followed by consistency in the political........

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