Let Palestinians decide!

Written by: Central Committee, CPA (M-L) on 21 August 2025

\Various proposals are circulating in relation to the recognition of a Palestinian state.

On the one hand, the Australian government’s decision is a welcome break from the slavish following of US protection of Israel at the United Nations where the US has used its Security Council veto 49 times to block resolutions critical of Israel. That veto, together with billions of dollars of arms and cooperation between the US and Israel governments and the CIA and Mossad, has been the principal source of Israel’s existence and its genocide of Palestinians.

The Australian government’s decision is an attempt to appease the growing opposition within Australian public to the genocide in Gaza.

However, the so-called democracies which have followed France’s lead in deciding to recognise Palestine as a state, have imposed impossibly anti-democratic conditions on their recognition. They include disarming Hamas and barring it from any presence in a new Palestine, and insisting that the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority be authorised to administer the combined West Bank and Gazan state of Palestine.

This is a blatant denial of the right of Palestinians to self-determine their own future.

No such prohibitions have been placed on Israel as a condition for its acceptance of a Palestinian state which presumably must be a factor in the two-state “solution” being proposed.

The governing party in Israel is Netanyahu’s Likud, supported by other far right parties. 

The 1977 original platform of the Likud Party began with the heading The Right of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel) and continued with the two following points:

a. The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.

b. A plan which relinquishes parts of western Eretz Israel, undermines our right to the country, unavoidably leads to the establishment of a "Palestinian State," jeopardizes the security of the Jewish population, endangers the existence of the State of Israel. and frustrates any prospect of peace…

The term “Eretz Israel” originated in the Torah and was adopted by Zionists to refer to the Mandated Territory of Palestine, that is, to the entire area from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. Judea and Samaria specifically refer to the area designated today as the occupied West Bank.

Continuing Israel’s expansion and occupation of the West Bank by over 800,000 violent and heavily armed Israeli settlers, backed by the IDF and Israel’s government, is intended to make the reality of a Palestinian state unviable.

It is inconceivable that conditions can be placed on the Palestinians which are not applied to the Israelis. Under these circumstances, a two-state “solution” is doomed to failure, and the only long-term basis for peace and justice from the river to the sea is a single secular state in which the rights of Jews, Muslims, Christians and people of no faith are protected by law.

For its own reasons of using Israel as a guarantor of US hegemony in the Middle East, US imperialism will never relinquish its connection with and support for the genocidal apartheid Israeli state. 

Despite the “recognition” rhetoric, Australia remains complicit in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians so long as we refuse to apply sanctions against the Zionists, and continue to allow the export of arms and armament components either directly to Israel or through a third country.

A number of Palestinians have warned that the Australian government’s recognition of Palestine without ending the military trade with Israel, without condemning Israel’s apartheid, genocide and occupation, and without imposing sanctions against Israel, is a political fig leaf.

We must continue to exert pressure for the rights of Palestinians, such as the continuing rallies and great events like the Sydney Bridge march, but we must also target US imperialism in our own country and our own region. 

US imperialism dominates Australia economically, militarily, politically and culturally. It takes our subservience for granted. When US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee’s stated that the Australian decision to recognise Palestine was greeted within the Administration “with an enormous level of disappointment and some disgust”, he was not speaking of us as an independent nation, but as a disobedient puppet which had the temerity to try pulling its own strings.

We must fight harder to achieve anti-imperialist independence and our sovereign right to assert our own views and policies in matters of foreign policy.

The Australian people freed from the grip of imperialism and able to make our own decisions will finally be able to really support the rights of Palestinians to make their own decisions.

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