Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Before the election senior Labor officials wrote in the Australian Jewish News that there was no difference between the Labor Party and the coalition on policies relating to Israel and on policies relating to the Jewish community. There were op-eds written by the Attorney-General and by the member for Macnamara.

But we have seen since the election there has been a greater gulf between the position of the Labor Party and the coalition in relation to Israel and the Jewish community, and we saw this before 7 October. We saw this in relation to changing the capital of Israel—a decision that was bungled, without consultation of the Jewish community in Australia and without proper warning to the government of Israel. I happened to be in Israel a couple of weeks after, and in meeting after meeting we were asked to explain why this had happened and how it had happened in this way.

We saw it in relation to the return of funding to UNRA. UNRA is the UN organisation whose headquarters in Gaza, sadly, had been used as a major communications facility for Hamas, and some of its employees had been involved in the 7 October terrorist attacks. It had been a negative actor in the Middle East even before that time.

We've seen it in changes to votes in the United Nations in relation to the position of Palestine and in relation to the position of Israel, and we're now seeing it in relation to the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state.

We on this side of the House support the idea of a two-state solution—a state of Israel and a state of Palestine living side by side. But the question is about the timing of the preconditions that need to exist before a Palestinian state should be recognised by Australia. The Australian foreign policy tradition is that we don't recognise states that haven't yet come into existence. It might interest the House to know that we didn't recognise the State of Israel, when it came into existence, until it proved that it could defend itself, almost nine months later. We make the recognition after the fact, not before the fact. It's important that we don't recognise a state that hasn't come into existence, particularly when many of the actors in that state do not believe that Israel has a right to exist. That has always been a precondition for the recognition of a Palestinian state in terms of Australian foreign policy.

But you cannot consider this motion without considering the context and the timing of the change in the government's position in relation to the recognition of a Palestinian state. This was not something they brought in before 7 October. This is a matter that they have pursued since 7 October. The events of 7 October were so dreadful—the largest number of Jewish people murdered in a single day since the Holocaust. And it was not just murder but sadistic murder and the rape of children, the rape of women, the beheading of people and the capture of babies and Holocaust survivors. There are still more than a hundred hostages who were taken by Hamas who have not been returned and are somewhere in Gaza today. To recognise a Palestinian state after that event sends all the wrong signals internationally. It says to people—a bit like the University of Sydney said—that, the more you push, the more violent you are and the less you want to come to the table and make peace, the more you will be rewarded. I think that's a terrible precedent.

If we think about the world on 6 October, Israel had been going round making peace with its neighbours. The Abraham accords were a game changer. Relations between Israel and its neighbours had never been better, and the Saudi deal was so close. The Hamas terrorists wanted to interrupt and degrade that because they felt that their cause would be forgotten if Israel and Saudi Arabia normalised relations. The events on 7 October have been a complete disrupter.

I think it's really important that we as Australia stand with a like-minded liberal democracy, which is Israel. I look forward to a like-minded liberal democracy in the state of Palestine at some point in the future. But that requires the Palestinian people to make the decision that the people of Israel have a right to exist and that there deserves to be a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel as well as a homeland for the Palestinian people. Until they recognise Israel's right to exist, which so many of the leading actors do not, the prospect of a Palestinian state is not something that we as Australians should be considering, and it's not something that underpins the fundamental values of Western democracy that Australia has always stood for.

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