As Australia’s wokest state, Victoria, pushes on with its so-called ‘treaty’ with so-called ‘Aborigines’, it’s an open question of whether such a thing even makes a lick of constitutional sense. After all, the federal government defines a ‘treaty’ as “an international agreement concluded in written form between two or more states (or international organisations) and is governed by international law”. Victoria is not a nation state, nor is it making a treaty with another nation state. Not even nation states can make treaties with their own citizens.
Is the Victorian government’s ‘treaty’ even legal?
The same must be asked of the federal government’s determination to recognise a ‘State of Palestine’.
The push by Australia, Britain, France and Canada to recognise a Palestinian state in the so-called ‘West Bank’ has no basis in international law.
Keep in mind the ‘pro-Palestine’ faction’s endless bleating about international law. Well, under international law, a sovereign state must have a permanent population, a defined territory, an effective government, and the capacity to conduct international relations. ‘Palestine’ has none of those – least of all the last two.
Even the ‘recognition’ spruikers like Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong recognise that Hamas cannot remain as the government of Gaza. Yet, their proposed alternative, the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank has no authority – not even in its own territory. The sole reason the PA’s Mahmoud Abbas has refused elections for two decades is that he knows full well that he’d be tossed on his ear in favor of Hamas.
Besides which, Abbas is the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. In case Albanese hasn’t read up on the PLO charter lately, it calls for the elimination of Israel by means of terrorism (Articles 15 and 9).
Yet, Albanese calls Abbas (whose ‘doctorate’ was on the thesis that Jews collaborated with Nazis to engineer the Holocaust as a means of establishing the Israeli state) a ‘moderate’. Is this man even serious?
As for a ‘Palestinian’ state’s capacity to conduct international relations, merely look at how they conducted themselves over the last two decades of self-rule in Gaza.
The Palestinians were given the right of self-determination through the Oslo Accords, and had they concluded negotiations with Israel in good faith, that would have led to statehood for them. But the Palestinian leadership squandered that opportunity. The Arabs living west of the Jordan River had been offered statehood alongside Israel in 1947 by UN General Assembly Resolution 181, but they rejected it. After ‘Oslo’ Yasser Arafat was offered statehood at Camp David in 2000. He walked out, went home and started a war – the second intifada. In 2008 Mahmoud Abbas was offered statehood by then prime minister Ehud Olmert. Again, the offer was rejected.
Albanese and Wong can prattle all they like about a ‘two-state solution’, but ‘Palestinians’ have spent the last 80 years demonstrating with the most appalling violence that they simply don’t want a two-state solution.
‘Palestine’ does not qualify as a state according to the 1933 Montevideo Convention, which is an international treaty, and therefore an instrument of international law.
Natasha Hausdorff, who is Legal Director of UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust, recently held a webinar with Professor Douglas Feith who has a distinguished career as a legal academic, and served as under secretary for defense in the Bush administration, where he helped to devise a strategy for the war on terrorism. He had this to say about the recognition of Palestinian statehood by France, Britain, Canada and Australia: ‘The Palestinians do not have a state under the definitions of international law. For these governments to say they are going to recognise something that doesn’t exist is showing contempt for the international legal concept of what a state is. Recognising something that doesn’t exist is saying that international law is nonsense. They are effectively saying “in the name of ‘international law’ we’re going to ignore international law”.’
So not only is the Albanese/Wong announcement throwing both the State of Israel and the Australian Jewish community ‘under the bus’, but arguably it is unlawful and will likely contribute to further bloodshed in the Middle East, as well further Jew-hatred at home.
Former PM John Howard is not the venal fool that Albanese and Wong are.
Former Liberal prime minister John Howard has accused Anthony Albanese of a “betrayal of international law” for a “premature” recognition of a Palestinian state, in an extraordinary statement that urged others to “resist such a reckless and dangerous course”.
But ‘reckless and dangerous’ are the Albanese government’s middle names.
