According to a Sydney Morning Herald report on 29 April, NSW Labor right power broker Tony Burke will lead a push for “a historic shift in Labor’s position” on Palestinian statehood at the ALP’s July national conference, with the approval of Labor leader Bill Shorten.

The report followed shadow treasurer, and Burke’s NSW right faction colleague, Chris Bowen telling the National Press Club that the ALP’s foreign policy should include “practical steps” to achieving a two-state solution in the Middle East.

Is Labor inching closer to support for the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s statehood bid? Could such recognition hasten an end to nearly half a century of military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and pave the way for the construction of a united, independent and viable Palestinian state?

Prompting Labor’s policy shift is intransigent opposition to a Palestinian state from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On the eve of Israel’s 17 March election, Netanyahu told the Zionist NRG news website: “I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate territory gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against Israel.”

Netanyahu declared that if his centrist opponent, the Zionist Union, were to win the elections, “it would attach itself to the international community and do their bidding”, halt the construction of West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements and cooperate with international efforts for a withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces behind the 1967 “green line”.

Since the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s November 1988 declaration of Palestinian independence, 135 states (70 percent of the United Nations’ 193 members) have recognised a Palestinian state. Yet efforts by the Ramallah-based PA, established as a result of the 1994 Oslo Accords, to establish such a state unilaterally have faced firm resistance not only from Israel, but also from its key backers: the United States, Canada, the European Union and Australia.

Since Israel’s July-August 2014 assault on Gaza, which killed more than 2,000 people and left tens of thousands homeless, some European states have moved closer to backing the statehood bid. Sweden became the first European Union state to officially recognise the state of Palestine last October. Since then, the Irish and Spanish parliaments, the British House of Commons and the French National Assembly have all followed suit.

A unilateral declaration of recognition of the state of Palestine by a future federal Labor government, is, however, more than some in the party can swallow. Last July, the NSW state Labor conference passed a resolution, drafted by former NSW premier and federal foreign minister Bob Carr, stating that, if no progress were made in peace negotiations, “and Israel continues to build and expand settlements, a future Labor government will consult like-minded nations towards recognition of the Palestinian state”.

Similar resolutions have been passed by Labor state conferences in Queensland, Tasmania and South Australia. Each has been carefully worded to signal to Israel’s supporters that an independent Palestine would pose no physical challenge to the colonial settler state. The South Australian Labor conference resolution reads: “SA Labor welcomes the decision of the Palestinian Authority to commit to a demilitarised Palestine with the presence of international peacekeepers including US forces.”

‘A political cul-de-sac’

Indeed, these formulations indicate one of the shortcomings of the PA’s statehood bid: it rests entirely on the support of imperial states, and not on efforts to mobilise the Palestinian people behind a national liberation struggle.

In a November 2009 article published at ElectronicIntifada.net, South African author Virginia Tilley described the PA’s bid as “the clearest danger to the Palestinian national movement in its entire history, threatening to wall Palestinian aspirations into a political cul-de-sac from which it may never emerge.”

She argued that the PA was seizing on a political formula that the African National Congress worked very hard to avoid: a Bantustan. South Africa’s Bantustans were “homelands” in which Blacks were forced to live, denied rights by the imposition of “self-governing” Black elites and denied resources for any meaningful independence.

Bantustans were widely seen by Black South Africans (and opponents of apartheid everywhere) for what they really were: a means of divide and rule by the apartheid regime. However, the Palestinian version, crisscrossed by Israeli-only roads, smothered by checkpoints and surrounded off by an 8 metre-high apartheid wall, is today viewed by Ramallah’s elite as the best they can get.

An independent and viable Palestinian nation will not be the fruit of diplomatic lobbying in the corridors of the parliaments of Canberra, Washington and London. It can only be the outcome of a concerted struggle against Israeli colonialism by Palestinians and the Arab masses with the support of an international solidarity movement. Palestinians deserve more than a Bantustan.

[Nick Everett is a member of Friends of Palestine WA.]