Labor’s Recognition of Palestine Betrays Australian Women

When Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong announced that Australia now recognises a Palestinian state, they claimed it was a gesture for peace. In truth it was an act of moral collapse. They chose to recognise a state whose most powerful faction, Hamas, has just been named by the United Nations as a perpetrator of rape, gang rape, sexual torture and abuse of women held hostage.

The UN Secretary-General’s report confirmed what survivors and witnesses had been saying since the massacre of 7 October 2023. Sexual violence was not incidental. It was deliberate. It was systematic. It was used as a weapon of war. Hamas is now formally listed among the world’s worst perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence. That is the reality the Albanese government decided to ignore.

Labor’s defence will be that recognition is conditional, that Hamas must be removed from power. Yet conditions spoken in Canberra mean little when recognition is conferred while Hamas still rules Gaza. The world does not read fine print. Hamas does not read fine print. What they will hear is that Australia has joined the chorus of legitimacy.

Symbolism is everything in politics. And the symbolism here is devastating. At the very moment the UN names Hamas as rapists, Australia extends recognition to a Palestinian state under their grip. Albanese and Wong will say they were recognising the Palestinian people, not Hamas. But recognition delivered while Hamas remains in power amounts to the same thing. It is recognition with Hamas.

Consider the domestic context. Australian women are living through a reckoning over violence, assault and the treatment of survivors. This government has made women’s safety a central theme of its rhetoric. Wong and Albanese speak of zero tolerance for gender-based violence. Yet when faced with the most grotesque examples of sexual brutality in war, they chose politics over principle.

What message does that send to Australian women. That their government will not even hold the line against systematic rape when it is committed abroad. That their leaders will speak passionately about women’s dignity at home while handing international recognition to men who weaponise sexual mutilation. It is hypocrisy of the highest order.

For Jewish Australians the betrayal is even more acute. Recognition tells them their government is willing to overlook terror and to overlook the desecration of women’s bodies if the politics are convenient. It tells them that the rights of rapists to a state are given more weight than the rights of women to live free from violence.

The government will congratulate itself for joining Europe in this new consensus. But history will not forget the timing. Nor will Australian women.