Australia backs UN resolution to grant Palestine full member status

Australia has backed a United Nations General Assembly resolution that would grant Palestine full member status, breaking with the US in a move that is likely to infuriate the Jewish community.

In a sign of Israel’s growing isolation internationally as the war in Gaza approaches its eighth month, the UN General Assembly voted by 143 to 9, with 25 countries abstaining, to make Palestine the 194th full member of the UN, a largely symbolic move almost certain to be blocked in the Security Council where the US wields a veto.

Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations James Larsen said Canberra had been “frustrated” by a “lack of progress” and wanted to signal “unwavering support for the two-state solution of Israel and Palestine living side-by-side in peace and security within recognised borders”.

“There is a role for the international community to build momentum, set expectations that parties resume negotiations for tangible progress and to support efforts for a political process. Australia no longer accepts that recognition can only come at the end of the peace process”.

“Australia has long believed a two-state solution offers the only hope for breaking the endless cycle of violence and achieving lasting peace,” he added.

The US voted against the measure along with Israel, Hungary, Argentina, Czechia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guines and Palau. Canada and the UK abstained.

The US had already vetoed a similar measure to grant Palestine, which since 2012 has been recognised as an ‘observer state’ by the UN, statehood on 18th April.

US deputy ambassador Robert Wood said the US backed a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine but the time wasn’t right. “It remains the US view that unilateral measures at the UN and on the ground will not advance this goal,” he said.

“Our vote does not reflect opposition to Palestinian statehood. We’ve been very clear that we support it and seek to advance it meaningfully. Instead, it is an acknowledgment that statehood will come only from a process that involves direct negotiations between the parties,” he added.

The vote came against a backdrop of a growing rift between the US and Israel over Jerusalem’s attack on Rafah in southern Gaza, which the Biden administration has argued risked killing too many civilians, threatening to block future weapons shipments to Israel.

President Joe Biden delivered a rare rebuke to Israel in an interview on CNN earlier this week, declaring a full-scale invasion of Rafah would cross a US ‘red line’ that would jeopardise the transfer of certain artillery shells and bombs to Israel.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong had not earlier revealed how Australia would vote. “I understand in this debate that people have such strong views on both sides, that any action or words by government is construed as either being at one end or the other of this debate,” she said.

The vote occurred Friday morning (Saturday AEST) local time in New York and the debate is expected to taken up again on Monday, given the lengthy list of speakers.

In dramatic scenes a furious Israeli ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan put a copy of the UN charter into a paper shredder while holding up a photograph of Hamas’s leader Yahya Sinwar with the word ‘president’.

“You are shredding the UN charter with your own hands … That’s what you’re doing, shredding the UN charter. Shame on you,” he told the chamber, adding the US would be letting a “terror state … into its ranks” that would be led by the “Hitler of our times”.

He accused UN member nations of not mentioning Hamas’ October 7th attack in southern Israel, which killed 1,200 people, and seeking “to reward modern-day Nazis with rights and privileges.”
“You are shredding the UN charter” says Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan. Picture: AP
The ambassador said if an election were held today, Hamas would win, warning members were “about to grant privileges and rights to the future terror state of Hamas.”

Under the UN Charter, prospective members of the United Nations must be “peace-loving” and the Security Council must recommend their admission to the General Assembly for final approval. Palestine became a U.N. non-member observer state in 2012.

The vote reflected the wide global support for full membership of Palestine in the UN as many countries have expressed outrage at the escalating death toll in Gaza, which Palestinian authorities put at over 34,00, and fears of a major Israeli offensive in Rafah, a southern city where about 1.3 million Palestinians have sought refuge

The renewed push for full Palestinian membership in the UN comes as the war in Gaza has put the more than 75-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict at centre stage.

Before the vote, Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN Ambassador, told the assembly in an emotional speech that “no words can capture what such loss and trauma signifies for Palestinians, their families, communities and for our national as a whole.”
Motion ‘counterproductive to peace’

On Friday, Jewish groups labelled the motion “counter-productive to peace”.

“It rewards Hamas violence and removes any incentive for the Palestinian Authority to implement the vital reforms required to prevent Palestine, once it emerges, from being a corrupt terrorist state,” Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler said.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry wrote in a letter to Foreign Minister Penny Wong this week that “voting to admit Palestine as a full member when no functioning state exists is inconsistent with the past practice of Australian governments concerning the criteria for recognition”.

Senator Wong is understood to have had a phone call on ­Monday night with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa to discuss Palestinian statehood.

“Countries are still negotiating … there is a lot of discussion,” Senator Wong said on Friday.

“We will look at what the actual meaning (of) the resolution is,” she added.

“We are focused on the situation on the ground, we want a ­humanitarian ceasefire, we want the release of hostages, we want to increase humanitarian aid.”

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham warned that upgrading Palestine’s status at the UN created “an incentive for Hamas and others to see that they get what they want through terrorism rather than negotiation”.

“(This) would be the world’s worst signal that you could possibly send out of a vote like this,” he told Sky News.

The vote is due to come down in the early hours of Saturday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time.

The UN action comes as Israel launched fresh strikes in the Gaza Strip on Friday after negotiators who had been pursuing a long-stalled truce deal left talks in Cairo without having secured a deal.

Artillery salvos hit Rafah on the territory’s southern border with Egypt, while airstrikes and fighting was reported in Gaza City further north.

Israeli and Hamas negotiating teams left Cairo overnight on Thursday after what the Egyptian hosts described as a “two-day round” of indirect negotiations on the terms of a Gaza truce, according to Egyptian intelligence-linked Al-Qahera News.

Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip and whose unprecedented October 7 attacks on Israel sparked the war, said its delegation had left for Qatar, home to the Palestinian militant group’s political leadership. It said after submitting its ceasefire plan on Monday, the “ball was now completely in the hands” of Israel.

With AP