TPAN

Recently many Western governments, including so-called Australia, announced their intention to recognise a “Palestinian state”. While some may view this as a positive step in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, we want to share our position. We believe this move is, at best, a distraction, and at worst, an obstacle to true liberation and self-determination for the Palestinian people.

Recognition without justice does not equal freedom. There is no peace on stolen land.

For decades, every version of a “Palestinian State” has emerged from a deeply flawed “peace process” – one brokered between Israel and its Western backers, and devoid of meaningful consultation with the Palestinian people. Each proposal has placed endless conditions on Palestinians, demanding that they compromise everything, while Israel, their occupier, compromises nothing.

What is being proposed now is no different. So-called statehood is only ever on Israeli and Western terms: a demilitarised territory with no genuine autonomy, no control of borders, water or airspace and with an antidemocratic imposition of leadership despite the will of the Palestinian people. A “state” made up only of the West Bank and Gaza would be fragmented and deliberately nonviable. Gaza remains an open-air prison under siege, while the West Bank is carved into dozens of isolated cantons by checkpoints, military zones and ever-expanding settlements. Palestinians cannot travel freely between Gaza and the West Bank, and even within the West Bank, movement is tightly controlled by Israel’s apartheid infrastructure of walls and settler-only roads. Crucially, no attention is paid to the millions of Palestinians living across the world and their ability to return to their homeland – because not every Palestinian is from the West Bank or Gaza. Any “state” built on these terms would look less like sovereignty and more like the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa – scattered, dependent, and permanently under Israeli control. In other words, a state in name only.

Even if sovereignty were granted in name, Israel has demonstrated time and again that it does not respect the sovereignty of its neighbours – from illegally annexing Syria’s Julaan (so-called “Golan Heights”) to repeated incursions into Lebanon, “pre-emptive” (i.e. unprovoked) missile strikes on Iran and Yemen. What would prevent continuous attacks on a demilitarised, fragmented Palestinian “state”, crippled by decades of dispossession and resource theft?

Speaking on his book Perfect Victims, Palestinian poet and writer Mohammed El-Kurd reminds us:

“Most of us are too busy surviving… to deliver a perfect script to a western audience. I wanted to write the book in a way that I believe the reader is already engaging with me in good faith…and I don’t have to start every sentence with a disclaimer…”

We share this refusal. We will not participate in tired, performative condemnations of Palestinian resistance groups, nor allow the one-sided framing of violence to obscure the reality of occupation and genocide. Palestinians are human beings, capable of the full breadth of human experience. They deserve the same dignity, rights and protections as anyone else. Palestinians deserve sovereignty, justice and self-determination. True self-determination.

This conversation is unfolding during a genocide in Gaza. The charge has been made at the world’s highest court. Leading genocide scholars and the world’s major human rights groups have confirmed it, even the Israeli ones. Aerial images reveal the devastation. Estimates place the death toll in the hundreds of thousands (1-2). In the West Bank, settler violence backed by the Israeli military terrorises, humiliates, maims and kills civilians daily, while the Knesset has recently approved thousands of new settler homes that will sever Palestinian access to and around Jerusalem.

The topic of so-called Palestinian statehood only arises when Western leaders are asked to take tangible action against Israel. Instead, Western governments wield Palestinian recognition as a “punishment” against Israel, as though basic human rights are conditional. This trivialises liberation, reducing it to a bargaining chip instead of a non-negotiable right.

How can a foreign government on the other side of the world presume to set conditions on another people’s freedom? To place conditions on Palestinian statehood is to strip away self-determination entirely and replace it with an empty shell designed to soothe Western consciences.

We must remember that Israel is a colonial project, created on the stolen land of Indigenous Palestinians.

In his August 2025 press release, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese proudly declared:

“Since 1947, Australia has supported Israel’s existence.”

Since 1947 – one year before the Nakba expelled 700,000 Palestinians from their homes – so-called Australia, itself a brutal settler colony, has supported the theft of Palestinian land and the legitimisation of this violent project. Just as the fiction of “terra nullius” was used to justify colonisation here, the fiction of “a land without a people for a people without a land” was used to justify colonisation in Palestine.

The two-state conversation assumes that Palestinians’ rights extend only to the 1967 borders. It erases any conversation of 1948, the Nakba, the right of return and reparations. Without these, two states becomes not a solution but a strategy for erasure. As Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu notes:

“The vast majority of Palestinians are not looking to have their own state, the vast majority are looking to have their rights enshrined and protected – and that has to be the starting point.”

In any case, the so-called two-state solution has already been destroyed by Israel itself through continued settlement expansion and illegal annexations in pursuit of a vision of “Greater Israel”. For decades, every “peace plan” has coincided with the building of more settlements, more walls and more settler-only roads that cut deeper into Palestinian land. Today, over 750,000 Israeli settlers live illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These settlements are not temporary outposts, they are sprawling towns with infrastructure, schools, highways and military protection, designed to be irreversible. Entire Palestinian communities have been displaced to make way for them. There is no longer any contiguous land left for a viable Palestinian state. Every new settlement is another nail in the coffin of the two-state illusion. To speak of two states in this context is not a plan for peace but a cover for apartheid – rewarding Israel’s violations of international law with impunity while Palestinians are left with shrinking, fragmented enclaves.

And we can’t believe we have to say this in 2025, but ethnostates are fundamentally unjust. For centuries, Palestinian Jews, Muslims and Christians lived side by side in Palestine. Only Zionism fractured this coexistence into apartheid. Anywhere else in the world, we condemn ethnostates. Why should we accept one here?

Justice does not look like partition and the two-state illusion leaves the core injustices untouched.

Justice looks like land back, the right of return, reparations, the same protections for all people, and a holistic redress for the generational inequalities suffered.

Recognition without these is purely symbolic – an empty gesture offering the appearance of progress without changing material conditions. We reject it. We stand with Palestinians in their demand for decolonisation, liberation and return.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

(1) Khatib et al, Lancet 2024

(2) Taylor L BMJ 2025