Kelly says no change to Labor’s support for Israel

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There is no change and there won’t be any change to Labor’s support for the continuing existence of the state of Israel, its right to exist, its right to exist in secure and stable borders says Labor MP for Eden-Monaro.

Mike Kelly

Mike Kelly was appearing on SKY News and answering questions about a proposed resolution which, if passed, will see NSW Labor  advocate the recognition of a Palestinian state.

Kelly said: “Our position is there will be a Palestinian state eventually – that’s the whole point about the two-state solution, so the question is what’s the best path towards that, and obviously there are going to have to be concessions made on both sides to get to that outcome.

I think people are sometimes unaware of the sort of things that have to be overcome on the Palestinian side as well.

There’s tremendous division between Hamas for the running of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian authority, very deep internal divisions there, and of course Hamas still maintains its position.

There are technical issues that would have to be worked through in relation to recognising the Palestinian state.

Under international law there are clear criteria that are established to be a state and one of those is to have a stable, unified government that can enter into binding agreements that bind the whole of your territory.

There’s a lot of things that still have to be worked through there on the Palestinian side to achieve that level of administrative capability, but certainly it’d be our ambition to really do what we can to contribute to working towards that, and the Labor Party was effectively the midwife to the two-state solution as Doc Evatt and Ben Chifley really navigated the partition plan through the UN back in 1947.

So we’ve had this position since day one. We’ll continue to pursue whatever we can do to achieve that two-state outcome.”