On Wednesday, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong was questioned by Senator James Paterson about Australia's decision last year to recognize a Palestinian state. It is worth watching.
Australia had justified recognition partly on promises by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to hold elections and reform Palestinian governance, education and finances. Clearly that hasn't happened, and for anyone who actually has watched the Palestinian Authority for the past two decades knows, it is never going to happen.
Paterson asked a simple question: if Abbas failed to keep those promises, would Australia withdraw its recognition?
Wong's answer was an unequivocal "no."
As Paterson pointed out, that meant these were not really preconditions at all. Australia had already given the Palestinian Authority what it wanted, and there was no prospect of taking it back if the promised reforms never happened.
Wong defended her self, saying recognition is "a contribution to peace in the Middle East… there is no peace without two states."
Rarely has the stupidity of the Western world post-Oslo been shown in such a pure form.
The Oslo Accords of the 1990s were based on a process. Israelis and Palestinians would make reciprocal commitments, establish institutions, assume responsibilities and negotiate outstanding issues over time. Every stage was a test for both sides to see if they can trust the other side for the next stage.
To be sure, it was a deeply flawed process, as we saw at the end of it. But it recognized something important: peace required changes in behavior, not merely diplomatic declarations.
Palestinian statehood was widely envisioned as a possible outcome of a successful peace process, although the original agreements left the final political arrangement to negotiations.
Today, much of Western diplomacy has effectively reversed that logic. A Palestinian state is no longer treated as something that should emerge from a peace agreement. Instead, recognizing Palestinian statehood is presented as a necessary step toward peace.
The outcome has become a premise.
Australia's September 2025 recognition announcement declared that the two-state solution "has always been the only path to enduring peace and security." Canada and Britain have made similar statements. France recognized Palestine in September 2025 as part of its effort to preserve a two-state future.
A "peace process" means that peace might be achieved through a negotiated process culminating in two states living alongside one another. Now the process is bypassed, the Palestinians rewarded with recognition of a state ahead of time, and then in some magic way peace will result.
It isn't only Australia. In July 2025, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that recognition would be predicated on Palestinian Authority commitments to governance reform, elections in 2026 and demilitarization. And then Canada recognized Palestine in September, before those commitments had been fulfilled.
France likewise recognized Palestine based partly on Abbas's promises to reform governance, combat hate speech and exclude Hamas from government.
Britain recognized Palestine while insisting that Hamas must have no future role in governing Gaza and that the Palestinian Authority needed reform.
Then, on October 13, 2026, Australia, Canada, France and Britain issued a joint statement expressing their deep regret that Abbas had postponed Palestinian presidential and legislative elections until September 2027. Their response was to call on Abbas to reconsider.
That's it.
Because for them, two states is no longer a logical necessity. It has become a religion that does not require evidence, just faith.
And recognition of the "State of Palestine" without any requirements besides words gives the Palestinians incentive not for peace, but for blatantly lying to the West. An empty promise becomes a substitute for performance.
Then there is the next question that the clueless Western leaders never ask: What happens if a Palestinian state is established and the conflict continues? We know the answer: they will blame Israel.
But again, they are ignoring history. The PLO's 1974 phased strategy explicitly contemplated establishing Palestinian authority over whatever territory could be obtained while continuing the struggle toward its larger objectives, to destroy the Jewish state completely.
There is nothing that Abbas has done that is incompatible with the 1974 phased plan. And there is no evidence that Palestinian statehood side by side with Israel has ever been conceived by Palestinian leaders as the endpoint of the conflict. Their insistence on the "right to return" by Palestinians to Israel itself makes this blindingly obvious: when building a state, who wants their potential citizens to move to their enemy?
Instead of providing incentives, disincentives, partial concessions and all the other tools of diplomacy that are used in every other conflict, the international community declares the end state to be the start and demands that Israel trust them when they say things will be better. They say with great certainty that there are great dangers of not establishing a Palestinian state and not even considering the dangers of establishing one.
October 7 should have shown the West that it is a fatal mistake to assume that its ideas of what Palestinians want coincide with what the Palestinians really want. Even Israel fell for the "concept" that Hamas cared more about the wellbeing of its people than about trying to destroy Israel. Western powers are making the same assumption about the corrupt, autocratic Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, not bothering to read their newspapers, watch their media, look at their school curricula, or even follow the statements of the government in Arabic, assuming that their self-interest is the same as what the Westerners are convinced it is.
Lately I've been spending time on the epistemology of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. This is an additional epistemological problem: how governments decide what they know and what evidence they require before acting.
There is a big difference between believing a theory that two states could eventually provide the basis for peace and asserting that two states are the only possible route to peace. The first requires testing the belief; the second requires making decisions as though this proposition had already been demonstrated.
And like anti-Zionist epistemology, there is no falsifiability. An intifada is evidence that there must be a Palestinian state. Rockets from Gaza are evidence that a two state solution is necessary. October 7 massacres and their near universal support among Palestinians are yet more evidence that Israel must be pressured more. There is literally nothing Palestinians can do to convince these clueless Western countries that they do not deserve their own state with their own security control and their own army.
Such a state has zero safeguards against becoming controlled by terrorist groups and inviting Iran to be their senior partner. Why wouldn't Hamas win the elections that were solemnly promised?
Bur the "experts" know better. A Palestinian state is the only pathway to peace. Evidence be damned; process is not necessary, their epistemology doesn't allow them to think any other way.
It is a religion, not an analysis.
Penny Wong showed what substituting belief for thinking looks like.