Former prime minister Bob Hawke has slammed Israel for its expansionist settlement policy and challenged the Turnbull government to grant diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine ahead of an historic visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mr Hawke is a long-time supporter of the state of Israel and its right to exist. But writing in today's The Australian Financial Review he is scathing of the Israeli parliament's decision to approve a law retroactively legalising 4000 settler homes built on privately-owned Palestinian land.
The aspirations of all those who had fought hard for peace in the Middle East are being "trashed by the inexorable expansion of Jewish settlement in the West Bank", he writes.
"Australia was there at the very beginning.
"The least we can do now, in these most challenging of times, is to do what 137 other nations have already done - grant diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine."
Mr Netanyahu is due in Australia next week. He is the first sitting Israeli prime minister to visit Australia since the state of Israel was proclaimed in 1948.
But first Mr Netanyahu is travelling to the White House to meet with Donald Trump, whose comments about the Middle East are said to have emboldened Israel's settlement building.
In contrast to the approach taken by Barack Obama, Mr Trump indicated he would ease pressure on Israel to limit settlements when he took office.
Australia has been a long-time friend to Israel. In the 1940s, then Australian foreign minister Doc Evatt strongly supported the campaign to create an independent Jewish nation-state.
"It was our great foreign minister, Dr Evatt who chaired the UN Special Committee on Palestine and it was the resolution of that committee which authorised the partition of the Palestine into two states," Mr Hawke writes.
"The aspirations of Evatt, the UN and the humanitarian foresight of Golda Meir have been trashed by the inexorable expansion of Jewish settlement in the West Bank – some 580,000 Israelis live in 123 government-authorised settlements and about 100 unauthorised outposts on the West Bank and 12 major neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem."
On December 23, the UN's Security Council adopted a resolution that the establishment of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 have "no legal validity," constitute a "flagrant violation" under international law and are a "major obstacle" to a two-state solution.
The provocative law to legalise Jewish settlements was passed by the Israeli parliament in early February.
