Until now there was not a lot to say, good or bad, about Anthony Albanese as Prime Minister. From a local, let alone global standpoint, he has been a grey blur. He fit perfectly the role of inoffensive – if nondescript – leader of a mid-sized Western nation. No invitation to the White House? Perhaps retaining Trump-hating Kevin Rudd as our ambassador irked the Trump administration. Perhaps not. Few seemed to know or care. And then our Anthony decided to recognise the existence of the non-existent state of Arab Palestine. Albanese, all of a sudden, was a pin-up boy for Hamas, more formally the Islamic Resistance Movement.

To be fair, Albanese insists that the praise he received from the Hamas death-cult is fabricated. Here, in any case, is the purported commendation by Hamas’ co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef: ‘We welcome Australia’s decision to recognise the state of Palestine, and consider it an important step towards achieving justice for our people and their legitimate rights. This position reflects political courage and commitment to the values of justice and the right of people to self-determination.’ A different Hamas spokesman, aware that a radical Islamic terrorist endorsing an Australian prime minister might be counterproductive, declared the sheikh’s commendation bogus. After all, Hassan Yousef is imprisoned in an Israeli jail and not, apparently, in a position to communicate with the world.

Here’s the problem. Albanese warns us to be wary of ‘fake’ Hamas propaganda while claiming the second corrective Hamas communique is genuine. But is it? Are any of the claims disseminated by Hamas and the Gazan Health Authority, not to mention the Al Jazeera network, genuine? Another problem is Albanese’s insistence that Hamas – which he disavows – and the Palestinian Liberation Organization/Palestinian Austhority (PLO/PA) – which he purports to trust – hold fundamentally different attitudes about a ‘two-state solution’. Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of Fatah and president of the PA, recently assured Albanese that a PA-run ‘state of Palestine’ would recognise ‘Israel’s right to exist’. History tells a different story.

Rejectionist Arab anti-Zionism comes in three flavours: Muslim Brotherhood types (such as Hamas) who view the existence of a Jewish state on the sacred territory of Dar al-Islam as a religious abomination; secular Arab nationalists (such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) who view Jews as the ruling class and Arabs as the proletariat; and Fatah, a hybrid of religious and secular rejectionism. For instance, Fatah propagandists maintain the great lie, going back to Amin al-Husseini in the 1920s and championed by Yasser Arafat at the Camp David in 2000, that Solomon’s Temple, the most sacred place in Jewish tradition, was not in Jerusalem but Nablus. Temple denial is something more menacing than a straightforward territorial dispute.

While all the Arab rejectionists, whether Fatah or Hamas, hate each other, the negative cohesion that binds them together is the unholy trinity of antisemitism, anti-Zionism and Israelophobia. The one thing they agree upon is a refutation of UN Resolution 181, the Partition Resolution of 1947. Were they to accede to this declaration, their proposed state of Arab Palestine would automatically become international law. No intercessions by Anthony Albanese or Emmanuel Macron required. So why does Abbas refuse to acknowledge Resolution 181? Because it would bestow legitimacy on a Jewish Palestinian state, since 14 May 1948, known as Israel.

But even if the PLO/PA were granted full sovereignty in the West Bank, and even if they chose not to wage war on Israel, how long could Fatah’s corrupt and unpopular cadres – now propped up by the Israel Defense Forces – hold out against a Hamas takeover? Abbas’ promise to Albanese that Hamas would have ‘no role’ in the new state is risible. Two years after Israel granted Gaza autonomy to the PA in 2005, Hamas seized all PA government institutions and replaced PA officials with their own operatives. Military tunnels, poverty, rockets, tyranny and genocidal anti-Zionism is the likely destiny of any future ‘state of Palestine’.

There is one sense, however, in which Albanese is right – the status quo in ‘the territories’, taken by Israel back in the 1967 Six-Day War, cannot be maintained indefinitely. The power of veto exercised by Arab rejectionists, be they Hamas or Fatah, must be bypassed. This, of course, explains the success of the Abraham Accords: Arab nations accepting the reality and opportunity of living alongside a Jewish state. It is a similar case of acceptance for the vast majority of Arabs who are Israeli citizens enjoying full democratic and legal rights. One explanation for the timing of Hamas’ barbaric Operation al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, 2023, was thwarting Saudi Arabia’s imminent membership of the Abraham Accords – a transformative shift towards Israeli-Arab accord.

Anthony Albanese is a useful infidel because he has failed to understand that Arab rejectionism today is less about a territorial dispute than the apocalyptic millenarianism of radical Islam. Were it not for the intransigence of Fatah and Hamas, and their antecedents in Al-Hussein’s Arab Higher Committee, the inhabitants of Gaza and the Arab towns in the West Bank would be further along the path to peaceful co-existence by now.

Promisingly, five sheiks belonging to the major clans of Hebron – the largest Arab city in the West Bank and located south of Jerusalem – recently wrote to Netanyahu asserting that if permitted to break from the PA they would create ‘the Emirate of Hebron’, formally recognise Israel as ‘the nation state of the Jewish people’ and sign up to the Abraham Accords. There are similar rumblings in Gaza. Expect Fatah and Hamas, and their Marxist-Islamist apologists in the West, to do everything in their power to throttle genuine Palestinian self-determination.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described Albanese’s plan to recognise the phantom state of Palestine at the UN General Assembly as ‘meaningless’. This is, perhaps, the kindest way to put it. A more critical view might frame it as a continuation of the Voice fiasco in which Albanese attempted to foist on Australia the recognition of a different kind of phantom state. As Campbell Newman recently remarked about Albanese’s lack of leadership on defence matters, do the politics of this erstwhile ‘left-wing student radical’ still inform his thinking? Perhaps the ‘grey blur’ that is his prime ministership has been a ruse all along.