Australia and Palestine have a history to be recovered - ABC Religion & Ethics - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

A year ago, on 21 September 2025, Australia formally recognised the independent and sovereign State of Palestine. Foreign Minister Penny Wong said the practical steps of recognition would include updating government documents, websites and systems so that the name “Palestine” would appear in them. It may have seemed like a new chapter, but it also brought back a name that had long been present in Australia’s historical record.

Behind recognition lies a much older Australian history with Palestine, spread across archives, maps, films, sport and diplomatic records, without often being seen as one connected story.

In 1944, an exhibition was opened inside the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, with a simple and unmistakable name: “Palestine Gallery”.

The Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. (Neon Wang: Unsplash)

On 22 July 1939, only months before the outbreak of the Second World War, the touring Palestine soccer team played Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Around 3,600 people attended the match. During its tour, the team played twelve matches in total, including five against the Australian national side. The name “Palestine” was evidently familiar enough to appear in the title of an international football match at one of Australia’s best-known sporting grounds.

Three years later, this name appeared again, this time on a beach in Gaza. In July 1942, Australian Army Amenities organised swimming and surf lifesaving competitions at Gaza Beach. The photographs show races, rescue teams, swimming and resuscitation contests, all under the heading: “Gaza Beach, Palestine”. In a country where surf lifesaving is part of the national culture, those images show Gaza in a very different way: a coastal city, a beach and the enjoyments of everyday life, not simply a war-torn landscape where everyday life has been reduced to rubble.

After the Second World War, Palestine became a focus of Australia’s diplomatic work at the highest level. In September 1947, Australian foreign minister H V “Doc” Evatt was elected chair of the United Nations’ Ad-Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question, which was charged with developing the partition plan.

Herbert Vere “Doc” Evatt led the UN’s Ad-Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question at the time of the partition. (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: UN Photo / McLain)

Australia’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state in 2025, therefore, did not come from nowhere. It was preceded by a long relationship with Palestine — from sport and archives to international diplomacy.

But that history has remained fragmented. This was not simply a case of accidental forgetting. The displacement of Palestinians and the reshaping of the land after 1948, followed by the continuing Israeli occupation, also contributed to the weakening of Palestine’s presence as a connected society with a distinct history in the public imagination. After all, memory is shaped not only by what is preserved, but by what is repeated until it becomes all too familiar.

This is where I believe the work of Patrick Wolfe is useful. He described settler colonialism as an enduring structure, linking it to what he calls the “logic of elimination”. That logic does not require every trace to disappear. A map, a photograph or a name can remain while the connection between a place and its people becomes weaker. The presence of some people comes to seem natural, while the presence of others appears to need constant explanation.

After the Nakba in 1948, leading to the mass displacement of Palestinians, the loss was not only physical. Many Palestinian villages were destroyed or emptied, names were changed, and communities were cut off from the places where they had lived. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has described the Nakba as “ethnic cleansing”. Memory changed with geography. Which names remain? Which maps become the reference point? Who is seen as a natural continuation of the place? In this way, the logic of elimination extended from the land to names and memory.

Bethlehem is a living Palestinian city, with Christian and Muslim communities, markets, schools, crafts and long-standing connections with the wider world. (Jonas Brief: Unsplash)

Today, Palestine is highly visible in the news, but often through the lenses of war, siege, settlements, displacement and political conflict. It is highly visible as an issue, but far less visible as a society, a culture, a history.

Bethlehem is an obvious example. Every year, millions of people watch Christmas celebrations and know the name through its association with the birth of Jesus. Yet most may not immediately connect the Bethlehem they know from the Nativity with contemporary Palestine. The place is known and the history is known, but their connection to Palestine itself often goes unnoticed. Bethlehem is a living Palestinian city, with Christian and Muslim communities, markets, schools, crafts and long-standing connections with the wider world. The Church of the Nativity and the Pilgrimage Route are listed as World Heritage sites in the State of Palestine.

The same is true of Jerusalem. It is not only a question of sovereignty. It is a sacred city for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as a city of neighbourhoods, markets, schools, families and social life built over centuries. Jericho takes us back to some of the earliest periods of permanent human settlement, while Gaza has a long history as a coastal city shaped by trade, fishing, education and culture.

Palestine also produced Edward Said, whose work has shaped the way we think about culture, power and representation; Mahmoud Darwish, who carried home, exile and memory into world poetry; and Mu’in Bseiso, the son of Gaza, who carried his city into poetry and theatre. The question, then, is not simply whether Palestinians are visible, but how they are made visible. One dominant image can reduce an entire society to war, exile and conflict.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), a Palestinian, poet, writer and novelist, in 2005. (Photo by Leonardo Cendamo / Getty Images)

There is another part of Palestinian history that matters here. In the late Ottoman period, Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in Palestinian cities, neighbourhoods and marketplaces with overlapping everyday relationships. Israeli historian Menachem Klein has written about dense and repeated Arab-Jewish interactions in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron before communal boundaries hardened in later decades, at a time when large parts of Europe were rife with antisemitism and persecution of Jews.

That history does not offer a ready-made political formula. But it challenges the idea that the land can only hold one national or religious community, and reminds us that the logic of elimination can narrow not only our relationship to the past, but also our ability to imagine a shared future.

Recovering this history is, therefore, not only about the past. Australia’s recognition came officially within a two-state framework. But it raises a question that goes beyond recognition itself: how does recognition of the Palestinian right to statehood and self-determination become real while the Israeli occupation continues?

The two-state solution remains Australia’s official position. But recognition can also open a wider discussion about other possible futures — from confederation to a single democratic state across historic Palestine based on equal political and civil rights. If coexistence was not always impossible, then it is legitimate to ask whether a future can be imagined in which one land does not mean domination by one people, but equality among those who live there.

This brings us to Palestinian refugees and the right of return. Return is tied to who belongs to the place, who can return to it and who holds the right to citizenship. Recognition can also create space to discuss return, compensation, ending the Israeli occupation and equal rights, without making the rights of one people depend on the denial of another.

Perhaps this is where recognition takes on a deeper meaning: not only that the words “State of Palestine” appear in an Australian government document, but that the name is reconnected with the history of the place and the society behind it.

In 1939, Palestine was on the field at the Sydney Cricket Ground. In 1942, it was written across photographs from Gaza Beach. In 1944, there was a Palestine Gallery in Canberra. In 1947, Palestine was at the centre of Australian diplomacy at the United Nations. And in 2025, Australia formally recognised the State of Palestine.

These moments reveal a long history that remained more visible in the archive than as a single story in public memory. One of the possibilities opened by recognition is to reconnect the name with the place, the place with its people, and the archive with the present.

Shamikh Badra is a Palestinian-Australian researcher, human rights advocate and community organiser from Gaza. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong, researching Palestinian diplomatic resistance. He is a co-founder of Gaza Nippers Project and is active in Palestinian advocacy, anti-racism and grassroots community organising in Australia.