Self-Determination: For Them, Not for Us

Today I watched a clip of two non-Palestinians debate on Australian television whether recognising Palestine would be ‘rewarding terrorism.’ One accused all Palestinians of supporting terrorism. The other ‘defended’ us, but still spoke for us. They both compared how many Palestinians they ‘knew,’ as if our right to exist could be measured by a personal contact list rather than by our history. Yet neither thought to platform the very Palestinians they claimed to know. 

For decades, Palestinians have watched people speak for us and without us. Even when we are presented, our pain is met with invalidation or brief, token validation. We must pass through checkpoints, both physical and verbal, before we are deemed worthy enough to be spoken to, heard… and still, we are rarely truly listened to. We are pigeonholed, made to fit into neat tick boxes so the world can accept us as “legitimate” or human enough to air our plight. Every word we speak is policed; we are expected to condemn any form of resistance, even if we do not engage in it, simply to be allowed a seat at the table. Israelis, on the other hand, are rarely asked to condemn the occupation or the violence committed since the inception of their colonial state before they are allowed to speak.

This is not self-determination, it is the opposite and the hypocrisy is staggering.

When Zionist militias carried out bombings and massacres in the 1940s, the world did not respond with sanctions or demands for “good behaviour.” It rewarded them with a state, even after the following events:

• July 22, 1946: Irgun bombed the King David Hotel, killing 91.

• April 9, 1948: Irgun and Lehi massacred over 100 civilians in Deir Yassin.

• September 17, 1948: Lehi assassinated UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte.

These were not isolated acts, and to list all the atrocities committed against Palestinians people leading to Israel’s formation and the years following would take books to discuss. However, these three events were part of the coordinated campaign to depopulate Palestine and seize territory.

The reward for this terrorism was swift. In 1947, the UN Partition Plan handed over more than half of Palestine to a settler minority owning under 7% of the land. By 1949, over 750,000 Palestinians had been expelled during the Nakba.

Our right to our homeland and the right to return to it has never been treated with the same urgency or legitimacy. We are told to “prove” ourselves, behave well under siege, endure occupation politely before being considered. And when recognition is offered, it comes shackled to conditions that entrench our subjugation. The 1967 borders saw no meaningful right of return, no control over airspace or borders, sovereignty under foreign oversight. Attempts to normalise and legitimise our occupier and deny our existence and trauma are a long legacy. 

When Israel was forged through massacres, bombings, and public killings, in acts that forced hundreds of thousands from their homes, the world never demanded conditional compliance. It gave legitimacy. Citizenship. Sovereignty. No questions asked.

But for us, besieged as natives of the land, recognition is dangling on a leash. You are required to dismantle your defenses. You expel your own. You deliver power to institutions that operate under international scrutiny. You accept borders carved by others. You must accept governments that we deem worthy for you. Only then the world might consider acknowledging your right to exist.

Somehow, despite everything Israel has done to Palestinians since — occupation, siege, illegal settlements, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and now an escalation of a 80 year genocide livestreamed in real time- Israel’s existence is never subject to “conditions.” No one tells Israel it must “behave” for existence. No one demands it disarm or dismantle its military and ethnocracy and apartheid regime before enjoying sovereignty. Once again, it is the victims who are told to kowtow to their oppressors.

Here in Australia, the same colonial support is playing out. Prime Minister Albanese has announced that Australia will formally recognise a Palestinian state at the UN in September, aligning with countries like France, Canada, and the UK who maintain alliance with Israel. Prime Minister Albanese frames it as part of a “two-state solution” and peace. But this “recognition” comes with conditions effectively deciding, once again, what Palestinian leadership and terms of freedom should be.

Prime Minister Albanese’s “recognition” would grant Palestinians borders based on the 1967 lines, without the right of return for our refugees from areas Israel built itself upon, without control over our own airspace or resources, and with sovereignty supervised by external powers. This is not independence…it is dependency dressed as diplomacy. Australia is not recognising Palestinians as a people with the right to decide their own governance: It is saying: you can have recognition while they still kill your people daily; only if you choose leaders and policies we approve of. Once again, choices are made for Palestinians without Palestinians.

Meanwhile, the Coalition Government has already vowed to revoke recognition if elected. Because recognition is conditional, it can be revoked or withheld depending on political winds. Hence Palestinian recognition is dangled as a revocable “favour” dependent not on international law or justice, but on which party holds office. That is the opposite of secure sovereignty.

This dehumanising farce has also reduced Palestinian statehood to a political football-to borrow from Prime Minister Albanese’s own reductionist framing. It is as if genocide is merely two equal sides competing for a goal, rather than the most heavily funded military power seeking to erase a people physically divided who have no official army, trying to survive and resist erasure. It entrenches the very logic of colonialism: you may exist, but only if you exist on our terms. It demands that Palestinians abandon all forms of resistance while refusing to demand that Israel abandon occupation. It frames Palestinians as the obstacle to peace, while the coloniser is rewarded legitimacy to act with impunity. .

Perhaps that is the bitterest irony: while they debate whether to “recognise” us, they are already recognising us, as our people are being tortured, starved and killed. They know we exist because they can see our bodies under the rubble, our names in the casualty lists, our children in shrouds. Both major Parties would much rather debate about voting to recognise our people before stopping funding and armed components sales to an ongoing genocide. The audacity remains that while Gaza is being starved, bombed, and flattened before the world’s eyes, the focus shifts to whether its victims can “behave” in ways acceptable to their oppressors. We are told to bow, to comply, to make ourselves palatable before the world will acknowledge our humanity.

This approach flips the principle of self-determination entirely on its head, because the colonised are being told they can only be “free” if they adopt the political structure and ideology dictated by the coloniser or their allies. It tells Palestinians: you may exist, but only under a governance structure we approve of, while your coloniser still occupies, besieges, and kills with impunity. It mirrors the old imperial model in which the colonised were allowed partial “self-rule” only if they adopted the ideology and leadership structures of their occupiers. 

Israel, on the other hand, faces no preconditions for its recognition or UN membership, despite decades of occupation, illegal settlements, and repeated violations of international law. From the Balfour Declaration to the UN Partition Plan, Palestinians have repeatedly had their future drawn up in foreign capitals without our permission.

This is not self-determination…it is colonial management.

***

In Australia:

• The land was taken without treaty or consent.

• Resistance was met with massacres and criminalisation.

• The narrative was rewritten so that colonisation became a “civilising” mission.

• Today, place names are restored and ceremonies are performed, but political power remains firmly in colonial hands with many attempts to dictate self-determination for the indigenous population.

** continues below

In Palestine:

• The land continues to be taken, piece by piece.

• Resistance, even if symbolic, assumed or non-violent is met with assassinations, imprisonment, and military force.

• The narrative is rewritten so that the coloniser is the victim and the native the aggressor.

• Today and historically “recognition” is offered only under the coloniser’s terms, without sovereignty, without control over borders, airspace, or resources.

  ***

From a decolonial and intersectional lens, settler-colonial states rarely grasp the meaning of self-determination for the colonised; because their very existence depends on denying it. Colonial logic is consistent across continents: it grants recognition to the coloniser without condition, while demanding recognition for the colonised only on the coloniser’s terms. Those with colonial histories rarely understand what self-determination or reparation truly entails.

The Lakota and Navajo of North America, the Sámi of Scandinavia, the Kanaka Maoli of Hawai‘i, and the Māori of Aotearoa all know this pattern like Palestinians. Symbolic gestures are offered while land remains stolen and sovereignty is redefined by those who took it away. Their sacred sites are mined or desecrated, rivers are poisoned, and animals and plants are killed or tightly regulated in the name of “conservation.” Their youth are incarcerated, women go missing, children are taken for ‘safety’ and placed amongst culturally different strangers, and men are buried in prisons. Entire communities are left carrying the weight of health disparities, discrimination, and generational trauma, forced to work in systems that were never built for them. Anger is criminalised, often recast into inappropriate outlets of domestic violence and crime blamed on culture, while trauma is pathologised but never healed and passed on. The toll is measured in missing people, broken families, and premature deaths from neglect, despair, and state violence alike. What ties these stories together is not coincidence but the logic of colonisation itself. Indigenous and displaced nations are told to reconcile with the very states that displaced them, and to “move forward” in frameworks designed by the occupier.

To be clear, I do not speak for First Nations people here in Australia or globally. Their voices stand in their own right, and they do not need me to represent them. They have their own truth, their own fight, and their voices are powerful and should be centered and heard. I stand beside, not in place of, their struggle. Acknowledging this I am aiming to highlight the shared structures of colonial power that binds our peoples struggles together, drawing on parallels both abroad and in Australia.

Australia, like the Americas, is the so-called “success story” of colonisation: total control of the land, marginalisation of the native people, and a rewritten history to make conquest seem inevitable. Israel is simply attempting to replicate that model while the world looks away. Here, colonisation is framed as history, yet for First Nations peoples it remains a living reality. For Palestine, the aims and goal for a completed colonisation is also actively unfolding in real time.In Palestine, the conquest is not a chapter in a history book it is a live feed. It is daily. It is active. Like many Indigenous peoples, we are not approached as people with inalienable rights. We are treated as bargaining chips. Our grief becomes a talking point. Our survival is reduced to a clause in someone else’s diplomatic agreement.

In Australia, that logic was codified in terra nullius the myth that this continent was “land without a people.” Israel’s founding myth was nearly identical: “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Both rely on erasure. Both depend on cognitive dissonance the ability to build national identity on the denial of another’s existence, hoping that over time the memory of that people’s suffering will fade from living history. These myths are not incidental; they are the architecture of dispossession. They allow a coloniser to move forward without looking back, to build their society on the ruins of another’s, leaving behind a trail of intergenerational trauma they hope will fade from living memory.

First Nations people in Australia are offered “acknowledgement” without sovereignty. Even a Welcome to Country or the restoration of Indigenous place names provokes outrage because it unsettles a national story built on erasure. You can rename Brisbane to Meanjin, deliver an Acknowledgement of Country, restore Indigenous place names and still live in a country built on the dispossession of its First Peoples. Australia’s treatment of First Nations mirrors this logic: symbolic recognition without sovereignty. Gestures that soothe the conscience of the powerful while leaving the structures of a system of domination untouched. In both Australia and Palestine, the coloniser and their normalisers still decide when and how the colonised may be “recognised,” and even dictate the terms of reparations whether through a referendum or imposed conditions without ever truly listening to them.

And forgetting is selective. The pain and struggle of the coloniser, the major loss events that shaped their story, are treated as the only narrative. Meanwhile, the pain of the colonised is expected to be buried, dismissed, and overwritten until one day, they hope, it is no longer spoken of at all. This selective memory is not accidental. It reveals the deeper pattern: the coloniser dictates the terms of remembrance, while demanding that the colonised accept silence.

Those with unrealised colonial histories rarely understand what self-determination truly means yet they do understand the gravity of recognition when it comes to their own loss and pain. In the Australian context, the loss of soldiers a century ago is preserved in national ritual. I do not disrespect this loss or the right to mourn. However, there is a parallel when it comes to the First Peoples of this land. The same nation that demands solemn remembrance tells them to “move on.” This is the hypocrisy of the settler state: memorialising its own pain while silencing the grief of those it colonises. Telling the colonised to “get over it, it happened x years ago,” as though their trauma is illegitimate.

This is not simply hypocrisy; it is cognitive dissonance born of shame and discomfort. Hence the problem is that for settler nations, recognition and self-determination are imagined as rights that belong only to them, even with the pain of collective loss and trauma. Because remembrance is permitted only for the coloniser, not the colonised, it is a silent message that pain is only sacred for the coloniser and is disposable with an “expiry date” for the colonised.

This is why conditional recognition is a problem. It reveals the colonial logic of inversion, where the oppressed are painted as aggressors and the coloniser as the eternal victim. The only valid narrative is one written by the conqueror. It explains why colonial societies cannot currently bear the mirror Palestinians hold up to them. It is also why they aim to avoid any real decolonial approach, as they have yet to do the work required to support the self-determination of Indigenous peoples on the lands they themselves colonised.

The reality is self-determination is not subject to the approval of those who benefit from one’s subjugation. It is the right of every people to shape their own future, free from external colonial domination. And until Palestinians and all Indigenous people can speak for ourselves without being spoken for, the global conversation to discuss our people will remain hypocrisy dressed as principle. Self-determination continues to be treated as a gift for the coloniser to grant dishonestly, but never as a right for colonised peoples to claim justly and with dignity.