The international community, Israel’s security narrative and the two-state paradigm

by Ramona Wadi

A growing display of flowers and tributes is seen at a memorial outside the Bondi Pavilion, honoring the victims of a mass shooting attack that killed 15 people at Bondi Beach in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia on December 15, 2025. [Claudio Galdames Alarcon – Anadolu Agency]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might project being vindicated after the recent mass shooting at Bondi Beach, which claimed the lives of 15 Jewish people celebrating Hanukkah on Sunday. When Australia announced it would recognise a Palestinian state, Netanyahu wrote to Prime Minister Albanese stating that recognition furthers antisemitism and rewards Hamas terror. After the recent shooting, of course, Netanyahu found the perfect opportunity to rehash the conflated rhetoric. In a statement, Netanyahu called the Australian government weak. “You let the disease spread and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today.”

Albanese’s reply was simple – there is no link between Australia’s recognition of Palestine and the mass shooting at Bondi Beach. “Overwhelmingly, most of the world recognises a two-state solution as being the way forward in the Middle East,” he stated.

Of course, the two-state paradigm will not be the way forward in the Middle East – it is a way forward for Israel’s colonial expansion. But linking the Bondi Beach mass shooting to a symbolic recognition of a Palestinian is way beyond the confines of imagination for anyone in favour of conflating the definition of antisemitism.

Recognising a Palestinian state based on the two-state compromise automatically recognises Israel and its colonisation of Palestine. Netanyahu is missing the key point. Recognising a Palestinian state means endorsing the 1947 Partition Plan, which unjustly bequeathed more land to Zionist colonisers than to the indigenous Palestinian people. Symbolism is weaker than colonisation – in this case recognition of a Palestinian state is weaker than recognising Israel and allowing it to commit a colonial genocide in Gaza.

Netanyahu taking issue with Australia’s recent symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state – something other states politically aligned with Israel have already done – only shows increasing exploitation and manipulation of antisemitism. It is Netanyahu that requires antisemitism be constantly tied to Israel’s security narrative. Netanyahu keeps warning that attacks on Jewish people anywhere in the world would require Israel’s intervention which, by the way, is a threat against any country’s sovereignty. Not all Jews ascribe to Zionism, and neither do all Jews ascribe to a colonial enterprise in their name, or to genocide. The facts speak for themselves.

However, Netanyahu’s tirade against the Australian government can be read as a threat to all states endorsing the two-state compromise. There is no separating recognition of a Palestinian state from the two-state politics; indeed those that do not recognise a Palestinian state cannot really be advocates for the two-state implementation. Netanyahu’s warning to Albanese could have been sent to any government in whose territory attacks against Jewish people had taken place. With that single warning, Netanyahu is widening the parameters of who stands for Israel, and who stands against. Based on conflation, of course, but who in the international community is paying heed?

The international community equates the two-state with Israel’s survival, and it is right because the unjustness of the paradigm prevents decolonisation and Palestinian liberation from happening. But is the international community willing to change the emerging Zionist narrative that Netanyahu is promoting – that recognition of a Palestinian state, thus implying also that the two-state paradigm – encourages attacks on Jewish people? If the international community upholds Israel’s security narrative at all costs, it is going to face a hard time protecting Israeli colonialism and its own corrupted middle ground.