There is growing global sympathy – crucially, from ordinary people rather than governments – for the Palestinians and mounting criticism of the fundamental structures of apartheid Israel. It's a sense of isolation that has prompted Netanyahu to cross the planet to this mediocre middle power.

Israel was established in 1948 on the basis of driving 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. That Israeli land grab, begun much earlier by Zionist colonists, has continued ever since.

Palestinian citizens of Israel have a second-class status, with inferior civil rights, education, social security and access to jobs. Palestinians on the West Bank are under Israeli military control, as their land is whittled away by Israeli colonists. The Gaza Strip is an appalling prison, blockaded by Israel, where about 1.9 million Palestinians live on only 365 square kilometres.

There are about 10 million people in the Palestinian diaspora, prevented from living in and many even from visiting their homeland.

Whether Labor or the Coalition has been in office, Australian governments have been among the fiercest supporters of apartheid Israel since its creation. Unlike about 138 other countries, Australia has refused to recognise the Palestinian Authority as the government of a Palestinian state. Slavish backing of Israel is mainly a byproduct of the Australia-United States alliance, which has long benefited Australian capitalism.

There's a fight going on inside the Labor Party over the cosmetics of its position on Israel and Palestine. For the present, party leader Bill Shorten, who wants to shake the hand of Netanyahu, is sticking with the ALP's current policy.

In the Australian Parliament, the most hard-line supporter of Israel, including of its military aggression, is the Labor member for Melbourne Ports, Michael Danby. Danby thinks that recent legalisation of the theft of even more privately owned Palestinian land on the West Bank, by Israeli colonists, was a bad idea.

But he argues there is no reason to recognise a Palestinian state. For Danby and the Israeli authorities, the weaker the Palestinian Authority is, the better.

Some members of the Israeli government also dislike the new law. They are worried that it is too large and sudden a step. It might provoke a militant response from ordinary Palestinians and create further sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

Former Labor prime ministers Bob Hawke, a passionate "friend of Israel" for decades, and Kevin Rudd, along with former Labor foreign ministers Gareth Evans and Bob Carr, now think the Palestinian Authority should be recognised. They argue that the continued expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and the latest Israeli land grab run the risk of fatally puncturing the already dissolving illusion of a possible "two-state solution" to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Rudd is fearful of a third Intifada: another Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. Recognition, they hope, will be both a diplomatic finger slap, which prompts the Israeli government to wake up to its own interests, and add to the Palestinian Authority's credibility.

The illusion of the "two-state solution" was used to justify the authority's creation in 1994, as Israeli's outsourced police force to discipline the Palestinian people, and to urge it to make ever greater concessions to Israel's demands. Israel, and its backers such as Danby, attribute the lack of progress towards the establishment of a Palestinian state to the bad faith of the authority.

Yet, under the cover of the two-state illusion, the annexation of Palestinian land on the West Bank, all of it already entirely under Israeli military control, has not slowed but expanded.

Hawke writes that he supports both the Palestinian "aspiration to be fully free" and "the right of Israel to exist as a state behind secure and recognised borders". These are totally incompatible. While Israel exists, neither its second-class Palestinian citizens nor the Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza and the diaspora can have full civic rights, including to their land, let alone democratic control over their lives.

The squabble in the Labor Party over how to best back Israel is a response to the shift in attitudes to that apartheid state. Increased recognition of the repressive Palestinian Authority as a state is symbolic of this shift. But it won't satisfy Palestinians' aspirations for freedom.

Only a democratic state made up of all those now living in the borders of historic Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora can achieve that goal.

Dr Rick Kuhn is an honorary associate professor In sociology at the Australian National University, was a founder of Jews Against Occupation and Oppression, and co-wrote Labor's Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the Politics of Class. rick.kuhn@anu.edu.au