Last week, I appeared at the royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion to defend the Palestine solidarity movement against the slanders of the Australian political establishment and an organised and ideologically hardened bloc of pro-Israel students and staff.
I did so because our movement has been the only decent human response to the barbarism being carried out by Israel in Gaza. I wanted to defend the 300,000 people who marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the tens of thousands of students who rallied, camped and organised on campuses around the country, and the millions internationally who have refused to stay silent while Palestinians endure genocide.
During the commission, witnesses—almost invariably supporters of Israel—have downplayed the scale of death in Gaza, suggested that Palestinian flags, keffiyehs and even Arabic script constitute antisemitism, and repeatedly blurred distinctions between Jewish identity, political Zionism and the actions of the Israeli state.
The Herald Sun and the Australian newspapers, among others, have uncritically reported the testimonies of the pro-Israel bloc, while repeating their lies and slanders against the anti-war movement. They have also distorted the incredibly limited testimony challenging the slanders.
According to a Herald Sun headline, for example, I described the “murder of Israelis” as “acts of mass resistance”. It’s a remarkable distortion. What I said was something very different, and historically obvious: people living under colonial rule and other forms of oppressive tyranny, and facing the sort of mass destruction we see in Palestine, have invariably resisted in many different ways. Some movements have relied primarily on strikes, protests and civil disobedience. Many have also included armed resistance.
So I stand by the quote that the Australian presented as a scandal: “I refuse to hold movements for the justice of the oppressed to a standard that says there can never be any violence”.
Were the Jews who were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto wrong to resist the Nazis by whatever means they had at their disposal? I say they were right to resist. The Herald Sun and Australian editorialists, by contrast, would probably have denounced resistance leader Marek Edelman and his comrades as a bloodthirsty, human-shield using terrorists on reading his testimony of killing German soldiers and proudly declaring that “German blood flooded the street” in Warsaw. Take the following recollection as indicative of the mindset of the ghetto partisans:
“Now something unprecedented took place. Three [German] officers with lowered machine pistols appeared. They wore white rosettes in their buttonholes-emissaries. They desired to negotiate with the Area Command. They proposed a 15-minute truce to remove the dead and the wounded ... Firing was our answer. Every house remained a hostile fortress. From every storey, from every window bullets sought hated German helmets, hated German hearts.”
Was it not right for Indians to fight against British colonial rule? Does the fact that they used armed resistance invalidate the justice of their cause? Karl Marx, in an 1857 New York Daily Tribune article about the Lucknow uprising, noted that the “outrages committed by the revolted Sepoys in India [sepoys were Indian soldiers recruited to the British military] are indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable”. But he went on to say that the conduct of the uprising was of the sort that “respectable England used to applaud” when carried out by the forces it supported. He continued:
“However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution: and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.”
Well may we apply this observation to Israel and Palestine, where Zionist barbarity over decades has produced, on a remarkably small number of occassions given the sustained assault the Palestinians have endured since 1948, a reflex aimed at retribution.
And what about Indigenous people in our own country? Did they not have the right to oppose the massacres carried out by colonial forces? Is it any wonder that the names Pemulwuy, Musquito, Windradyne and Jandamarra are celebrated as heroes to this day for their uncompromising resistance?
Recognising all this is not the same as endorsing every act committed in the name of resistance. And it is certainly not the same as advocating violence in Australia. The Palestine solidarity movement has always been a mass, non-violent movement. Hundreds of thousands of people have marched, protested and spoken out. That is the movement I’ve been proud to be a part of.
But I refuse to accept that Palestinians living under military occupation should be judged according to moral standards that defenders of Israeli state violence never apply to Israel itself, even as it ethnically cleanses hundreds of thousands of people. Even as it commits the “crime of crimes”: genocide.
In some ways, though, this is giving too much credit to the Sun Herald. How seriously should we take the cynical slanders from the Murdoch press, which has backed every major war of Western aggression? As Marx noted of British hypocrisy in 1857, violence is acceptable if it reinforces the unjust brutality of capitalism—in particular, its Western iteration.
For example, on 15 March 2003, under the headline, “Boom, boom, boom”, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph published a feature cheering on the upcoming invasion of Iraq. It began:
“The only thing missing when the bombs start dropping over Iraq will be the thumping crescendo of the 1812 Overture. Pyotr Tchaikovsky could not have asked for a more spectacular light and sound show to accompany his legendary celebration of military might.”
Talk about a celebration of violence. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were condemned to death for the sake of power and profit. But for the Telegraph, the only thing missing was an orchestra to accompany the slaughter.
These same publications have provided a platform for Andrew Bolt to deny the Stolen Generations (he has claimed that “no one to this day has been able to name even 10 of the children allegedly stolen”) and to dismiss the violence of Australia’s colonial history by accusing historians of inventing this country’s genocidal past.
When violence reinforces empire, it is presented as perhaps regrettable but necessary. When oppressed people resist, it becomes evidence that their entire cause is illegitimate.
That double standard also shaped much of my questioning before the royal commission. I was repeatedly asked whether I would condemn Palestinian violence. But no comparable scrutiny was directed towards those who have spent the past two and a half years defending or excusing Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Supporters of Israel have not been asked to justify or defend the bombing of refugee camps, the destruction of hospitals, the starvation of civilians or the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Those horrors disappear into the passive language of “conflict”.
That asymmetry is political. State violence carried out by a Western ally, in the eyes of our political and media establishment, begins from a position of legitimacy, while violence by the oppressed requires endless condemnation before their grievances can even be discussed. Palestinians are expected to continually prove their humanity—and their anti-racist credentials—while they are bombed to smithereens. Those backing one of the most destructive military campaigns of the 21st century rarely face equivalent scrutiny.
But framing the debate simply around violence misses the point about how we can win a liberated Palestine. As a socialist, my support for Palestinian liberation is a principled stand against oppression, regardless of whether I support particular political organisations inside Palestine, such as Hamas.
I want to see a Palestine free from occupation, siege and apartheid. I am a revolutionary; I believe that freedom can only be won by people liberating themselves. History shows that lasting freedom is won only when millions of workers and oppressed people organise collectively to overthrow the systems that sustain exploitation and oppression.
That means solidarity between Palestinians and workers across the Middle East against Israeli apartheid, its Western backers, and the authoritarian Arab regimes that have betrayed the Palestinian cause as they collaborate with imperialist powers.
That vision is rarely discussed because it doesn’t fit the simplistic framework promoted by politicians and the Murdoch press. It’s much easier to reduce every conversation about Palestinian liberation to an argument about terrorism. The socialist movement doesn’t rest on an uncritical embrace of violence. It has always been about building a mass political movement to end it.
The only lasting solution lies not in endless cycles of military domination and retaliation, but in a struggle from below capable of dismantling both apartheid and the broader system of imperialism that has sustained it for generations.
