In the wake of the terrible massacre at Bondi, carried out by supporters of ISIS, Labor governments, the far right and sections of the media have launched a renewed assault on the Palestine solidarity movement. Rather than confronting the real sources of racist violence, they have cynically weaponised a tragedy to smear a mass movement that has, for over two years, mobilised hundreds of thousands against genocide in Gaza.
The accusations have reached fever pitch, with the Australian newspaper leading the charge. A particularly egregious example came last week from Megan Goldin, former Middle East correspondent and novelist. In an article titled “The march to the Bondi massacre began at the Sydney Town Hall”, Goldin directly linked pro-Palestine marches with the massacre. She maintained that the movement against Israel’s offensive in Gaza was somehow motivated by hate.
In a fabulous exercise of minimising the obvious, Goldin merely mentioned the slaughter in Gaza. The 70,000 plus Palestinian’s murdered by Israel could not be a justification for the demonstrations, she argued. Rather, the only possible reason for the unprecedentedly large anti-war demonstrations is hatred, foreign influence and terrorist sympathies. The rest of the article rested on racist assertions and outright slander to back up such claims. That a speaker at one of the Australian rallies once “studied in Qatar”, the country where some Hamas leaders lived, was enough “evidence” for Goldin.
The Palestine movement did not emerge from hatred. It emerged from opposition to slaughter and has been led by people who understand the long history of Israel’s violence toward the Palestinians. This history was why our movement was determined to move quickly. We understood from the very beginning that Israel would massacre thousands of Palestinians after Hamas’ 7 October attack. We were entirely justified in such a prediction. Indeed, many of us underestimated the lengths to which Israel was prepared to go. We didn’t anticipate the degree of depravity enacted upon the besieged population of Gaza.
Since 7 October, the Israeli state has unleashed a campaign of mass killing that has left tens of thousands, at least, dead. Indeed, Israel’s leading English-language newspaper, Haaretz, argues the number of dead could be more like 100,000. Hospitals have been destroyed, entire neighbourhoods levelled and famine imposed as a weapon of war. It was this horror that motivated people to take to the streets demanding an end to the bombing, an end to the siege and justice for Palestinians.
To call this antisemitism is to drain the word of all meaning. Antisemitism is a real and deadly form of racism, with a long and horrific history. It culminated in the Holocaust and continues today in violent attacks on Jewish people and institutions. But opposing a state’s actions—even fiercely—is not racism. Opposing genocide is not hatred. Demanding freedom for Palestinians does not require hostility to Jews, and in practice it has generated the opposite.
From its earliest days, the Palestine movement has involved large numbers of Jewish people. Jewish anti-Zionists, socialists, students, Holocaust survivors and their descendants have marched, spoken, organised and been arrested alongside Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike. Indeed, many Jewish people have asserted that it is because of their knowledge of the history of the Holocaust that they feel compelled to take a stand.
And many Jewish people and organisations have protested precisely because they reject the claim that Israel speaks in their name, or that Jewish safety can ever be secured through apartheid, ethnic cleansing and mass murder.
This is one of the movement’s greatest strengths—and one of the reasons it is so threatening to those invested in Israel’s impunity. The presence of Jewish activists explodes the lie that criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. It shows that the real dividing line is not between Jews and non-Jews, but between those who defend oppression and those who resist it.
The reality is that the Palestine movement is a mass movement. It reflects Australian society as it actually exists—multicultural, multiracial and deeply connected to the world beyond our borders.
Yet, again and again, the movement is judged not by what it does, but by what it refuses to do—namely, endorse Israel’s narrative that its violence is “self-defence”, that Palestinian resistance is uniquely illegitimate and that the lives of Palestinians are expendable. In a political culture in which unquestioning support for Western-aligned states is the norm, dissent is treated as extremism.
The thinly veiled panic about “migrants”, “foreigners” and “Middle Eastern influence” echoes some of the oldest racist tropes in Australian politics. The “war on terror” propaganda, a Western ruling-class campaign to drum up support for war in the Middle East, justified its own brutality through reference to the dangers of a terrorist fifth column in Western societies. It is no accident that Muslims and Arabs are singled out, portrayed as inherently dangerous, disloyal or prone to violence. Such narratives served, and continue to serve, our rulers. They turn our attention away from imperial violence.
Crucially, the movement has consistently stood against all forms of racism, including antisemitism. When antisemitic incidents occur, they are condemned. When far-right forces attempt to exploit the crisis, they are opposed. This is not accidental. It flows from the movement’s politics: a commitment to universal liberation and opposition to all systems of oppression.
Those now attacking the Palestine movement are not interested in combating antisemitism or preventing violence. If they were, they would confront the rise of the far right, the mainstreaming of racist conspiracy theories, and the brutalisation produced by a society riven with inequality and alienation. Instead, they target a movement that has challenged imperialism, exposed Western hypocrisy and mobilised solidarity on a scale not seen in decades.
The attempt to link the Palestine movement to the Bondi massacre is obscene. It diverts attention from the real causes of racist violence and seeks to silence opposition to genocide through fear and intimidation. We should reject it outright.
Defending the Palestine movement is not just about defending one cause. It is about defending the right to protest, the right to dissent and the right to stand against mass murder without being smeared as racist or violent. In a world where atrocities are increasingly normalised, that defence could not be more urgent.
