Fighting imperialism then and now
Today was a brilliant day of protests against Israeli atrocities in Palestine and our government’s complicity in them.
I’ve been asked how it compares to the national rallies on the weekend of 14-16 February 2003, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets around the country in opposition to the US government’s imminent invasion of Iraq.
Today was similar in that it was a series of nationwide protests from the biggest cities to the smallest towns (600 in Tathra!), all coming out against the government of the day. The energy was the same—the experience of turning what would otherwise have been a sleepy Sunday into mass political action that has become the key political issue around the country.
But the differences are equally striking. Today was angrier, more hostile to the government, more oppositional.
Consider the two situations. A whole section of international ruling class opinion was opposed to the US invasion of Iraq. The German and French governments came out against it. The ALP was against it because the UN did not sanction it. In 2003, Labor opposition leader Simon Crean spoke at the Brisbane rally, and the Labor lord mayor also spoke at rallies. The Age newspaper in Melbourne editorialised against the war.
To be against the Iraq War didn’t require people to stand on principle against Western imperialism. The stance was in tune with widespread liberal opinion. To my knowledge, no-one lost their job for speaking out against it, no-one was suspended or expelled from university for doing so, and no-one was condemned as a racist for opposing war. The only accusation the right could dredge up—that you were an apologist for Saddam Hussein or for radical Islam—was regarded as laughable.
The very premise of the war—Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction—was thoroughly debunked even before it started. Things had well and truly moved on from the US’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, when standing against war put you in a small minority.
Today, we’ve got no friends in any lodge, chancellery, palace or ministry. Every Western government backs Israel. Government rhetoric in much of the West may have shifted a bit in the last couple of months, but this doesn’t disguise the fact that Israel can massacre the Palestinians without a single government doing anything to stop it. This is true of social democratic governments as much as conservative ones.
It's not just that they’re not standing up to Israel. They are attacking opponents of the genocide. Standing up to Israel’s war takes guts. It requires a much stronger sense of purpose, because opposing Israel means opposing the entire establishment—the politicians, newspaper editors, managers and university vice chancellors who have disgracefully used the antisemitism slur to destroy careers, sack workers, withdraw funding and expel students.
Our rulers have subjected opponents of the war to public ridicule and hatred. The “antisemitism” slur has been much more chilling than the ridiculous slurs of being a “Saddam stooge” in 2003. The Israeli genocide, by highlighting the lines of division in our society, therefore exposes the workings of our system much more clearly than the Iraq war did.
With the Iraq war, we knew what horrors it might (and did) unleash, but everyone attending rallies today has seen the barbarism that has been meted out to the civilians of Gaza, the emaciated bodies wracked by starvation, the bags of body parts being collected by grieving parents or children, the sheer horror of Israel bombing people queuing for food. The morning news bulletins tell us how many dozen civilians have been blown to pieces while we slept.
This experience has burned itself into the minds of everyone who marched today. At least in the early stages of the Iraq war, the US was fighting a conventional army. Who is Israel fighting? It’s just massacring unarmed people.
The Iraq war demonstrations were unprecedented in that hundreds of thousands came out before a shot was fired (although US sanctions had killed hundreds of thousands in the years preceding). That was incredible, and we hoped the antiwar movement would build as the war dragged on. But they were a rocket that lit up the night sky only to quickly fall to the earth. The US smashed Hussein’s army and quickly established control. The protests of hundreds of thousands quickly subsided.
Today, we have been marching on the streets virtually every week for two years. And yet today was the biggest day of action yet. We’ve learned some lessons over these two years. None of us marching today has any illusions that any government will help us. All of us despise the complicity of our governments in this genocide. At the Brisbane rally against the Iraq war, a minority of us booed Simon Crean, but most gave him the benefit of the doubt. Today, we all despise the Labor politicians. Their hypocrisy, their token measures that do nothing to stop the killing are worse than Australian PM John Howard’s fawning over US President George Bush.
And it’s been more than two decades since 2003. Australia has escaped some of the worst economic crises since that time and our political system is still less polarised than elsewhere in the world. But our government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide is another reminder that we are part of a world system of barbarism—a world in which the far right is growing, the climate crisis is getting worse, social welfare is being further gutted and inequality is becoming more extreme.
As well, the threat of a major war in our region looms as governments throw hundreds of billions of dollars at new weapons systems. Israel’s genocide is of a piece with this: a world in which the powerful can simply destroy the common people with impunity.
The comparison between 2003 and 2025 reinforces in my mind the need for a socialist alternative to this rotten system. George Bush went. John Howard went. But things have gotten worse. They’re not going to get better.
Today was a beautiful demonstration of the power of ordinary people when they decide “enough is enough”. We need many more of them.
But we also need a clear vision of what we’re fighting against and what we’re fighting for. I think the movement today is angrier than in 2003, more determined, in it for the long haul. But that doesn’t mean it’s particularly politically sophisticated. Debates over how to defeat Israel are virtually non-existent; people in their desperation tend to grasp at straws.
The Israeli genocide is like a distillation of the evils of capitalism. The Israeli government has been planning this offensive for years. Its backers in the West support it. Our side, that of the working class, needs to be conscious of our tasks if we are to defeat them. That’s why, 22 years on from Iraq, and 40 plus years since I first got involved, I’m still as dedicated as ever to building a socialist alternative to this rotten system.
