Gaza is a thousand Port Arthurs

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s claim that a pro-Palestine demonstration at the Sydney Opera House on 9 October was “akin to a Port Arthur moment” (referring to a shooting in 1996 at the tourist town of Port Arthur that killed 35 people) reaches a new level of absurdity. The claim came in a recent speech at the Sydney Opera House, which condemned the supposed “violence” and “anti-Semitism” of Palestine supporters, and threatened migrants with deportation.

What really happened on 9 October was that 1,000 supporters of Palestine rallied peacefully, under the slogan “No War on Gaza”, to resist what we all knew was coming: a massacre. We marched from Town Hall to the Opera House, much like protesters have done at dozens of other demonstrations about a range of different issues, where we chanted and heard speeches and then went home.

People attended the rally because they knew that “Israel’s right to defend itself”, so frequently cited in those early days by those now backing the war, is a euphemism for murdering Palestinians, one which has been used to justify slaughter after slaughter since the state of Israel was established in 1948.

There is something stomach-churning about being accused of violence for being part of a peaceful protest against a war that has been more brutal than most protesters could have anticipated. Israel has carried out a cruel, calculated, precision-guided murder of more than 35,000 Palestinians so far. It has imposed starvation on hundreds of thousands of Gazans, and it has assassinated those who try to help feed the hungry. It has displaced more than 1.6 million people, of whom a million currently are languishing in Rafah, under threat of an Israeli invasion.

If Dutton wants a Port Arthur comparison, Gaza is a thousand Port Arthurs.

And there have been no incendiary speeches about the acts of violence and intimidation committed by Zionists in Australia since the genocide began. There was more media coverage of the fact that Qantas cabin staff had, god forbid, worn Palestinian flags on their uniforms than there was of a Palestine supporter in the Sydney suburb of Botany having an improvised explosive device placed on his car because he hung a Palestinian flag outside his home.

The political establishment isn’t really concerned about violence. It is concerned to intimidate, marginalise and discredit anyone who criticises its ally, Israel. Accusations of “anti-Semitism”—ironically from the leader of the racist “No” to the Indigenous rights campaign—are a key part of this. Dutton, and the Israeli state, read from the same handbook of doublespeak.

It doesn’t matter to these newly minted “anti-racists” that the banner of the group Jews Against the Occupation flew proudly that night, as it does frequently at Sydney Palestine rallies. Nor that members of the Jewish anti-Zionist collective Tzedek marched on 9 October and have been part of the campaign week in, week out, ever since.

Nor does it matter to them that the allegation at the centre of this charge of anti-Semitism, that a small minority of rally attendees had supposedly chanted “gas the Jews”, turned out to be a fabrication. On 2 February, it was reported by the ABC that an independent investigation commissioned by the NSW Police found “no evidence” of those words being chanted. In fact, the claim had been made by a Zionist organisation in order to smear the protests.

When we decided to march on 9 October, it wasn’t just Dutton trying to slander us. Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also called on us to desist. Zionist organisations like the Executive Council for Australian Jewry tried to whip up fear by telling Jewish people not to enter the CBD. This was not in response to any actual threat, but an attempt to cast the march as a violent mob. In the following days NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns attempted to ban future marches.

It was right to march. The last six months have horrifically demonstrated this. But even by the night of the rally, Israel had murdered nearly 700 Palestinians. Israel has, since 7 October, killed more than twice as many Palestinians as it did during the Nakba of 1948. Sydney has seen 27 consecutive weekends of demonstrations in support of Palestine, with hundreds more protests smattered in between.