Every progressive movement and cause, at some stage, is slandered by its opponents. But the scale and extremity of the lies told to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza are breathtaking. Most people who have become sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have been stunned by the slanders levelled against them by the political and media establishments. Opposition to war, genocide and racism has been painted at every step as racist and genocidal in intent.
These lies are used not only to portray Israel’s genocide as defensive and defensible, but also to justify serious attacks upon democratic rights and civil liberties in Australia. Since 2023, the federal Labor government has brought in successive laws and amendments that extend the extraordinarily repressive measures introduced during the “war on terror” and broadened the remit of Australia’s legislative anti-terror framework to include “hate speech” and groups deemed “hateful”.
The project of establishing Israel, a Jewish supremacist ethno-state constructed on the historic lands of Palestine, has always been built upon lies. The first lie, told by a series of prominent figures in the early twentieth century, such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky, was that Palestine was “a land without a people”. This lie continued even after Israel was founded through the mass expulsion of some 750,000 inhabitants. So Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1969: “[T]here was no such thing as Palestinians”. In 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich echoed her statement, saying, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history”.
A second lie is that the Palestinians have brought Israel’s long-term genocide upon themselves. Today, the blame is heaped on the Islamist Hamas. But before Hamas was founded, the target was the secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Before the PLO, it was almost anyone resisting forced displacement and apartheid. The Palestinians are, in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s estimation, Amalekites who deserve to be annihilated. (In the Hebrew Bible, the people of Amalek are perennial enemies of the Israelites.)
A third lie is that Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonisation is motivated by antisemitism, and that supporters of the Palestinians are also primarily or implicitly motivated by antisemitism. This charge has for decades been levelled against even Jewish opponents of Israel’s brutality, such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein in the United States.
Since 2023, many more new lies have been told. For example, during a recent hearing of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, federal antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal challenged the death toll of more than 70,000 reported by Gaza’s Health Ministry, saying, “I believe that it is well known and even accepted by the United Nations that those statistics have been grossly inflated ... when they have done a recount of the numbers, they have found them to be grossly inaccurate”.
That is a lie. Even the Israeli military has acknowledged that the statistics are accurate. Independent estimates put the death toll higher—a minimum of 75,000 at the start of this year. Segal’s highly paid job should require that she know things like this.
Other oft-repeated lies are that hospitals and schools are legitimate targets because they are actually terrorist bunkers, that civilian deaths are a result of Hamas using “human shields”, that starvation is a result, not of Israel’s siege of the territory, but of the criminality among Palestinians themselves—and on it goes.
Two barefaced lies
Two central claims—lies—have been made about our student movement so far by the political right and pro-Israel organisations and individuals.
The first is that our movement is antisemitic. In May 2024, shadow education minister Sarah Henderson denounced university administrators for failing to stamp out “encampments and other protest activity which are fuelling unprecedented levels of antisemitic hate and incitement”.
Students for Palestine, the national campus activist group, held high school and university strikes for Palestine in 2023 and 2024. We established Gaza solidarity encampments across the country in mid-2024, inspired by students who did the same in the United States. We did so not out of prejudice against Jewish people, but to draw attention to the fact that our own universities were engaged in weapons research and development projects with companies that were arming Israel. By then, the Israeli military had killed nearly 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza in just seven months.
Research carried out by the office of Jillian Segal, Australia’s special envoy into antisemitism, directly counter Henderson’s claim. Last year, Segal’s office found, after two years of intensive pro-Palestine activism, that young Australians overall “hold a positive sentiment towards the Jewish community, with the community rated second only to Italians in terms of willingness to share social closeness”. The study of young people (especially students) went on to note that participants in the solidarity campaign:
“... did not perceive Jewish individuals as collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli government ... many participants expressed support for Jewish communities while also criticising the actions of the Israeli state. They differentiated between Judaism, as a religion, and Zionism, as a political movement which they associated with colonialism and so could be condemned.”
The survey showed that young people are adept at distinguishing between Judaism and Zionism. Surprisingly adept, given the desperate attempts to conflate the two by Israel’s government, Segal herself, the Murdoch press and pro-Israel student groups.
For years, supporters of Israel have themselves promoted what could reasonably be called an antisemitic narrative: that Judaism is synonymous with Zionism. In doing so, they have attempted to make a person’s ethno-religious identity conditional on whether they politically support Israel, an ethno-nationalist, Jewish supremacist state.
During the encampments, Jewish members of Students for Palestine were specifically targeted by supporters of Israel and slandered as “self-hating Jews”. Making Judaism conditional on support for Israel also helped universities to justify bizarre crackdowns on freedom of expression by Jews under the guise of preventing antisemitism.
For example, the University of Queensland attempted to block a screening of the film Israelism, which was directed by two Jewish filmmakers. At Monash University, security officers told students that using the words “Zionist” or “Zionism” or accusing anyone of supporting genocide contravened university policy.
Students for Palestine has the opposite approach. Instead of automatically conferring a person with an entire political world view based on their ethno-religious identity, we have insisted on distinguishing between Zionism as a political ideology and Judaism. This should not be controversial. Indeed, the political right are often at the forefront of making similar arguments—for example, when defending right-wing Aboriginal figures, they make the valid point that it is racist to suggest that someone’s politics could or should be determined by their skin colour or indigeneity.
We have produced several written documents expressing our outlook and orientation since 2023. Not a single one contains anti-Jewish prejudice, and many of them contain explicit statements of opposition to antisemitism. So the 2024 Manifesto from the Encampments states: “We stand alongside Jewish people against discrimination, and we see ourselves as standing on the shoulders of a long line of Jewish pro-Palestine and anti-war activists”. This statement was not written by only one individual, but put together through a collective process of discussion and revision in open meetings at twelve of the Gaza solidarity encampments on Australian university campuses. Not a single campus objected to including statements of opposition to antisemitism and solidarity with Jewish people.
If you look at photos of the Gaza solidarity encampments, you’ll see the faces of Jewish students like Yasmine Johnson, Jaan Schild and Raphael Duffy who helped to lead and politically shape the protests. You’ll see cardboard signs reading, “Jewish students against genocide”, signs proclaiming opposition to Islamophobia and antisemitism and banners with the slogan popularised by Jewish activists drawing on the historical legacy of opposition to the holocaust: “Never again for anyone”. Jewish students and members of non-campus Jewish groups such as the Tzedek Collective organised Shabbat events. And not a single member of Students for Palestine has been found to have said or done anything antisemitic by university disciplinary processes, despite pro-Israel students flooding the university disciplinary bodies with spurious complaints.
The second lie is that the student movement created a climate of fear and intimidation.
In a 2024 statement, the then-president of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS), Noah Loven, claimed: “[I]t’s simply not safe for many Jewish students on campus at the moment, and it’s unacceptable that many feel they cannot attend their lectures and classes in person without fear of intimidation, harassment and violence”.
This was categorically untrue. Right-wing media outlets intent on demonising the encampments were unable to find any examples of violence by pro-Palestine students during the encampments or our student protests. Instead, when students faced university discipline, it was for things like breaking local rules about using megaphones on campus or protesting inside university buildings. In my own university hearing, I was found guilty of refusing to pack up the encampment when instructed to by management.
The AUJS submission to a previous Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities provides the following as an example of unsafe behaviour at Monash University:
“A lecturer supported a group presenting on a social cause in a sociology class, suggesting the ‘pro-Palestinian movement’ as their topic. The lecturer reportedly guided the group before and during their presentation and mentioned that his friend organises pro-Palestinian rallies in the city on Sundays and that he supports ‘Free Palestine’. This created an unsafe and discriminatory environment for a Jewish student due to the overt preferential treatment given to the group presenting the pro-Palestinian topic.”
Obviously, a teacher encouraging a project topic related to a contemporary political issue is not unsafe or discriminatory. By contrast, Luka Kiernan, a student with a Jewish background, wrote of raids on the Monash Gaza solidarity encampment by supporters of Israel, including members of AUJS:
“On the first night, around a dozen men, mostly middle-aged, invaded the camp at 2am. One claimed to be a serving member of the Israeli military. They smashed a gazebo and threatened activists with violence. They played Hebrew songs calling Palestinians ‘swarms of rats’ who ‘will die in the dungeons’ and sang ‘Advance Australia fair’. Eventually, police removed them. Four nights later, they came back ... Zionists have constantly harassed the camp in daylight hours, often taunting activists with statements such as: ‘What genocide? There is no genocide happening’ and ‘Palestine does not exist’.”
Mimi, a student at the Deakin camp, woke up in their swag one night to see a man in a balaclava standing directly over them. He tore down the Palestinian flag above their bed and then proceeded to join his friends wrecking as much of the infrastructure of the camp as they could. Those responsible posted videos publicly to brag about the incidents on an Instagram page titled “australians_for_israel”. Another pro-Israel student walked up to two Muslim women students at Deakin, accused them of supporting Hamas and spat on them. At the University of Adelaide, supporters of Israel shot fireworks at the camp.
These were real acts of violence. It’s no surprise that supporters of Israel would resort to violence and racist intimidation. Their world view already excuses racial apartheid, mass murder, torture and sexual violence against Palestinians.
The royal commission is a sordid attempt to bury Australia’s Palestine movement beneath a pile of petty, tendentious and baseless complaints. The hundreds of thousands of us who have stood on the right side of history in this country won’t fall for it.
