Supporters of Palestine must stand up to the post-Bondi right-wing offensive

Since the Bondi massacre, the right-wing press has been saturated with vile slanders against the Palestine solidarity movement and the left. Racist pig Pauline Hanson led the charge, but she’s been followed by a slew of political figures and editorialists blaming the Palestine solidarity movement for the murders. Even former PM John Howard is part of the chorus. Howard savaged the Australian working class and led the country into the criminal invasion of Iraq, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. That the corporate media still take this war criminal seriously says it all.

Some are using language that wouldn’t have been out of place in Hitler’s Germany. In one piece for the Australian, John Carrol contrasted the clash of civilisations he claims is at the root of the Bondi shooting with “monocultural Japan, which has preserved its ethnic and cultural purity, helping make its cities today, clean, orderly and smoothly running”.

Left-wing people must stand up to the vitriol and the disgraceful, cynical slanders. The people and institutions going after us have spent decades stoking racism in Australian society, torturing refugees—or justifying it—and punching down and attacking the vulnerable. For the last two years, they have backed the genocide in Palestine. Those trying to make political capital from the Bondi attack were baying for blood in Gaza as bombs rained down and as people starved.

Their goal is to shift public opinion hard against the Palestine movement. They want to strike a blow against the political left and the Labor Party—which has backed the genocide, but apparently hasn’t been enthusiastic enough in its support for Israel or open enough in its racism. They want to make up the political ground that they lost over the last two years.

From 7 October 2023, the political right and supporters of Israeli apartheid lost a series of debates on the Palestine question. The depravity of Israel’s genocide has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets and has shifted broader public opinion against both Israel and the US. Two years into Israel’s offensive, polling showed that 57 percent of Australians supported sanctions on Israel and 58 percent said a genocide was taking place.

In August last year, despite two years of the right smearing all those who stand with Palestine as antisemites, demonstrations flowered in even the smallest country towns as more than 300,000 took to the streets in the largest Palestine solidarity mobilisation in Australia’s history. NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns, arguably Australia’s most pro-Israel premier, was defeated twice in the courts by Sydney’s Palestine Action Group and definitively in the streets when 300,000 defiantly marched across the Harbour Bridge.

Now, he’s joining the right’s crusade to turn the tide. Minns has introduced a law allowing the state government to temporarily ban demonstrations. Antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal and her deputy Greg Craven have taken specific aim at students, claiming that university-based protests contributed to a climate of hatred which led to the massacre. This is the same antisemitism envoy who failed to issue any statement when a Nazi organisation took centre stage at mass racist protests last year.

Segal has used this moment to again insist that the government adopt a raft of anti-democratic measures that would lead to a severe crackdown on freedom of speech in universities, including proposing that she be given the right to block funding to universities and arts organisations.

We cannot let them turn the political tide. Gaza is strewn with broken concrete and smashed homes, under siege from every direction by the Israeli military. Underneath the rubble are an estimated 9,000 bodies. Tents perch on stretches of land that form valleys surrounded on all sides by shelled buildings. The people are starving; even the animals are going hungry. One mother told news outlet Electronic Intifada: “I stay awake all night guarding my children from the dogs”.

Israel is refusing to let in anywhere near adequate aid, and has revoked the operating licences of 37 aid groups delivering some relief, including Doctors Without Borders and the Norwegian Refugee Council. But Gaza is not chaos. The Israeli government is a skilled social architect, using the most brutal methods to physically and psychologically torture the entire population. From the beginning of the siege in 2007, for example, the military limited the number of calories allowed into the territory to a bare minimum as part of a campaign of economic warfare.

In November, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir reportedly urged troops to shoot “children and donkeys” who stray near the newly established “yellow line”, which has cut Gaza in two and allows Israel to occupy 60 percent of the land. This is what the so-called ceasefire looks like.

As Palestinians suffer through a freezing winter, we must continue to fight for Palestinian liberation. This means standing up to an emboldened and rabid political right, and to any and all attacks on the right to demonstrate for justice in Gaza.