The impact of the Palestine solidarity movement
One night in June 2024, balaclava-clad pro-Israel thugs descended on the Deakin University Gaza solidarity encampment. The next night, a Turkish woman in her 40s turned up at the camp. She mostly sat back from the flurry of activity, but by 3am we realised she wasn’t leaving. She stayed that night, and many more after, as our self-appointed sentry, leaving early each morning to take her kids to school and go to work.
She later explained that she had been one of the thousands of protesters who camped in Istanbul’s Gezi Park to defend it from demolition in 2013. When Turkish riot police carried out vicious pre-dawn attacks, the protests transformed into a mass revolt calling for the downfall of the president. She sat watching over us all these years later because, to her, we were the next generation, taking up a fight that was in some way the continuation of her fight.
The mass struggles which draw people out of their routines and into the streets shape official politics and the minds of millions. The Gezi Park protests, for example, imbued a sense of defiance and opposition to police in Türkiye. Black Lives Matter spread anti-police consciousness and a desire to fight racism in millions across the world. The environmental movement, especially Extinction Rebellion and the School Strikes for Climate, pointed the finger at the corporations and the rich that are wilfully hurtling us towards disaster.
These movements showed again and again that, when confronted with brutality and injustice, throwing ourselves into protest is the natural and logical thing to do. To win most of our demands, we will have to go further than this—to mass working-class action—but protest continues to be how the powerless initially demand to be heard.
The Palestine movement has hit the world in a different way. It has become the core issue animating a bitter anger at the system among a new layer of leftward moving young people and millennials. And, significantly, those who march have felt themselves part of an international struggle, not just a local question. The sheer depravity of Israel’s war has shaken people from all walks of life, the deliberate bombings of hospitals and schools destroying any remaining illusions in the Western powers’ respect for human rights or the rules of war.
From the beginning of the genocide in 2023 to the aftermath of the latest ceasefire, tens of thousands of people have repeatedly hit the streets in major cities across Australia. The movement overall has involved many hundreds of thousands of people. The movement has had ebbs and flows. When the extremity of the starvation in Gaza began making headlines in May 2025, the weekly demonstrations surged. By August, public anger was at its peak. Sydney-based Palestine Action Group battled the Minns Labor government over the right to march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The activists won, and 300,000 people defiantly marched in pouring rain. This was followed by a nationwide day of protest that mobilised hundreds of thousands across the country, including large numbers in small towns. This defeat of Minns, a more active supporter of Israel than other premiers, was an important political win for the movement. So was the constitutional challenge against his attempted anti-protest laws in October 2025.
The extremity of the war has laid bare the fact that our world is not governed by rules and that even the most extreme human suffering is tolerated in the name of projecting Western power. Organisations like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, which are meant to stand above nation-states and protect human rights, have proven impotent in the face of atrocities committed by Israel and backed by Western imperialism.
Mass sentiment shifted significantly over the course of Israel’s war and genocide. In November 2023, 49 percent of Australians said that they thought the government shouldn’t take a side in the war. By October 2025, 57 percent of Australians supported sanctions on Israel and 58 percent said a genocide was taking place.
Support for the United States has likewise tanked. In 2020, a Lowy Institute poll found that 51 percent of Australians trusted the US to act responsibly in the world. In 2025, the result has dropped to just 36 percent, with more than 62 percent saying they did not trust the US to act responsibly. This is the lowest level in the history of the Lowy poll.
The Palestine movement has created a new culture of activism. Groups of friends in capital cities don’t just go clubbing or to gigs any more—for two years they have planned their lives around protesting for a group of people on the other side of the world. Parents of young kids contended with how to explain what they were protesting about to their children, and workers marched with workmates and talked Palestine over lunch.
All this despite the near consensus on the part of official politics for backing Israel—with the honourable exception of the Greens, who took a commendable stand against the genocide that likely impacted large numbers among their heavily millennial voter base.
In Melbourne, campaign groups cropped up everywhere early on. At first, they were mostly framed around campaigning to get local councils to pass motions condemning the genocide, pledging to divest or to raise the Palestinian flag. These didn’t just crop up in the leftie ghettos or heavily Arab areas, but across the city. After a few months, many of these groups transitioned to other tactics. Some organised protests outside of local Labor MP offices or focused their efforts on picketing factories that are part of the global F-35 supply chain.
Workers in all sorts of industries formed union groups to campaign for Palestine. ASU for Palestine, which has organised two walkouts by community and legal sector workers, stands out. Most of these council and workplace groups wound down by 2025, but they left an important imprint and meant the movement itself was deeper than just central demonstrations.
In April 2024, when the demonstrations waned somewhat, student encampments blossomed across the country. Inspired by students at Columbia University in New York, University of Sydney students set up tents and camped out through winter to demand divestment. Many other campuses followed, with the camps becoming an important focal point for activism and education. Activists exposed the links that universities have to Israel, their role in facilitating weapons research and the political nature of the institutions. The camps connected with each other, discussing and updating a shared statement in regular meetings. Socialists played a key role in establishing them in most cases, and in connecting them to each other. University managements have used heavy-handed repression against students, including expulsions at Melbourne University and the Australian National University and suspensions at Deakin. Many students have now been dragged through disciplinary processes for their activism, and notably in most cases they have won.
To a far greater degree than during the climate movement or Black Lives Matter protests, those who wish to stand with Palestine must take risks to do so. The fight around the political question has opened many more battles over the question of free speech and expression. In 2024, two bakery workers were sacked for wearing keffiyehs at work. Academics, teachers and public sector workers have been faced disciplinary processes or had their funding cut. Many have had to fight for the right to wear a keffiyeh or badge at work. This means that even though support for Palestine is widespread, it’s also a real fight in people’s everyday lives and, as a result, more politicising than issues that are less controversial among liberals.
Cultural institutions have also been forced to take sides and reveal their political affiliations, discrediting their liberal reputations in the process. Melbourne Symphony Orchestra terminated the contract of Jayson Gilham after he dedicated a recital to assassinated Gazan journalists. When three actors in a Sydney Theatre Company production of the Seagull wore keffiyehs on stage during a curtain call, donors pulled funding and three board members resigned. Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre refused to host a performance by feminist activist Clementine Ford, citing “safety” fears for Jewish patrons because of Ford’s strong stance against Israel’s genocide.
And once again, the highly partisan nature of the Australian media has been exposed. There’s been a systematic burial of Palestinian voices, while Israeli and pro-Israel figures are given a front seat. Journalists have resigned from the ABC, Nine, the Age and other outlets over the coverage of Gaza. In 2024, ABC journalists revealed that management had tried to ban them from using words including “genocide” and “occupation” when covering Palestine.
Australian politicians from both sides have backed the genocide. The Labor government has only strengthened its commitment to the F-35 supply chain for fighter planes to Israel.
Labor’s political support for the genocide is, if not more so, as important as its arming of Israel. Albanese’s statements have always led with assertion of solidarity with Israel, and he’s done his best to denigrate, demonise and belittle those who protest against Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation. He has appointed an antisemitism envoy to assist in his campaign to portray pro-Palestine feeling as antisemitic bigotry. He travelled to the US to pose with US President Donald Trump, and forced Senator Fatima Payman out of the party for daring to stand firm in her support for a Palestinian state.
Labor state governments have proved some of the most determined opponents of the Palestine movement. The Victorian and NSW governments in particular have helped the political right charge supporters of Palestine with antisemitism. The Minns government deliberately withheld information that showed organised crime was responsible for the attacks. It did so to use them as a pretext for serious anti-protest measures, knowing that the protesters had nothing to do with the crimes. Now, the Minns and Allan governments are exploiting the tragic Bondi shooting to rush through laws allowing the state governments to ban protests for defined periods. The defence of civil liberties will continue to be a crucial fight for those who stand with Palestine.
It is important to reckon with the fact that this significant, large and ongoing movement did not stop the genocide.
When atrocities happen, people find they have no option but to protest. And while the genocide wasn’t stopped, people feel vindicated in their opposition and have been drawn into an international opposition to the brutality of our rulers. Only once people have been convinced to plant their feet on the right side of history, and to act in accordance, can discussions about strategy begin to take on real meaning beyond the ranks of handfuls of people. In this sense, the movement is an important beginning. And the response to government intransigence has largely been not demoralisation but demands to escalate. The mass strike against the genocide by Italian workers in solidarity with the Sumud flotilla showed a small glimpse of the type of action that is and was needed across the world to defeat Israel. Protests and pickets are essential acts of mass defiance, but they do not have anywhere near the power of workers striking at the point of production.
To defeat Israel’s genocide, we would have needed to see sustained mass strikes in Western bloc nations like Australia and the United States, and revolutionary working-class uprisings involving strikes across the Arab world. This is not an impossible dream.
Australian workers carried out a general strike in 1917, partly motivated by opposition to the First World War. In 1967, Australian Seamen’s Union members refused to crew the ship Boonaroo, which was meant to deliver military cargo to support the Western war effort in Vietnam, and Melbourne dock workers refused to load ships in solidarity with the struggle against South African apartheid. During the Arab revolutions of 2011, Palestinian liberation both inspired the anti-dictator struggles and was a thread running through them. In 2019, when Algerians rose against their own dictator, the Palestinian flag was draped on buildings and carried in crowds.
In the words of Joseph Heller in Catch-22, “they have the right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing”. We might not have stopped them this time, but there will be more battles. The challenge for all those on the side of the Palestinians is to keep up the fight and build a movement with the power and the politics to defeat the ruling classes who carried out or backed this genocide, once and for all.
