Thousands will march across the Harbour Bridge for Gaza
The Sydney Harbour Bridge is one of the world's iconic landmarks. The Palestine Action Group has organised for tens of thousands to march across it on Sunday 3 August to oppose the genocide in Gaza. We’ve just won a significant victory in the NSW Supreme Court: the NSW Police application to overturn the right to march has been struck down.
The right to protest this Sunday is a serious win. As Josh Lees, Palestine Action Group organiser, told media during the court proceedings, “Humanity in Gaza is at stake, and our humanity here is at stake”. The entire population of Gaza is starving. The Israeli aid blockade and constant bombardment have killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of Palestinians already. The situation is acute, and it calls for urgent action.
The outpouring of public support for this protest has been immense. The original Instagram post advertising the event has been viewed nearly a million times. More than 300 organisations have endorsed the rally. At least eleven trade unions, including the Maritime Union, the United Workers Union, the Nurses and Midwives’ Association and the Electrical Trades Union, have pledged their support. Political organisations, NGOs, religious groups, and cultural institutions are on board, and the list of endorsements includes celebrities such as Stella Donnelly and Craig Foster. It’s been enough to pressure Sydney mayor Clover Moore to lend her approval to the rally, and fifteen NSW Parliamentarians, including five Labor members, signed a statement declaring their support for the protest. Even Sydney’s most popular meme page “monkeyboy.sydney” has shared the protest details.
Despite this, Labor Premier Chris Minns and the NSW Police have done everything in their power to prevent the rally from going ahead. On Thursday, Minns told the media that "the last thing we want, and the last thing police want, is chaos in Sydney streets". On Friday, the police took Lees to court on behalf of the organisers, claiming the protest on the bridge would be a threat to public safety. But it's not impossible to close the Harbour Bridge, and “public safety” was a cheap excuse to deny us the right to protest.
The bridge has been closed plenty of times: twice in 2023 for a Ryan Gosling film and the World Pride march, in 2000 for the Walk for Reconciliation and in 2009 for a picnic. It’s also regularly shut for marathons, including one coming up in four weeks. None of these events have caused threats to the public, and in most cases they are far less urgent than taking a stand against genocide. In response to the argument made by the police that it would create disturbance to the public to allow the protest to go ahead, the Supreme Court judge was right to find that, “if matters such as this were to be determinative, no assembly which would cause disruption would be permitted”.
Chris Minns and the police did everything in their power to suggest that the protest was already or could be banned. This was a lie. We have the right to demonstrate in NSW. But the fact that they threw everything at preventing us tells you something important about how society works, and why socialists think mass politics matters.
The late Marxist cultural critic John Berger once wrote of mass demonstrations that they pose to the state a challenge—either the capitalist class and the state repress them, and in so doing show their true, unjust motivations; or they're forced in the face of mass numbers and determination of ordinary people to let them go ahead, and in so doing reveal that there's a greater power than theirs below the surface. Our rally is not a revolutionary rehearsal. But it's important that we won this small test of wills between the forces of injustice and imperialism, and the humanity of ordinary Sydneysiders standing up to a genocide. The world is watching Gaza, and the world will be watching us.
