I spent nine hours in a Brisbane police watch house cell in April, having been arrested along with twenty others for wearing a T-shirt with a pro-Palestine slogan. The police treated us with the distaste you would expect and it was boring, but the experience was not all bad. For one, I had lots of time to chat with other activists who’d found themselves on the wrong side of the Queensland police.
One such activist was Stephen Heydt, a 73-year-old retired psychologist. Steve is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist who has been fighting for a free Palestine for more than five decades. He grew up in South Africa, where he was a part of the underground movement against apartheid. Steve was arrested at the demonstration last April for wearing a T-shirt which read “Jews for a free Palestine from the ... to the ...”.
Following our release, I sat down to talk with Steve about his lifelong commitment to the Palestinian struggle, the recent attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement and the campaign against the Crisafulli government’s anti-free speech laws in Queensland.
You grew up in a pro-Zionist family in South Africa. How did you come to support the Palestinian cause?
Stephen Heydt: I’ve supported Palestine for very long time. It started in 1970, when I went to Israel for immersive study (ulpan) to become a rabbi. And the racism against Palestinians was so bad that, even then, it was worse than in South Africa. So I left early after being there for only three months. I was supposed to be there for a couple of years.
After returning to South Africa and particularly following the 1976 Soweto uprising, I became more active. Having to leave in 1981, I arrived in Sydney.
In 2005, I got a job with UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] in Gaza, running their mental health program. Between 2005 and 2010, I spent three and a half years in Palestine and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
That’s the back story anyway. I was there through three Israeli wars in Gaza: 5,000 people were killed. Islam and Judaism have many practices in common: one of which resulted in me helping to collect body parts for burial.
In 2010, I was kicked out by Israel and banned from going back for ten years. I returned to Australia. It was harder to find pro-Palestinian people here, back then anyway, so I was mostly involved in organisations in London and the UK.
Recently in Australia, we’ve experienced a wave of attacks on the pro-Palestine movement. They all attempt to equate pro-Palestine activism with antisemitic hatred, neo-Nazi symbols and so on. How do you respond to these kinds of attacks?
I’ve even been called “treyf”, which means un-kosher, which I find very funny.
I’ve been watching the issue for 55 years, and this has always been the trick. When [Israeli President] Isaac Herzog was here, Mark Leibler [head of the Zionist Federation of Australia] claimed that “anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism”. Flipping the conversation— it’s what they’ve been doing for at least 55 years. Leibler stated, “false accusations of genocide and apartheid are not legitimate critique. They are a verdict. They are a moral inversion designed to strip Jews of legitimacy”. Of course, the real moral inversion is Leibler’s, in stating that [true] “accusations of genocide and apartheid” are akin to antisemitism.
I saw earlier today that Yair Netanyahu [Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, a far-right podcaster] has “from the ... to the ... will be Israeli” on his Twitter/X page. But Palestinian supporters use it and are told, “Oh, you can’t say that” you know.
I’ve read the manuals on this stuff. It’s not strange, so I just expect it and it’s why I think we must confront it. We have to wear the T-shirts, we have to say the phrases, we have to say “this is bullshit”. If you don’t call that bullshit, what can you do?
That leads in well to my next question, which was about why you thought it was right for us to resist Crisafulli’s laws and risk arrest.
To me, it’s the fact that the law itself, and this is my absolute trigger point, is fundamentally racist. It is aimed at a very narrow segment of the population and treats Palestinians and their supporters as different and worthy of attack.
And to me, that’s just the absolute definition of racism. The preference of one group of a population to another. And I grew up in South Africa, I know racism. You know, I really do. And really, that’s my trigger point for these laws.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been an outcry about the fact that the Shahada has been effectively outlawed in Australia. And, I mean, it’s maybe the most important tenet in Islam.
I can even recite it, you know, I’ve heard it so often. It is astonishing that this is the country we’re in today. And I just think we need to fight it. And once this fight is over, as far as I’m concerned, the Shahada is probably going to be my next fight. I just think that there needs to be pushback. There has been too much sliding backwards recently.
There has been a real turn towards authoritarianism and Islamophobia in recent months.
It’s a partial authoritarianism, towards a certain section of the population. We need a fight, not just in Brisbane. I did a search, and it came up that there are 600 pieces of legislation in Australia that are contrary to human rights principles.
Recently, we’ve seen lots of laws going after so-called hate speech or terror, but the most hateful, violent people in society are on the front cover of the newspapers and in parliament.
Well, they own the newspapers. Greg Craven, Jillian Segal’s appointed representative to police universities, wrote to criticise Sarah Shwartz [from the Jewish Council of Australia] for her “Dutton’s Jew” comments, and said the Australian would keep an eye out for more antisemitic hatred.
So, the Australian gets to decide what’s hate speech and what is not. And now Craven will be paid $200,000 a year to give universities antisemitism scorecards.
The Australian is publishing articles warning of a “clash of civilisations”, approvingly citing Japan’s “ethnic purity” and defending racist conspiracy theories like the great replacement theory. Hardly an authority on anti-racism.
I thought the clash of civilisations thing died out. One of my heroes, and I don’t have many, is Robert Fisk. He wrote a book called Great War for Civilisation. I met him, in fact, on a rooftop in Gaza at a dinner with some others. We stayed up after dinner talking until four or five in the morning, just listening to these people talk about their lives.
Robert Fisk’s Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East is all about how war has been justified against Muslims and people overseas, or people in oppressed demographics. And what wars and what people get attention. Two hundred thousand people killed in Iraq or whatever it was. When they get killed, the world doesn’t even blink. It’s a hard read, because it’s very graphic.
Reading about the Iraq War and the fact that everyone responsible for that crime got away with it politicised me as a teenager. It made me hate America, which I think is a healthy thing for a young person.
It’s heartening, and I mean this genuinely, it really is nice to see young people coming forward because for a while I just despaired, it was like everyone had drunk the Kool-Aid. Young people I worked with seemed so apolitical, even if they mostly voted for the Greens.
I wanted to ask you where you think we should go from here and if you could give your take on the role that activism and resistance can play in fighting for a better world.
I said this to someone recently and it wasn’t taken very well, but it’s almost like we’re [the Palestine movement] too polite and we’ve kind of adapted to our environment. In South Africa, we would organise times and places to appear, and we’d pull out pictures of Steve Biko [a murdered anti-apartheid activist, part of the Black Consciousness movement]. We got tear gassed. Maybe we need to be open to being tear gassed here.
