The Australian government is rolling out the red carpet for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned visit this month.
Julie Bishop, who visited Israel late last year, said she wanted to “reaffirm our absolute enduring commitment to the state of Israel and our friendship”. This is the latest in an appalling history of Australian government support for the brutal policies of Netanyahu and the Israeli state.
Netanyahu exemplifies the horror of Israel’s attempt over the last 69 years to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population. His first coalition government rested on an alliance with hard right settler parties Shas and Yisrael Beitenu. He appointed renowned hard line settler Avigdor Lieberman to the foreign ministry. Lieberman calls for the mass expulsion of Palestinians who still live in Israel, and called for the beheading of Palestinians who resist apartheid policies.
Netanyahu’s government has overseen a huge increase in the construction of colonial outposts (“settlements”), often populated by extreme right wing militias that carry out attacks on nearby Palestinian communities to terrorise them into vacating the land.
Along with the increase in the number of settlers in the West Bank, there has been a rise in settler attacks on Palestinians – many of them carried out with the complicity of the occupying Israeli military.
Under Netanyahu, there have been two wars on the Gaza Strip. In 2012, 200 Palestinians were killed in a week of bombardment, and in 2014 more than 2,300 Palestinians were killed and more than 10,000 injured.
Australian governments, both Labor and Liberal, have given Netanyahu uncritical support while he carries out these war crimes. Julie Bishop’s invitation to Netanyahu is just the latest event in this history.
The Palestine Action Group is organising a protest on Thursday 23 Feb, 6:30 at Sydney’s Town Hall Square, to coincide with Netanyahu’s visit. These meetings of Australian politicians with war criminals like Netanyahu play a big role in normalising the relationship between Israel and Australia, create a veneer of respectability for the Israeli state and help it cover up the brutal violence on which it is founded.
So it is important that people in Australia come out to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

Damian Ridgwell

War criminals should not be welcome in Australia

In June 2011, inspired by the Arab revolutions sweeping the region, Palestinian refugees in Syria marched on and overran the border of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. For a fleeting moment, they were able to achieve one of the historic aims of the Palestinian movement: the return to their homeland.
The Arab revolutions had such an electrifying effect in Palestine because the demands of the revolutions were also the demands of the Palestinian movement: freedom, democracy and an end to authoritarianism.
It is shameful, then, that many international supporters of the Palestinian cause have backed the dictator Bashar al Assad in his war against the Syrian people. In doing so, they use the same justifications for supporting the massacre of the Syrian resistance that Zionists employ to justify Israeli massacres of Palestinians.
Just like Israel, Assad and Putin have bombed hospitals, dropped chemicals weapons such as white phosphorus and demolished cities with aerial bombardment. Who can look at Aleppo today and not see Gaza? Yet some denounce these acts as war crimes when carried out by Israel but celebrate them as acts of liberation when they are carried out in Aleppo.
Echoing Netanyahu’s slanders against the Palestinians, Assad says that indiscriminate mass killings in Aleppo are justified because anyone who opposes the regime is an Islamic terrorist. Just as Zionists do, the supporters of the Assad dictatorship say that bombing apartment buildings is justified because terrorists are using civilians as human shields. Supporters of Palestine should be very familiar with this apology for collective punishment – we reject it when it is used to defend the terrorism of Israel, so we should when it is being used by Assad.
It’s often said that the Assad regime supports Palestinian resistance and opposes imperialism. People who have campaigned in support of Palestine should be able to tell the difference between the rhetoric that a regime employs and the reality. The Assad government is just as “anti-imperialist” as Israel is “democratic”. As with many of the Middle East dictatorships, the rhetoric of anti-imperialism is used to justify internal repression and class exploitation.
The Assad regime has always had an opportunist relationship to Western imperialism, offering occasional token support to the Palestinian movement, but never enough to threaten the stability of Israel. At key moments, the regime has intervened to weaken the Palestinian movement. In 1970, it stood by as the Jordanian government massacred Palestinian resistance fighters. In Lebanon during the civil war, the Syrian army invaded to support the Phalange Christian fascists against the Palestine Liberation Organisation and its left wing Lebanese allies. The Assad regime has a history of collaborating with the United States, exemplified by its involvement in the US’s extraordinary rendition program.
But that aside, the “anti-imperialist” rhetoric of Assad supporters is the height of hypocrisy when the main imperialist intervention in Syria is that of the Russian government. Syrian and Russian forces are responsible for more than 95 percent of the deaths in Syria since the start of the revolution. Opposing only the militarism of the US and its allies is not opposing imperialism, but simply embracing imperialism of a non-Anglophone kind.
People who peddle this argument often make out as if the fall of the Assad government would be a victory for Israel, yet Assad’s main backer, Russia, is no enemy of the Israeli state. Israeli-Russian relations are closer than they have ever been, with Israel approving the sale of military drones to Russia in 2015, as well as refusing to condemn Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
In 2016, the Russian Embassy in Tel Aviv said that Israel and Russia had “become genuine partners who understand and who know how to respect each other’s interests”. Opposing imperialism is only meaningful if all imperialism is opposed and we give solidarity to those resisting US imperialism in Palestine and those resisting Assad and Russian imperialism in Syria. These “anti-imperialist” supporters of Assad are the mirror image of Western politicians who cry crocodile tears over Syria, but support Israel’s war crimes.
Solidarity is central for the Palestinian struggle to achieve liberation. Those who have been inspired by and moved by the tenacity of the Palestinians in the face of overwhelming violence should give their solidarity to the Syrian people in their fight against the Assad dictatorship.

Supporters of the Palestinians should oppose Assad’s crimes

The picket of the Hutchison Ports terminal at Port Botany is continuing. The company is refusing to reinstate 97 workers sacked on 7 August.
The Fair Work Commission has ordered those still employed by Hutchison to go back to work. But a meeting of workers resolved to stay out on the picket, which has operated 24 hours a day since the morning after the sackings.
John Duggan is one of those sacked by email. “It was my birthday on Thursday; I’d been out with my family”, he said. “That night I got the email saying effective immediately I won’t be required to attend work.”
John has been on the picket line since receiving the news. “Everyone is positive, as long as we stay united”, he said.
On 9 August, dozens of trucks were turned away by workers and their supporters. “As far as we’re concerned, there will be no trucks coming in or out of this place until the company sits down with the union”, Joe Deakin, assistant secretary of the MUA Sydney branch, told Red Flag.
A freight vessel, the Capitaine Tasman, was due to be unloaded at the terminal in the morning on 10 August. But with no one to unload it, the Capitaine Tasman was sent back out to sea.
The union has put out a call for support and many other unions and groups have responded. The MUA has a long history of backing campaigns for social justice. Supporters from the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the Save Millers Point campaign have been out to Port Botany to return the solidarity they have received from maritime workers in the past.
Participants in Sydney’s march for equal marriage rights donated hundreds of dollars to the sacked workers. “We’re very proud that the community joined with working men and women in this union and other unions to make sure that worker justice is still alive in this country”, Deakin said. “The standover tactics of Hutchison and companies like them, aided and abetted by Tony Abbott and Eric Abetz, will be put to the sword.”
Workers from the other two companies operating terminals at Port Botany – Patrick and DP World – have visited the picket before and after their shifts. Adam, a stevedore, took a week of leave to be able to stand on the picket line. “I’m here to support the Hutch workers. We’re all wharfies; it’s important that we all stick up for each other. If this fails we’re all stuffed.”
Sydney picket: Gate B150 Sirius Rd, Port Botany (access via Foreshore Rd)
Brisbane picket: Curlew Street, Berth 11 Fisherman Islands

Hutchison picketers defy Fair Work

The Club of Rome’s breakthrough scientific report Limits to Growth, released in 1972, predicted that if then existing trends continued, the global population would decline by as much as one-third by 2100. The report describes computer-modelled estimates of population changes, industrial growth, pollution, food production and resource depletion.
In most of the scenarios, a phenomenon the authors called “overshoot and collapse” occurred – an unsustainable growth in resource consumption leading to a catastrophic decline in industrial production sometime in the 21st century.
At the time, conservative commentators scoffed at the modelling, likening the report to crying wolf. Again in 2002, Foreign Policy claimed it belonged in the “dustbin of history”.
Last month, researchers at the University of Melbourne published a study showing that the book’s predictions match, nearly identically, the data for the 40 years since its release. Their findings also align with the fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released earlier this year. The IPCC, though often conservative in its estimates, concluded that there is a high likelihood of extreme weather events, such as heat waves, flooding and cyclones. It predicted that many populated areas may become uninhabitable due to the impact of climate change.
Capitalism’s need for rapacious growth lies at the heart of impending ecological catastrophe. That is why capitalism’s ideological defenders have been the shrillest in denouncing the predictions of works such as Limits to Growth. Avoiding “overshoot and collapse” would require the reorganisation of production as part of a revolutionary challenge to the profit system.
[Damian Ridgwell is the National Union of Students environment officer.]

Global collapse predictions confirmed

Around 150 protesters defied heavy-handed policing to protest the opening of the Israeli Film Festival in Sydney on 21 August. The festival is funded by the Israeli embassy and organised by Australia Israel Cultural Exchange (AICE). Founded by Benjamin Netanyahu, AICE has a history of campaigning against Palestinian rights.
The protest – organised by the Palestine Action Group (PAG) – was held despite NSW police obtaining a Supreme Court order banning a demonstration in front of the opening night venue. This isn’t the first time PAG has had to fight for the right to protest. In 2012, the police attempted to ban a protest commemorating Al-Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Israel. On that occasion, the police failed in court.
However, police will likely attempt to use the film festival case as a precedent to ban demonstrations in the future.
Determined not to be silenced by the decision, protesters gathered at Taylor Square on Oxford Street. Addressing the demonstration, Mona Abu Zalef, a Palestinian student at UTS and PAG activist, spoke of the importance of a boycott of the festival: “We are protesting because it is sponsored by the same people who are murdering our children in Gaza.”
Riot police stopped the protest marching as a group to the festival, but protesters evaded the blockade by running down alleys and side streets to reach the venue and protest in defiance of the court order.
Shaymaa Abdullah, an Aboriginal woman, was assaulted by four police officers. She told Red Flag, “This is Indigenous land and I should have the right to walk. I should have the right to walk on my own land, and the police are defending people who are killing Palestinians.”

War criminals should not be welcome in Australia

Supporters of the Palestinians should oppose Assad’s crimes

Hutchison picketers defy Fair Work

Global collapse predictions confirmed

Palestine supporters protest film festival despite ban

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