On 7 December, around 200,000 South Koreans braved freezing Seoul weather to demand the resignation and impeachment of right-wing President Yoon Suk Yeol after his failed coup attempt four days earlier. 
Yoon declared martial law, for the first time in 44 years, at 10.23pm on 3 December in a surprise national television broadcast, which was met with widespread shock and outrage across South Korea. During the broadcast, the South Korean president, who is from the People Power Party (PPP), justified the enactment of martial law by accusing the National Assembly, which is dominated by the opposition Democratic Party (DPK), of paralysing his administration and causing “political strife” by blocking the proposed national budget and “sabotaging the core functions of the state”, while also “turning Korea into a ‘drug paradise’ and causing panic over public security”. 
In the announcement, Yoon noted that since his government came to power in May 2002, opposition lawmakers in the DPK had brought 22 motions to impeach government officials, including the minister of the Interior and Safety, the minister for National Defence, the chair of the Korea Communications Commission and the president of the Board of Audit and Inspection.
Yoon also accused the National Assembly of being a “den of criminals” engaged in a “legislative dictatorship”, as well as being North Korean agents, going on to say that martial law was necessary “to protect the Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces, to immediately eradicate the unscrupulous pro-Pyongyang anti-state forces that pillage the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect free constitutional order”. 
At 11pm, the full text of the martial law declaration was issued, repeating Yoon’s claim that “anti-state forces” were secretly operating in South Korea and that all political activities by the National Assembly, political parties and associations were now banned, along with all political rallies, protests, strikes and workplace slowdowns. The martial law decree also announced that all press and publications would now be under the control of the military, and that any workers currently engaged in workplace protests must “return to work within 48 hours or face punishment under the Martial Law Act”. The decree concluded by declaring that “violators of the decree may face arrest, detention, and warrantless search and seizure” and other punishment. 
Shocked and angered by Yoon’s declaration, thousands of Korean citizens defied the threat of arrest and flooded the streets outside the National Assembly in protest. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) issued a statement condemning Yoon’s actions, saying, “the people will not forgive this,” as they remembered and had never forgiven the previous dictatorships that had “suppressed citizens and violated democracy”. Opposition lawmakers also raced to the National Assembly to vote to overturn the martial law declaration. Under South Korean law, martial law can be overturned by a two-thirds vote of the 300-strong National Assembly. 
Many of the politicians, including DPK leader Lee Jae-Myung—whose party holds 175 seats in the South Korean parliament—had to scale the walls of the building to enter, while other politicians and staff already inside barricaded the main entrances to stop the military from taking control of the building. 
Footage of Ahn Gwi-Ryeong, a former news anchor turned lawmaker, attempting to stop troops from storming the building also quickly went viral. Ahn, a deputy spokesperson for the DPK, was filmed grabbing the rifle of a soldier, saying: “Don’t you feel shame?” In an interview with Reuters on 6 December, Ahn downplayed her actions, saying that they were not “particularly special” and that “there were many people braver than me who stood up to the martial law troops”, including “people who even managed to stop armoured vehicles outside”, referring to the actions of ordinary citizens who had massed on the streets. 
Failure of the Coup
Despite Yoon’s office contacting the national police to “stand by” approximately four hours before his declaration of martial law, it appears that only a small number of Yoon loyalists within the military and his political party were aware of the coup plot. 
In testimony given on 6 December to the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee, the first deputy director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), Hong Jang-Won, described how, minutes after the declaration of martial law, the president contacted both himself and the national director to demand they carry out a series of arrests of Yoon’s political opponents, which they refused to do. According to Hong, the Yoon had ordered him to “use this opportunity to round everyone up. Wipe everything clean”. 
Hong went on to state that Yoon’s arrest list included the head of the KCTU, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court and left-wing journalists, as well as the head of Yoon’s own People Power Party, Han Dong-Hoon, who had been critical of the presidential imposition of martial law. Yoon also sought to target for arrest key members of the opposition party, including the DPK’s national leader Lee Jae-Myung, National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-Shik, the DPK’s National Assembly floor leader Park Chan-Dae and DPK Supreme Council member Kim Min-Seok, who four months earlier had warned that Yoon was preparing a coup. 
According to a Korea Times article published on 3 September, Kim Min-Seok raised concerns about a possible coup during the confirmation hearing for Yoon’s newly appointed defence minister, Kim Yong-Hyun. The DPK lawmaker noted that the government was “suddenly replacing the minister of national defense with [former] Presidential Security Service chief Kim Yong-Hyun, a Cha Ji-Cheol-style suppressor of the opposition”, referring to the long-term political ally and security chief of military dictator Park Chung-Hee, who was assassinated along with Park in 1979. He argued that this, along with Yoon’s sudden use of the phrase “anti-state forces”, signalled “a strategic operation to prepare for martial law by stoking fear of North Korea under considerations of a regional war”. 
The DPK member has further noted that the newly appointed defence minister was also a member of the “Chungam faction,” which included Yoon contemporaries and loyalists who all attended Chungam High School with him. Other loyalists within Yoon’s faction included Park An-Su, the chief of the army, who would later enact the martial law decree following Yoon’s national broadcast, the Defence Counter-Intelligence Commander Yeo In-Hyung and Army Special Forces chief Kwak Jong-Geun and Special Forces Commander Lee Jin-woo.
According to a report on 5 December by Yonhap News Agency, it was Kim Yong-Hyun who recommended that Yoon implement martial law and was also responsible for ordering troops to “infiltrate the National Assembly and block lawmakers from entering the compound during martial law”. The former defence minister was subsequently arrested in the early hours of 7 December on charges of insurrection and abuse of power. On Sunday, 8 December, Yonhap reported that another of Yoon’s loyalists in the Chungam faction, Defence Counterintelligence Commander Yeo In-hung, in November had ordered the preparation of plans to implement martial law. Due to his role in the botched operation, Yeo has been suspended, while investigation into the plot continues. 
While evidence continues to emerge about the planning of the coup, the narrowness of the plot resulted in a lack of communication and confusion between military, police and intelligence commands. This delayed not only the dispatch of the special forces and other military, providing a 40-minute window for both opposition lawmakers and ordinary citizens to mass at the National Assembly to try to stop martial law.
According to a report on 6 December in the conservative Chosun Daily, one of Yoon's closest allies, Interior Minister Lee Sang-Min, lamented the failure of the plot, saying, “Frankly speaking, if we had successfully shut down the National Assembly, the vote on the lifting of martial law would not have happened at all. We could have held back the legislators with ease if we had chosen to”. 
Yoon’s lame duck presidency
Yoon has faced turmoil since becoming president in May 2022. A former prosecutor, Yoon only very narrowly defeated the DPK’s Lee Jae-Myung. During his presidential campaign, Yoon ran on an anti-labour and anti-union platform, threatening to cut the minimum wage, remove limits on working hours and enact policies that would allow corporations to operate free from “excessive” regulation. 
Yoon also sought to capitalise on the growing anti-feminist sentiment among many young male Korean voters impacted by rampant economic inequality caused by decades of neoliberal capitalism but who have blamed the modest gains made by Korean women for their plight. Courting the 20-30-year-old male vote, Yoon called for the abolition of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, claiming that systemic “structural discrimination based on gender” did not exist in South Korea. This is despite the economic and social indicators for women in South Korea being some of the worst in the developed world. 
After winning the presidency, the new president moved to crack down on South Korea’s union movement. Yoon’s anti-labour attacks, however, have sparked widespread opposition. On 24 November 2022, more than 25,000 truck drivers walked off the job for sixteen days to demand job security and for minimum pay rates to be extended to all truck drivers. Seoul subway workers joined the truck drivers on the streets, launching their first strike in six years after negotiations about worker redundancies had collapsed. Yoon’s response was aggressive, invoking a law not used for 18 years to issue a “back-to-work order” five days after the strike had begun. Under the order, workers who failed to comply faced jail terms of up to three years and/or fines of 30 million won (USD $22,400).
In January 2023, just weeks after the back-to-work decree was issued, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions was surrounded by 1,000 riot police as 30 National Intelligence Service agents stormed the building, conducting a ten-hour raid. The NIS accused members of the KCTU and the KCTU-affiliated Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union of being North Korean spies and charged union members with violating South Korea’s anti-communist laws. The KCTU, which has a membership of more than 1 million workers, denounced the raids. In a statement issued by the confederation’s Central Executive Committee, KCTU President Yang Kyeung-Soo accused the president of trampling on democracy, say the union would not stop its criticism of the government and would continue to fight again Yoon’s anti-democratic and anti-labour regime.
Yoon’s popularity has continued to plummet, dropping from 53 percent at the start of his presidency to just 17 percent in August 2024. Already unable to pass much of his legislative agenda, Yoon officially became a lame duck president after the DPK won a landslide victory in the April 2024 general elections. While the DPK increased their seats by 19 to give them 175 and a super-majority with other oppositionists in the National Assembly, Yoon’s PPP lost six seats, reducing their parliamentary number to 108. 
The DPK and opposition super-majority has meant that the National Assembly has been able to pass a range of opposition legislation, while actively stymieing Yoon’s legislative agenda, including his national budget. Yoon, however, has repeatedly used his presidential veto powers to stop opposition legislation moving forward. 
Public anger has continued to grow over Yoon’s abuse of the presidential veto, including his vetoing of a legislative investigation into allegations that his wife had been involved in stock manipulation and had interfered in the nomination process in a June by-election and subsequent local elections. In response to Yoon’s abuse of the presidential veto, the DPK and the KCTU have organised a series of mass rallies with between 100,000 and 300,000 workers and other anti-government protesters taking the street each time, the fifth such rally being held just three days before Yoon’s declaration of martial law. 
Candlelight Protests 
The fallout from Yoon’s failed coup has been swift. The morning after the botched coup, the KCTU announced that they would “commence an indefinite general strike until the Yoon Suk Yeol regime steps down” and that their members would stage ongoing public protests. Trade union members and workers have been joined by tens of thousands of ordinary Koreans each day on the streets. The public’s anger has been further fuelled by 105 of the 108 People Power Party lawmakers in the National Assembly boycotting the impeachment vote on Saturday. 
As word filtered out to the 200,000-strong candlelight protests outside the National Assembly on Saturday night that the vote to impeach Yoon had automatically terminated due to the failure to reach a quorum because of the PPP boycott, protesters demanded they “get back in the chamber” and vote. People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, one of the many groups that helped to organise the Saturday rally, called the boycott of the vote “an act of sympathizing with insurrection that tramples on the will of the people, the true owners of the country”, going on to say that the public would “not tolerate the existence of the People Power Party”. 
 While the DPK has scheduled a motion on 11 December for another impeachment vote in the National Assembly to be held on 14 December, newspaper Hankyoreh, reporting live from the Saturday protest, noted the widespread determination from protesters, who vowed they would “not give up” despite the failure of the first impeachment vote. One student told the newspaper “our candles will only grow brighter” because of the PPP’s lack of action. True to their word, tens of thousands of KCTU workers and other protesters returned to the streets again on 9 December to demand both Yoon’s arrest and impeachment. As both Yoon and his party continue to try to cling to power, hoping to wait out the crisis, pressure from the streets will only continue to intensify as people vow to continue their protests until he is arrested and impeached.

Kim Bullimore

South Korean coup attempt provokes democratic uprising

Debunking the myths of Israel/Palestine

As Hollywood celebrates the release of Oppenheimer, protests have focused on the devastating impact of the Trinity atomic test in New Mexico on local Hispanic and indigenous communities. The protests have brought attention to the ongoing struggle of the communities for recognition and compensation, and the film’s whitewashing of racism during the development and testing of the bomb. 
The Trinity atomic test, which took place on 16 July 1945 at Los Alamos, was part of the top-secret Manhattan Project, which was established in 1942 to develop and produce an atomic bomb. After German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered neutron-induced nuclear fission in uranium in 1938, the US government under President Franklin Roosevelt formed a Uranium Committee, headed by military and scientific experts, to advance the USA’s atomic research and nuclear capabilities.
In 1941, the country’s atomic research was reorganised, marking the official government shift from research to development. A little under a year later, the Manhattan Project was officially created with an initial $500 million allocated. Three locations across the USA were chosen for the testing of bombs developed by the project: Hanford in Washington, Los Alamos in New Mexico and Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Additional locations were later established in Nevada and Colorado in the 1950s and 1960s.
The selection of the initial sites, in particular Hanford and Los Alamos, had an immediate impact on local Native American communities. While white residents of Hanford and nearby White Bluffs were provided with minimal compensation and 90 days to relocate, no compensation was offered to the Umatilla, Yakama and Nez Perce peoples who refused to abandon their traditional lands. 
In a 2003 interview for the Atomic Heritage Museum’s oral history project documenting the Manhattan Project, Russell Jim—a member of the Yakama nation—noted that, although the Hanford area had been used for centuries by his people, it was chosen by the government because it was considered to be “an isolated wasteland, and the people were expendable”. Jim noted that when more than 19,000 documents were released in 1986 about the Manhattan Project, it was revealed that the tests included an intentional release of radioisotopes into the environment. One of these releases had been a “green run”, which Jim explained was “an intentional release to test on the people and the environment”. It had a devastating impact on the Yakama people’s health. 
Gabriel Bohnee, a member of the Nez Perce nation, in another interview for the Atomic Heritage Museum, explained the impact of US imperialism on his people and their lands, saying: “The environment was sacrificed in the name of global power”. 
In New Mexico, as in Hanford, locals were not warned about the danger before or after the tests, despite 19,000 people living within an 80-kilometre radius of the detonations. Writing for the New York Times in 2020, essayist and author of Acid West Joshua Wheeler highlighted the racism of the US state, saying: “It should come as no surprise that the downwinders [the people who lived downwind of the tests] of Trinity were largely impoverished agricultural families, mostly Hispanic and Native”. 
At the time of the test, New Mexico was home to nineteen Native American townships, as well as members of the Apache and Navajo nations. 
Despite there being an established and sizeable Indigenous and Hispanic population living off the land, the Trinity testing site had been chosen due to it being not only flat with predictable wind patterns, but also because it was deemed to be “remote”. It originally had been estimated that the nuclear fallout covered an area 400 kilometres long and 320 kilometres wide. However, a new study by Princeton University has found that the fallout from the atomic tests in New Mexico and Nevada moved across 46 US states, as well as Mexico and Canada, within ten days.
Lily Adams from the Union of Concerned Scientists, who joined the protests in support of the New Mexico downwinders, told the Associated Press that the US government “poisoned its own people, many of whom are still waiting for recognition and justice”.
Despite the devastating impact of the Trinity test on their communities, New Mexico downwinders have never been eligible for compensation under the US Radiation Compensation Act. However, according to the Princeton Study, the accumulation of radioactive material in 28 of the 33 counties located within New Mexico and on federally recognised Native American tribal lands far exceeds the required limit set for the federal compensation program. For the New Mexico downwinders, the radiation fallout from the atomic test resulted in a rise in infant mortality, as well as an increase in cancer and decades of health problems.
In an interview with Waging Non-Violence about the release of Oppenheimer, New Mexico downwinder and cancer survivor Tina Cordova said that the film could have done a lot to raise awareness of their struggle. However, filmmakers ignored their request to acknowledge the impact of the bombs.
The racist disregard for indigenous people by imperialist states engaged in the race to develop the most destructive weapon known to humankind was not limited to the USA. In Australia, the British government—with the approval of the Liberal Menzies government—conducted twelve nuclear tests in the 1950 and 1960s. Of these, seven were at Maralinga in South Australia on the traditional lands of the Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Tjarutja and Kokatha peoples. Among the atomic bombs detonated at Maralinga was one twice the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima.
Neither the British nor Australian governments sought permission from the First Nations people, whose land and communities were directly impacted by the atomic tests. Instead, the Australian government attempted forcibly to remove and/or prevent Aboriginal communities from accessing their land. While some warning signs were erected, they were written in English. The failure to warn properly any of the Aboriginal communities about the tests or their fallout resulted not only in Aboriginal people being blinded but also in radiation poisoning among the four peoples, resulting in lifelong radiation-related health problems. 
Despite millions of dollars being spent on “cleaning” the area in the 1980 and 1990s, a 2021 study by Monash University found that the ground is still contaminated—and is far worse than previously thought. Speaking with ABC News last year, lead researcher Megan Cook noted that there continued to be “a sustained and prolonged release of plutonium into the ecosystem”. 
Imperialist racism was not only part of the develop of the atomic bomb in the USA and Australia. It was also used to justify the mass murder wrought by US imperialism when it dropped two bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just three weeks after the successful Trinity test. 
In the aftermath of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, which resulted in the USA abandoning its isolationist position to enter World War II, anti-Japanese racism became central to the US imperialism and it war efforts. Anti-Japanese racism was widely popularised within US media. US government policy also worked to further anti-Japanese racism by interning more than 120,000 Japanese Americans and migrants in concentration camps. 
Opinion polls in December 1944 revealed that 13 percent of the US public and 50 percent of US military personnel were in favour of exterminating all Japanese people. Polls conducted in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the murder of more than 210,000 Japanese civilians, indicated 85 percent public approval for the mass murder of Japanese civilians. Polls conducted two months after the bombings revealed that more than one-fifth of the US population thought more bombs should have been dropped.

Imperialism, racism and the atomic bomb

Six years after exposing the appalling treatment of Indigenous children in the Northern Territory’s Dondale prison, ABC’s Four Corners has revealed similarly terrible conditions in Western Australia’s Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre. 
The report, which aired on 14 November, opens with disturbing images of children held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day being held down by prison officers, who “fold” the children into positions which carry a risk of suffocation and death. Reporter Grace Tobin outlines that “state governments are ignoring the evidence from the experts and their own departments. Politicians know that detaining children as young as 10 [and] traumatising them makes them more likely to reoffend”.
Between 2020 and 2021, around 4,695 children aged between 10 and 17 years were incarcerated in youth detention facilities nationally per day, according to a March 2022 Australian Institute for Health and Welfare report. Over the course of the year, a total of 9,352 children spent time in detention. Of the children incarcerated, nearly half (49 percent) were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, despite Indigenous kids making up just 5.8 percent of the total child population in Australia. Nearly three-quarters of children in detention were “unsentenced”, according to the report. 
The number of Indigenous children in prison has increased dramatically over the last decade. Speaking with the NT News on 2 November, acting NT Children’s Commissioner Nicole Hucks said her office had recorded a 233 percent increase in the number of children incarcerated. In 2018, it was revealed that every single incarcerated child in the territory was Indigenous, and today the figure is 99 percent. The increase in numbers was primarily due to the 2021 Youth Justice Legislation Amendment introduced by the NT ALP government and passed with bipartisan support in May 2021. At the time, David Woodroffe from the Northern Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency condemned the law, telling the National Indigenous Times the legislation would “put more children behind bars and make them more likely to reoffend”. 
In Queensland, Indigenous children now make up 63 percent of all children in detention and account for 84 percent of all youth placed in solitary confinement. In Western Australia, Aboriginal children make up 60 percent of all children in detention, and are being jailed at 21 times the rate of non-Aboriginal kids.
In February 2022, the president of the Perth Children’s Court, Judge Hylton Quail, highlighted the dehumanising conditions in Banksia Hill when he slammed the treatment of a 15-year-old Aboriginal boy kept in solitary confinement for 33 days. Quail noted the causal link between the treatment of the child and his aggressive behaviour against prison guards, saying the boy—who had been diagnosed with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, attention deficit disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder—had been subject to “prolonged, systematic dehumanisation”.
A month after Quail’s comments, the WA Custodial Services inspector issued a report stating the majority of the children in detention at Banksia Hill had serious cognitive impairments and needed specialised, trauma-informed care. This was not news; high levels of cognitive impairment had been documented four years earlier in a 2018 medical study examining the prevalence of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder among 99 minors—74 percent of whom were Aboriginal—in youth detention at Banksia Hill. The study found that more than one-third (36 percent) of the children had been diagnosed with the disorder. In addition, the study found 88 of 99 children who had participated in the study “had at least one domain of severe neurodevelopmental impairment”. The study further noted that previous studies on youth incarceration had also identified a “high prevalence of intellectual disability and poor mental health” among young people in detention across Australia. 
The Custodial Services inspector report also revealed that 24 suicide attempts had occurred in Banksia Hill between January and November 2021. According to the report, children locked up at the detention centre had a “poor quality of life” and had been subject to inhuman conditions, with their rights repeatedly violated. Many had been subject to weeks or months of solitary confinement, spending less than one hour a day outside of their cells, which were small and “in a poor state”. These conditions “typically lead detainees to act out”, an increasing number of children engaging in self-harm. The report also noted that several of the children who had been subject to prolonged solitary confinement had formed a “suicide pact”. 
None of this information, however, was included in a 5 July media release issued by the WA Department of Justice and Corrective Services announcing the transfer of 20 youth from Banksia Hill Detention Centre to Casuarina Prison, an adult maximum-security prison. While the media release obliquely referred to the “complex needs” of the children, the primary emphasis was on their “significant offending histories” and track record of “destroying infrastructure, assaulting staff and harming themselves”. 
Responding to the announced transfer, the Australian Human Rights Commission issued a statement saying that they were “deeply concerned” for “the safety and wellbeing” of the teenagers as “this was not a safe or suitable option for these young people, many of whom have experienced cruel and degrading conditions in their treatment at Banksia Hill, including long periods in isolation and inadequate care for their complex needs”. 
In an effort to stymie the growing criticism of his government, on 27 November, Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan announced a $63 million funding boost for Banksia Hill, half of which would go towards infrastructure upgrades, including the strengthening of security to control “high risk and difficult” detainees. Of that, $22 million would go towards hiring more staff, including prison guards, while only $10 million would be spent on mental health services. 
The announcement was criticised by Aboriginal community leaders, as well as health and human rights advocates, who attended an emergency “summit” called by McGowan. The co-chair of Social Reinvestment WA and CEO of the Wungening Aboriginal Corporation, Daniel Morrison, dismissed the move as little more than a media stunt, telling the Guardian that if the premier “put half as much energy into actually fixing the issues, we would all be in a better place, including the children without a voice”.
Repression and incarceration, rather than investment in improved living conditions, health care and measures to address social inequality, will only make racism, and the suffering it causes, worse.

The scandal of Indigenous children in detention

Fifteen years ago, the John Howard federal Coalition government launched a military invasion and occupation of Aboriginal townships and lands in the Northern Territory. More than 600 military and police personnel, accompanied by a phalanx of government bureaucrats, entered 73 Aboriginal communities, placing them under the unilateral control of the Australian army. 
Bearing the name Operation Outreach, the same name given to the US Department of Defense’s “humanitarian” relief program in the wake of the US military’s invasion and devastation of Afghanistan, the invasion came just six days after Howard first announced the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) on 21 June 2007. 
In Mutitjulu, the small community at the centre of what would become known colloquially as the “Northern Territory Intervention”, residents feared that the army would take their children away. Located 460 kilometres south-west of Alice Springs and home to 1,500 residents, the community was gripped by terror as military jeeps rolled into the remote township. 
Speaking with SBS’s National Indigenous Television (NITV) in 2017 on the tenth anniversary of the Intervention, Mutitjulu resident Dorethea Randall recalled the fear and panic experienced by her community:
“I’ve never seen my family and the community members so nervous and scared. There were some family members, especially a lot of our mothers, who’d experienced the Stolen Generation. They ran up to the sand dunes to hide their kids, so you can just imagine they were reliving something they’d experienced.”
Another Mutitjulu resident, Gary Cole, recalled the apprehension that swept the community, telling NITV: “We heard they was coming, and some people were hiding in their houses, thinking, ‘Oh, they’re gonna come and start shooting people and taking over our community’. A lot of people were scared, we were all scared”.
At the 21 June press conference, flanked by Mal Brough—the minister for Indigenous affairs—Howard declared there was “a national emergency in relation to the abuse of children in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory”. Howard and Brough then outlined measures to be imposed, including bans on the possession of pornography and alcohol, as well as forced medical examinations of all Indigenous children under 16. 
Income support and family assistance payments would be linked to school attendance, while 50 percent of welfare payments would be quarantined. Howard also announced that the federal government would “take control of townships through five-year leases”, “scrap the permit system for common areas and road corridors on Aboriginal lands” and increase policing.
Howard justified the measures by citing the Little Children Are Sacred report, which had been commissioned by the Territory government and outlined allegations of child abuse and family violence in Aboriginal communities, as well as the systemic disadvantage experienced by Indigenous people—including economic deprivation, social marginalisation, unemployment, poor health and inadequate housing. The report, however, was not the first received by the federal government on the issue, nor was it the first to link the cause of family violence to lack of investment in Aboriginal communities and the failure to provide basic services and infrastructure. 
Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, several reports were furnished to Howard’s Coalition government by a range of state and federal departments, as well as Aboriginal and non-Indigenous organisations, including one in 1996 from Secretariat National Aboriginal &amp; Islander Child Care proposing a national strategy to prevent child abuse and neglect in Aboriginal communities. 
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), abolished by Howard in 2004, had also provided reports on the issue between 1996 and 2004, while working to develop programs to combat family violence. However, in his first budget after being elected in 1996, Howard cut $460 million from ATSIC, and over the next decade continued to reduce funding to the Indigenous body before abolishing it. These funding cuts ensured ATSIC was never able to fully address issues affecting Indigenous communities, including family violence. 
Writing three days after the start of Operation Outreach, Sydney Morning Herald columnist Alan Ramsey noted that the Coalition had also received a major report on violence in Aboriginal communities written by Dr Paul Memmott in August 1999, but waited eighteen months to release it. Ramsey asked rhetorically what Howard had done in response to Memmott’s report, noting he did not call out the troops or send in the police. Instead, the report, documenting many of the same issues in Little Children Are Sacred, was ignored by Howard’s Coalition.<a> However, things changed abruptly in the lead-up to the 2007 federal election, with the prime minister suddenly discovering a national emergency in Aboriginal communities. </a>As Ramsey correctly concluded, Howard’s “national emergency” was purely political.
In many ways, the NT Intervention was to the Coalition’s 2007 federal election campaign, what the Tampa affair and the “children overboard” scandal had been to its 2001 election campaign. In 2001, less than three months out from the election, Howard’s government manufactured a “border crisis”, refusing to allow a Norwegian freighter to dock in Australia after its captain had rescued more than 400 refugees from drowning in the Indian Ocean. 
Howard used the events surrounding the MV Tampa to craft a new “border protection” policy, making it the centrepiece of the Coalition’s election campaign. Six weeks later and just four weeks out from the election, Howard and his ministers again played the race card, this time falsely claiming that asylum seekers had thrown their small children into the ocean to force the Australian navy to rescue them and bring them to Australia. 
In 2007, the race card played to advance the Coalition’s electoral fortunes was the Intervention, the focus this time on Aboriginal communities rather than asylum seekers. 
The Intervention, however, was not just policy on the fly. As Professor Jon Altman, who has written extensively on the Intervention, notes, the NTER had “a considerable policy history”, according with Howard’s long-held ideological beliefs. Writing in the Journal of Indigenous Policy on the first year of the Intervention, Altman explained that reshaping Indigenous affairs was “a core ideological issue” for Howard, with this being “evident in a series of ‘antis’: anti-ATSIC, anti-native title, anti-reconciliation, anti-the rights agenda, anti-apologising to the stolen generation in 1997, anti-land rights and anti-the diverse intercultural institutions of Indigenous Australia”. 
Prior to the Intervention, Howard had long sought to demolish and dilute not only Indigenous institutions but also rights. In a subsequent 2021 Arena article, Altman argued that, with the Intervention, Howard “set out to eradicate the ‘self-determination’ approach and unleash restorative free-market capitalism on remote places”, this being “expertly guided by state schemes to modify behaviour and educate and train the workforce”.
To enact the Intervention, legislation was subsequently passed on 16 August 2007 with the support of the Labor Party. Costing $580 million in its first year, the legislative package ensured the enactment of the measures announced at the press conference, along with the denial of compensation to traditional owners for the Commonwealth’s compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal townships and lands, while also excluding consideration of customary law and cultural practices in sentencing and bail decisions. 
It also suspended the Racial Discrimination Act, denying Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory anti-discrimination protection under the law.
The speed with which Howard was able to orchestrate the Intervention was in part due to sensationalist reporting carried out by the media, in particular ABC’s Lateline. In June 2006—one year before the Intervention—Lateline ran a sensational story on the alleged abuse taking place in Mutitjulu, showcasing an interview with a man claiming to be a “youth worker” living in the community. The “youth worker”, whose face was concealed and voice digitally distorted, claimed to have witnessed several incidents of child sexual abuse, widespread domestic violence against Aboriginal women and sex slavery. 
However, as investigative reporter Chris Graham would expose in a 2007 National Indigenous Times article, “Bad Auntie”, not only were the allegations false but the man was not a “youth worker” at all. He was Greg Andrews, an assistant secretary in the Office of Indigenous Policy, advising Mal Brough on violence in Aboriginal communities. And Lateline was aware of his real identity. 
However, as Graham explained in another article in 2015, the damage was done: “The morning after Lateline’s scoop, [NT Chief Minister] Clare Martin announced her government would hold a major inquiry into violence against children in Aboriginal communities”. The result was the Little Children Are Sacred report, used by Howard to initiate the Intervention. 
Although Howard’s Coalition was swept from office in November 2007, Kevin Rudd’s new Labor government continued and extended the Intervention. Speaking in June 2008 at the Queensland ALP conference, Rudd claimed that the Intervention had made a major difference and that communities felt safer “with more police on the ground”. Speaking just four months after issuing an apology to the Stolen Generations, Rudd outlined his determination to “maintain momentum” and continue the Intervention. The Racial Discrimination Act remained suspended for another three years. 
Labor governments redesigned and extended the Intervention. When the legislative basis for it was due to expire in 2012, it was replaced with the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act, ensuring the Intervention continued for another ten years. Stronger Futures resulted in the expansion of income management, increased payment quarantining and penalties relating to alcohol and pornography, including up to six months in jail for the possession of a can of beer and eighteen months for a six pack. It also expanded the policy linking school attendance and Centrelink payments and the Commonwealth’s powers regulating Aboriginal townships, while continuing the suspension of the land permit system. 
Subsequent Coalition governments under Tony Abbot, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison continued to tinker with Stronger Futures, while cutting funding from frontline Aboriginal organisations and programs, including legal and health services and early childhood education programs. 
While successive Labor and Coalition governments continued to support the racist Intervention, the impact on NT Aboriginal communities has been devastating. In a 2019 letter to then Minister for Indigenous Affairs Ken Wyatt, Aboriginal leaders documented the increasing and ongoing socio-economic disadvantage within their communities caused by the Intervention. 
The letter, issued by the Intervention Rollback Action Group, noted that Aboriginal men were widely and wrongly being labelled as child abusers and that the Intervention had resulted in loss of community control, governance and assets, the closure of community organisations and pressure to sign over land, along with an increase in racism and negative stereotyping. The letter noted that “the Intervention has taken away people’s control over their lives and is insidiously and seriously affecting health”, resulting in a rise in suicide rates. Excessive policing had also increased incarceration rates and the removal of children, “entrenching a sense of helplessness in future generations”. 
In the wake of the election of the Albanese Labor government, Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory have continued to organise, demanding an end to the intervention. As part of the 18 June National Day of Action, launched after the acquittal of Northern Territory cop Zachary Rolfe for the 2019 murder of 19-year-old Warlpiri teen Kumanjayi Walker, Warlpiri Elders called for armed police to be removed from Indigenous communities, as well as “the complete repeal of all Intervention laws and the restoration of our community control” with all Intervention funding being “re-directed to our expert community services” to allow for “grassroot” solutions.

The racist disgrace of the Northern Territory Intervention

The Israeli High Court has approved the expulsion of between 1,200 and 1,800 Palestinians from eight villages in the Masafer Yatta region of the South Hebron Hills in the occupied West Bank. Should the expulsions go ahead, it will be the one of the largest incidents of ethnic cleansing in the area since 1967.
The ruling contends that Palestinians living in eight of the twelve townships in the Masafer Yatta region had not been permanent residents in the 1980s when Israel established a military zone in the area. Instead, the Israeli state claimed that Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta—nomadic farmers who lived for generations in the area before the establishment of Israel in 1948—were “squatting”.
The Zionist state has long used the tactic of declaring a Palestinian area to be a “closed military zone”, under various “defence” and “emergency” regulations, to justify the seizure of Palestinian land.
This has been proven to be the case in Masafer Yatta. According to the minutes of a 1981 Israeli government ministerial meeting presented by the residents’ legal counsel to the court, but ignored by the justices, the Zionist state declared Masafer Yatta to be a military zone in 1981 for the sole purpose of removing the Palestinian population. The ministerial minutes document the recommendation of Israeli former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, at the time minister for agriculture and the chairman of Israel’s settlement committee, that the military expand the Masafer Yatta firing zone to prevent “the spread of the rural Arabs of the mountain down the side of the mountain facing the desert ... and to keep these areas in our hands”.
In statement issued on 5 May in response to the court ruling, Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem declared the High Court to be “the Supreme Court of the Occupation”, pointing out that the purpose of the court ruling was to provide legal justification for Israel’s destruction and ethnic cleansing of the Masafer Yatta communities. The B’Tselem statement went on to note that the ruling “proved once again that the occupied cannot expect justice from the occupier’s court”.
Veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass, writing for the Tel Aviv-based Haaretz newspaper, on 6 May noted that the Israeli military had previously carried out a “mass eviction” in the Masafer Yatta villages in 1999. According to Hass, the High Court’s ruling has simply confirmed once again the “colonial-settler” character of the Israeli state.
Hass is correct. The High Court ruling is just the latest salvo in an ongoing campaign by the Israeli settler-state to enact an apartheid regime to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the lands they have lived on for centuries.
Since its establishment in 1948—when Zionist militias ethnically cleansed more than 500 Palestinian villages and forced more than 750,000 Palestinians into exile—a primary goal of the Zionist state has been territorial expansion. In 1967, Israel further extended its territorial control and regime of oppression when it illegally seized control of and occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.
In recent months, Israel has stepped up its campaign to seize more Palestinian land not only in the occupied West Bank but also in occupied East Jerusalem. Since March, Israel has conducted repeated raids in East Jerusalem to facilitate access for illegal Israeli settlers to Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), where the Al-Aqsa compound is located.
The most recent attack was on 5 May, when the Israeli military stormed Haram al-Sharif along with 600 illegal settlers. During the incursion, the military attacked Palestinian Muslim worshippers inside Al-Aqsa with rubber-coated bullets, tear gas and stun grenades.
While the number of incursions and raids by the military and settlers on Al-Aqsa have steadily increased since the Bennet-Lapid government came to power in mid-2021, they are not new. They are part of a decades-old joint strategy by right-wing Israeli settler groups and the Zionist state to change the demographic make-up of East Jerusalem and entrench Zionist control of the city in violation of international law.
The importance of establishing such “facts on the ground” was explained by Teddy Kollek, the former director-general of David Ben-Gurion’s prime ministerial office, after Israel seized East Jerusalem in 1967. Kollek, who later served as the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem for 28 years, said in 1968: “The object is to ensure that all of Jerusalem remains forever a part of Israel. If this city is to be our capital, then we have to make it an integral part of our country, and we need Jewish inhabitants to do that”.
Israel tried to formalise its seizure of East Jerusalem in 1980 by passing the Jerusalem Law, claiming, in contravention to international law, that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”.
In entrenching Israeli control over the Palestinian territories that it illegally occupies, Israel has enacted an apartheid regime in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as inside the Zionist state itself.
Since 1967, Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza have been subjected to thousands of military regulations that affect every aspect of Palestinian daily life, including in relation to legal identity, education, employment, healthcare, housing, freedom of movement and political activity.
These military regulations are not enforced against the Israeli settlers living on Palestinian land in the occupied territories. Moreover, Palestinians do not have any legal recourse to challenge the regulations.
In addition, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary punishment and restrictions at the hands of the Israeli military occupation, including destruction of homes and agricultural crops, and the prevention of using roads or entering areas reserved only for Jewish colonial-settlers. Under this apartheid regime, Palestinians’ water resources and land are regularly confiscated and redirected for Jewish-only use in Israeli colonies.
Inside the Zionist state, more than 65 laws have been enacted to discriminate against Palestinians. According to Israeli human rights organisation Adalah—the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel—these discriminatory laws cover areas such as marriage and family matters, employment, education, land, property and political activity.
In July 2018, the Knesset voted for the Jewish Nation State Bill, enshrining its decades of apartheid policy. At the time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gloated that it was “a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the annals of the state of Israel”.
The bill stated that Israel is the “national home of the Jewish people” and that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”, thus denying Palestinians and other non-Jews the same right. According to Adalah, the bill entrenches “the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens, while simultaneously anchoring discrimination against Palestinian citizens and legitimising exclusion, racism, and systemic inequality”.
The purpose of the bill was made clear by one of its sponsors, Avi Dichter—an anti-Arab racist, who is also a former head of Israel’s secret police—who explained that it was designed to “prevent even the slightest thought, let alone attempt, to transform Israel to a country of all its citizen[s]”.
Despite Israel’s ongoing repression, Palestinians inside the Zionist state and in the occupied Palestinian territories have continued to resist Zionist settler-colonialism, occupation and oppression. In the wake of the Israeli High Court decision, Nidal Abu Younis, the mayor of Masafer Yatta, denounced the court as being “part of the occupation” and made it clear, in an interview with Reuters, that they will continue to fight to stay on their land.

Israel promises more ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

The longest protest for Indigenous land rights, sovereignty and self-determination in the world, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, located on Ngunnawal land in Canberra, will mark its 50th anniversary on 26 January. Established by Aboriginal activists to demand land rights, the Embassy has been a key site for the struggle for Indigenous rights ever since.
The foundation of the Embassy and the land rights movement, which emerged in the 1960s, was first laid in the 1920s and 1930s by the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association, the Australian Aborigines’ League and the Aborigines Progressive Association. Campaigning against hated protection boards—which controlled all aspects of Aboriginal lives—all three organisations called for Indigenous control of Indigenous affairs, equal citizenship rights, the right to education, the protection of cultural identity, land rights and an end to the removal of Aboriginal children from their families.
Building on the work of early Aboriginal activists such as Fred Maynard, William Cooper, Bill Ferguson, Jack Patten, Pearl Gibbs and many more, a new generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activists in the 1960s and 1970s took up the banner that had been unfurled by these organisations.
In 1965, Charles Perkins, a young Aboriginal man, organised a group of students to embark on a “freedom ride” around New South Wales. The Freedom Ride succeeded in drawing attention to the segregation endured by Aboriginal people, which included being forced to sit in “Aboriginal-only” seats in cinemas, being banned from swimming alongside white people in community pools and being prohibited from entering public bars and RSL clubs (despite many having served in the armed forces), while also raising awareness of the power of public protest among Aboriginal youth.
At the time, there was also a renewed struggle for land rights by Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. In 1966, the Gurindji people—led by Vincent Lingiari—in response to poor wages and working conditions, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/gurindji/">walked off Wave Hill, the largest pastoral lease in the Territory</a>. Their protest quickly expanded into a struggle for land rights, drawing attention to the poor living conditions faced by Aboriginal people who continued to live and work on their traditional lands.
Three years before the Wave Hill strike, the Yolngu people of the Yirrakala region of Arnhem Land on the Gove Peninsula had also begun a campaign to win back control of their traditional lands. In 1952, large deposits of bauxite had been found on Yolngu land. The federal Liberal government then changed the law to allow mining companies access to Aboriginal reserve areas. A decade later, in 1963, Prime Minister Robert Menzies—without the knowledge of or consultation with the traditional owners—approved plans for mining to go ahead, including granting a mining lease for 140 square miles (36,260 hectares) of land that would be removed from the Arnhem Land reserve.
In response, the Yolngu people presented two bark petitions to the House of Representatives, written in Yolngu Matha and English. The bark petitions described the traditional owners’ connection to the land from time immemorial, explaining that the peoples of Yirrkala “fear that their needs and interest will be completely ignored as they have been ignored in the past”.
Although the Coalition government of John Gorton in 1968 established a bipartisan parliamentary committee of inquiry, which acknowledged the Yolngu people’s rights described in the petitions, it rejected handing back ownership of the land. Instead, it granted a special 42-year lease to the mining giant Nabalco.
In response, the Yolngu launched legal action. The “Gove land rights case” became the first significant legal case for Aboriginal land rights in Australia. However, in April 1971, Justice Richard Blackburn ruled against the Yolngu people, saying that “the Aborigines belong to the land, but the land does not belong to the Aborigines”. Blackburn said that any land rights that existed before European colonisation had since been invalidated. As a result, Nabalco was allowed to continue its mining project despite the objection of the traditional owners.
To try to stop any future claims, Liberal Prime Minister Billy McMahon released a white paper in January 1972. While claiming to understand “fully the desire of the Aboriginal people”, it rejected any recognition of land rights, saying they would lead to “possible challenge[s] in relation to land titles in Australia which are at present unquestioned and secure”. Instead, the government “concluded that it was in the national interest, as well as largely in the interest of the Aborigines themselves, for mineral exploration and development on Aboriginal Reserves to continue”.
The establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on 26 January 1972 was a direct response to McMahon’s denial of land rights. According to historian Gary Foley, who was part of the Black Power movement and involved in the Tent Embassy protests, Aboriginal activists in Redfern planned a major demonstration outside of Parliament House. However, because the protest would take time to organise, they decided that a small group of activists would be dispatched immediately to Canberra to “establish a visible presence and immediate physical response to the PM’s statement”.
After recruiting Noel Hazzard, a long-time member of the Communist Party and photographer for the Tribune, to drive them to Canberra, four Aboriginal activists—Michael Anderson, Billy Craigie, Tony Coorey and Bert Williams—began their protest by erecting a single blue beach umbrella on the lawns of Parliament House. The founding of the Embassy was documented in a series of now famous photographs taken by Hazzard, which show the four young activists seated under the umbrella, which bore the sign “Aboriginal Embassy”. In establishing the Embassy, Foley later explained, the activists were highlighting the fact that “Aborigines were treated like aliens in their own land”.
The four activists were soon joined by others from Sydney and around the country, including Foley, John Newfong, Chicka Dixon, Shirley Smith and the Coe siblings Jenny, Isabel and Paul. The Embassy protest camp was expanded, with tents erected to act as a protest office and sleeping quarters. According to Foley, in his <a href="http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/pdf_essays/embassy.pdf">reflections on the first 30 days of the Embassy</a>, “numerous offers of food, blankets and money” were received by the Aboriginal activists from a “growing number of supportive and friendly Canberra residents”. Local non-Indigenous students and anti-apartheid activists also assisted with the logistics.
On 28 January, a delegation of Aboriginal women already in Canberra for the National Council of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Women conference arrived at the Embassy to show support. The women later moved a motion at their conference calling for McMahon and his minister for Aboriginal affairs to resign.
Asserting that Aboriginal people had never ceded sovereignty, the activists also set about designing a new flag. According to Foley, “the first flag that flew on the tents was a black, green, red and black pennant which was the flag developed 50 years earlier by Marcus Garvey as the symbol of his international black consciousness movement”. This was soon replaced by a flag “comprising a spear laid across a red and black background with four crescents looking inward to symbolise the black rights struggle from the four corners of Australia”. On 2 February, the red, yellow and black flag designed by Harold Thomas was raised for the first time at the Embassy.
Four days later the activists presented their demands to the McMahon government: control of the Northern Territory as a state within Australia; the parliament of the Northern Territory to be predominantly Aboriginal, with title and mining rights to all land within the Territory; legal title and mining rights to all other reserve lands and settlements throughout the country; the preservation of all sacred sites in Australia; legal title and mining rights to areas in and around all capital cities; and compensation for lands not returnable.
Unable to evict the activists or the Embassy because there were no laws preventing “camping” on the lawns in front of Parliament House, the McMahon government banned squatting, camping and the erection of tents on parliamentary lawns. On 20 July, more than 150 Federal Police descended on the protest camp to remove the Embassy and the protesters. Undeterred, the Aboriginal activists and their supporters re-erected the Tent Embassy three days later, only to have it destroyed once more by the police.
A week later, the protesters succeeded in re-erecting the Embassy for a few hours. On 12 September, the ACT Supreme Court ruled that the laws police were using as a basis for their actions could not be used to evict the protesters. In the wake of the ruling, Aboriginal activists once more erected the Tent Embassy for several hours, again asserting their demand for land rights.
In December, the McMahon government was swept from office, ending 23 years of Liberal Party rule. Labor Party leader Gough Whitlam—who had visited the Embassy in February and had promised to legislate for Aboriginal land rights—was now prime minister. Almost a decade after the Gurindji people began their struggle, the Whitlam government partly fulfilled its promise. In August 1975, Whitlam poured soil into the open hand of Vincent Lingiari, symbolising the return of control of 3,237 square kilometres of land traditionally belonging to the Gurindji people.
Although the Tent Embassy was again dismantled at the front of Parliament House in 1976, it continued to occupy several other sites around Canberra in the decades that followed. In 1992, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the original protest, the Embassy was re-established on its original site. Since 1992, Aboriginal activists have fought an ongoing battle to stop police removing the protest site, despite it being placed in 2015 on the Commonwealth Heritage list as part of the Old Parliament House precinct.
Today, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy remains a symbol of enduring protest and the struggle for Indigenous rights in Australia. As Ngambri-Ngunnawal man Paul House—who attended the original protests in 1972 as a toddler with his mother Matilda House—told ABC News in June 2020, the Embassy is “ground zero for First Nations people in terms of our struggle for human rights, for First Nation rights in this country, for a whole range of rights that we need to speak up for”.

Celebrating 50 years of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy

Aboriginal rapper Barkaa announced before Christmas that, in solidarity with Palestine, she was pulling out of the Sydney Festival. The Malyangapa and Barkindji artist announced her decision on Instagram, saying: “I stand with Palestine always and I’m pulling out of all events associated with [Sydney Festival]”. 
Sharing the statement from Artists Against Apartheid calling on the Sydney Festival to drop its $20,000 sponsorship deal with the Israeli embassy and not to “artwash” Israel’s human rights abuses and apartheid regime, Barkaa went on to say: “We as a nation live in a time where we should know better, so we should do better”.
Barkaa’s withdrawal came a day after Aboriginal journalist Amy McGuire also publicly announced her withdrawal on Twitter. McQuire, a Darumbal/South Sea writer and activist, noted that she “was supposed to appear on a panel for Sydney Festival called ‘Goodbye misogyny’” but had “decided to pull out and join Palestinian calls to boycott the festival”. McQuire went on to criticise the festival board’s attempt to deflect criticism about its partnership with the Israeli state, saying that their claim to be “apolitical” was “shameful”. 
While more than 100 artists and creatives have now withdrawn from the festival, including high profile acts such as Tom Ballard and Judith Lucy, Aboriginal artists and artists of colour have been at the forefront of the solidarity efforts with Palestine. In the past weeks, Barkaa and McQuire have been joined by Wiradjuri visual artist Karla Dickens and the Marrugeku Indigenous Dance Troupe. Speaking on the Project about why Aboriginal artists had chosen to withdraw, McQuire explained that it was because of the “connections we see as fellow Indigenous populations living in a settler colonial society”. 
The recognition of such connections is not new. In 2019, Aboriginal historian and activist Gary Foley recounted the long history of Aboriginal-Palestinian solidarity in Australia in an interview for the Status podcast with Palestinian academic and activist Noura Erakat. Like McQuire, Foley noted the connections between the two Indigenous populations:
“What had happened to the Palestinian people, was pretty much exactly what happened to us”, he said. Foley and other Aboriginal members of the Black Power movement that emerged in the 1970s were able to identify with the Palestinian struggle because Aboriginal land had also been “invaded, occupied and stolen”.
“Our awareness of the Palestinians ... was yet another part of our understanding of colonialism and imperialism and how they affected not just us but affected many peoples around the world in similar situations to us”, Foley told Erakat. He went on to explain that by working together, Aboriginal and Palestinian activists had developed “some really strong bonds”, because solidarity “was about mutually assisting each other in raising awareness and consciousness about each of our struggles”.
While Aboriginal-Palestinian collaboration has continued since the 1970s, in the past year several initiatives involving both Aboriginal and Palestinian activists have once more shone a light on this solidarity. In October, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were among the almost 80 organisations and 440 individuals who signed a statement by the Australian Centre for International Justice, which denounced Israel’s latest attempt to criminalise six Palestinian human rights organisations. 
In December, the Sunday Paper was also launched as “an alternative platform to centre Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Palestinian voices”. The initiative seeks to foster further solidarity, while also highlighting the censorship regularly faced by Palestinians in the corporate media, including in so-called progressive media such as the Saturday Paper and the Monthly, run by Schwartz media.
Writing in the first edition of the Sunday Paper, McQuire once more reflected on the shared “connectedness” between the Palestinian and Aboriginal people, noting that it existed not simply in the violence faced by both groups but “in our shared resistance ... that is predicated on our right of return, to live, and to breathe freely on our traditional lands”. It is because “sovereignty is at the heart of both our protests”, McQuire explained, that “even when there seems to be no hope, we are still able to resist”.

Aboriginal solidarity with Palestine

Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz declared six prominent Palestinian NGOs and human rights groups “terror organisations” in October. They include the oldest Palestinian human rights organisation, Al-Haq, which was established in 1979, as well as two political prisoner advocacy groups: Addameer and Defence for Children International-Palestine. The latter campaigns specifically for the rights of Palestinian child political prisoners. 
The three other groups are Bisan Centre for Research and Development, which advocates for social justice, democracy, equality, human rights and good governance; the United Agricultural Workers Committees, which represent peasant farmers; and the Union of Palestinian Women Committees, a progressive feminist organisation founded in 1980, which opposes all forms of discrimination and advocates democracy and an end to Israel’s military occupation. 
According to an editorial in the Jerusalem Post on 23 October, which cited a document issued by Israel’s Justice Ministry, the organisations have been declared “an arm of the terrorist organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine”. Gantz’s order gives the military the legal cover to close their offices, seize their assets and jail their staff members for up to 25 years. The designation also bans acts of support for the organisations—including financial aid or publishing words in “praise, support or sympathy”—under the threat of five years’ imprisonment.
The Israeli government is yet to provide any concrete credible evidence to support its claims. The Jerusalem Post editorial pointed out that neither Gantz nor the government had provided the media with any evidence “to prove the charges being levelled against the groups”. 
In a follow-up report the following day, the Post’s intelligence, terrorism and legal analyst Yonah Jeremy Bob also noted the lack of evidence. On 4 November, independent Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham, Oren Ziv and Meron Rapoport reported on the contents of a 74-page classified dossier compiled by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, which was the basis of the terrorism declaration against the six organisations. 
Published simultaneously in Israel and the US by three independent news sites—+972 Magazine, Sikha Mekomit (Local Call) and the Intercept—the report outlines the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s efforts to use the dossier to convince representatives of several European countries to stop funding the six organisations. The investigative report, however, notes that “at least five of the European countries [approached by Israel] said that the dossier did not contain any ‘concrete evidence’, and thus decided to continue financially supporting the organizations”. 
Abraham, Ziv and Rapoport explained that the dossier sent to the Europeans was “based almost entirely” on Shin Bet’s interrogation and torture of two Palestinian accountants who worked for the Health Work Committees, a Palestinian NGO not listed in Gantz’s announcement. Both men had been previously fired by the Health Work Committees for financial malpractice. “Contrary to the Israeli Defense Ministry’s claim”, Abraham, Ziv and Rapoport wrote, “the dossier did not provide a single piece of evidence proving the six organizations diverted their funds to the [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] or to violent activities”. 
At a joint press conference in Ramallah on 23 October, Palestinian civil society organisations condemned the Israeli attack and called on the international community to stand with Palestine by joining the #StandWithThe6 solidarity campaign. At the press conference, Addameer’s general director, Sahar Francis, said that the designations were a reprisal for the successful work being carried out by Palestinian human rights groups and the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, and the ongoing resilience of the Palestinian people. 
Francis was joined by Al-Haq’s general director, Shawan Jabarin, who said: “We will continue our work as we used to do, as if there is no designation by the Israeli ministry”. Jabarin went on to challenge Israel and its military to “prove their claims about our work”.
Two days later, 24 Israeli human rights organisations also issued a statement denouncing Gantz’s actions as “a draconian measure that criminalizes critical human rights work” and “an act of cowardice, characteristic of repressive authoritarian regimes”. The statement went on to pledge to “stand in solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues”. 
In the last two weeks, thousands of trade unions, human rights organisations, civil society groups and individuals from around the world have also joined the campaign to #StandWithThe6. In Australia, almost 80 organisation and 440 individuals have so far signed a community solidarity statement published the Australian Centre for International Justice in support of the six Palestinian organisations.

Israeli government brands human rights groups ‘terrorists’

French President Emmanuel Macron and fifteen of his ministers were forced to change their phones and numbers in July after it was revealed that they were targeted in 2019 by Moroccan authorities using Israeli-made spyware called Pegasus. Once installed, the Pegasus spyware can access and turn on a smartphone’s camera and microphone and access all applications, harvesting GPS location data, photos, videos, SMS messages, emails, WhatsApp chats, calendar and phone contacts.
According to French newspaper Le Monde, Macron’s and his ministers’ mobile phone numbers were among more than 50,000 targeted by the spyware, which was developed by cyber-surveillance company NSO Group Technologies. Paris-based non-profit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International, which initially broke the story, reported that at least 180 journalists worldwide were also targeted. 
In May 2019, 1,400 smartphone users were similarly targeted using Pegasus spyware, including government officials, diplomats, lawyers, journalists, political dissidents and human rights defenders in twenty different countries. At the time, it was discovered the surveillance software could be installed on iPhones and Android smartphones by ringing the targeted user via the WhatsApp messaging application. An article published in the Financial Times noted that the spyware could “be transmitted even if users did not answer their phones”, the malicious calls simply disappearing from the call logs. Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, claims to have fixed the security breach and has since launched a lawsuit against the NSO Group. 
The NSO Group—which sells “cybersecurity” programs only to government agencies worldwide—reportedly has contracts with at least 60 intelligence, military and law enforcement agencies in 40 different countries. Founded in 2010, the company is one of the many cybersecurity firms in Israel established by former members of the Zionist state’s military intelligence spy corps. The largest unit in the Israeli military, Unit 8200 (also known as the ISNU) is considered the equivalent of the US National Security Agency. 
Israeli anti-occupation group Who Profits noted in its June 2021 report Repression Diplomacy: The Israeli Cyber-Industry that Unit 8200 is responsible for collecting 90 percent of all intelligence in Israel and is involved in all the major operations run by Mossad and Shin Bet, respectively the state’s external spy agency and internal secret police. 
According to the Who Profits report, a central activity of Israel’s military intelligence unit has been maintaining “military and political control over the occupied Palestinian population”. This was confirmed in 2014, when a group of 43 serving and former soldiers from Unit 8200 published an open letter in Israel’s largest circulation newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. The soldiers’ letter confirmed that “intelligence [gathering] is an integral part of Israel’s military occupation over the territories”. 
According to the letter, information gathered by Unit 8200 is used “for political persecution and to create divisions within Palestinian society by recruiting collaborators and driving parts of Palestinian society against itself”, preventing Palestinians from leading “normal lives” and working to “fuel more violence”. According to one of the signatories, Unit 8200’s actions are reminiscent of the surveillance activities carried out by the Stasi in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. 
Four years after the publication of the letter, Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz reported that Israel has continued to carry out its cyber-surveillance operations against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories, including “monitoring the media, social media and the population as a whole”. Haaretz noted that the operation was “among the largest of its kind in the world”. 
While Israel has long been a leading arms dealer, selling weaponry it advertises as being “field-tested” and “battle-proven” against Palestinians, it is also a leading exporter of surveillance technology similarly tested against Palestinians. Writing for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs last year, Jonathan Cook, an award-winning British journalist and author living in Israel, noted that the country’s trade in military hardware is now “being overshadowed by a market for belligerent software: tools for waging cyber warfare”. 
According to Cook, like the military hardware being exported by the Israeli state, the “digital age weapons developed by Israel to oppress Palestinians” are now also being used “against Western populations who have long taken their freedoms for granted”. Cook notes, however, that the Israeli state “keep[s] its fingerprints off much of the new Big Brother technology” by outsourcing the additional developments to the military graduates of Unit 8200 such as the NSO Group but “implicitly” approves the actions of these spyware firms by granting them export licences. 
In 2019, Israeli civil rights groups launched a legal challenge to demand that the Israeli Defence Ministry cancel the NSO’s export licence. Danna Ingelton, deputy director of Amnesty International’s technology division, whose own staff had been targeted by Pegasus spyware, told the Financial Times that “the Israeli Ministry of Defence has ignored mounting evidence linking NSO Group to attacks on human rights defenders”, including selling its products “to governments who are known for outrageous human rights abuses, giving them the tools to track activists and critics”.
While Israel has been forced in the wake of the Macron scandal to “investigate” the NSO Group, it is unlikely much will change. The Israeli state and its security elite will continue to cash in on the international market for cyber warfare, while continuing to “battle test” their surveillance products on the Palestinian population they continue to oppress.

South Korean coup attempt provokes democratic uprising

Debunking the myths of Israel/Palestine

Imperialism, racism and the atomic bomb

The scandal of Indigenous children in detention

The racist disgrace of the Northern Territory Intervention

Israel promises more ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

Celebrating 50 years of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy

Aboriginal solidarity with Palestine

Israeli government brands human rights groups ‘terrorists’

Israeli spyware: tested on Palestinians, deployed around the world

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