Global military spending has hit an all-time high, a sign that world politics increasingly is being shaped by heightened imperialist tensions. 
Military expenditures reached US$2.4 trillion last year, according to estimates in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute <a href="https://www.sipri.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2024-04/2404_fs_milex_2023.pdf">annual report</a>, released in April. The figure is a 7 percent increase on 2022—the biggest single year jump in at least 15 years.
It also marks the first time that military spending increased simultaneously in all five major geographical areas: Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Asia and Oceania. Every pocket of the world is embroiled in geopolitical and military competition. 
“The unprecedented rise in military spending is a direct response to the global deterioration in peace and security”, Nan Tian, a senior researcher at the institute, which is regarded as the global authority on military expenditures, said in a media release. “States are prioritizing military strength but they risk an action-reaction spiral in the increasingly volatile geopolitical and security landscape.”
Some countries are spending much more than others, of course. Most of the outlays are accounted for by a very small number of states. At the forefront is the US, whose military spending rose 2.3 percent to US$916 billion—almost 40 percent of the world total, far surpassing any other state. China, in second position, spent an estimated $296 billion, followed by Russia ($109 billion) and India ($84 billion). China’s spending is, however, one of the fastest growing, with an increase of 6 percent year on year. 
When America’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies are included (almost all of Europe plus Canada, Türkiye and the United Kingdom), the domination of the US-aligned bloc of states is even clearer. NATO members accounted for more than $1.3 trillion in military outlays in 2023—55 percent of the global total.
The Australian government is throwing itself into the arms race. Just this month, Defence Minister Richard Marles <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-drive-to-war">announced</a> Labor’s National Defence Strategy, which contains a commitment to at least $750 billion in military spending over the next decade. This will increase military spending to 2.4 percent of Australia’s gross domestic product by 2034. 
According to Marles, this spending is needed to “maintain our way of life in a much less certain region and world”. The nationalist platitude is hard to swallow at a time when the living and working conditions of most people in Australia are <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/the-ongoing-assault-on-workers-in-australia">deteriorating</a>.

Maria Dabbas

Global military spending soars

The Albanese government is attempting to introduce legislation that would allow for the prosecution of refugees who try to prevent their own deportation. The proposed laws would also allow the government to stop processing the visa applications of citizens from countries that do not accept refugees involuntarily deported from Australia. 
Under the proposed Migration Amendment (Removal and Other Measures) Bill, asylum seekers would face mandatory jail time of anywhere from one to five years and/or a fine of $93,000 for not complying with government directives to deport them back to their home countries. The draft bill acknowledges that there may be some “reasonable excuses” for non-compliance, but states that genuine fear of persecution is not one of them. 
In a press conference last week, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said that the amendment would apply only to asylum seekers who have “exhausted every legal option” to stay in Australia. 
But <a href="https://alp.org.au/media/2594/2021-alp-national-platform-final-endorsed-platform.pdf">Labor’s own national platform admits</a> that the current screening processes used to assess asylum seekers’ claims are not “fair, thorough and robust”. People facing persecution have already been denied refugee status and deported, or placed on temporary visas that will be the target of any new legislation. 
The Refugee Council of Australia has <a href="https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/new-legislation-puts-refugees-failed-by-fast-track-process-at-risk/">expressed concern</a> that Labor’s bill will likely lead to the deportation of refugees “who have strong claims, but have not had a fair hearing or review”. What’s more, there is every chance that the legislation, if passed, will apply to people who have had their refugee status successfully recognised by the Australian government. 
According to the explanatory memorandum accompanying the draft bill, “it may be necessary to revisit the protection finding” of refugees when “the circumstances of the person or the country in relation to which a protection finding has been made have changed”. It’s as if being a refugee, from this perspective, is tantamount to a holiday, and deportation threatens all those who overstay their welcome. 
Even more alarming is the proposed introduction of ministerial powers to designate “removal concern countries”. This bureaucratic euphemism means outright bans on protection applications from any
citizens of countries that will not accept involuntarily deported refugees. If implemented, the measure would effectively make the capacity for involuntary deportation the yardstick of Australian refugee policy. 
Although the bill passed the lower house, opposition from the Greens and the Liberals blocked its progress in the Senate, resulting in a six-week inquiry due to conclude in May. This is a setback for Albanese’s government, which had hoped to ram through the legislation before the High Court meets on 17 April to make further rulings on the legality of indefinite detention. 
Since the High Court ruled against indefinite detention last November, anti-refugee racism has yet again returned to the centre of Australian politics. Under the leadership of Peter Dutton, the Liberals have <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/the-liberals-and-labors-history-of-competition-over-racism-and-refugee-cruelty?fbclid=IwAR2WHaqwtQKxDu0roa6gnOIUJTR_HtQRj7X8NVs-WLOygv-WvUvR-OrwVMc_aem_AUvu2izWJpLI0A5oBWT-xXKVHaOxD_1AgOLHhEjsfdr0chFSGxXzjteOGsstQ_Z0kGVoE5GhdhrSU1uGygaKxMyf">unleashed</a>
a rabid political campaign casting refugees freed from detention as criminals and sexual predators. In response, the Labor Party has pioneered draconian restrictions on the formerly detained refugees. 
With another High Court case on refugee detention looming, the Labor Party is now designing more repressive legislation to pre-empt and mitigate further right-wing, racist political attacks from the Liberals. Greens federal Senator David Shoebridge <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/media-release-labors-cruel-new-plan-people-seeking-asylum-desperate-and-futile">claims</a>
that the Labor government is “trying to outflank the Coalition to the right, in a cruel contest they can never win”. But in the cruel contest of refugee torture, the Labor Party is not just a half-hearted participant; it is a conscious co-creator. 
Long-term refugee activists and refugees have learnt this first-hand. For Aran Mylvaganam, a member of the Tamil Refugee Council, Labor’s new legislation is sickening, but not surprising. 
“Labor is always like this”, he told Red Flag. “They try to make themselves look good, but they end up behaving exactly like the Liberals—if not worse.”
That the Labor Party maintains the support of significant community organisations adds insult to injury. “If the Liberals were to introduce something like this, more people would already be on the streets fighting”, Mylvaganam said. “But instead, there are many organisations providing cover to the Labor Party or maintaining silence about them.”
The proposed legislation should shatter any illusion that the Labor Party is a friend of refugees. With anti-refugee racism likely to strengthen as the High Court challenge to indefinite detention continues, it’s time to reinvigorate grassroots activism for refugee rights and against the decades-long bipartisan torture regime.

Labor sets the agenda on refugee torture

Thousands of high school and university students across Australia ditched class on 29 February to protest in solidarity with Palestinians who continue to face severe privation, displacement and murder as part of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. 
The action was organised by Students for Palestine, an activist collective with a presence at universities across the country. It comes in the wake of one of the world’s largest school walk-outs for Palestine last December, and more recent student-led protest occupations of major train stations. More than 1,000 rallied in Melbourne, while several hundred attended the protest in Sydney and hundreds more in Canberra, Brisbane, Wollongong and other cities. 
In Melbourne, chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” bellowed through the streets, as students marched and occupied a nearby shopping centre. The overwhelming sentiment from rally speakers and attendees was one of refusal: a refusal to accept the genocidal crimes committed by Israel in collaboration with its allies.
To university student Eloise, there is no shortage of stories encapsulating the urgency of keeping up the Palestine solidarity movement. “I read yesterday that a Gazan child was fed bird seeds, because that’s the only food they had access to. And that kid died”, they told Red Flag. “There’s no food entering Gaza. I’m here for that kid.” 
For high school student Ariel, “supporting our brothers and sisters in Palestine, who have been suffering for many years”, was a given. So was the fact that mainstream politicians are no friend of Palestine: “Who else will care about the thousands of Palestinians who’ve been killed, if not us?” 
Supporters of Palestine are used to being ridiculed and slandered by Israel’s allies in parliament, boardrooms and the media. But when young people in particular speak up for Palestine, the condemnation from the mainstream is also steeped in condescension. Young people, so we’re told, are simply too naive to understand the nature of Israel and its conduct toward Palestinians. 
Those protesting thought otherwise. 
“Politicians should go and study the history books”, Iza, university student, quipped. “I’m from Poland, and that’s where the Holocaust happened. If that taught me anything, it’s that I don’t want anything like that to happen again. But it’s happening in front of our eyes, and we need to speak up about it.”
“Politicians talk a lot about education”, said another university student, Zara. “But education is about what’s happening in the world. Education is about change.” 
The question of how to achieve social justice was taken up in Melbourne by Victorian Socialists member Jerome Small. He told the crowd about how he was politicised by the movement against South African apartheid as a high school student, how he was often told that that regime would never fall, but how mass struggle—outside South Africa but most importantly by Black workers within it—eventually smashed apartheid. 
The lesson, he told protestors, is simple: “You can fight, and you can win. Don’t let them tell you otherwise”. That lesson is being learned by a new generation: as another high schooler told Red Flag, “We can’t be complacent. This is just too important.” 
In their collective defiance, high school and university students are offering us all an invaluable lesson on the courage and conviction that solidarity with Palestine demands.

Students protest for Palestine

Greens councillors in Darebin, a local government area in Melbourne’s north, are being challenged by a grassroots campaign from community members determined to maintain the council’s position of solidarity with Palestine. 
Darebin is one of seven councils in Victoria to have become a terrain on which local communities have sought to <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/socialist-local-councillors-take-labor-over-palestine">challenge </a>the political mainstream’s pro-Israel consensus. In a sign of the depth and breadth of the mass politicisation precipitated by Israel’s war on Gaza, local councils have been transformed into sites of political contestation—much more intense than the mechanics of roads, rates and rubbish usually entail. Community activists across the state are pressuring councils to oppose Israel’s genocidal onslaught and forcing councillors to reveal where they stand.
Nowhere have these political fault lines been drawn more sharply than in the supposedly progressive Darebin council. Last November, amid mounting death and destruction wreaked on Gaza by the Israeli military, Darebin councillors resolved to stay quiet. “Their response was, basically, ‘it’s not our problem’”, explains Lachie Challis, a Victorian Socialists member and one of the Darebin locals who subsequently helped establish the activist group <a href="https://linktr.ee/darebin4palestine">Darebin for Palestine</a>. 
When Challis and others caught wind of councillors’ plans to pass a mealy-mouthed motion on 18 December that would call for peace but refuse to significantly criticise Israel, they <a href="https://www.change.org/p/call-on-darebin-council-take-a-stronger-stance-on-palestine">launched</a> a petition demanding that councillors support the “withdrawal of Israel from occupied Palestinian land”, and acknowledge “that the conflict did not begin on 7 October, but with the Israeli occupation of Palestine”. Almost 600 people signed within four days. 
This emergent grassroots campaign, however, appeared to have little sway with Greens mayor Susanne <a href="https://greens.org.au/vic/person/susanne-newton">Newton</a>, and Greens councillors Tom <a href="https://greens.org.au/vic/person/tom-hannan">Hannan</a> and Trent <a href="https://greens.org.au/vic/person/trent-mccarthy-0">McCarthy</a>. In the December council meeting, Newton tried her best to prevent any discussion on Palestine and the content of a solidarity motion. As Jaan Schild, an anti-Zionist Jew and queer activist present at the meeting, explains: “there’s a time limit on council meetings, and the Greens knew that if they postponed for as long as possible, it would be impossible to have any discussion on Palestine”. 
“An image has stuck in my mind from [that] meeting”, Challis told Red Flag—of the Greens mayor who “sat there doing everything possible to block the motion with a ‘no woman is free until every woman is free’ sticker on her laptop. Palestinian women are excluded, I suppose?”.
With support from independent councillor Gaetano Greco, pro-Palestine activists and community members were eventually able to score a victory. Just after 10pm, five minutes before the meeting was set to close, the council voted up a <a href="https://www.darebin.vic.gov.au/-/media/Council/Files/About-Council/Councillors-and-meetings/Council-and-Committee-Meetings/Council-meetings/Agendas-and-minutes/2023/December-2023/CouncilMeetingMinutes-18December2023.ashx">motion</a> supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and committing the council to fly the Palestinian flag indefinitely outside the Preston town hall. 
While Darebin for Palestine activists were celebrating, however, movements behind closed doors to revoke the motion and bring down the Palestinian flag began. They came to a head last week. 
On 8 January, Darebin councillors convened a last-minute online meeting, from which the public was barred from participating. The urgent motion to be discussed, spearheaded by Greens councillor Tom Hannan, bore the innocuous-sounding title, “Significant Dates for Flying Flags on the Community Flagpole”. 
In explaining the motion, Hannan <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8EqxA1Gx-c">told</a> councillors that “a timeline for taking down the Palestinian flag is required for other flags to be raised and to promote cohesion and inclusion in our community”. The Palestinian flag, he said, had to come down so the council could raise the queer flag for Midsumma Festival and the Aboriginal flag for Invasion Day. 
It takes a particularly bankrupt set of politics and a particularly chilling bureaucrat to propose a new flag policy as a matter of urgency in response to community activism against a genocidal bloodbath. “This motion”, Greco rightly quipped in the January meeting, “is contemptuous of what is happening on the ground in Gaza”. 
As if that wasn’t enough, the Greens councillor sought to shield his attempt to roll back community support for Palestine under the cover of LGBTIQA+ and Indigenous rights. 
“We should not be in a position of having to put one cause against another”, Hannan fretted.
And he is right: the Darebin council has multiple flag poles. It consistently flies the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island flags outside the town hall. The council could have also voted, as proposed by Greco, to re-raise the Palestinian flag immediately after Invasion Day. It instead voted up Hannan’s motion. 
The only ones arbitrarily pitting struggles for social justice against each other were Hannan and his fellow Greens councillors—in opposition to the communities in whose names the Palestinian flag was set to be lowered, and without any consultation. As Darebin for Palestine activists put it in their 11 January <a href="https://ugc.production.linktr.ee/e7b447fa-265a-4424-a2f4-d9052190728f_Updated-Media-release--Palestinian-Flag-Darebin--11-01-2024-.pdf">press release</a>, “the Darebin community is remaining vigilant against councillors’ craven attempts to pinkwash genocide apologism and wedge Indigenous struggles against settler-colonial violence”. 
“The Darebin Greens and other councillors have shown their true colours,” they continued. “They don’t want to take a strong, principled stand against the genocide of the Palestinians, and instead have worked to actively undermine it”. 
Many are shocked by these councillors’ political cowardice, as it stands in contrast to stance taken by Greens politicians at a state and federal level. Federal Greens senators Mehreen Faruqi and Janet Rice staged a parliamentary walk-out last November in protest against the federal Labor government’s unflinching support for Israel. Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam has spoken at pro-Palestine rallies and <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/allan-says-she-expects-students-not-to-strike-for-palestine-next-week-20231114-p5ejsh.html">thrown</a> her weight behind school students striking for Palestine. 
To Challis, the conduct of the Darebin Greens councillors shows they are bereft of “backbone, political convictions, or knowledge of what has been happening in Palestine since before 1948”. To Schild, these councillors embody the contradiction of a party “filled with petty bureaucrats less than willing to follow the lead of their more famous leaders”. 
While the Palestinian flag for now remains raised above the Preston town hall—thanks to manoeuvring by Greco and ongoing pressure from activists—the future is unclear. An online-only special council meeting has been called for Monday 22 January, which will likely determine the Darebin council’s stance on this issue. Activists are calling on locals and the broader community to mobilise for a rally this Thursday evening, 18 January, to keep up the pressure on the local council. Another protest is planned for 5pm Monday 22 January outside the town hall. 
Join Darebin for Palestine at the protest this Thursday 18 January at 6pm, meeting outside Ged Kearney’s Office, 159 High Street, Preston (details here: <a href="https://fb.me/e/8owDpChZx">https://fb.me/e/8owDpChZx</a>) and the protest on Monday 22 January at 5pm, meeting outside Preston Town Hall (details here: <a href="https://fb.me/e/54SqtEYfQ">https://fb.me/e/54SqtEYfQ</a>)
<img alt="Darebin rally details" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/Darebin%20rally%20tiles1.jpg" />

Darebin community stands up to Greens councillors’ pinkwashing of their political cowardice on Palestine

Mainstream politicians and pundits have long peddled the narrative that young people are politically disengaged, more interested in taking selfies than changing society. But the explosion of youth-led <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/17/school-strike-4-climate-australian-students-skip-classes-en-masse-to-call-for-action">climate protests</a> and <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/school-students-give-lesson-solidarity">Palestine activism </a>indicates there is no shortage of political opinions among young people. They’re just not the sort of opinions the establishment approves of. 
When more than 2,000 high schoolers walked out of school last week to take a stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, politicians across the aisle mocked, condemned and <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/we-wont-be-silenced-why-high-school-students-are-walking-out-palestine">patronised</a> them. ABC’s 7.30 Report ran a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcU7Ct3OZ9g&amp;list=PLDTPrMoGHssAW8ipBtDkMIU297wWTLhDP&amp;index=11">story</a> with a contemptible contention: high schoolers, far from having the collective courage to raise their voices for justice in Palestine, had likely faced indoctrination from biased social media platforms. 
When thousands of high schoolers swarmed the streets demanding urgent action on climate change at the height of the Schools Strike 4 Climate movement in 2018 and 2019, they were met with a smear campaign from the government. Dan Tehan, then federal minister for education, <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=DTWEB_WRE170_a_GGL&amp;dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailytelegraph.com.au%2Fnews%2Fnsw%2Fhardcore-climate-change-activists-coach-children-on-how-to-orchestrate-massive-school-walkout%2Fnews-story%2F4e14f47708335bfba36bf23a534283da&amp;memtype=anonymous&amp;mode=premium&amp;v21=GROUPA-Segment-1-NOSCORE">told</a> the Daily Telegraph that “taxpayer funded eco-worriers” were masterminding “an appalling political manipulation” of high schoolers. Resources Minister Matt Canavan <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-30/australian-students-climate-change-protest-scott-morrison/10571168">told</a> ABC that the only thing high-school protesters learnt was “how to join the dole queue”; only school could teach them things that matter: “how to build a mine, how you do geology, how you drill for oil and gas”. 
When hundreds of brave high schoolers rallied at Flinders Street Station in 2007 to protest against the figurehead of US imperialism, George Bush, Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had stern words for these disobedient teens. “Stick to [your books]”, he <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-09-05/student-protests-could-turn-violent-education-dept/660492">urged</a>. “This is not a time for kids to get mixed up in protest activity.” Rudd clearly hadn’t heard the catchcry of earlier generations of anti-war student protesters and their pithy riposte to establishment politicians: books, not bombs—or, in the slightly expanded form that <a href="https://commonslibrary.org/when-the-bombs-drop-school-stops-eight-decades-of-australian-school-strikes-and-direct-action/">gained traction</a> during 2003 school walkouts against America’s invasion of Iraq, “when the bombs drop, school stops”. 
Time and time again, when young people mobilise against the rich and powerful and the war-mongering, climate-destroying status quo, they’re deemed too dumb to understand, too impressionable to have agency and too impotent to make change. In part, this reflects the way that political and economic leaders respond to anyone who challenges their prerogatives. But it also reflects something more specific: in an era of deep crisis and declining support for traditional political forces, young people are a constant thorn in the side of those who want to claim social consensus exists around conservative politics. 
Much to the <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/generation-left-why-the-right-side-of-politics-has-a-problem-20230717-p5dos7">chagrin </a>of the political right and the corporate media, young people’s political views are well to the left of other social layers on every major issue. ABC’s 2022 <a href="https://votecompass.abc.net.au/">Vote Compass</a>, a representative survey conducted and published after every Australian federal election since the 1980s, revealed that young people were the most left-wing in the poll’s history. 
The Australian Election Study found that support for the Coalition among people younger than 40 was as low as 25 percent in 2022, which is the lowest support for either major party in such a large cohort in the study’s history. Young people also vote Green at the highest rate of any age group—in 2019 the Australian Election Study found a record 37 percent of 18 to 25-year-olds gave their primary vote to the Greens. 
Concern about the climate is an important factor driving this trend. In the last Vote Compass, young people nominated climate change as the main issue that matters to them. Other surveys reflect the same sentiment. For example, the 2020 Our World, Our Say report, led by the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience and World Vision, <a href="https://amp.abc.net.au/article/100950770">found </a>that 80 percent of participants between 16 and 24 years old were extremely concerned about climate change and government inaction.
And climate change is not the only thing young people are concerned about. Younger people were also most likely to support the Voice to Parliament, according to <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/polling-migrants-young-people-most-likely-to-support-voice/">polling </a>by the Australia Institute in July this year. Seventy-three percent of 18 to 29-year-olds indicated they would vote yes, compared to 52 percent over all. Support for this extremely moderate reform, which became the basis of a racist campaign by the far right and Liberal Party, decreased in direct proportion to age.
When consulted on cost-of-living pressures, young people consistently demand greater government assistance to ensure basic needs are met. The third annual Australia Youth Barometer, <a href="https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/report/The_2023_Australian_Youth_Barometer/24087186">published </a>earlier this month by Monash University, found that 70 percent of young people think affordable housing is an issue requiring immediate action from the government—9 percent more than in 2022. 
These views reflect the grim social reality that most young people face. Increasingly frequent and severe climate catastrophes, entrenched social inequality and mounting financial stress mean it’s not hard to understand why young people express demands and sentiments that put them at odds with the status quo. 
As 21-year-old Frewoini Baume <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-13/young-people-more-left-wing-than-previous-generations/101040632">told </a>ABC News, “Our generation has been raised into this world where it’s like, everything is record breaking, unprecedented”. And short of a social transformation that matches the scale of crisis, the outlook for young people feels bleak. In the recently released Scanlon Foundation <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/economic-stress-splinters-community-cohesion-fuels-migration-concerns-20231114-p5ejvv.html">report </a>on social cohesion, 43 percent of young respondents said they are pessimistic about the future—more than any other age bracket. 
Far from representing some kind of generational weakness, as some prominent Australian business people have <a href="https://www.removepaywall.com/article/current">suggested</a>, young people’s heightened pessimism also reflects something real: that they tend to bear the brunt of economic and social precarity, more than any other age group.
According to a recent report from <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-21/commbank-iq-young-old-divide-housing-rates-mortgages-rents/103126250?fbclid=IwAR1TBtDa_RPlZS4axZBwP1iYiANBXmeHN4y2Ycawc8XKNrNIGOlzOQ4iog4">CommbankIQ</a> based on financial data from 7 million Australian residents, young people have suffered the greatest deterioration in their economic and social conditions as a result of the cost-of-living crisis. The report reveals that, while people under 30 are slashing their spending on food, fuel and insurance to stay afloat, those over 65 are instead expanding their discretionary spending faster than inflation. Fewer savings and assets, lower wages and myriad government <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-18/election-promises-risk-increasing-intergenerational-inequality/101072004">policies</a> that benefit older, wealthy voters are all compounding to create an untenable situation for young people. 
Young people don’t need to be convinced that the system isn’t working; the struggle to get by under capitalism helps do that by itself. The challenge is to channel that sentiment into collective campaigns, protests and movements that can start to take on the powers that be and give a lead to others to do the same. As the world’s most famous young <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/26/im-striking-from-school-for-climate-change-too-save-the-world-australians-students-should-too">rebel</a>, Greta Thunberg, put it, “We can no longer save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to be changed”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hrkac

Young people have political opinions—the political establishment just doesn’t like them 

“Just because we’re young, it doesn’t mean we can’t have political opinions”, Ramona says. She’s a 14-year-old student at a Melbourne High School and one of the organisers of the school strike for Palestine on Thursday 23 November. 
Hundreds of high schoolers are expected to walk out of class and meet on the steps of Flinders Street Station by lunchtime to show solidarity with Gazans facing a genocidal onslaught by the state of Israel. They also want to show their opposition to the Australian government’s support for Israel. For Ivy, another organiser of the walk-out, the sentiment catalysing many of her peers to participate is simple: “We can’t sit back while our government supports genocide”, she says. 
“My school friends and I have been going to the Sunday rallies together but we want to do more”, Audra Hope, another student, told the thousands-strong <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-19/pro-palestinian-pro-israeli-rallies-across-australia/103123204">demonstration</a> in Melbourne last Sunday—the sixth consecutive weekend protest in support of Palestine. “We cannot pretend that this isn’t the biggest crime our generation has seen. We cannot be silent as Israel kills kids in cold blood. We cannot accept what our principals are saying: that this is a war with equal sides.”
Ramona, Ivy, Audra and their many peers are following in the footsteps of high school students across the world mobilising against Israeli apartheid and their governments’ complicity in it. From <a href="https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2023/10/19/israel-hamas-war-student-walkout-bay-area">San Francisco</a> to <a href="https://socialistworker.co.uk/palestine-2023/school-students-walk-out-for-palestine-in-tower-hamlets/">London</a>, high schoolers have ditched class to demonstrate for Palestine. They’ve <a href="https://twitter.com/ZZZZZZZZZZZack/status/1714755322798117269?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1714755322798117269%7Ctwgr%5E2fc54e72fc71c80b713fd35b019c5c96ef97d086%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsws.org%2Fen%2Farticles%2F2023%2F10%2F21%2Fnifm-o21.html">bellowed</a> chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” across school corridors and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk5kf7U3euo">scaled</a> monuments to hoist the Palestinian flag. 
And <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/nov/17/gillian-keegan-deeply-concerned-over-pupils-missing-school-for-gaza-protests">just like</a> other high schoolers all over the world, organisers of the Melbourne-based school walk-out are facing a campaign of both condemnation and condescension from their school administrations, establishment media and major political parties.
The right-wing press and the political right are apoplectic. 3AW radio host Neil Mitchell has <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/melbourne-radio-host-neil-mitchell-declares-kids-being-manipulated-to-take-part-in-climate-and-palestine-school-strikes/news-story/7ad03b5389a99e39cba86cf4d9ab9d91">decried</a> the “manipulation” of high schoolers by supposedly pro-Hamas, professional activists. The Daily Telegraph’s hand-picked child psychologist Michael Carr-Greg has <a href="https://archive.md/Zb9Fo#selection-863.0-863.172">implored</a> parents to prevent their kids from taking part in the walk-out, because “young people’s brains aren’t fully developed yet, [and] it is the job of the parent to be the frontal cortex”. 
Meanwhile, federal Shadow Education Minister Sarah Henderson has similarly <a href="https://www.removepaywall.com/article/currenthttps:/www.removepaywall.com/article/current">lamented</a> the use of students as “political pawns” and <a href="https://vic.liberal.org.au/media-releases/2023-11-13-statement-from-the-shadow-minister-for-education?topic=&amp;fbclid=IwAR1GWiS_3qq9VhZDD_A0iuGQobMU12MNHZFjjsLrg_N10G37xDbQazngzvc">denounced</a> political activists for importing the “extremely complex conflict in the Middle East into Victorian classrooms”. 
As far as the right is concerned, high schoolers and young people more broadly can only ever be instruments, not agents, of politics—particularly when it comes to opinions and actions antagonistic to the pro-Israel status quo. 
The message from the Labor Party is similarly dismissive. Victorian Education Minister and Deputy Premier Ben Carrol <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wLJaDH6H7o">issued</a> a patronising plea to high schoolers last week: “You want to change the world? Attend school. Get an education”. Federal Education Minister Jason Clare <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/15/australian-school-kids-strike-climate-change-action-friday-doctors-note">told</a> the Guardian that students, however passionate, “should be at school during school hours”. 
In the eyes of the political establishment, high schoolers are simply too young and naive to understand the supposed complexity of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, and too impotent to make a difference anyway. But high schoolers active in the Palestine solidarity movement beg to differ. 
“We know it’s wrong to bomb a hospital filled with kids and babies. We know it’s wrong to force Palestinians out of their homes, only to bomb them on the streets. We know it’s wrong to spin a genocide as self-defence”, Audra says. 
For Ivy, the reaction to the walk-out from the political establishment is pure self-interested opportunism. “It’s just a deflection from their complicity”, she says. “If they really cared about students and education, they’d care about the Palestinian kids being bombed in their schools.”
Ramona and her peers are also keenly aware of the ways that high schoolers have fought for social justice historically—not by deferring to authority and diligently doing their homework, but by collectively disrupting the status quo. The struggle against South African apartheid and students’ role in it looms large in their political frame of reference. “High schoolers have walked out before and it’s worked”, Ramona says. 
And the more that they are targeted by school administrations, the more their peers are drawing their own conclusions. “There’s been so much repression in my school”, Ramona explains, “and so many of my classmates are shocked and wanting to get active”. 
With high schoolers in Sydney, Wollongong and Adelaide now <a href="https://archive.md/Zb9Fo#selection-863.0-863.172">organising</a> to join their Melbourne counterparts in Thursday’s walk-out, young people are leading the way and showing what the “adults in the room” really are: cowardly, compliant apologists for Israeli apartheid.
PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hrkac

‘We won’t be silenced’: Why high-school students are walking out for Palestine 

No sooner had the dust settled after that blast that killed hundreds of Palestinians at Gaza’s al-Ahli <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/18/what-do-we-know-about-the-strike-on-the-hospital-in-gaza#:~:text=Nearly%20500%20people%20have%20been,by%20an%20Israeli%20air%20raid.">hospital</a> on 17 October than the propaganda war began. 
The Israeli media machine went into overdrive and, with the help of the compliant Western media and governments, managed quickly to cast doubt on the simplest and most likely explanation for the tragedy: that Israel bombed the hospital that it had bombed before, that it had warned people to evacuate from and that it knew large numbers of Palestinians were sheltering at. Instead, it alleged, Palestinians themselves were responsible for the disaster. 
Israel being exposed as having fabricated <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israels-spin-about-hospital-massacre-quickly-comes-apart">evidence</a> in order to support its contention that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad was responsible, its refusal to produce military logs for the time or any other concrete evidence to support its claims, didn’t seem to concern its apologists or the many pro-Israel experts willing to give weight to the friendly-fire hypothesis. Nor did it matter that Israeli politicians, military figures and civil society groups have made no secret of their desire to punish and destroy the Palestinian population of Gaza, including by destroying civilian homes and infrastructure, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/9/israeli-defence-minister-orders-complete-siege-on-gaza">describing</a> Palestinians as “human animals” to annihilate, supposedly centrist Israeli politicians <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/israeli-politician-the-children-of-gaza-have-brought-this-upon-themselves/">blaming</a> Gazan children for “bringing [death] upon themselves” or, subsequently, Israeli doctors <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/israeli-doctors-urge-the-bombing-of-gaza-hospitals/">demanding</a> that the government escalate its bombing of Palestinian hospitals.
And even when Israel does admit to carrying out atrocities, such as the bombing of Gaza’s largest refugee camp Jabalia in late October, it is justified under the all-encompassing catchcry of “self-defence”. Israel—or rather, the image of itself it projects with the full support of mainstream media outlets—is always not only innocent of any wrongdoing, but the embattled, misunderstood victim. 
This is how the Israeli propaganda machine operates: deny facts, dominate the narrative and deflect attention elsewhere. This basic formula is tried and true. 
A high-profile example occurred last year following the murder of veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. She was <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/11/shireen-abu-akleh-israeli-forces-kill-al-jazeera-journalist">shot</a> in the neck and killed by an Israeli sniper while reporting on an Israeli military raid on the Jenin refugee camp and wearing clothing that clearly identified her as part of the press. 
Then Prime Minister Naftali Bennett <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/22/lies-investigations-and-videotape">claimed</a> that Abu Akleh was killed by an errant Palestinian bullet, and state officials released a video ostensibly showing Palestinian fighters celebrating the shooting. Abu Akleh, Bennett also said, was killed amidst a tense shooting battle between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. These claims were swiftly <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220512-btselem-israel-narrative-about-killing-shireen-abu-akleh-untrue/">disproven</a> by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
That did not stop major media outlets from dutifully repeating the arguments of Israel and sanitising the violence behind Abu Akleh’s assassination. “Trailblazing Palestinian Journalist Dies”, read the obituary first <a href="https://www.newarab.com/opinion/shireen-abu-akleh-and-nyts-pro-israel-disinformation">published</a> in the New York Times, yet again sending a clear message that, as far as the media are concerned, Palestinians are never murdered or destroyed by the Israeli state; they simply “die”, and their hospitals “explode”. 
The mainstream media have perfected the erasure of Palestinians and their struggle against apartheid to a fine art. Laura Albast, <a href="https://www.newarab.com/opinion/shireen-abu-akleh-and-nyts-pro-israel-disinformation">writing</a> in the New Arab, captures its essence: “Use passive voice. Omit facts. Do not make Israel the aggressor. Israeli violence is justified. Israeli sources are to be believed. Do not challenge or verify Israeli officials’ claims. Limit the use of Palestinian sources”. Shireen Abu Akleh died. 
An “operational investigation” conducted by the Israeli military came to the <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israelopt-israeli-military-cannot-keep-killing-palestinians-shireen-abu-akleh-impunity">conclusion</a> in September last year that there was a “high possibility” Abu Akleh was “accidentally” struck by Israeli gunfire. In the final analysis, however, it deemed it impossible to “unequivocally determine the source of the gunfire”. Likewise, an investigation by the US security coordinator <a href="https://www.state.gov/on-the-killing-of-shireen-abu-akleh/">ruled</a> that, although the Israeli military was most likely responsible for her death, this was “not intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances”.
After pumping out propaganda to absolve itself of responsibility for Abu Akleh’s murder, having its lies and deliberate omissions reinforced by compliant media outlets and the Western political establishment, and holding out for the disappearance of Abu Akleh’s name from the news cycle: only then did Israel move an inch towards recognising reality. 
Sometimes it does not concede even this much. Operation Cast Lead, launched by Israel in December 2008, is a case in point. It may seem mild in contrast to today’s scenes of genocidal calamity in Gaza, but at the time the brutality of Operation Cast Lead shocked the world. 
For 22 days, the Israel military pummelled Gazans by air, land and sea, with a ground invasion starting on 3 January 2009. White phosphorous <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/03/25/rain-fire/israels-unlawful-use-white-phosphorus-gaza">rained</a> down on densely populated civilian areas, including schools and markets, in violation of international humanitarian law. More than 1,400 Palestinians, including 313 children, were killed. 
Predictably, all of this was justified by Israel and its allies as self-defence against Hamas. George W. Bush, in his last days as US president, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/16/timeline-how-us-presidents-have-defended-israel-over-decades">declared</a> his opposition to “any ceasefire that leads to rocket attacks on Israel”. 
<a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/10/frie-o13.html">Long-time</a> shills for American imperialism such as Thomas Friedman <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/opinion/07iht-edfriedman.1.19157373.html">reframed</a> Israel’s assault on Gazans as “the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East”, one which ought to be entitled: “‘Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?’” 
The scale of Israel’s barbarism was, however, too great for these diversionary tactics and barely masked Islamophobia to wash away any criticism of Operation Cast Lead—even from Israeli soldiers. 
A now famous <a href="https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Operation_Cast_Lead_Gaza_2009_Eng.pdf">compilation</a> of testimony from Israeli soldiers who had participated in the 2008-9 operation, produced by the organisation Breaking the Silence, captured in stark terms the atmosphere of feverish, unhinged blood lust fostered within the Israeli military. “The hatred and the joy of killing ... [with] nothing to hold you back”, is how one soldier put it. 
What the Breaking the Silence report conveyed in anecdotal terms was subsequently analysed in forensic detail in the Goldstone Report. This refers to the outcome of a “fact-finding mission” commissioned in April 2009 by the United Nations Human Rights Council, with the South African Judge Richard Goldstone at its helm. 
The mission’s premise was far from radical. It did not call into question Israel’s right to subject the population of Gaza to 22 days of terror on the grounds of supposed self-defence; it merely sought to question its limits within the bounds of the international laws of war. It was led, as the Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/14/goldstone-report-history">noted</a>, by “a Jewish Zionist judge with impeccable international credentials”, hardly a detached observer. 
Nevertheless, Israel refused to cooperate. It blocked UN investigators’ entry into Israel and the Occupied Territories. It denounced the mission as one-sided and unfair. The only reasonable explanation for this, as Richard Falk, writing in the Electronic Intifada, <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/goldstone-report-and-battle-legitimacy/8456">argues</a>, is that Israel “had nothing to tell that could hope to overcome the overwhelming evidence against it”. 
And the evidence was indeed overwhelming. Over more than 574 pages, the Goldstone Report <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2009/10/3/key-points-of-the-goldstone-report">documents</a> severe war crimes and breaches of international law, including the deliberate targeting of civilians, use of disproportionate force and deprivation of liberty. Just to list a few, <a href="https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/12session/a-hrc-12-48.pdf">Israel carried out</a> “attacks on houses in the al-Samouni neighbourhood south of Gaza City, including the shelling of a house in which Palestinian civilians had been forced to assemble by the Israeli armed forces,” and engaged in “the shooting of civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so” and the “shelling with high explosive and white phosphorus munitions” of a United Nations relief centre “[offering] shelter to between 600 and 700 civilians and [containing] a huge fuel depot”. 
The Goldstone Report could only conclude that “what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity to both work and provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability”. 
Israel responded to these findings, published in September 2009, with outright contempt or deflection. Israel’s then President Shimon Peres <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/goldstone-report-and-battle-legitimacy/8456">derided</a> the report as a “mockery of history” that “fails to distinguish the aggressor and a state exercising the right of self defence”. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau <a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/vilifying-goldstone/">called</a> it “a kangaroo court against Israel, whose consequences harm the struggle of democratic countries against terror”. 
For its part, the US used its veto power in the UN Security Council to block any attempt by UN parties to discuss Goldstone’s findings—let alone to censure Israel for its wanton destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods in Operation Cast Lead. 
But even this total impunity was not enough for Israel. On top of condemning or attempting to undermine the legitimacy of its findings, Israeli political forces and their supporters <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2011/4/5/goldstone-recants-but-how-much-is-changed">unleashed</a> a vilification campaign targeting Goldstone himself, with the goal of coercing him into disavowing the report he had painstakingly prepared. And it worked. 
“If I had known then what I know now”, Goldstone <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC_story.html">wrote</a> in April 2011 in the Washington Post, “the Goldstone Report would have been different”. He chose to renege, in particular, on the finding that the Israeli government also happened to find the most intolerable: that the Israeli military deliberately targeted civilians. Jubilation and vindication subsequently swept across the Israeli political establishment, with Netanyahu seeing in Goldstone’s trajectory impetus for the UN to “toss [his] report into the trash can of history”. 
Time and time again, Israel and its supporters across the media and halls of power distort, deny, lie in the hope, or more accurately the well-founded expectation, of burying their crimes of apartheid and genocide. The only “truth” Israel can countenance is one in which its expansionist, genocidal project is never called into question. 
Against this manufactured “truth” stands the memory of Palestinians and the increasing numbers of people around the world who stand with them in demanding justice. As the US historian Howard Zinn wrote, “The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface”.

Lie, deny, deflect: Israel’s mastery of obfuscating genocide 

Conservatives and right-wingers rarely miss an opportunity to present themselves as victims of political persecution by the supposedly censorious, intolerant, if not downright <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/language-memory-soft-totalitarianism-live-not-by-lies/">totalitarian</a>, left. Yet the latest war on Gaza is once again showing that those most vulnerable to “cancel culture” are pro-Palestine voices. 
Nowhere is this more evident than in the US. Radhika Sainath, a senior attorney for the American advocacy organisation Palestine Legal, <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/a-mccarthyite-backlash-against-pro-palestine-speech">recently told Jewish Currents’ Alex Kane</a> that Palestine advocates are facing nothing short of an “immense McCarthyite backlash and suppression”, more intense than anything that has come before. 
University campuses are at the centre of this wave of political repression. Students and staff members supporting Palestinian rights have faced physical attacks and death threats. Palestine solidarity activists from the University of California, Los Angeles, <a href="https://twitter.com/SJPatUCLA/status/1712534666824266142/photo/3">have reported</a> that Zionists disrupted a teach-in on the situation in Palestine, physically assaulting attendees and threatening to “rip their fucking head off”. When activists at Brooklyn College <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/podcast-ep-84-students-fight-smears-universities-back-israels-genocidal">gathered</a> to show their support for Palestine, a local pro-Israel council member turned up brandishing a gun. 
Those who have expressed support for Palestine in words have not fared any better. In a <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/widget/2023/10/10/psc-statement/">statement</a> published on 10 October, 34 individuals and student groups at Harvard University condemned Israel as a violent apartheid regime that has forced Palestinians “to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden” for 75 years. For this, they have been <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/hundreds-harvard-faculty-sign-letter-080029229.html">denounced by the university</a>, <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/10/psc-statement-backlash/">condemned by politicians</a> and <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/10/12/israel-palestine-letter-ceos-blacklist-harvard-students">are being blacklisted</a> by employers. Some students have had job offers <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/business/corporations/harvard-letter-israel-columbia-ivy-davis-polk-law-firm-student-rcna120881?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma&amp;taid=652f11fc0c82f000011e9288&amp;utm_campaign=trueanthem&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter">rescinded</a>. 
Many have also had their names, pictures and addresses released publicly, both to intimidate them and to make them targets of violence. In response to the Harvard students’ statement, the conservative group Accuracy in Media <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/harvard-doxxing-truck-hamas-palestine-israel_n_65281b32e4b03ea0c0044387">sent trucks</a> to Harvard Square, displaying pictures of individual students who signed the statement, and labelling them “Harvard’s leading antisemites”. 
In a statement published in response to the escalating repression of Palestine advocates, the National Students for Justice in Palestine <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CyZX_c0pDED/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D&amp;img_index=2">noted</a>: “While the Palestinian people are being unjustly massacred, we are expected to stay silent”. But when “expectation” is enforced by the various reprisals suffered by those who speak out for Palestine, it is more accurate to call it coercion. 
The intimidation of voices critical of Zionism or the practices of Israeli governments has a <a href="https://palestinelegal.org/the-palestine-exception">long history</a>. Jewish scholar Noam Chomsky noted in The Fateful Triangle, published in 1983, that discussions about the nature of Israeli society, the Arab-Israeli conflict and US support for Israel had, since 1967, become “difficult or impossible in the United States as a result of a remarkably effective campaign of vilification, abuse, and sometimes outright lying directed against those who dared to question received doctrine”.
In the 21st century, the atmosphere has become even more censorious. Matthew Abraham, himself a target of a hysterical Zionist cancellation attempt for having shown sympathy for the Palestinians, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41858670">wrote in a 2011 Arab Studies Quarterly essay</a>: “Since 9/11, Middle East scholars have increasingly found themselves targets for hyper-nationalist forces eager to paint them as anti-American and anti-Israel radicals—even supporters of terrorism”.
More recently, David Spero, <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2018/06/silencing-palestinian-professors/">writing for the news website Mondoweiss</a>, noted:
“A small army of pro-Israeli watchdog organizations keeps a close eye on everything Palestinian academics do and say, every Tweet they post and group they join. Those who go too far in criticizing Israel or standing up for Palestine may pay with their jobs, their academic standing, their future admission and employment opportunities.”
A blacklist of pro-Palestinian US-based activists, the Canary Mission, has developed into a database <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/06/24/students-for-justice-in-palestine-fbi-sjp/">reportedly used</a> by the FBI and the Israeli government for intelligence-gathering purposes. Removal from the database requires a listed person to politically disavow and apologise for previously expressed critical views about Israel. 
The Canary Mission targets university students who have been involved in Palestine solidarity activism. Without significant resources, they mostly face their blacklisting and its consequences in unremarkable and unremarked anonymity. One such person <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/10/04/israel-palestine-blacklists-canary-mission/">told the Intercept</a>: “The first thing that comes up when you Google my name [is] the claim that I’m a terrorist supporter and an extremist”.
Even those with slightly more clout and social standing are not immune from political cancellation. In 2014, during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, US academic Steven Salaita had an offer of employment withdrawn from the University of Illinois after he posted comments on his personal social media calling out the hypocrisy of Israel’s claim to self-defence while it massacred Palestinians. “Only Israel can murder around 300 children in the span of a few weeks and insist that it is the victim”, he wrote in one tweet. When wealthy benefactors threatened to stop donating to the university, management cancelled Salaita and his purportedly “disrespectful and demeaning speech”. 
Another high-profile case concerns Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish academic and longstanding critic of Israel, who was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/11/internationaleducationnews.usa">fired</a> from De Paul University in 2007. <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2018/06/silencing-palestinian-professors/">As a former colleague told Mondoweiss</a>: “His detractors smear him as a ‘Holocaust denier,’ knowing full well that [he] is the son of two Holocaust survivors, and that the remainder of his family died in the Nazi death camps”.
Amid all this cancelling and intimidation, the “free speech warriors” of the political right are nowhere to be seen. Having campaigned for at least half a decade about “woke” culture’s purported threats to free speech and the need for reasonable people to stand against the increasingly censorious atmosphere in US society, they have fallen silent on the question. 
“Palestine is an unfailing litmus test of freedom of speech”, Randa Abdel-Fattah, <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/blog/the-great-palestinian-silence/">wrote in a 2020 Meajin article</a>. The list of people who have failed this test is too long to repeat. Yet the ongoing global mobilisations in solidarity with Palestine powerfully show that not everyone has remained silent or been intimidated out of standing against apartheid and genocide. Millions of people across the world are passing the test with flying colours: black, white, green and red.

Zionism’s cancel culture

As survivors <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/10/3/lampedusa-marks-10-year-anniversary-of-tragic-shipwrecks?traffic_source=KeepReading">gathered</a> in the southern Italian island of Lampedusa in October to commemorate the tenth anniversary of one of the most deadly drownings of refugees in the Mediterranean, European leaders met to discuss further plans to deport refugees and prevent asylum seekers gaining entry to Europe. 
“That story is unforgettable. Ten years aren’t enough, a whole lifetime isn’t enough. It lives with me. I dream about it every night”, Solomon Asafa <a href="https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Filmanifesto.it%2Flo-sogno-ogni-notte-a-lampedusa-10-anni-dopo-i-grandi-naufragi">told</a> Il Manifesto. Asafa was on the boat carrying hundreds of asylum seekers, mostly from Somalia and Eritrea, that capsized on 3 October 2013, killing 368 people. Just eight days later, another 268 people, mostly from Syria and 60 of them children, drowned in a similar incident.
Fisherman Vincenzo Luciano spoke of the horror of taking his boat out in February this year and finding the bodies of some of the at least 94 refugees, one-third of them children, drowned off the southern Italian coastal city of Cutro. “I have those faces fixed in my mind”, he told the Lampedusa gathering. “They appear in my dreams.” 
The commemoration at Lampedusa coincides with a renewed political focus on the island, which has long been a hot spot for refugee boat arrivals and, consequently, of Europe’s brutal border policing. <a href="https://theconversation.com/whats-happening-on-lampedusa-and-what-europe-needs-to-do-now-to-manage-migration-214650#:~:text=In%20barely%20two%20days%2C%20between,island%20of%20around%206%2C000%20inhabitants.">Large numbers</a> of asylum seekers have made the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean this year. More than 10,000 arrived in September alone, and boat crossings are at their <a href="https://www.frontex.europa.eu/media-centre/news/news-release/central-mediterranean-accounts-for-half-of-irregular-border-crossings-in-2023-G6q5pF">highest</a> level since 2016.
This situation has led European leaders across the political spectrum to denounce the migration “crisis” afflicting the continent. There certainly is a crisis, but not in the way they <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/giorgia-meloni-rishi-sunak-uk-italy-call-urgency-migration/">mean</a>. People arriving to seek asylum is not a crisis. Rather, border policies that make seeking asylum dangerous, and persecute those who attempt it, are causing a shameful humanitarian crisis. 
The very reason that most refugees try to reach Europe in ramshackle boats is that Frontext—the European Union’s border control agency—has made land crossings at choke points in Eastern Europe incredibly difficult. 
When it comes to boat arrivals, Frontex focuses on deterrence, with deadly consequences. In its five-year “Operation Sophia”, for example, Frontex guards destroyed wooden fishing boats used by refugees fleeing Libya, forcing them to risk their lives in ever more unsafe vessels. Meanwhile, non-governmental organisations that conduct search-and-rescue missions have had their activities <a href="https://www.ansa.it/toscana/notizie/2023/10/05/nave-open-arms-20-giorni-in-fermo-amministrativo-a-carrara_af91b5a4-3768-4811-9346-7239f76df056.html">blocked</a> and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/3/italy-detains-two-ngo-vessels-for-defying-new-rescue-law">criminalised</a>. 
In tandem with these measures, Frontex outsources European border policing to the North African regimes of <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/2/2/italy-complicit-in-crimes-for-renewing-pact-with-libya-ngos">Libya</a> and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/19/europe-frets-over-migration-tunisia-moves-refugees-to-departure-points">Tunisia</a>, both countries beset by deep political and economic turmoil. In exchange for these governments’ cooperation with boat turn-backs and arbitrary refugee detention, Frontex provides financial, technological and military assistance. 
The result is a system in which the capacity to accept and resettle refugees has been deliberately reduced in favour of military and diplomatic mechanisms intended to deter them. In Italy alone, for example, Giuseppe Campesi, writing in Il Mulino magazine, <a href="https://www.rivistailmulino.it/a/che-cos-una-crisi-migratoria">estimates</a> that refugee resettlement capacity was reduced by 240 percent between 2017 and 2022. 
So the “crisis” unfolding at Lampedusa in recent weeks—thousands of refugees crammed into ramshackle welcome centres, dependent on food and clothing donations from locals and awaiting transfer to new detention and repatriation centres the Italian government is rushing to build—is one that prevents people, punishes them or forces them to risk their lives exercising their basic right to seek asylum. It is no accident: it is a crisis by political design, and it is being seized upon by different forces vying for dominance in the European Union elections due to be held next year. 
The European Union parliament has long been the stronghold of a centrist coalition, led by the centre-right European People’s Party. It has primarily been a mechanism for cohering European member states to a shared neoliberal and geopolitical agenda. But reflecting the growth and intensification of far-right politics across the continent, the EPP looks <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/european-election-2024-polls-right-wing-big-gains/">likely</a> to be ousted from its hegemonic position in the EU parliament next year by a right-wing governing bloc of the European Conservatives and Reformists and Identity and Democracy. These two groups—the former including Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party and the Brothers of Italy, and the latter Matteo Salvini’s Lega, Marie Le Pen’s National Rally and Alternative for Germany—encompass the most reactionary, racist and anti-refugee forces across Europe.
Recent jostling between European leaders over the latest surge in refugee arrivals and the <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-migration-deal-screening-pressure-european-countries/">longer</a><a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-migration-deal-screening-pressure-european-countries/"> </a>term, deadlocked project of reforming its framework of refugee management to spread responsibility across member states, is an important part of this electoral contest. Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, eager not to be outflanked to the right by her coalition partners in the Lega, earlier this month <a href="https://ilmanifesto.it/scontro-con-berlino-ma-litalia-gia-sapeva-dei-fondi-alle-ong">condemned</a> German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for flouting Italian sovereignty by unilaterally deciding to finance pro-refugee non-government organisations. Meloni subsequently got EU leaders to minimise references to NGOs in the text of the EU’s refugee management framework, which she <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/giorgia-meloni-eu-approve-final-plank-migration-reform/">spun</a> as an important victory. 
Even more belligerent are Meloni’s political allies in power in Poland and Hungary. Both used their veto powers to block a group statement on migration devised by European leaders at the Granada Summit in early October. Hungary’s Victor Orban <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/6/poland-and-hungary-clash-with-eu-leaders-over-migration-reform">likened</a> accepting refugees to being raped. Meanwhile, Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki, in campaign mode in the lead-up to the 15 October election and <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/poland-mateusz-morawiecki-float-migration-referendum-video-election/">referendum</a> on rejecting “illegal” immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, asserted that he will reject any migration “dictate coming from Brussels and Berlin”. 
With EU lawmakers pushing to overhaul migration policy before the 2024 election, and the broader economic and political conditions that drive refugees to flee elsewhere showing no sign of abating, the targeting of refugees for political gain is likely to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/once-welcoming-germany-talks-tougher-asylum-ahead-elections-2023-10-06/">worsen</a>. 
Tareke Brhane, one of the people responsible for the remembrance activities of the 2013 Lampedusa refugee catastrophe, told Al Jazeera that, 10 years on, “we haven’t learned anything.” In reality, the leaders of Fortress Europe have learnt everything they need to about the value of murdering and brutalising people for political gain.

Fortress Europe targets refugees

Chants of “Black, Indigenous, Arab, Asian and white—unite, unite, unite to fight the right!” echoed across the streets of Sunshine West on Saturday, when 500 anti-fascist activists and local community members gathered to protest against Legacy Boxing Gym. 
The gym has become a flashpoint for anti-fascist opposition since the Age <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/inside-the-melbourne-boxing-gym-with-a-neo-nazi-underbelly-20221223-p5c8ga.html">revealed</a> last year that it is an organising base for a neo-Nazi organisation called the National Socialist Network (NSN). The group is one of the most reactionary of Australia’s far-right: a Hitler-worshipping, anti-Semitic white supremacist outfit, the confidence and visibility of which has grown in the wake of the right-wing anti-vax movement. 
In less than a year, the NSN has <a href="https://www.starobserver.com.au/news/melbourne-neo-nazis-target-drag-performer-at-family-friendly-youth-fest/217074">disrupted</a> community events for queer youth and a mourning <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/neo-nazis-crash-merri-bek-council-mourning-ceremony-20230126-p5cfpc.html">ceremony</a> on Invasion Day, performed the <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-19/victoria-nazi-salute-peformed-parliament-government-response/102116672">Sieg Heil</a> salute on the steps of Victoria’s parliament to support the far-right transphobic activist Posie Parker, and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-13/anti-immigration-rally-neo-nazis-violent-clash-melbourne/102342632">organised</a> several racist protests—including a demonstration, in the wake of federal Liberal leader Peter Dutton’s post-budget <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/dutton-steps-his-racist-assault">remarks</a>, blaming immigration for the housing crisis. 
Saturday’s protest followed a recent attempt by NSN members to disrupt an anti-fascist <a href="https://thewhiterosesociety.writeas.com/national-socialist-network-fail-to-attack-anti-fascist-fundraiser-in-thornbury">fundraiser</a> for the White Rose Society and the Black People’s Union at Cafe Gummo, a left-wing gathering place in Thornbury. Though they intended to intimidate, the handful of Nazis instead were <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq0noqR49Dg">forced to flee</a> up High Street. 
A subsequent speakout called by the Campaign against Racism and Fascism in response to the Nazi mobilisation grew into a 100-strong demonstration of solidarity with the anti-fascist groups and built momentum for Saturday’s protest. 
Speakers at the Sunshine rally spoke about Melbourne’s history of anti-fascist resistance, the connections between the political establishment and the far right, and the need for ongoing grassroots opposition to neo-Nazi organising. Speakers included Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam, Animal Justice Party MP Andy Meddick and Victorian Socialists member Liz Walsh. 
“There can be no safe space for Nazis”, Walsh said. “Not in the western suburbs, not in the northern suburbs, not in the east or the south. Nowhere can the Nazis be allowed any space to organise and grow. We must be committed to hounding them wherever they go.” 
While antifascists took a stand against the Nazis on their own turf in Sunshine, a number of the latter <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/anti-voice-crowds-dominated-by-conspiracy-theories-as-neo-nazis-gatecrash-rally-20230921-p5e6hw.html">joined</a> the Vote No protests held at the same time in the city, where they unfurled a banner reading: “Voice = anti-white”. 
This highlights the need to build an ongoing anti-racist and anti-fascist movement capable of kicking the Nazis out of Sunshine and of challenging the broader racism of the “mainstream” conservative right, which gives oxygen to their reactionary politics.
----------
CARF is organising another anti-Nazi protest in Melbourne on 25 November. Follow CARF on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/carf.melbourne/">Instagram</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/campaignarf">Facebook</a> for more details.

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