The International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) 19 July <a href="https://www.icj-cij.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/case-related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf">advisory opinion</a> that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories violates international law argued that the occupation should be ended “as rapidly as possible”.
The 83-page judgement further found that “Israel’s policies and practices in the West Bank and East Jerusalem implement a separation between the Palestinian population and the settlers transferred by Israel to the territory”. 
In other words, Israel is implementing apartheid.
The ICJ declared Israel was obliged to “immediately cease all new settlement activity”, repeal legislation and policies that discriminate against Palestinians or are “aimed at modifying the demographic composition of any parts of the territory” and “provide full reparation for the damage caused” by its illegal occupation. 
Twenty years ago, the ICJ issued another <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/016/2004/en/">advisory opinion</a>
that the construction of Israel’s “separation barrier” (better known as the apartheid wall) inside the West Bank was contrary to international law. Just as it did in 2004, Israel is today thumbing its nose at the ICJ’s findings. 
Since Hamas’ “Operation Flood” on 7 October last year, Israel’s efforts to extend and consolidate its occupation of Palestinian territory through settlement expansion and settler violence have dramatically escalated.
<a href="https://www.ohchr.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2024-03/Palestine-March2024.pdf">According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights</a> (OHCHR), 465,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank in September last year. An additional 230,000 lived in East Jerusalem. From 1 November 2022 to 31 October 2023, 24,300 new settlement housing units were approved, the largest increase on record. 
This year, the Netanyahu government has announced thousands of new settlements planned across East Jerusalem and the West Bank. At the same time, settlers have become increasingly emboldened to establish new outposts. These typically begin without official government approval but receive assistance to establish roads and infrastructure. The Israeli military stands ready to detain any Palestinians that get in their way.
On 21 July, Faz3a (a civil protection group, pronounced faz’a) reported that just one day after the ICJ statement, three of its international volunteers were evacuated to a hospital after being attacked by Israeli settlers in the village of Qusra in the northern West Bank. The volunteers were part of Faz3a’s recently launched <a href="https://www.defendpalestine.org/">Defend Palestine Campaign</a>, which seeks to build a mass protective presence for Palestinians under attack.
The settlers, using metal pipes and wooden batons, attacked Palestinian farmers tending to their lands alongside the volunteers seeking to protect them. As in past cases, the Israeli military failed to stop the attack.
“The attack today, not even 24 hours after the ICJ ruled that Israeli occupation is illegal and that settlers enjoy impunity when exercising violence, serves as further proof for the dire need for international civil protection in Palestine”, Mohammed Khatib, a Defend Palestine Campaign organiser, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C9sx1wFID6X/">said in a statement</a>. “Eighteen communities in the West Bank have been completely wiped out by such violence since October, and the Palestinian people have no time to wait.”
According to Faz3a, Qusra has been the target of “nearly daily attacks by Israeli settlers, who attack villagers, vandalise farms and have even burnt several houses in the village with complete impunity”.
On 11 October, four Palestinians were killed in the village when settlers attacked a family home. Two more were killed the following day.
Saeed Amireh describes a similar situation in his village, Ni’lin, located west of Ramallah in the central West Bank. Amireh told Red Flag that the violence of the Israeli soldiers and settlers since last October “is something we’ve not seen in decades”.
“Since 7 October, they have blocked the entrance of my village to isolate it and cut it off from the rest of Palestinian villages and cities. We can’t move in and out easily and we risk being shot dead”, Amireh said. 
The siege of Ni’lin is having a dire economic impact on its residents. Those employed outside of the village have lost their jobs. Farmers were unable to harvest their olives last season because of settler and soldier attacks. Eight olive pickers were shot, according to Amireh, his cousin being permanently disabled as a consequence.
Many residents are unable to pay their electricity bills because they are denied an income. Settlers are also attempting to deny residents access to communal water sources. 
“When we try to protest, they shoot directly at us with live bullets and arrest us”, Amireh said.
One of the most violent settler groups, known as the “Hill Boys”, is directly supported by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. 
“The Hill Boys have even stolen sheep from Palestinian Bedouin communities and cut us off from all sources of life and existence”, Amireh told Red Flag. “The settlers are helped fully by the Israeli soldiers at every step. They work as gangs ... they invade our homes, they steal whatever they see of value: money, phones, televisions, gold, cars etc. They even film their actions and laugh about it.”
The pattern of Israeli soldier and settler violence has been repeated throughout the West Bank over the past ten months. Since 7 October, <a href="https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-update-175-west-bank">according</a>
to UN monitoring group Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 554 Palestinians have been killed by the military in the West Bank, and at least ten more have been killed by settlers. 
<a href="https://www.unicef.org/mena/press-releases/child-casualties-west-bank-skyrocket-past-nine-months-unicef">According</a>
to UNICEF, 143 of the Palestinians killed are children. On average, a Palestinian child has been killed every two days in the West Bank since October, an unprecedented figure.
The OCHA further reports that, since 7 October, Israeli authorities have demolished, confiscated or forced the demolition of more than 500 Palestinian homes, resulting in the displacement of nearly 3,000 people. 
Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes and displacement of residents is not a new policy. Since 1967, the Zionist state has continually expanded its West Bank settler population to take more and more Palestinian territory. However, the escalating state violence is making Palestinian resistance more difficult. 
Amireh told Red Flag that military checkpoints are now a daily occurrence in Ni’liin. 
“If they find anything [on residents’ phones] related to Palestine such as a Palestinian song or flag, or that the person liked something in favour of the [Palestinian] resistance ... they arrest that person directly and put them in administrative detention”, he said.
“Administrative detention” refers to imprisonment without charge or trial, which is lawful in the West Bank for stateless Palestinians, who are subject to military law, but not for settlers, who hold Israeli citizenship. 
Amireh explained that, since last October, the military has detained 743 Ni’lin residents, mostly under administrative detention orders. Only seventeen have been released. A further 900 people have fled, while the remaining 4,300 residents remained trapped and isolated in the village.
In the last ten months, <a href="https://www.ohchr.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/documents/countries/opt/20240731-Thematic-report-Detention-context-Gaza-hostilities.pdf">according</a>
to another report recently released by the OHCHR, the military has “initiated daily mass, apparently arbitrary, arrests of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, affecting all sectors of Palestinian society”.
By the end of June, 9,440 Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem were being held in Israeli prisons, effectively hostages of Israel, almost double the number held at the end of September. 
Palestinians are held in shocking conditions. In interviews conducted by the OHCHR, former detainees alleged torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including sexual abuse of both women and men. 
“The testimonies gathered by my office and other entities indicate a range of appalling acts, such as waterboarding and the release of dogs on detainees, amongst other acts, in flagrant violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law”, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/un-report-palestinian-detainees-held-arbitrarily-and-secretly-subjected">said on 31 July</a>.
According to the OHCHR, at least 53 Palestinian detainees are known to have died in Israeli military facilities and prisons since 7 October.
The village of Ni’lin sits in West Bank Area B, defined as land that is under joint Palestinian Authority civil control and Israeli military control. The Palestinian Authority (PA) acts as Israel’s accomplice. 
Since 7 October, PA forces have reportedly killed eleven Palestinians protesting in solidarity with Gaza, and arrested hundreds more. Like the Israeli military, the PA has been found to carry out arbitrary detention, torture and ill treatment of its prisoners. One former detainee, arrested by the PA while participating in a Gaza solidarity demonstration in Hebron last December, told the OHCHR that during his detention he was slapped and punched repeatedly, kept in solitary confinement and deprived of the use of toilet for more than seven hours.
In Area C, approximately, 300,000 Palestinians live alongside the 400,000 Israeli settlers, who reside in approximately 230 settlements. This area, which constitutes 60 percent of the occupied West Bank, remains under Israeli military control. 
“The big target for the settlers is to annex all of Area C”, Amireh told Red Flag. 
Israel’s Civil Administration administers Area C directly, along with Israel’s settlements across the West Bank. The Civil Administration is headed by Smotrich, who is himself a settler. 
“To keep his coalition government alive, Netanyahu has given the settlers the West Bank like a gift to do whatever they want. They [the military] have armed over 150,000 settlers. They are very well armed and are preparing to massacre the [Palestinian] people. They are escalating the situation step by step, beginning by isolating people, separating us from each other. They are focusing now on attacking us in bigger and bigger groups”, Amireh said.
“My greatest fear is that if a war starts with Lebanon, they will try to massacre us like they did in 1948. It will become a catastrophe.”
In response to the escalation of settler violence, Faz3A is <a href="https://www.defendpalestine.org/en/join">appealing</a> for international volunteers to travel to the West Bank for the next olive harvest in the coming months. Once in Palestine, Faz3A volunteers undertake training to provide both direct protection to Palestinian civilians facing Israeli settler violence and attacks, as well as to monitor, document and report on violations of their rights.
At the same time, solidarity activists need to increase the pressure on our governments to isolate Israel. In this regard, the ICJ opinion focuses attention on the many ways Western governments continue to aid and abet Israel’s crimes. 
The ICJ noted that all states must cooperate with the UN to put in place measures to end the occupation (in other words, sanctions) and achieve “the full realisation of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”. No state, it said, should “render aid or assistance in maintaining ... Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.
To date, the Australian government has followed the examples of the US, Britain and Canada by announcing sanctions against only a handful of extremist settlers. However, this measure avoids any meaningful action against Israel.
If Israel is to be stopped from ethnically cleansing the entirety of historic Palestine, we must act now to demand our government—and governments around the world—break all diplomatic, military and trade ties with apartheid Israel.
Nick Everett is the chair of Friends of Palestine Western Australia.

Nick Everett

Israeli settlers’ West Bank rampage escalates

When Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza last October, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong was quick to take Israel’s side. “We stand with Israel and we always will”, she <a href="https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/penny-wong/speech/remarks-australia-israel-chamber-commerce">told</a> the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce. 
Wong boasted of the role played by “Australia’s most consequential foreign minister”, Herbert “Doc” Evatt, “a leading architect of the partition plan that laid the foundations for the creation of a new nation state”.
Just as Evatt backed the partition of Palestine in 1948, Wong insisted that a new (or not so new) partition plan—the “two-state solution”, in which Palestinians are given “statehood” in a mere morsel of their homeland—is needed to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
That the two-state solution has never eventuated, according to Wong, has nothing to do with Israel’s determination to maintain its 67-year-long occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem through settlement expansion and a brutal siege of Gaza. Instead, it’s the actions of Hamas that have “pushed that two-state solution further out of reach”, she asserted.
Labor’s rhetoric has shifted somewhat over the past eight months. With the International Court of Justice demanding a halt to Israel’s assault on Rafah and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest for war crimes, the Australian government has felt compelled to tone down its enthusiasm for Israel’s genocide.
However, any talk of sanctions against the apartheid state has been sharply rebuked. 
When Western Australian Labor Senator Fatima Payman put the case for sanctions against Israel on 15 May, she faced scorn from across Labor’s front bench. Labor senators joined with the opposition to condemn as “antisemitic” the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, which Payman had used to end her speech. 
And the attacks on our movement continue, Labor accusing the Greens and other supporters of Palestine of “inciting violence”.
Why is Labor so pro-Israel?
One argument—put forward by a number of former Labor politicians such as Bob Carr, Kevin Rudd and Paul Keating—is that the Zionist lobby exercises an all-powerful influence within the corridors of federal parliament and in media debate. The Zionist lobby has been able to dictate Australia’s foreign policy to the detriment of Australia’s “national interest”, <a href="https://johnmenadue.com/the-lobby-and-labor/">according to</a>
former Foreign Minister Carr.
To unpack this assertion, we need to consider what Carr means by the “national interest”. 
Labor governments don’t serve the interests of the Australian working class; they serve the interests of big business. And Australian big business overwhelmingly favours a close relationship with the United States as a protector of its interests in the Asia Pacific. It should therefore be no surprise that Israel—Washington’s most important ally in the Middle East—gains favourable media coverage and red-carpet treatment from Australian politicians.
However, both Wong and Albanese hail from Labor’s left faction. Albanese was once a founding member of Parliamentary Friends of Palestine and early in his career spoke inside and outside parliament in opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Their embrace of Israel is part of a long tradition of Labor governments going back to 1948; it can’t be explained by the power of the Israel lobby alone. Rather, it is rooted in the long history of Labor’s links with Zionism, Israel’s founding ideology. 
When Israel was established in 1948, it had the backing of not only the Labor Party, but also the Communist Party (CPA) and the wider labour movement. The CPA’s position echoed that of Moscow: the USSR under Joseph Stalin had long since subordinated Communist parties around the world to serve its foreign policy interests. The Cold War was just beginning, and Stalin hoped that the USSR could counter Washington’s growing influence in the Middle East by having Israel on its side.
Labor’s links with Zionism reflected the movement’s influence within European social democracy. Zionism began as a minority movement within European Jewry. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, argued that antisemitism was inherent in non-Jews and could not be fought. By contrast, the <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/the-radical-jewish-tradition-revolutionaries-resistance-fighters-and-firebrands">socialist response</a> to antisemitism was that it could be fought, along with other forms of oppression and racism, but that it would require a united struggle of the working class to overthrow capitalism and create a genuinely equal society.
Zionism needed to appeal to a Jewish labour movement that was overwhelmingly socialist or communist in outlook. It straddled this contradiction with the development of a “left-wing” Zionist current, known as Labor Zionism, which embraced the rhetoric of socialism to justify Zionism’s settler colonial project in Palestine. The main currents within Labor Zionism decisively subordinated class questions to nationalism in the 1930s and played a central role in the establishment of the Zionist state.
During the British mandate in Palestine, between 1922 and 1948, Britain attempted to balance Zionist aspirations for their own settler-colonial regime in Palestine with London’s need to foster clientelist relationships with Arab regimes. Between 1936 and 1939, Britain worked with the Zionists to suppress a popular Palestinian uprising, which opposed both British colonial rule and the influx of Zionist settlers. 
The defeat of the Palestinian revolt emboldened the Zionists to go on the offensive. In 1946 the Irgun, a Zionist terror organisation, bombed the King David Hotel, headquarters of Britain’s colonial administration in Jerusalem. Terrorist attacks by both the Irgun and the Stern Gang followed, hastening the end of British colonial rule in Palestine.
In Australia in the prewar years, the conservative Lyons government strongly backed colonial rule during Britain’s suppression of the Palestinian revolt, a policy continued by his successor Menzies and, during the war, by Labor Prime Minister John Curtin. Each shared Britain’s fear of an Arab backlash against the declaration of a Jewish state. 
However, after the war, the Chifley government began to reorient Australian foreign policy, shifting allegiance from a declining British Empire towards the United States. In doing so, Chifley began to pursue a more independent foreign policy attuned to a more assertive Australian ruling class that recognised the Middle East’s significance for global shipping and trade.
In December 1943, Labor’s national conference <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/LIB18896">expressed support</a> for “the continued growth of the Jewish national home in Palestine by immigration and settlement”. Prominent journalist Wilfred Burchett <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/rebel-journalism/163C5F9D2CCA23C857E3841AAEC1B4CA">equated</a> the Jewish struggle for independence in Palestine with that of the Spanish Republicans confronting a fascist enemy. Feminist Jessie Street also emerged as a strong <a href="https://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0403b.htm">supporter</a> of a Jewish “national homeland” in Palestine.
The Melbourne-based Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism, established in 1942, operated as a coalition of Jewish social democrats, communists and liberals. It was significant in shaping labour movement opinion. In a 1947 pamphlet, titled Whither Palestine, the council defended Jewish mass migration to Palestine and, <a href="https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/informit.311270452672386">according to</a> labour historian Philip Mendes, “attributed Arab-Jewish conflict to the malign influence of exploitative Arab landowners, and the extremist Mufti of Jerusalem who had collaborated with the Nazis”.
A May 1948 council petition calling for immediate Australian recognition of Israel gained the support of leading ALP figures Jim Cairns (Snr), William Slater, Doris Blackburn and Frank Crean, as well as Communist trade union leaders Clarrie O’Shea and Jim Healy. The CPA newspaper, Tribune, operated in lockstep with the council, publishing numerous articles supporting Israel.
According to Mendes, “the paper constructed the [1948] war as a brave Israeli ‘David’ backed by the Soviet Union and all supporters of freedom confronting a conservative Arab ‘Goliath’ supported by British and US imperialists and oil companies”. No consideration was given to Palestinian desires for liberation from colonial rule and their mass displacement by Zionist colonisers. 
A widespread sentiment of humanitarian sympathy for Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and vocal and organised support for Israel within the labour movement, combined with a more independent and assertive foreign policy, contributed to the Chifley government’s support for Palestine’s partition and Israel’s creation. Doc Evatt, the minister for external affairs in the Curtin and Chifley governments, was well placed to rally support behind the Zionist cause.
Evatt was instrumental to the establishment of the United Nations Committee on Palestine in May 1947. He also chaired the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question, appointed by the UN General Assembly. Both bodies recommended Palestine’s partition. The Ad Hoc Committee presented a plan to the UN General Assembly that allocated 56 percent of Mandate Palestine to a Jewish state, despite Jewish settlers being less than a third of Palestine’s population. 
Evatt’s chairing of the Ad Hoc Committee was instrumental in persuading the UN General Assembly to vote in favour of partition, leading historian Chanan Reich to <a href="https://research.monash.edu/en/publications/australia-and-israel-an-ambiguous-relationship">describe</a> Evatt as “one of the godfathers of the present Israeli state”. 
Israel’s declaration of independence came at midnight on 14 May 1948. It occurred amid a wave of Zionist terror, known by Palestinians as the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/nakba-understanding-palestinian-catastrophe">Nakba</a>. Between late 1947 and early 1949, 530 Palestinian villages were ethnically cleansed, 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 750,000 more were forced into exile. By the end of the war, the new state of Israel controlled 78 percent of historic Palestine.
While the US and the Soviet Union immediately recognised Israel, Britain moved more slowly. Though the Chifley government supported Israel’s creation from the outset, official recognition didn’t come until eight months later, in concert with Britain. The Chifley government laid the foundation for the US alliance and Cold War policies pursued by his successor, Robert Menzies.
When Labor returned to government, led by Gough Whitlam in 1972, Israel had become the Middle East’s most powerful military state and a key pillar of US hegemony in the region. While Israel’s founding faced no significant opposition within the Australian left, its invasion of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights in 1967 provoked a very different response. 
Israel’s occupation of the remainder of historic Palestine coincided with a massive escalation in the US war in Vietnam and the introduction of conscription in Australia. By 1968, a powerful anti-war movement had developed, and its impact was being felt within Labor’s base as trade unionists became increasingly involved in anti-war protest. Labor’s left faction began to express its solidarity with Palestinians. 
The 1973 Yom Kippur War proved to be a turning point. While the US backed Israel unconditionally, the Whitlam Labor government felt compelled to adopt a more cautious, independent approach. Australia did not condemn the Syrian and Egyptian attacks on Israel but did condemn the US weapons being airlifted in to support Israel. While officially adopting a position of neutrality, Whitlam and most of his cabinet colleagues remained sympathetic to Israel.
Several factors influenced the Whitlam government’s position. The end of the White Australia Policy meant that Arab voters, though a tiny minority, now emerged as a lobby in support of Palestinian rights. Additionally, Whitlam was focused on building a relationship with Indonesia’s military regime, led by General Suharto, and newly independent Malaysia, both Muslim states.
Whitlam’s deputy, Jim Cairns, had been a prominent figure within the Vietnam movement. The elevation of Cairns and other prominent Victorian left party members into the cabinet was an attempt to coopt anti-war and left-wing sentiment. Enlisting Cairns and other leading luminaries of the Labor left in Whitlam’s business-friendly agenda required making some concessions. This was reflected in a somewhat more critical stance towards US imperialism, in both the Middle East and South-East Asia. 
In 1974, Australia’s UN ambassador <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_194211/DU117_18_A55_1977.pdf">announced</a> that “if the Palestinians want to create a state of their own alongside Israel, we will accept this”, committing Australia for the first time to supporting a two-state solution. Before his dismissal in November 1975, Whitlam even approved establishing a Palestine Liberation Organization liaison office in Canberra.
However, this more progressive approach was not without its critics inside the ALP. One of the most vocal Labor supporters of Israel was Bob Hawke, elected Labor president in 1974. Hawke became Australia’s next Labor prime minister in 1983, but had had a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/03/secret-embassy-cables-cast-the-bob-hawke-legend-in-a-different-light">cosy relationship</a> with the US embassy in Canberra in the preceding Fraser years, when president of the ACTU. Once elected prime minister, Hawke reasserted a close relationship with Washington. 
In a 1987 speech, following a visit to Israel, Hawke <a href="https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-7126">expressed</a> his admiration for the Israeli state and its Labor Zionist founders.
“As a social democrat, I could not fail to respect the way in which Israel had incarnated the vision of David Ben Gurion of a working class building its own nation through its own physical and intellectual labour”, he gushed.
Hawke rejected the idea of a Palestinian state in <a href="https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-7089">favour</a> of Jordanian-Palestinian confederation (an idea that resurfaced again under Trump’s presidency in 2018). Perhaps more attuned to realpolitik, Hawke’s successor Paul Keating threw his support behind the Oslo Accords and established Labor’s longstanding support for a two-state solution. 
However, this “solution” was from the outset a capitulation to Israel’s demands. Had it succeeded, it would have given Palestinians statehood on just 22 percent of their historic land. The Oslo Accords failed to meet Palestinian demands for the right of refugees to return to the villages from which they were expelled in 1948 and facilitated Israel’s annexation by stealth of the West Bank through ongoing illegal settlement.
Labor’s support for Israel has continued ever since. During the 2007 federal election campaign, Labor leader Kevin Rudd claimed he had Israel “in his DNA”. Two years later, his deputy, Julia Gillard, defended Israel’s bombardment of the defenceless and blockaded civilian population of Gaza, claiming Israel had “a right to defend itself”.
Whether in opposition or in government, Labor has always been heavily committed to Israel. To the extent that Whitlam embarked on a more independent foreign policy, it proved to be the exception, rather than the rule. Even a national conference resolution committing Labor to recognise a Palestinian state at some point in the future (or rather confer “statehood” on the corrupt and collaborationist Palestinian Authority) has proved a step too far for the Albanese government while Israel carries on its slaughter in Gaza.
Labor’s insistence on a “two-state solution” is and always has been a capitulation to Zionism. It is premised on the idea that Jews cannot live side by side with Muslim and Christian Palestinians within the same state. Moreover, such a “solution” will hold Palestinians hostage in a fragmented territory surrounded by walls and checkpoints, leaving Israeli apartheid intact. 
Genuine liberation requires tearing down the state structures of oppression and racism that Zionism has created, structures now intertwined with Israeli and regional capitalism. It will require a revolutionary struggle by the Arab masses to overthrow their corrupt and capitalist regimes and establish a socialist confederation of states throughout the Middle East.

Why Labor has always backed Israel

During World War Two, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) was at the height of its influence. The party’s membership peaked at 23,000 in 1945. Communists dominated the leadership of the Miners’ Federation, the Waterside Workers’ Federation and the Seamen’s Union, and were influential in numerous other trade unions. 
When the party emerged in Australia in 1920, inspired by the Russian Revolution, there was widespread revulsion at the 20 million deaths and carnage of World War One. Communists won a wide hearing for the case that war was caused by capitalism and was used to turn workers of the imperialist nations against each other. The CPA argued that the working class should turn an imperialist war into a civil war, with soldiers turning their guns on their officers. 
However, during World War Two, the CPA argued for a radically different position. The party offered unqualified support for the Australian war effort, led by Labor Prime Minister John Curtin in 1941-45. Communist union officials, who had in previous decades led strikes, now derailed them to maximise wartime production. Simultaneously, the party urged its members to enlist in the armed forces. 
The CPA supported its own ruling class in waging war in defence of the imperial interests of its allies—Britain and the USA—because it had long ceased to be a revolutionary party. The party’s abandonment of its former revolutionary aims began in 1929, when the Communist International (the Comintern) imposed a new leadership on the party, destroying internal democracy and ensuring Moscow’s command over party policy. 
During the Depression years, the CPA’s militant defence of workers’ rights echoed Moscow’s line that global capitalism was entering a deep and profound crisis. However, when that crisis led to a second world war between imperial powers, it was to Joseph Stalin’s men in Moscow that the party leadership turned. As a consequence, the CPA departed from the practice of revolutionary Marxism and pursued a policy of class collaboration, subordinating the interests of the Australian working class to Curtin’s imperialist war effort. The CPA’s cheerleading of the Curtin government was the third phase in a series of zigzags that echoed Stalin’s foreign policy in the lead up-to and during the war.
After the Nazis took power in Germany and destroyed the German Communist Party—the largest Communist party outside the USSR—Stalin abandoned the ultra-left Third Period line, which had branded Labor and social democratic parties as “social fascists”. Under a new “popular front” policy, the main enemy was now fascism, and all other questions became secondary. Comintern policy dictated that working-class interests were to be subordinated to the needs of “progressive” capitalists who opposed fascism. 
Under the new logic of the popular front, Stalin began courting an alliance with Germany’s main imperial rivals, Britain and France, in the name of “collective security”. The USSR’s foreign policy lurched dramatically to the right. In 1934, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, a club of the victorious powers of World War One, and in 1935 the Franco-Soviet pact was signed in Moscow. Simultaneously, the Comintern directed its affiliate Communist parties to pursue a united front of the labour movement from “above and below”. They were urged to pursue formal agreements with capitalist and working-class parties opposed to fascism and work with non-Communists to build front organisations. 
In Europe, this approach led to Communists joining and defending capitalist governments led by social democratic parties, with disastrous consequences. In France, the Popular Front government collapsed, giving rise to the Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany. In Spain, the Communist Party disarmed and repressed anti-fascist militias not under the control of the republican government, hastening the victory of Franco’s nationalist forces.
The CPA’s popular front turn meant an about-face in its orientation to the Australian Labor Party, with which it now sought to affiliate. Rebuffed by federal Labor, the CPA set about building popular front organisations such as the Movement Against War and Fascism, initiated by the CPA in 1933. Another was the Spanish Relief Fund, which rallied support for Spain’s Popular Front government between 1936 and 1939. However, the fall of Barcelona to Franco’s nationalist forces in January 1939 sealed not only the fate of the Republican government, but also attempts to build popular fronts from below. 
Appeals for unity of the labour movement became increasingly overshadowed by Stalin’s determination to secure an alliance with Britain at all costs. The CPA played its part in rallying patriots behind the British flag. In 1937, the party campaigned for Labor, arguing that the conservative Lyons government was not doing enough to prepare the country for war. Labor should form a government in alliance with middle-class and capitalist parties, the party argued. 
The CPA’s popular front policy resulted in a drift towards parliamentarism and support for a policy of national defence. In 1938, the party adopted a new constitution that buried any revolutionary pretensions. Lance Sharkey, the party’s Moscow-backed chair, now made clear that the CPA favoured a “parliamentary road to socialism”. 
The party’s national paper Workers Weekly was rebranded Tribune, “the people’s paper”, shorn of its hammer and sickle. The change was not merely symbolic; the party’s propaganda became infused with a stridently nationalist tone. In a January 1939 Communist Review article, Tribune editor Harry Gould argued that workers were not only the most consistent “champions of democracy”, but also “the only consistent champions of patriotism”. Rejecting the Leninist policy of transforming the imperialist war into a civil war, Gould argued that an “armed struggle against an invasion by Japanese fascism, even if led by capitalists, would be a democratic struggle, one which workers would support”.
However, in August 1939, Stalin signed a “non-aggression” treaty with Adolph Hitler that enabled the pair to divide Poland. With Moscow now pursuing a tenuous pact with the Axis powers, a new line emerged. Whereas just months before, the party was championing a “people’s war against fascism”, the CPA now loudly denounced the “inter-imperialist war”. It vowed that Australian workers should not be sacrificed for Britain’s war ambitions. This tone undoubtedly struck a chord with a significant section of the Australian working class, especially those with memories of the brutality of World War One. 
Once Britain declared war on Germany, on 3 September 1939, Menzies declared Australia also to be at war. However, his efforts to impose wartime discipline on the labour movement were not warmly received and, in some cases, faced stiff resistance. In March 1940, the NSW state Labor conference declared its support for an immediate end to hostilities. A similar resolution moved by union leader and Communist Ernie Thornton at the ACTU congress failed by just two votes. 
The party’s strident support for the Stalin-Hitler pact provided Menzies with a pretext for a wartime ban on the party’s publications, and soon the party itself, on the grounds that it was “collaborating with the enemy”. In June 1940, federal police raided CPA offices and members’ homes, seizing allegedly seditious material and driving the leadership underground. 
The party proved well prepared, continuing to organise through its underground and front organisations. In the September 1940 federal election, and the March 1941 Queensland state election, CPA candidates garnered thousands of votes. And when two Communists, Horace Ratliff and Max Thomas, were jailed for printing anti-war leaflets, 50,000 workers went on strike. Their cause tapped into a wider sentiment of opposition to Menzies’ attacks on civil liberties. 
There was, however, nothing internationalist about the CPA’s newfound anti-imperialism. The party defended Stalin’s occupation of territory in Finland, Poland and Romania as a policy of “self-defence”. Some quit the party in disgust; others were expelled. 
The CPA’s left turn lasted until June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Over the following four months, the Nazis overran Ukraine and reached the outskirts of Moscow. Desperate to slow the German onslaught, Stalin pleaded with Churchill to open a Western front, but to no avail.
Under Moscow’s orders, the CPA now did another giddying about-face. The war was no longer an “imperialist war”, but a “patriotic war” to defend the independence of oppressed peoples: a reversion back to the Popular Front line. As Sharkey put it, Hitler’s invasion of the USSR “changed the character of the war into a war of independence on the part of the democratic peoples against fascist imperialist aggression”. 
The CPA enthusiastically campaigned for Curtin’s election and declared its wholehearted support for the new government’s war effort. In October 1941, Tribune welcomed Curtin’s victory, calling for “an ever increasing contribution by Australia in all spheres of endeavour to the Allied struggle for victory over Hitler”. 
“Let us go to it, leading the enthusiasm for output, for recruiting, and for financial sacrifice”, Tribune declared.
Though there was disquiet within party ranks about the dramatic shift, CPA leaders were aided by Curtin’s former reputation as a radical. Curtin had been an anti-conscription activist in World War I and, unlike Menzies, was not tainted by fascist sympathies. 
Secondly, Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbour, its rapid advance through South-East Asia and its bombing of northern Australian towns, assisted Curtin to stoke fear of an imminent Japanese invasion. In the context of White Australia, talk of the “yellow peril” connected with deeply entrenched racism. 
The Allied war effort is often celebrated as a “good war”: a war for democracy, contrasted with the tragic waste of human life on the European battlefields of World War One. This myth asserts that national unity was needed to overcome the fascist and militarist threat of the Axis powers. However, the Allied powers showed little regard for democracy. Britain and France each ruled over vast colonial empires, denying their subjects the democratic right of self-determination. Immediately after the war, independence uprisings were brutally suppressed in countries such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam. 
World War Two was therefore not a war to defeat fascism and save democracy. Rather, it resulted from rising tensions between imperialist powers, exacerbated by the Great Depression. With the collapse of world trade in the 1930s, the British and French ruling classes attempted to protect their weakened economies by raising trade barriers, prompting their competitors—Germany and Japan—to seize territory to gain access to raw materials and new markets. 
The Australian ruling class, which had long tied its fortunes to the British Empire, had valuable colonial possessions of its own to protect in territories such as New Guinea, Nauru and Fiji. The Curtin government invoked fear of a Japanese invasion to justify its entry into the Pacific War even when intelligence reports provided evidence to the contrary. Curtin now pushed legislation through parliament to enable the conscription of Australian troops to serve overseas. General Douglas MacArthur was invited to establish a US military command headquarters on Australian soil. 
The CPA now encouraged its members to enlist in the military. On the home front, Communists worked to drum up support, sending comfort parcels to the armed forces, selling war bonds and mobilising labour for fruit picking and canning. A January 1942 Victorian CPA state conference resolution summed up the new line: “The policy we are now pursuing is that ... the Communist Party becomes the leading and most active war party. In the prosecution of a just war, a people’s war ... it is obvious that the working class must become the leading force”.
Fifteen hundred CPA members heeded the call to enlist, and 2,500 more were recruited from the CPA’s work in the armed forces before the war’s end. CPA army cadre campaigned for increased pay, better facilities and equal pay for servicewomen, whose pay was just two-thirds that of servicemen. While these were obviously supportable demands, they were always framed in terms of boosting morale to aid the war effort.
The CPA was rewarded for its enthusiastic pro-war stance with legalisation. The Menzies government’s wartime ban was lifted in December 1942, but only after the CPA signed an undertaking with Attorney-General Bert Evatt promising to “do its utmost to promote harmony in industry, to minimise absenteeism, stoppages, strikes or other hold-ups”.
Wherever CPA trade union officials had influence—in factories, mines and on the waterfront—they exhorted workers to increase wartime production. For example, the Miners’ Federation accepted cancellation of holidays, suspension of compulsory retirement, and overtime to boost production. The shop committees the CPA had built in the 1930s to lead industrial struggles now suppressed such struggles. 
Labour Minister Eddie Ward appointed CPA union officials to the Commonwealth Coal Commission, the Stevedoring Industry Commission and the Maritime Industry Commission. In each case, their task was to oversee increases in wartime production and suppress strike action. In May 1942, the coal owners and the Curtin government provided the Miners’ Federation with legal sanction to expel striking members. Militants who persisted in striking could be prosecuted, fined and even drafted into military service.
In 1943, the Communist Waterside Workers’ Federation leadership rode roughshod over rank-and-file opposition in Sydney to the introduction of a rotary gang system, which they feared would result in speed-ups and longer hours. Officials Jim Healy and Tom Nelson worked with the Curtin government to break a sixteen-day strike.
Workers had many grievances around which to fight. While household incomes had increased, they came at the cost of long hours of overtime and shift work. Increased taxes ate away at workers’ pay packets, and wartime rationing limited the availability of essential goods. Women workers, who were conscripted into the workforce to aid wartime production, took industrial action to demand equal pay. 
Amid the upturn in struggle, the CPA was obliged to bend to the mood of workers, especially in the coal mines. From mid-1943, industrial disputes in the coal industry began to rise as militant coal miners defied their leaders’ attempts to stop strikes. To remain implacably opposed to all industrial action would have seriously weakened the party’s influence among industrial workers. However, the CPA also acted to suppress rank and file revolt, most notably within the Federated Ironworkers Association (FIA), where it faced a determined opposition from renegade union branches at Mort’s Dock, in Balmain, and nearby Cockatoo Island. Led by a small group of Trotskyists, they fiercely resisted the FIA leadership’s attempts to encroach on branch authority. 
The CPA’s size and influence reached a high point in the final year of the war. Membership rose from 4,000 in 1940, when the party was declared illegal, to 16,000 in 1942 and 23,000 in January 1945, according to CPA historian Alistair Davidson. Hundreds of thousands of workers were now in unions led or influenced by the Communists.
The party also achieved impressive electoral results. In 1944, CPA candidate Fred Paterson won the Queensland state seat of Bowen with strong support from sugar workers and coal miners in the state’s north. In the same year, sixteen CPA candidates were elected to New South Wales local councils. In the Hunter Valley coalfields town of Kearsley, Communists won a council majority.
Three factors shaped the party’s growth during this period. First, despite the brutality of the Moscow trials and gulags, the Soviet Union enjoyed substantial support among Australian workers. It was perceived as representing a departure from the ills of capitalism, a product of the 1917 Russian Revolution. And its ultimate defeat of German fascism was praised as an example of self-sacrifice. 
Second, the early wartime ban on the CPA, not lifted until late 1942, engendered significant support for the party, whose members continued to organise defiantly underground. The party was able to trade on the authority it had won in the preceding years when its members had organised the unemployed and led significant strikes. Finally, the CPA’s popular front policy provided the party with a degree of mainstream acceptability. 
Whereas most of the party’s recruits in the early years of the war were industrial workers, in the latter years middle-class recruits began to flood in. The party’s enthusiastic support for the war effort attracted professionals such as journalists, teachers and scientists, as well as university students and intellectuals. Communist Ralph Gibson recalled that these new youthful recruits joined the party “on the crest of a great wave of advanced democratic sentiments” espousing a “liberal-democratic rather than revolutionary outlook”. 
However, the CPA’s period of spectacular growth proved short-lived. In the postwar years, especially after Chifley’s defeat of the 1949 miners’ strike and the onset of the Cold War, the CPA once again found itself on the margins. From its peak in early 1945, CPA membership fell by nearly half to 12,000 in 1947 and halved again by 1952, according to former CPA member and historian Robin Gollan. It never really recovered.
The party’s decline had much to do with postwar exposure of the Soviet Union’s authoritarianism. Khrushchev’s1956 speech confirmed what many already knew: Stalin’s reign of terror had resulted in hundreds of thousands—including many former leaders of the revolution—being rounded up in gulags. Moscow’s crushing of the Hungarian Revolution the same year showed that the Stalinist bureaucracy was not about to change its spots. 
However, workers also left the party because of its domestic wartime policy. They had every reason to feel betrayed. The CPA’s pro-war stance amounted to a complete departure from the internationalist tradition advocated by Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks at the time of World War One. Moreover, the idea that World War Two was a “good war” could be evoked by subsequent Australian governments to justify Cold War military interventions in alliance with the United States, such as the invasions of Korea and Vietnam.

When Australia’s Communists became cheerleaders for imperialist war

Starving a colonised people has long been a favoured policy of imperial powers. 
Consider, for example, India and Ireland under British colonial rule. According to <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169">research</a> by Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel, India suffered 165 million excess deaths between 1881 and 1920, largely due to starvation. One million Irish (a quarter of the population) starved in the “Great Famine” between 1845 and 1851, their potatoes exported to feed Britain. Indians and Irish alike were collateral damage in a system of “laissez-faire” capitalism imposed by their British colonial masters.
The literal translation of “laissez-faire” is “let it happen”. And “let it happen” they did. 
India once exported quality textiles to all corners of the globe. Under British rule, India’s textile industry was reduced from riches to rags. The colonial regime removed tariffs to enable British goods to flood the domestic market and subordinated India’s peasant workforce to cheap producers of cotton to feed the “dark, satanic mills” of British industry. 
Mike Davis, in his monumental book <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/products/1719-late-victorian-holocausts">Late Victorian Holocausts</a>, documents that famines that plagued India, northern China and north-eastern Brazil were not simply historical accidents but the direct consequence of capitalist “modernisation” pursued by the European imperial powers.
Today, more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza are beset with the same fate. 
A staggering 85 percent of Gaza’s population—1.9 million people—have been forcibly displaced during Israel’s current offensive, <a href="https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15564.doc.htm">according to</a> the UN. Their homes have been reduced to rubble by a relentless Israeli bombing campaign made possible by lavish US military aid.
As Israeli forces push south, Gaza’s homeless population have converged on Rafah, the sole crossing point between Egypt and the besieged Palestinian territory. More than half of Gaza’s population are now crammed into UN-run schools, public buildings and sprawling tent cities, with their only lifeline a thin line of aid trucks. 
Israeli checkpoints ensure that the trickle of aid that gets through is not nearly enough for subsistence. The World Food Program <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/hungers-border-why-aid-trucks-taking-humanitarian-gear-and-food-gaza-face-long-waits">estimates</a> that half a million people are starving. Hepatitis A and cholera are now spreading through these camps due to poor nutrition and the lack of sanitation. 
The collapse of the health system is exacerbating the crisis. Just fourteen of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remain open. All have been targets for Israel’s military operations: all lack the resources needed to provide effective care. In December, UNICEF <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144927">reported</a> that more than 1,000 children have had limbs amputated, with most operations performed without anaesthesia. 
On 26 January, the United States and Canada announced a halt to their funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the primary source of aid to destitute Palestinians. The following day, the UK, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Netherlands, Italy and Finland followed suit.
The flimsy pretext for the attack on UNRWA funding was Israel’s claim that twelve Gaza-based UNRWA staff (out of 13,000) participated in the Hamas breakout of Gaza on 7 October and the subsequent kidnapping of Israeli citizens. The sole evidence provided by Israeli officials was “confessions” from captured Palestinian fighters, likely extracted under torture. 
On 28 January, the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/28/world/middleeast/gaza-unrwa-hamas-israel.html">reported</a> that its journalists had reviewed an Israeli intelligence dossier that revised down the number of UNRWA employees involved to just six and cited surveillance of text messages as the source of its claim. Nonetheless, UNRWA summarily sacked nine of the accused without an independent investigation. 
In a further attack on the UN agency, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu <a href="https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-784595">told</a> UN ambassadors that “UNRWA is totally infiltrated with Hamas” and that it should be immediately shut down.
Israel announced its spurious claims about UNRWA on the same day the International Court of Justice (ICJ) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc-kmoEEyKc">determined</a> that South Africa had made a plausible case that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. The ICJ’s interim ruling called on Israel to cease impeding the delivery of aid to Gaza and to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of genocide and punish incitement to genocide.
This funding cut is not just another exercise in the collective punishment of Palestinians: it demonstrates the West’s complicity in Israel’s genocide. The combined attack on UNRWA, and the case made against it, serve as a convenient counter-narrative to imply that the evidence provided to the ICJ by UNRWA officials supporting South Africa’s claims of genocide is not credible.
Since 1949, UNRWA has provided a lifeline of aid to 1.5 million Palestinians residing in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, providing employment, education, health care and food aid. Its establishment followed the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), when 750,000 Palestinians were forced into exile to make way for the newly created state of Israel.
UNRWA at the time served Israel’s interests. By creating a separate body to the International Refugee Organisation (forerunner of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees), it undermined the idea that Palestinians were genuine refugees, like Jews following WWII, and therefore deserving of protection. And it provided a means for other states to foot the bill for the Zionist state’s ethnic cleansing and brutal occupation of Palestinian territory. Nevertheless, it maintained that Palestinian were a displaced people with rights that should be upheld, including the right of return to their ancestral lands as enshrined in UN Resolution 194. 
The vast majority of Gaza’s population are refugees, or descendants of refugees, from 1948 Palestine—the land that became Israel. Consequently, the Netanyahu government wants to drive them out of Gaza into the Sinai desert and destroy any links they retain with their homeland. Today’s Gaza Nakba echoes 1948: it is being pursued by Israel for the same objectives. Only this time around, it has the <a href="https://mondediplo.com/outsidein/us-israel-joint-war">unqualified support</a> of the US, the world’s only global superpower.
For years now, both the state of Israel and its American Zionist supporters have attempted to whip up a storm about UNRWA’s supposed aid to Palestinian “terrorism” (anti-colonial resistance). UNRWA has come to represent something Israel despises: Palestinians’ common sense of national identity.
In 2018, US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew all US funding to UNRWA at the behest of Netanyahu. Trump subsequently announced the move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and his commitment to support Israel’s annexation of settler enclaves in the West Bank, believing he could forcibly impose a settlement on the Palestinians that he hailed as “the deal of the century”. 
Like every other US-sponsored “peace plan”, it offered Palestinians nothing. The Biden administration quietly resumed US funding, while offering Tel Aviv all the military and diplomatic support it needed to continue its rampage against Palestinians. 
The very survival of Palestinians as a people currently lies in the balance. The ICJ ruling provides important vindication for the pro-Palestinians voices that have been ignored or criticised for calling Israel’s war what it is: genocide. But it won’t put off the powers intent on overseeing the elimination of the Palestinians. 
Today’s imperial powers—like those of the nineteenth century—are prepared to inflict hunger and misery on a mass scale to preserve their order, where trade and profits trump human lives. We must continue to come out onto the streets and demand that Palestine be free: from the river to the sea.

UNRWA funding cuts: starving a colonised people

‘Closing the Gap’? Labor’s dismal record on Indigenous rights

John Pilger was a writer, journalist and film maker who pulled no punches. His work was hard hitting and scathing about the rich and powerful, both in Australia and globally. Pilger died in London on 30 December of pulmonary fibrosis, aged 84.
Born in Bondi in 1939, Pilger launched his first newspaper at Sydney High School. After a four-year journalism cadetship with Australian Consolidated Press, Pilger left Australia in the early 1960s and moved to London. There he began his journalism career as a freelance journalist, then joined Reuters before moving to London’s Daily Mirror where he became chief foreign correspondent.
Working for the Mirror, Pilger reported on conflicts and upheavals around the world. He joined the march from Alabama to Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King and reported from the front line on Washington’s war on Vietnam. His first documentary, The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made for British television, revealed to the world the open rebellion inside the US army.
In 1978, Pilger returned to Vietnam to make the film Do You Remember Vietnam? It documented the horrors of the US war and the struggles of post-war Vietnam to overcome the destruction it caused: 44 percent of Vietnam’s forests were decimated by bombing and strafing with agent orange, a pesticide that continues to cause deformities in Vietnamese babies to this day.
The following year, Pilger made Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, which chronicled the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. Cambodia’s dictator Pol Pot took power in 1975 following a secret US bombing campaign against the Viet Cong, in which 100,000 tons of ordinance were dropped over the country. The film pointed the finger at Washington, which had removed King Norodom Sihanouk from power and paved the way for the explosion of violence that followed.
Genocide—and the role of imperial powers in fermenting it—was a key theme in much of Pilger’s work. In 1994, he travelled under cover into Indonesian occupied East Timor to make <a href="https://johnpilger.com/videos/death-of-a-nation-the-timor-conspiracy">Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy</a>. On his website, Pilger described this film as “the most challenging to my sense of self-preservation and the most inspirational”. 
Posing as travel agents, Pilger and director David Munro joined cameraman Max Stahl, who had filmed the bloody Santa Cruz massacre in Timor’s capital Dili three years earlier, to document the genocide that had followed the Indonesian military dictatorship’s 1975 invasion of the country. Pilger and his crew interviewed eyewitnesses who describe the murder of entire villages resisting the Indonesian invasion.
“I had no idea that much of the country was a mass grave, marked by legions of crosses that march all the way from Tata Mai Lau, the highest peak, 10,000 feet above sea level, down to Lake Tacitolu, where there is a crescent of hard, salt sand beneath which lie countless human remains, local people told me”, Pilger notes.
Death of a Nation documents the complicity of Western governments that enabled Timor’s occupation. Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and US President Gerald Ford both met with Indonesia’s dictator General Suharto in the lead up to the invasion. Secret cables revealed than both men, and their ambassadors in Jakarta, gave Suharto the green light for the invasion. 
The US and Britain supplied the military hardware to enable the bombing and occupation of Timorese villages, while Australian Army Intelligence Corps trained Indonesia’s elite Kopassus troops. A former CIA officer tells Pilger: “We supplied them with everything they needed [from] MI6 rifles [to] US military logistical support”.
Perhaps the most revealing scene in the film occurred on board an Australian aircraft flying over the Timor Sea in 1989. Two men in suits—Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans and his Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas—each raise a glass of champagne in a toast.
“This is a uniquely historical moment that is truly, uniquely historical”, babbles Evans.
The two men were celebrating the carve up of the rich oil and gas resources that lie beneath the Timor Sea: a loot long sought by rapacious Australian energy companies. The Timor Gap Treaty was made possible because the Australian government was the only country in the world that formally recognised Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor.
The film made an enormous impact everywhere it was shown, drawing world attention to Timor’s liberation struggle, and bringing new energy to the Timor solidarity movement. 
In 1998, Suharto was overthrown by Indonesia’s youthful democracy movement. His successor, Habibi, was forced to concede an independence referendum in East Timor, paving the way for the country to gain independence in 2002.
Pilger made several documentaries about Australia’s own history of genocide and apartheid. These included <a href="https://johnpilger.com/videos/the-secret-country-the-first-australians-fight-back">The Secret Country</a> (1985), The Last Dream (1988), <a href="https://johnpilger.com/videos/welcome-to-australia">Welcome to Australia</a> (1999) and <a href="https://vimeo.com/167556065">Utopia</a> (2013). The last of these documented contemporary injustices faced by Aboriginal Australia, including the Howard Liberal government’s 2007 Northern Territory intervention, when the military was sent in to occupy Aboriginal communities, while residents were subjected to paternalistic measures that took away their control over welfare payments and funding for community employment.
Pilger also documented Israel’s brutal war against the Palestinians. In 2002, following the outbreak of the second intifada, he made the film Palestine is still the Issue (he had made a film by the same name in 1977). Pilger travelled into the occupied West Bank to interview Palestinians in the wake of a massacre by Israeli troops in the Jenin refugee camp. The film was a powerful inditement of Western support for apartheid Israel and an important testament to the resolve of Palestinians to resist in the face of enormous adversity.
I had the opportunity to meet Pilger and hear him speak on several occasions. In 2002, Pilger addressed a Green Left Weekly public meeting titled “Breaking the silence: war, propaganda and the new empire”, in Sydney Town Hall. We were pleasantly surprised to sell tickets for every one of the 2,000 seats in the venue (there was no online ticketing back then, we collected cash or manually processed a credit card transaction for each ticket). 
Pilger told an enthralled audience about how the US had exploited the tragedy of the 11 September 2001 terror attack on New York’s iconic World Trade Centre to carve out a new imperial role in the Middle East. At this time, the War on Terror was in its infancy. 
War and empire were key themes of his films, books, articles and talks over the following two decades. In 2009 and 2010, Pilger was a guest speaker at Socialist Alternative’s annual <a href="https://www.facebook.com/MarxismConference?__cft__%5B0%5D=AZWGpqWgTdOYY1ZBhV8QeXqki9x6rwOchMQkIRz-PJMhHrLQ1yezn2KVVD-kBc1SkOub1dvOcKslxL28KQQoQpmYT-6BSpdVJCuJHDpiRTsXRxLhgZZ3J8IIFZZ7dJev-FCaonavG7BUFbL3MJh9bnPnde3Ezq50jfYk53MQSi4yZ8T_kJJzcCBUN6hoKxBg7q0rkKAab6YxzNWOHXRrvKpj&amp;__tn__=-%5DK-R">Marxism Conference</a>, at which he spoke about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Washington’s failed ambitions for a new American century.
Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003) opened with the words: “This film is about the rise and rise of rapacious imperial power and a terrorism that never speaks its name—because it is our terrorism”.
The War on Democracy (2007) chronicled US intervention in Latin America and the social movements challenging neoliberalism across the continent. The War You Don’t See (2010) explored the role of corporate media in shaping propaganda needed to justify imperial intervention, such as the Bush and Blair governments’ baseless claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction” that threatened the entire Middle East.
The Coming War on China (2016) examined the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia and, as the title suggests, preparations for a war with its imperial rival, China. It is a prescient film examining the new arms race, a quarter century after the end of the last Cold War.
Pilger won a US TV Academy Award, an Emmy, and a British Academy Award for his documentaries, which have also won numerous US and European awards, such as as the Royal Television Society’s Best Documentary.
However, his greatest contribution was to give voice to the oppressed and build solidarity with their struggles.
In recent years, he was an outspoken campaigner for freedom for Julian Assange, a dissident journalist and publisher imprisoned in Britain’s Belmarsh prison awaiting extradition to the US on treason charges. His engagement with this important campaign sometimes led Pilger to express support to some unsavoury opponents of US imperialism, including the Putin regime.
Nonetheless, Pilger was a tireless campaigner for truth and justice over more than half a century.
Former leader of Britain’s Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn wrote on X that Pilger had given “a voice to the unheard and the occupied: in Australia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, East Timor, Palestine and beyond. Thank you for your bravery in pursuit of the truth — it will never be forgotten”.
On 31 December Pilger’s family published a statement on his website stating: “His journalism and documentaries were celebrated around the world, but to his family, he was simply the most amazing and loved dad, grandad and partner”.

John Pilger: a fierce critic of empire

This is an edited version of a speech delivered by Friends of Palestine WA chairperson Nick Everett at a rally in Perth on 21 October.
Not far from where we stand is a memorial dedicated to the six million Jewish men, women and children who perished in the Holocaust. It calls out to us: “never let this happen again”.
But such crimes have happened again and again since 1945. Our rulers have a selective memory when it comes to genocide. They only use the term “genocide” when it suits them.
During the Vietnam War, the American government dropped 2.75 tonnes of ordnance on Cambodia—more than was dropped by the Allies in World War Two. During the Nixon administration, between 1970 and 1973, this frenzy of carpet bombing killed at least 150,000 people and contributed to famine and civil war, leading ultimately to the genocide of the Pol Pot regime.
Are we going to let this happen to the Palestinians?
Soon after the US exited Indochina, a new genocide began in East Timor, when Indonesia invaded on 7 December 1975. US President Gerald Ford met with Indonesia’s dictator General Suharto the day before, giving the green light to that invasion. Suharto had come to power a decade earlier in a military coup that resulted in the death of 1 million Indonesians, with the support of the US government. 
During Indonesia’s 23-year occupation of East Timor, 250,000 Timorese—a third of the population—died. This genocide was made possible with American-supplied weapons and British Hawke aircraft.
Are we going to let this happen to the Palestinians?
For twelve years, beginning in 1991, Iraq suffered under a regime of UN sanctions imposed at the behest of Washington. Half a million Iraq children died, according to UNICEF, more than died in the bombing of Hiroshima. 
When asked on national television about the death toll, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-madeleine-albright-as-who-she-really-was">replied</a>: “We think, the price is worth it”. 
The sanctions regime ended only when the US bombed and invaded its way into Iraq, laying waste to the country. 
Are we going to let this happen to the Palestinians?
In 2016, Myanmar’s military junta launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya in Rakhine State. Tens of thousands were killed, accused of being foreigners and terrorist vermin. 750,000 were driven across the border into Bangladesh, where most continue to languish in refugee camps.
In the lead-up to the carnage, Western governments played down the military junta’s crimes, keen to get their hands on Myanmar’s vast natural resources. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, lauded in the West, helped facilitate this genocide, acting as the regime’s <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6041">smiling face</a>.
Are we going to let Palestinians suffer the same fate?
Of course, Palestinians have their own experience of ethnic cleansing. During the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, 500 villages were depopulated and thousands were killed by Zionist militia. Just like the Rohingya, 750,000 were driven from their homes and forced into permanent exile from their homeland.
Now Israel wants to repeat the 1948 Nakba by destroying homes and forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into exile again.
A week ago, the Israeli Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, compared Palestinians to the Nazis in a television <a href="https://youtu.be/d8x3EXfdD0Y">interview</a>. Just as Britain’s war on Nazi Germany led to 600,000 civilian deaths, Hotovely said, there is a moral equivalence in Palestinian civilians being killed by Israel.
Yet fascism was not defeated in 1945 by the bombing of German cities. It was defeated by resistance movements who refused to give up in the face of adversity. 
One of the worst crimes committed by the Nazis was the incarceration of 400,000 Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Not unlike contemporary Gaza, the Ghetto was an open-air prison shut off from the outside world. Behind those prison walls a resistance developed that was determined to go down fighting and not be forgotten. 
The last survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Marek Edelman, who died in 2009, was a socialist who wanted nothing to do with Zionism. Edleman pledged his support for the rights of Palestinians. 
“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors”, he said.
Like Edelman, we must resist. We must stand on the side of the oppressed, the Palestinians. And we must never give up.

Are we going to let this happen to the Palestinians?

Ayman Qwaider was impassioned and determined when he addressed a rally of 5,000 people in Perth’s Supreme Court Gardens on 21 October. Looking out across a sea of faces, he told those gathered about the brutal crimes that Israel was committing against Palestinians in Gaza, where he had lived most of his life. 
Ayman spoke of the anxiety and fear he felt, not knowing whether his family would survive from one day to the next. He described phone conversations with his father, who would ask, “Should we stay or should we go?”—and the helplessness of not being able to offer advice, knowing that Gaza has no safe place to shelter.
I have known Ayman and his wife Sameeha for nearly ten years. 
Several months after arriving in Perth in 2014, they <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/we-need-isolate-israel">shared with me</a> their experiences of growing up under Israeli military occupation, and the severe repression Gazans faced from occupation forces during the second intifada, when they were both school students in the early 2000s.
There had been a moment of reprieve in 2005 when Israeli settlements were dismantled under Prime Minister Sharon’s “unilateral disengagement” policy. But the respite didn’t last long.
“In 2008 and 2009 everything changed dramatically”, Sameeha said at the time. “Now everybody became a target for the attacks [from Israel]. It wasn’t safe walking in the streets. A car could blow up next to you while you were walking.
“There was nothing you could do but stay home and pray that you would survive”, she continued. “We felt very helpless. The electricity would be cut off all day long; there were no food supplies; you had to survive by whatever means you could.”
Israel’s Operation Cast Lead killed 1,400 people over three weeks that winter. In the summer of 2014, Operation Protective Edge killed another 2,000. Ayman, Sameeha and I rallied together and marched together through Perth’s streets every weekend for five weeks.
But nothing could prepare them for the anguish of Israel’s current offensive, which has killed more than 5,000 people.
As we marched again, this time in the largest Palestine solidarity protest Perth has ever seen, Ayman asked, “What do we need to do to stop this war? When will the politicians listen?”
“We need to get masses of people on to the streets, shut down our workplaces if we can and force them to abandon their support for Israel”, I replied. But I felt guilty. I knew none of this could come soon enough for Ayman’s family.
Later that afternoon, at 4:45pm, Ayman received a status update from his sister Alaa Qwaider in Gaza City. 
“There is bombing all around me”, she wrote. “Every night is harder than the night before. I am exhausted, God please accept me in the heavens.”
Several hours later, Ayman’s worst nightmare came true. Alaa and her three children, Eman (5), Faiz (3) and 7-month-old Sara, were killed in an Israeli airstrike. It was Eman’s fifth birthday.
<img alt="Faiz (L), Eman and 7-month-old Sara." src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/Faiz%2C%20Eman%20and%20Sara_0.jpeg" />
Faiz (L), Eman and 7-month-old Sara.
The family lived in the Daraj neighbourhood in Gaza City. Ayman’s brother-in-law Mahmoud Ahel survived the attack. However, seventeen members of Mahmoud’s family were killed when the Israeli airstrike destroyed the apartment in which they lived.
The other victims of the massacre included Mahmoud’s mother and father, his two sisters Sabeeha and Eman, Eman’s three children, Alma, Lamar and Elia, Mahmoud’s brother in-law, his sister-in-law Maraha and her child Anis.
Al-Daraj is one of the city’s oldest and most densely populated neighbourhoods. Situated on a hill, it is the site of Gaza’s largest and oldest mosque, the Great Omari Mosque. Today, Al-Daraj and the surrounding suburbs of Gaza City sit in an area declared by apartheid Israel a free-fire zone.
Two days later, I visited Ayman and Sameeha in their Canning Vale home. They served traditional Arabic coffee and cake.
“We are seeing entire families brutalised and killed, while there is no food, no medicine and no fuel to maintain generators in the hospitals”, Ayman said. 
“Death awaits thousands of injured people in Gaza’s hospitals if this war continues. Israel’s bombardment deliberately targets the most vulnerable: 70 percent of those killed are children, women and elderly people.”
<img alt="Ayman" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/Ayman.jpeg" />
Ayman.
What is Israel’s end goal? Another 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees?
“How do we interpret the displacement of one million people in two weeks, the killing of more than 2,000 children in two weeks, the bombing of schools, mosques, churches and medical centres?”, Ayman asked.
“We have seen this death and destruction inside the UN schools that are supposed to be shelters. We have seen children looking at the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers and kissing them.
“What is the message that Israel is conveying to Palestinians? That we are going to get you, we are going to kill you. Israel is determined to eliminate the younger generation of Gaza”, he continued. “This is collective punishment, a war crime. This is systematic. This is a genocide against the Palestinian people.”
Amidst the violence being rained down upon Palestinians, Ayman was determined that his sister’s story be known. He requested that a media statement be prepared, and said that he would not allow his sister’s memory to be packaged into media sound bites and newspaper stories that obscured the history of Israel’s violent colonial occupation.
Ayman asked if I could arrange leaflets to be distributed at a community prayer meeting to be held for his sister that evening. I got on the phone and arranged delivery of leaflets to his friend, Ahmed.
As I left for another rally organising meeting, Ayman related that his father had cried while on their last video call. “I’ve never seen my father cry like that before”, he said.

A family murdered by Israel: Ayman’s worst nightmare comes true

“The [Voice] referendum is about whether we retreat into ourselves or have the courage to advance forward”, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared in a keynote speech at the Garma Festival in north-east Arnhem Land on 4 August. 
Albanese likened his government’s resolve to the kangaroo and emu that sit on the Australian coat of arms. “[They] are two of the only animals in the world that never go backwards – they just go forwards”, he said.
Yet go backwards Labor did.
On 8 August, WA Premier Roger Cook and Aboriginal Affairs Minister Tony Buti fronted a press conference to declare their government’s surrender in the face of a racist campaign by farming, mining and pastoral interests against the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act, which came into force on 1 July. 
Cook announced that the Act would be repealed and that the state government would revert to the 1972 Aboriginal Heritage Act, which has provided a licence to mining interests to destroy Aboriginal heritage sites for the past half century.
“Put simply, the laws went too far, were too prescriptive, too complicated and placed unnecessary burdens on everyday Western Australian property owners”, Cook <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/08/wa-repeals-axes-aboriginal-cultural-heritage-laws-premier-roger-cook">told</a> the media.
When Rio Tinto blew up two sacred sites at Juukan Gorge in 2020, the mining company ignited outrage across the world. The rock shelters were sacred to the Pinti Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples in the Pilbara region. They contained artefacts that included unique stone tools, human hair and animal remains that, <a href="https://www.terrijanke.com.au/our-culture-our-future">according</a> to Wuthathi-Meriam woman Terri Janke, provide evidence of “cultural practices, resources and knowledge systems’ of human life going back 46,000 years”.
Rio Tinto’s wanton destruction of Aboriginal heritage and total disregard of the wishes of traditional owners was made possible by Section 18 of the 1972 Act, which allowed the minister to weigh heritage concerns against the “public interest”. Once the minister’s decision was made, it was final. Traditional owners had no right of review, even when new evidence of cultural heritage is found.
The Section 18 process became so routine that it was known as an “approval” or “clearance”. In 2011, the former Liberal minister Norman Moore <a href="https://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/parliament/commit.nsf/(Evidence+Lookup+by+Com+ID)/A8958147D45E57874825794A002F70A3/$file/ef.aar10.11111.tro.001.Department+of+Indigneous+Affairs.pdf">joked</a> at a mining industry function that the raffle prize would be a free Section 18 approval. <a href="https://www.klc.org.au/land-councils-say-new-cultural-heritage-laws-are-pointless">According to</a> South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council CEO Wayne Nannup, “Over 99 percent of the 400 plus Section 18 applications made by miners and developers to the McGowan government [had] been granted” as of last year.
Additionally, anyone from big agribusiness to small farmers could defend the destruction of Aboriginal heritage by simply claiming that they didn’t know that the site was there and couldn’t reasonably have known it was there. 
Under the 1972 Act, the process for registering a protected heritage site was extremely onerous for Aboriginal applicants. The Act established an Aboriginal Cultural Materials Committee, which could provide recommendations to the minister about whether a site should be protected, and whether the economic use of a site was compatible with its preservation. The final decision rested with the minister, who was always free to disregard the council’s advice, though often the minister felt no need to do so.
In 2020, when Rio Tinto destroyed sacred sites at Juukan Gorge, the chair of the committee was Gavin Fielding, a life-long state bureaucrat and former head of the WA Industrial Relations Commission, who just happened be a Rio Tinto shareholder. Fielding insisted he held no conflict of interest. Also on the committee was the chief surveyor of Landgate, a state government authority responsible for land development.
Over the past half century, there are many examples of WA state governments using “public interest” (i.e., mining and development interests) to permit the destruction of Aboriginal heritage in the face of determined community opposition. Some of the most high-profile cases include US multinational Amax’s <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7540">oil drilling exploration</a> at Noonkanbah station in 1980 and the development of the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6661">Old Swan Brewery site</a> on Perth’s foreshore in the early 1990s.
In the decade prior to the Juukan Gorge disaster, mining companies were granted permission to damage 463 “protected” sites, including some containing rock art dating back tens of thousands of years. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/aug/28/more-than-100-aboriginal-sacred-sites-some-dating-before-the-ice-age-could-be-destroyed-by-mining-companies">According to</a> the Guardian, Rio Tinto has 13,300 ethnographic and cultural sites on its Pilbara mining leases, Fortescue manages more than 5,900 Aboriginal heritage sites across its leases, and BHP manages about 8,000 sites.
When elected in 2017, Labor had promised to update the antiquated law. However, at the time of Rio Tinto’s destruction of Juukan Gorge, Labor had done nothing to act on this promise.
Bowing to pressure and faced with a damning Senate inquiry, the McGowan government rushed the new Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act through state parliament in November 2021 with little parliamentary opposition. The government’s key selling points were the removal of Section 18 and an increase in fines for those who break the law (from $50,000 to $10 million). The government <a href="https://consultation.dplh.wa.gov.au/aboriginal-heritage/aboriginal-heritage-bill-2020/">claimed</a> the new bill would “reset the relationship between land users and Traditional Owners and transform how Aboriginal cultural heritage is identified, managed and conserved”.
However, Aboriginal groups were sceptical. The Kimberley Land Council and the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council <a href="https://www.klc.org.au/land-councils-say-new-cultural-heritage-laws-are-pointless">said</a> in 2021 that the new Act would “not stop the destruction of scared sites as long as decision-making power over their protection remains with a government minister”.
And Kimberley Land Council CEO Nolan Hunter stated: 
“Whilst the changes remove Section 18, government endorsed destruction without the agreement of Traditional Owners would still be possible under a re-badged and rebranded Section 139. With a few more checks and balances, a minister will still have the final say on if a sacred site is important or not.”
Nonetheless, the 2021 Act shifted the burden of responsibility to identify Aboriginal heritage and consult with traditional owners to landholders and mining interests. The Act established new Local Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Services, Aboriginal-run independent bodies to investigate local heritage claims, for a fee.
As the implementation date of the new Act approached, the Pastoral and Graziers Association and the Liberal and National parties called for the Act’s implementation to be paused. A petition calling for a six-month delay garnered 30,000 signatures. Their campaign soon attracted support from right-wing media outlets such as the Australian and Sky News, and opponents of Labor’s proposed Voice to Parliament.
Geraldton mayor Shane van Styn <a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/indigenous-australians/aboriginal-cultural-heritage-act-geraldton-mayor-shane-van-styn-claims-new-laws-stopped-tree-planting-event-c-11220261">told</a> the West Australian on 9 July that a tree-planting event at Wonthella Bush Reserve to honour the service of the late Queen Elizabeth II was “shut down” after a local traditional owner had claimed the reserve was a sacred site (she had actually protested the event because she objected to the site being named after the deceased monarch). Two days later, Styn erroneously <a href="https://www.2gb.com/new-indigenous-laws-stop-tribute-to-the-queen-elizabeth-ii/">claimed</a> in an interview with Sydney radio station 2GB:
“The Act gives Aboriginal folk the right to enter any property ... stop any works, they have a right to demand passwords to your computer ...” and that “the Act grants them enough powers that they can use force which is not likely to cause grievous bodily harm or death”. 
Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce and One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson quickly piled on, stoking fears that Labor would roll out laws to curb farmers’ rights across the country. On 3 August, Liberal Senator Jonathon Duniam <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/peta-credlin/wa-cultural-heritage-act-is-socialist-state-gone-mad/video/bc0110ab73782b1b9da26faa9e6cdbba">told</a> Sky News presenter Peta Credlin that the legislation was the act of a “socialist state gone mad”.
Underlying the racist campaign was a desire by conservatives to leverage opposition to the legislation towards defeating the Voice to Parliament referendum. The latest Essential poll, on 5 August, shows support for the Voice has slipped below 50 percent in all states. In Western Australia, where support is lowest, only 39 percent said they would vote yes.
Despite government claims to the contrary, speculation has been rife that Albanese brought pressure to bear on Cook to get the issue off the agenda. Shamefully, Yes 23 campaign spokesperson Dean Parkin welcomed news of the WA premier’s capitulation. 
Parkin <a href="https://thewest.com.au/politics/dumping-heritage-laws-give-clear-air-for-voice-yes-campaign-director-c-11495233">told</a> the West Australian that the scrapping of the legislation “gives us a clearer pathway from now through to the referendum to be able to focus very closely on that very simple question of recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the first peoples of this country through a Voice”. 
In other words, the modest but real gain of Aboriginal heritage protection in WA must be jettisoned to achieve a symbolic outcome at a federal level. As Red Flag contributor Jordan Humphries <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/voice-parliament-losing-ground-poll">observed</a> in June, “the whole messaging of the Yes campaign avoids any discussion of the racism that Indigenous people face” and, consequently, its “depoliticised approach ... is flirting dangerously with failure”.
While supporting a Yes vote, we should have no illusions that the Voice will address the structural racism that Aboriginal people face. Indeed, it has been engineered to avoid any significant challenge to the status quo. In WA, Labor has made it abundantly clear that it is more willing to listen to the voices of graziers, farmers and mining companies than Aboriginal people. Why should we expect that the Voice to Parliament, should it be enacted, is any more likely to be listened to?

Max Vickery

WA Labor capitulates to racist campaign against Aboriginal heritage law

Esteban Volkov was just 13 when, in May 1940, Stalin’s assassins tried to kill him. Why? Because his grandfather was Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
Born in Yalta, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) in 1926, Esteban was the son of Trotsky’s daughter Zinaida and her husband Platon Volkov. At the time, Platon was a prominent member of the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky. The pair were both vocal critics of Stalin’s increasingly rightward leadership of the USSR. 
In particular, Trotsky viewed Stalin’s China policy as a complete departure from the internationalism and class independence that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had advocated. Stalin, who had succeeded Lenin as party leader, argued that the Chinese communists should disband and fuse with the pro-capitalist Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party), claiming that it was the only force capable of defeating the occupying imperialist powers. 
This proved disastrous when, in April 1927, Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek massacred hundreds of communists and their supporters in Shanghai, opening the way for anti-communist purges across the country. 
Trotsky had been proved right. Stalin responded by exiling him to Alma Ata in Central Asia and then banishing him from the Soviet Union two years later. He subsequently stripped Trotsky and his family of their Soviet citizenship, rendering them stateless. 
The repression didn’t stop there.
Platon was murdered by Stalin’s agents, forcing Zinaida and her 5-year-old son, originally named Vsevolod, to join Trotsky in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo. From there they moved to Berlin. Sick with tuberculosis and separated from her family, Zinaida became deeply depressed. In January 1933, on the eve of the Nazis taking power in Germany, she took her own life. Vsevolod, now an orphan, was sent to a Vienna boarding school before joining his uncle, Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov, in Paris.
Paris offered a haven for Vsevolod, and an organising centre for the Trotskyists. However, Stalin’s agents were in hot pursuit. In 1938, Sedov died in suspicious circumstances following an appendectomy at a Paris clinic. It was suspected he had been poisoned, though the case was never proven.
Orphaned again, Vsevolod remained in the care of his uncle’s widow before leaving Paris in 1939 to join his grandfather in Mexico. There he adopted a Spanish name—Esteban.
Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova had arrived in Mexico City in January 1937. With the help of Mexican painter and communist Diego Rivera, they acquired a villa in Coyoacán, surrounded by a very high wall. Coyoacán was then a tranquil town on the outskirts of Mexico City; today it is a trendy inner-city suburb.
“I was thirteen and a half when I first arrived in this house—from Paris, with Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer”, Esteban recalled in a 2017 <a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/memories-of-leon-trotsky-from-his-grandson-1849/">interview</a> with Left Voice. “The contrast was stark. Europe in winter is grey, grey, grey. I came from a sinister climate full of grief. After the death of my uncle Lev Sedov, I was emotionally damaged.”
Esteban described taking trips into the countryside with Trotsky, who had become an avid collector of cacti: “My first impression was: Colour! Mexico is a country full of colours”.
This blissful life was soon rudely interrupted. 
In the early hours of 24 May 1940, a group of Stalin’s henchmen, led by painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, breached the compound in which Trotsky and his family had found sanctuary. The front gate was opened by Sheldon Harte, a Stalinist agent who had infiltrated the US Socialist Workers Party, which had entrusted him to act as Trotsky’s bodyguard.
Once inside, the men sprayed machine gunfire into the bedrooms where Trotsky, Natalia and Esteban slept. Natalia jumped out of bed and pulled Trotsky out of the line of fire. Esteban awoke and hid behind his bed until the shooting stopped. Natalia suffered burns; a bullet hit Esteban’s big toe. It was a lucky escape.
Half a century later, when the Soviet archives revealed the government’s hidden secrets, Esteban discovered that Harte had criticised his comrades for wanting to kill a child. For that, Harte was branded a traitor, killed and buried in a park.
“That is how the Stalinist system worked”, Esteban told Left Voice. “When something went wrong, you had to find someone to blame. And in this case, it was very easy to blame the American.”
With funds raised by the Socialist Workers Party, the compound was now fortified: windows were bricked up and bunkers were constructed on the roof to protect against would-be assassins. “Grandfather [Trotsky] was basically a prisoner in his home”, Esteban recalled.
Three months later, on 20 August, another Stalinist agent succeeded in his mission. The assassin, a Catalan named Ramón Mercader, had been a Soviet secret police agent during the Spanish Civil War, working to subordinate the forces of revolution to Stalin’s dictates. He drove an ice pick into Trotsky’s skull while he sat reading at his desk. 
“When I went into the study, I saw Lev Davidovich [Trotsky] wounded, lying on the ground, but the guards and others stopped me from going any closer”, Esteban recalled in a 2003 Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/feb/13/heritage.russia">interview</a>. “My grandfather had said: ‘Don’t let Seva [Esteban] in, the child mustn’t see this’. Later, he crossed the garden for the last time, on a stretcher carried by male nurses.” 
Trotsky died in hospital the next day.
“The more grotesque lies about Trotsky have disappeared with the regime that manufactured them. But there still exists another distortion, the one that equates Trotsky and Stalin as two bad Russian bears”, Esteban told the Guardian. 
“But it went deeper than a personal power struggle. It was a conflict over what type of society the Soviet Union should be. Stalin was the builder of a bloody, oppressive and bureaucratic system. Trotsky led and defended a revolution. There is no comparison.”
After Trotsky’s assassination, Esteban remained in the house with Natalia, who died in 1962 at the age of 79. He trained as an engineer, developing technology that enabled the mass production of the first contraceptive pill. He married and raised four daughters in the same home.
But his greatest legacy was his contribution to keeping alive the ideas of his grandfather. 
In 1990—50 years after the assassination—Esteban opened the doors of his family home to the public, establishing a museum to honour Trotsky’s life and an institute to promote the rights of those seeking political asylum. The museum displays Trotsky’s study as it was at the time of his assassination. Behind the house stand a library, art gallery and meeting venue.
Esteban passed away peacefully on 17 June at the age of 97. He is survived by his four children and was cared for in his final years by Gabriela Pérez Noriega, now the director of the Leon Trotsky Museum. 
Esteban Volkov’s work is evidence of the motto: “You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea”. He stood in a proud tradition of opposition to Stalinism and support for the idea of an internationalist, revolutionary socialism.
Esteban Volkov presente!

Israeli settlers’ West Bank rampage escalates

Why Labor has always backed Israel

When Australia’s Communists became cheerleaders for imperialist war

UNRWA funding cuts: starving a colonised people

‘Closing the Gap’? Labor’s dismal record on Indigenous rights

John Pilger: a fierce critic of empire

Are we going to let this happen to the Palestinians?

A family murdered by Israel: Ayman’s worst nightmare comes true

WA Labor capitulates to racist campaign against Aboriginal heritage law

Vale Esteban Volkov, grandson of Leon Trotsky

Other Media

Shop

Conferences

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us