Swinburne University in Melbourne’s east has recently imposed shocking new measures to restrict the religious freedoms of Muslim students and community members on campus.
It began by enforcing swipe card access to the prayer room, restricting access to many who make use of the facility. The closest mosque is more than ten kilometres from Hawthorn, so for years local residents have gone to Swinburne to pray. Most other areas of campus, such as the library and student lounge, remain accessible to the public.
Alarms were installed on the prayer room doors to prevent them from being propped open. To escalate even further, the university sent in campus security to guard the entrance and then enter the room during prayers to check IDs.
Most insultingly, the university removed the Islamic Society’s chosen prayer leader and replaced them with its own hand-picked Imam, to run the large Friday payer. This was done with little to no consultation. As the Islamic Society pointed out in a statement, no other club or society on campus is subject to university appointment of their leaders or speakers.
Multiple Muslim students at Swinburne told Red Flag they believed the university’s crackdown on prayer room access, and imposition of the Imam, was at least partly because the student-led Friday prayers regularly discuss Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.
Things came to a head at a Friday prayer in October, when students prevented the university-appointed Imam from taking over and leading the prayer. The University responded by sending in security guards. Then, in a major crackdown, it announced that the prayer room would be closed for Friday prayers until students accepted the university-appointed Imam. The university also opened investigations into student prayer leaders.
Students defied this attack, holding protest-prayers outdoors on two consecutive Fridays that were attended by more than 200 students, staff and community members. Speakers at the prayers highlighted the rise in Islamophobia on campus and in broader society, spoke about links to the persecution of Muslims overseas and asserted the basic right of students to control their own affairs.
Thanks in part to pressure from the students, including a petition with hundreds of signatures, the university has since allowed use of the prayer room. However, restrictive swipe card access and surveillance from campus security remain.
These moves against the Muslim community are just one example of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/universities-are-repressing-palestine-solidarity-activism">the repressive climate on university campuses today</a>. Swinburne is among the most repressive campuses in the country, calling the police against socialist and Palestine activists three times this year for the supposed crime of leafleting on campus without permission. Across the country, universities are responding to pro-Palestine activism with new restrictions on students’ rights. These attacks aren’t aimed exclusively at protest actions, but against pro-Palestine speech in general.

James Gallagher

Swinburne University cracks down on Muslim students’ rights

Wollongong Friends of Palestine community activists successfully organised a picket on 15 November against Australian company Bisalloy Steels. Bisalloy has a factory in Unanderra, a suburb of Wollongong, and manufactures steel plating used in tank armour. 
The company’s business manager, Justin Suwart, previously boasted that Israel is the largest export market for Bisalloy’s armour-grade steel and cited the “strong opportunities to further increase sales in the region” in a report on the company’s website. In other words, some of Bisalloy’s profits come from supplying a state that is perpetually waging war on the Palestinians.
Roughly 200 people gathered early in the morning to protest outside the company gates. This is the fourth time since Israel’s current genocide in Gaza began that Wollongong activists have organised a picket. The previous time, the company shut down for the day. This time was no different, although the company dubiously invoked a “picnic day” as its reasoning. At any rate, we celebrated the win. 
A week earlier, the company’s shareholders moved their annual general meeting to Zoom after discovering that we planned to protest the event.
Our protest occurred on the 86th anniversary of the Dalfram dispute—when dock workers refused to load pig iron onto ships headed for imperial Japan to be used against the Chinese. Wollongong Friends of Palestine activists are standing in a tradition of anti-war activism and finding ways to do what we can to disrupt the business of genocide. 
Bisalloy Steels will continue to be a target as long as they are involved in manufacturing materials for war.

Megan Guy

Wollongong Palestine solidarity activists picket company supplying Israel

If you walked past Mark McGowan, former premier of Western Australia, and gave him a serve for his role in locking up Indigenous children, you would probably feel pretty good about yourself. If it was filmed and put online, you might even end up in a segment on the Project. If you happened to do it at Curtin University in Western Australia, you’d probably be suspended. This is what happened to a student at Curtin last month, one of many students across the country facing discipline over justified acts of protest. 
<a>Red Flag has covered</a> the increased repression on campuses in the wake of the Gaza solidarity encampments. In response to the Palestine solidarity movement, universities changed their policies and student charters to make it even harder to speak out against the genocide in Gaza. We are now seeing the impact of these changes, as well as the political impact of the parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism on campuses. The historic student general meetings (SGM), in which thousands of students nationwide have voted in solidarity with Palestine, have also kicked off a new wave of repression. 
There are dozens of examples of universities repressing pro-Palestine activism in just the last few months. Here are a few of them. The Students for Palestine club at the University of New South Wales has been suspended in the wake of the SGM. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology has launched disciplinary proceedings against three students for their participation in a political meeting at that campus. The University of Sydney shut down a bake sale raising funds for Gazans and has brought misconduct charges against students for organising a Palestine solidarity protest on campus, including an anti-Zionist Jewish student. Melbourne University is hunting down students who occupied the office of a pro-Israel lecturer. The vice-chancellor interfered in the student union elections at the University of Technology Sydney to ban mention of the word “genocide”. And at the Australian National University, the spending of elected student union officers is being audited because they promoted Palestine solidarity. Not only students: two academics at the University of Sydney are being accused of racial vilification over their support for Palestine. 
Up and down the country, space for student activism—almost a rite of passage for young people—is narrowing, and those who dare to speak out against the genocide in Gaza are being dragged through misconduct hearings. It’s difficult to grasp the full scale of this, as many universities impose confidentiality clauses that prevent students from speaking publicly about their repression.
The political backdrop for these attacks is a hysterical campaign by the mainstream media, the Labor government, the Liberals and Zionist organisations against Palestine solidarity activism. This resulted, among other things, in a Senate committee about a supposed wave of antisemitism on campuses. Many of the submissions to the committee made the well-rehearsed argument that any criticism of Israel amounts to a racist attack on Jewish people. The purpose here is to accuse pro-Palestine activists of being antisemites who must be stopped.
University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott in particular was accused of not doing enough to suppress this supposed problem. Submissions and commentators, including opposition leader Peter Dutton, attacked him for not instantly shutting down the Gaza solidarity encampment on his campus. Jillian Segal, the recently appointed special envoy to combat antisemitism, wrote a submission to the Senate hearing which stated that there is a “pervasive hatred” of Jewish people at the University of Sydney, and that antisemitism is an “embedded” part of university culture. Her accusation is based on a few interviews with Jewish staff and students, all of whom support Israel and are opposed to the anti-war movement. In the months after the campaign against Scott began, the university launched a witch-hunt against known Palestine solidarity activists.
In the initial months of Israel’s war on Gaza, there was a more liberal approach on the campuses. Even when the solidarity encampments were established, most universities chose not to shut them down or bring in the cops, as we saw in the United States. Scott even said he wouldn’t ban political expression and respected the right of students to protest. But a hardline approach has since been adopted by the administrations, who have fallen into line with the anti-Palestine campaign.
Universities are some of the country’s largest institutions that help to manufacture the ideological material of Australian society, as well as the literal material of weapons research in partnership with weapons companies and other imperialist nations like the United States and Israel. This is all far more important to administrations than academic freedom and open political expression. Those who run the universities form part of Australia’s elite: they come from it, and they contribute to it. For instance, RMIT vice-chancellor Alec Cameron is a long-term member of the ultra-conservative, boys-only, Australian Club. Sydney University’s chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson, sits on the board of Thales Australia, a major weapons manufacturer. Many vice-chancellors earn more than a million dollars a year. 
So when a hegemonic political line is established by the Australian elite, university management will toe it. There is a common view of universities as oases of open expression, where ideas flow freely, common sense is challenged, and diversity and debate flourish. This is much overstated. Our universities are embedded in Australian capitalism; they are economically and ideologically beholden to it. Ideas deemed too dangerous to the status quo have historically been repressed.
The Australian establishment ardently backs Israel, regardless of the atrocities it commits, because it is a loyal member of the Western imperialist bloc. The Palestine solidarity movement of the last year has threatened the ideological myth of Israel as a defender of democracy and freedom. The federal and state governments, as well as the billionaire-backed mainstream media, have denounced the movement from day one. Universities, which can feel the pressure of upholding their liberal image, took a looser stance to begin with. But now they have fallen into line.
The excuses that universities have used to justify the repression in recent months are astonishing. For instance, in suspending the Students for Palestine club at UNSW, Arc, the body that oversees clubs and student life, alleged that the mere presence of pro-Palestine posters caused damage to the “psychosocial safety” of the university community. It’s pretty jarring to anyone who has watched footage of dead Gazan babies being pulled from bombed buildings to hear that putting up posters advertising a student meeting is a threat to “psychosocial safety”.
Student activists at the UTS in Sydney have also apparently harmed the psyches of staff and students by handing out a leaflet for an event titled “exposing UTS ties to genocide”. Students were informed by security that the vice-chancellor said the use of the word would be “triggering”. 
At RMIT, students who made use of an empty lecture theatre for a political meeting after a Palestine solidarity rally received disciplinary hearing notices that insinuate the students were celebrating terrorist attacks on Israel. They imply that the mere sight of a keffiyeh caused anxiety and threatened the wellbeing of staff and students. 
The phrase “From the river to the sea” has been banned by multiple universities, including ANU, where students were warned that the phrase was “harmful”, and at Monash, where banners and placards with the phrase were seized. Monash has also disciplined two students for putting up pro-Palestine stickers—one was dragged out of class by security. 
As mentioned, some universities have altered their campus policy guidelines to restrict protests by demanding that students first seek approval from management. While they refuse to spell it out, the motive for this is to shut down pro-Palestine activism. For instance, at Sydney University, the new Campus Access Policy has been used only to shut down Palestine-related events, such as a bake sale, or discipline students who organised a Palestine rally. Other non-Palestine-related events that broke the new guidelines have not been touched. 
RMIT is altering its “Property Management Procedure” and the “Health, Safety and Wellbeing Policy”. The changes will give unilateral power to the director of Property Services to bar room bookings or “protest or protest related activity” that might cause “financial or reputational” damage to the university. Like the Campus Access Policy, it also prohibits camping—a clear reference to the encampments. 
According to an anonymous staff member who works in the policy department, an earlier draft of the policy changes was so restrictive and undemocratic that the policy team rebelled against the directives of management, which was forced to revise the policy. This staff member also reported that the emails about the policy included “Palestine protests” in the subject line. 
Last month, Swinburne University in Melbourne’s inner east made the extraordinary move to remove the Islamic Student Society’s chosen prayer leader and replace them with a university-appointed chaplain, and stationed guards at the entrance to the prayer rooms to bar those without a student card. Students feel that this act of religious repression happened because the students frequently make references to Palestinian oppression in their prayers. 
It’s a terrible precedent that a university can interfere with students’ religious freedoms. And it highlights the real social problem in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza: the ramping up of Islamophobia. Jewish students have not had their prayers or events shut down by any university across the country. There has been no enquiry into the impacts of the war on Muslim students. This again speaks to the selective outrage and enforcement of restrictions by university administrations. 
Universities frequently celebrate the struggles of the past. Students learn about the movements against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid in history degrees. Universities use photos of protests from the ’70s and ’80s in their advertising material to future students. UNSW proudly displays a bronze statue of Nelson Mandela. But university managements opposed those movements when they were happening, and they are repressing the students who are confronting the modern equivalents. 
The absurdity at the heart of this issue is that the students and staff who are facing repression are those calling simply for peace, for an end to the war. Yet they are being suspended, expelled, harassed and intimidated. Some staff may even lose their jobs for speaking up for Palestine. The universities are telling us that right is wrong and wrong is right. This is the reality of campus life for socially progressive students and staff. It’s a reality that must be challenged.

Anneke Demanuele

Universities are repressing Palestine solidarity activism

The Students for Palestine club at the University of New South Wales has been suspended. This is just the latest in a wave of attacks on Palestine solidarity activists across the country.
Arc, the body that oversees clubs and student life at UNSW, accused the Students for Palestine club of breaching campus policy by putting up posters, hanging banners, running stalls without bookings and allegedly harassing students by leafleting and making announcements in lectures. While these activities are simply the bread and butter of building any sort of activist life on campus, Arc outrageously claims that they harm the “psychosocial safety” of students. 
In a meeting with club members, Arc representatives objected to our use of the word genocide in promotional material or protest speeches, suggesting that it may be offensive to some students. This is like saying it would have been wrong to criticise apartheid South Africa in the 1980s because students who supported that regime would find it upsetting. 
The suspension follows a historic student general meeting organised by Students for Palestine, which was the largest Palestine solidarity event ever to take place at UNSW. More than 600 students voted to oppose the university’s ties to weapons companies and the genocide in Gaza. 
The suspension will be reviewed in January 2025 but is unlikely to be lifted as Arc has stated that more allegations against the club are still being investigated. It seems likely that university management played a hand in the suspension. Disciplinary proceedings were initiated by Arc shortly after management sent an email alerting students and staff to alleged breaches of the student code of conduct at the student general meeting. Arc staff have also indicated to us that university executives have taken an interest in the suspension case. 
This is an attack on the ability of students to organise a Palestine solidarity campaign on campus. Recently, the university banned a speak-out to commemorate one year of the genocide in Gaza. Despite this, students at UNSW are determined to continue the fight to oppose our university’s ties to this genocide. No matter what the university accuses us of, we know we are on the right side of history—and we will not be silenced.

Emma Terry

Palestine solidarity club suspended at UNSW

Phil Butland

When a Zionist riot is reported as an antisemitic pogrom

Israel is tightening the noose around Gaza: it is starving northern Gaza, invading refugee camps like Jabalia and ramping up its bombing of the besieged strip. This apocalypse follows the blueprint laid out by the “Generals’ Plan”. Its author, retired General Giora Eiland, said any civilians left in Gaza should be seen as “legitimate military targets”. The bombardment of Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last partially functioning hospital in northern Gaza, makes clear that Israel’s strategy remains one of unbridled terror. 
Israel is also obliterating any remaining lifelines for the Palestinians. It has banned UNRWA, the United Nation Relief and Work Agency, and withdrawn from a 1967 agreement allowing the agency to work in the Occupied Territories. UNRWA aid has been a thin line of protection from the total collapse of food and water supplies in Gaza; its banning is tantamount to a death sentence for many Palestinians. 
Western leaders have offered toothless criticisms of the ban. Foreign Minister Penny Wong took to X to opine: “UNRWA does life-saving work. Australia opposes the Israeli Knesset’s decision to severely restrict UNRWA’s work”.
Yet, Israel can flout international law and attack UN aid institutions precisely because of the unceasing support it receives from Western governments. In January this year, over a dozen countries including the US and Australia suspended funding to UNRWA in the middle of the genocide. The decision was justified with flimsy accusations against the body presented by Israel. Penny Wong suspended funding while admitting to the ABC that she did “not yet have all the evidence to hand” when making the decision. Western military, financial and diplomatic support continues to flow to Israel.
The Israeli military has also attacked UN bases in Lebanon. This was criticised by the West, but with no serious repercussions. 
UN aid services are powerless when pitted against the might of the Israeli military. International law is, once again, incapable of taming the crimes of imperialism.

Owen Marsden-Readford

Israel bans UNRWA while laying siege to Gaza

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has passed landmark motions calling for an institutional academic boycott of Israel and condemning the “scholasticide” in Gaza—the systematic destruction of educational institutions and academic life.
At its national council meeting in Melbourne in early October, a motion supporting the institutional academic boycott of Israel passed overwhelmingly. This followed calls from Palestinian civil society going back many years, as well as campaigning from the union’s rank-and-file members and left-wing delegates at national council. 
The motion encompassed refusing cooperation with Israeli academic institutions, promoting divestment from Israel by international academic institutions and supporting Palestinian academic institutions directly.
The union is calling on Australian universities to conduct a nationwide audit of their connections to the Israeli military and its suppliers, and is pushing for an immediate end to any such ties. 
Another motion opposed recent attempts to curtail protest rights at universities. University administrations have increasingly attempted to restrict Palestine solidarity activism across Australia, including through disciplinary actions against students and staff. The NTEU’s motions are a significant push back against this development, asserting that the right to protest and debate remains central to university life.
National Council also formally recognised and condemned the scholasticide. The motion refers to the Israeli military’s demolition of every university in Gaza, the killing of hundreds of students and academics, and the destruction of libraries, museums and archives.
“These motions are a step forward in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign”, said Robin Laycock, a national councillor and member of Socialist Alternative. “At a time when university managements are trying to silence protest and debate about Palestine, union members have stood up for the fundamental right to organise on campus.”
The motions also reflect an important shift in sentiment. Ten years ago, in the wake of an Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza, the union’s national council narrowly voted down a BDS motion.
The motions distinguish between opposing Israeli state policies and antisemitism, the union reiterating its stance against all forms of discrimination including antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.
The union also calls on universities to provide scholarships to Palestinian students and scholars and to support the rebuilding of Gaza’s destroyed higher education system.
Alexis Vassiley is a national councillor of the NTEU.

Alexis Vassiley

University union endorses academic boycott of Israel, defends right to protest

Simone McDonnell

Israel’s war on Lebanon: ‘a mortal threat to the whole region’

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” This clarion call for an end to the oppression of the Palestinians echoes around the streets of our cities every weekend. Tens of thousands raise their voices in hope for a state in historic Palestine where people of all religions, or no religion, live together in peace with equal rights.
Yet universities around Australia that claim to stand for freedom of speech and equal rights for all are, one after another, banning this slogan on campuses. They claim it makes Jewish students feel threatened. Likewise, a motion in the federal Senate that condemned the slogan and asserted that those who use it “seek to intimidate Jewish Australians via acts of antisemitism” was carried 56 votes to 12. And Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is on the record agreeing with former Defence Department secretary Dennis Richardson that the slogan is “very violent” and with former Liberal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg that it has “no place on our streets”. 
So why do backers of Israel denounce a slogan calling for freedom and equal rights? And why do they not rail against openly genocidal remarks made by Israeli government ministers, or against the unspeakable atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza? To unravel this conundrum, it’s not enough just to note their hypocrisy. We have to go back to the fundamentals.
The ideology of Zionism rejects the possibility of Jews and non-Jews living together peacefully. This misanthropic ideology is the linchpin of support for a Jewish state. Sanctified by the UN, brute force and terrorism drove out 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 to make way for Israel. Gaza is but the latest example of the continuing horrendous genocidal war on the Palestinians.
Defence of Israel relies on a twisted logic. Zionists conflate Judaism with the ideology of Zionism, in spite of the existence of many anti-Zionist Jews. Accordingly, Zionists insist that any opposition to Israel is an attack not on a marauding state, but on the Jewish people as a whole. They can interpret hostility to the ethno-state of Israel only as opposition to the very existence of Jews on that land.
But the visceral response to the slogan by the political class can’t be explained just by that ideology. It is made an imperative by the material reality of imperialism. 
Israel is America’s bulldog to protect its imperialist interests in this oil-rich, strategic region. So to be accepted in respectable circles in Australia, let alone as prime minister of this loyal ally of the US, virtually uncritical support for Israel is a non-negotiable condition. This means defence of the morally indefensible and a commitment to silencing any voice raised against Israel’s atrocities. Hence the outlawing and condemnation of this slogan and increasing repression of Palestinians and their supporters.
This explains why Albanese has not raised a word against the truly genocidal threat included in the 1977 platform of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”, it declares. Daniella Weiss, one of the Israeli settlers committed to realising that goal, spoke to the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers">New Yorker</a> last November, outlining the settlers’ rejection of any rights for Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. Their vision invokes ethnic cleansing and genocide of Arabs to enable the Jewish ethno-state to stretch from the Euphrates River to the Nile in the south-west. This, encompassing much more than historic Palestine, they claim as the “homeland of the Jews”.
Support for these reactionary ideas has meant, from the earliest days of Israel’s existence, a repugnant indifference to the oppression of the Palestinians. Referred to as “animals” and other racist terms that dehumanise them, Palestinians are regarded as nothing but an obstacle to Israel’s right to the land of much of the Middle East.
The movement to support the Palestinians and defend them from genocide generates a vision of human solidarity that is common to all movements for the rights of oppressed peoples. It aspires to freedom—something supporters of the barbarity of capitalism, its imperialist wars and consequently of Israel, cannot countenance.
It has been clear from 1948 that the existence of the highly militarised, expansionist and aggressive state of Israel backed by the Western powers is incompatible with anything approaching human freedom in the Middle East. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”, when raised by pro-Palestinian activists, flows from and strengthens a belief in the possibility of liberation even up against such an intimidating adversary. That’s why it must be vigorously defended.

Sandra Bloodworth

Why is the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ so controversial?

The term “social cohesion” has had a workout in Australia over the past year. Always a handy staple for those wanting to cast a blanket of conformity over society, the term has particularly been used to attack those protesting Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and its war on Lebanon. 
In late July, the Albanese government appointed Labor MP Peter Khalil as the country’s first special envoy for social cohesion. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that friction in the community over Israel’s war on Gaza was causing a “great deal of concern about disharmony” across Australia.
The use of social cohesion as a weapon to reproach pro-Palestine demonstrations came to something of a climax as Israel invaded Lebanon in late September and with the approach of the first anniversary of its murderous onslaught on Gaza.
On 30 September, Sky News reported breathlessly the claims of shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan that “social cohesion is failing in our country” and demanded punitive action when Hezbollah flags and portraits of assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah appeared at the weekly Palestine rallies in Melbourne and Sydney.
A week later, NSW Premier Chris Minns tried to ban pro-Palestine protests, to the acclamation of Peter Dutton. Echoing these sentiments, Albanese proclaimed 7 October was “not a time for demonstrations to occur ... It’s a time to try to make sure that social cohesion in Australia is valued”.
What is the “social cohesion” that Australia’s political leaders seek to protect against protest? 
Like every attempt to paper over the massive divisions built into Australian capitalism, it begins from the assumption that unity is something both possible and desirable. Further, if social cohesion is natural, then unity can have been disrupted only by troublemakers—the infamous “outside agitator” thesis beloved by every boss who ever faced a strike and every government that inspired rebellion. 
So social cohesion is based on a demand for compliance and demonisation of those who challenge it. In the Cold War 1950s, it was “reds under the bed”; now it’s Arabs and Muslims who are the supposed danger. 
Peter Dutton spelt it out on 19 April: “Central to Australia’s social cohesion is a social contract. Whatever our background, our faith, or our cultural traditions, we do not allow the problems, the tensions, or the animosity of other parts of the world to manifest in our communities or on our streets ... there are people in our country today who do not subscribe to our democratic values”.
That demand for compliance is backed by a political and legal infrastructure designed to undermine and criminalise protests of all kinds, including strikes. Sometimes it’s been the crushing weight of <a>a media barrage of the dominant ideas</a>, sometimes it’s been threats from university administrations against even using words like “from the river to the sea” or “genocide”, and sometimes it’s a battery of laws against protesting or striking. 
It is “cohesion” only in the sense of those who run society demanding compliance with their rules. As Bernard Keane pointed out in Crikey on 15 August: “Labor tries to make a virtue of supporting ‘social cohesion’, even while demonising pro-Palestinian protesters, cutting immigration, refusing entry to Gazans, and denouncing political organisation by Muslim voters”. All the concern and blame are placed on supporters of Palestine. Where are the headlines calling for supporters of Israel to stop backing genocide because such ideas undermine social cohesion? 
The ALP is the manager of an imposed consensus—from maintaining Australia’s imperialist alliances to centring profitability in the economy—about which it actively works to discourage debate, let alone protest. 
There’s nothing naturally cohering in a class-divided society. At the core of capitalism are irreconcilable competing class interests. Social cohesion is a myth—at our expense. Often the so-called cohesion can be maintained only by exclusion, such as that of Indigenous people, or the ban on marriage equality before 2017. Refugees remain condemned to be permanent outsiders. The attack on the CFMEU coheres the union movement even further around tame cat passivity in the face of the cost-of-living crisis. 
In other words, calls for social cohesion always mean just going along with the status quo. On the other hand, the high points of struggle, such as the successful working-class fight against conscription in World War I or the smashing of the anti-union penal powers in 1969, have involved breaking with the notion of social cohesion and exposing the real divisions in society through mass struggle.
So social cohesion is deserving only of the utmost hostility. Socialists don’t want social cohesion; we want to make the class war visible. As the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared in 1857: 
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Swinburne University cracks down on Muslim students’ rights

Wollongong Palestine solidarity activists picket company supplying Israel

Universities are repressing Palestine solidarity activism

Palestine solidarity club suspended at UNSW

When a Zionist riot is reported as an antisemitic pogrom

Israel bans UNRWA while laying siege to Gaza

University union endorses academic boycott of Israel, defends right to protest

Israel’s war on Lebanon: ‘a mortal threat to the whole region’

Why is the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ so controversial?

‘Social cohesion’: a weapon to defend the status quo

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