The Melbourne Palestine movement is taking the streets this Sunday, 12pm at the State Library, to protest the federal government’s decision to invite the Israeli president to visit Australia, to demand an end to the Gaza genocide and occupation of the West Bank, and to defend our right to protest.
The Gaza genocide continues. Israel has violated the so-called ceasefire nearly 1,000 times in less than three months. At least 418 Palestinians have been slaughtered. All those people, with hopes and dreams that will never be fulfilled. 
<a href="https://www.un.org/unispal/document/gaza-strip-ipc-reports-19dec25/">According to the United Nations</a>, 1.6 million people in Gaza, including 800,000 children, are suffering acute food insecurity. That is more than three-quarters of the entire population. Gaza is buried under at least 50 million tonnes of rubble, making it impossible for the Palestinians to rebuild their lives. Meanwhile, Israel continues to tighten its suffocating blockade, banning essential construction materials, energy resources and humanitarian aid. 
The Gaza genocide has also given cover for Israel to rapidly advance its colonisation of the West Bank. Early last year, the military launched a full-scale assault in the north,<a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/largest-forced-displacement-west-bank-1967-oxfam"> </a><a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/largest-forced-displacement-west-bank-1967-oxfam">displacing 40,000 Palestinians</a>—the largest ethnic cleansing since 1967. Recently, in<a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israeli-military-raids-west-bank-force-entire-communities-lockdown-keeping-children-out-school"> </a><a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israeli-military-raids-west-bank-force-entire-communities-lockdown-keeping-children-out-school">Tulkarm</a>, hundreds of Palestinian families were again expelled from their land as the Israeli military bulldozed scores of homes. 
Amid these atrocities, the Australian political establishment is weaponising the Bondi massacre to crush Palestine solidarity. How dare they. 
Liberal leader Sussan Ley slandered our movement, linking it to the massacre, <a href="https://nswliberal.org.au/melissa-mcintosh/news/remarks-made-at-the-bondi-pavilion">arguing</a>: “First they came for the Opera House, then they came to the Harbour Bridge, now they’ve come for Bondi”. Her lies were echoed by a chorus of politicians, journalists and the business elites. 
These people have been crusading against the Palestine movement for the past two years. People like veteran racist Pauline Hanson, who has repeatedly called for Palestinian refugees to be deported back to Gaza. The ghouls from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry who slammed our rallies for disrupting business as usual. The media outlets, from the Age
to the ABC to the Herald Sun, that lined up to defend Israel’s crimes against humanity. 
They are using the post-Bondi moment to claw back lost ground. Mass opinion has shifted in favour of the Palestinians and against Israel, which put the Australian political establishment on the back foot. Now, they are on a massive offensive. Chris Minns, the New South Wales Labor premier, has banned protests and criminalised pro-Palestine phrases like “globalise the intifada”. Just last week, a woman was arrested for wearing a shirt with the slogan, which refers to supporting the Palestinians rising up against their oppression.
Our movement has rightly put the political establishment on notice for their complicity in genocide. The Labor government has helped arm Israel, supplying the barrel cannons for their F-35 fighter jets. A death-machine designed to fire over 3,000 bullets per minute. How dare they accuse us of stoking violence when they are up to their necks in this genocide. 
Anthony Albanese has personally invited Israeli President Issac Herzog to address the federal parliament. This man has blood on his hands for the Gaza Holocaust, justifying the slaughter of Palestinian civilians, arguing: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible” (for the 7 October 2023 attack). 
In a just world, Herzog, along with the entire political establishment here and around the world, would be tried for war crimes. But in this capitalist hellscape where profit and power rules, human life is expendable. 
Supporters of Palestine must redouble our efforts to build the solidarity movement and stand up to the ruling class offensive. The road to a free Palestine is a long one, but the past two years have given us a glimpse of hope—from the global Freedom Flotilla to the general strike in Italy.
We have faced down attacks on our movement because we know that we stand on the right side of history. This moment is another test; we must rise to the occasion.

Bella Beiraghi

Why you should march for Palestine this Sunday

Since the Bondi massacre, the right-wing press has been saturated with vile slanders against the Palestine solidarity movement and the left. Racist pig Pauline Hanson led the charge, but she’s been followed by a slew of political figures and editorialists blaming the Palestine solidarity movement for the murders. Even former PM John Howard is part of the chorus. Howard savaged the Australian working class and led the country into the criminal invasion of Iraq, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. That the corporate media still take this war criminal seriously says it all.
Some are using language that wouldn’t have been out of place in Hitler’s Germany. In one piece for the Australian, John Carrol contrasted the clash of civilisations he claims is at the root of the Bondi shooting with “monocultural Japan, which has preserved its ethnic and cultural purity, helping make its cities today, clean, orderly and smoothly running”. 
Left-wing people must stand up to the vitriol and the disgraceful, cynical slanders. The people and institutions going after us have spent decades stoking racism in Australian society, torturing refugees—or justifying it—and punching down and attacking the vulnerable. For the last two years, they have backed the genocide in Palestine. Those trying to make political capital from the Bondi attack were baying for blood in Gaza as bombs rained down and as people starved. 
Their goal is to shift public opinion hard against the Palestine movement. They want to strike a blow against the political left and the Labor Party—which has backed the genocide, but apparently hasn’t been enthusiastic enough in its support for Israel or open enough in its racism. They want to make up the political ground that they lost over the last two years.
From 7 October 2023, the political right and supporters of Israeli apartheid lost a series of debates on the Palestine question. The depravity of Israel’s genocide has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets and has shifted broader public opinion against both Israel and the US. Two years into Israel’s offensive, <a href="https://apan.org.au/media_release/poll-finds-australians-back-sanctions/#:~:text=New%20poll%20finds%20widespread%20opposition,without%20being%20attacked%20or%20penalised.">polling showed that</a> 57 percent of Australians supported sanctions on Israel and 58 percent said a genocide was taking place. 
In August last year, despite two years of the right smearing all those who stand with Palestine as antisemites, demonstrations flowered in even the smallest country towns as more than 300,000 took to the streets in the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/australia-rises-for-palestine">largest Palestine solidarity mobilisation in Australia’s history</a>. NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns, arguably Australia’s most pro-Israel premier, was defeated twice in the courts by Sydney’s Palestine Action Group and definitively in the streets when 300,000 defiantly marched across the Harbour Bridge. 
Now, he’s joining the right’s crusade to turn the tide. Minns has introduced a law allowing the state government to temporarily ban demonstrations. Antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal and her deputy Greg Craven have taken specific aim at students, claiming that university-based protests contributed to a climate of hatred which led to the massacre. This is the same antisemitism envoy who failed to issue any statement when a Nazi organisation took centre stage at mass racist protests last year.
Segal has used this moment to again insist that the government adopt a raft of anti-democratic measures that would lead to a severe crackdown on freedom of speech in universities, including proposing that she be given the right to block funding to universities and arts organisations. 
We cannot let them turn the political tide. Gaza is strewn with broken concrete and smashed homes, under siege from every direction by the Israeli military. Underneath the rubble are an estimated 9,000 bodies. Tents perch on stretches of land that form valleys surrounded on all sides by shelled buildings. The people are starving; even the animals are going hungry. One mother told news outlet Electronic Intifada: “I stay awake all night guarding my children from the dogs”. 
Israel is refusing to let in anywhere near adequate aid, and has revoked the operating licences of 37 aid groups delivering some relief, including Doctors Without Borders and the Norwegian Refugee Council. But Gaza is not chaos. The Israeli government is a skilled social architect, using the most brutal methods to physically and psychologically torture the entire population. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/17/israeli-military-calorie-limit-gaza#:~:text=13%20years%20old-,Israel%20used%20%27calorie%20count%27%20to%20limit%20Gaza%20food%20during%20blockade,needed%20to%20sustain%20the%20population.">From the beginning of the siege in 2007</a>, for example, the military limited the number of calories allowed into the territory to a bare minimum as part of a campaign of economic warfare. 
In November, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir <a href="https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-ministers-debate-shooting-gaza-children-near-yellow-line#:~:text=Israeli%20ministers%2C%20including%20Ben-Gvir,Mute">reportedly urged troops</a> to shoot “children and donkeys” who stray near the newly established “yellow line”, which has cut Gaza in two and allows Israel to occupy 60 percent of the land. This is what the so-called ceasefire looks like.
As Palestinians suffer through a freezing winter, we must continue to fight for Palestinian liberation. This means standing up to an emboldened and rabid political right, and to any and all attacks on the right to demonstrate for justice in Gaza.

Jasmine Duff

Supporters of Palestine must stand up to the post-Bondi right-wing offensive

Suppose we accept the fiction that none of us expected Israel to launch a full-scale <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds">genocide</a>
in Gaza—a premeditated campaign to erase the Strip and exterminate a significant portion of its inhabitants. Let us pretend that nearly 80 years of relentless massacres were not a prelude to this moment, and that Israel had never before sought the physical destruction of the Palestinian people as outlined by the 1948 Genocide <a href="https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf">Convention</a>.
If we go so far as to accept the sterile, ahistoric claim that the <a href="https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/">Nakba</a> of 1948 was “merely” ethnic cleansing rather than genocide—ignoring the mass graves and the forced erasure of a civilisation—we are still left with a terrifying reality. Having witnessed the unmasked extermination that began on 7 October 2023, who can dare to argue that its perpetrators lack the intent to repeat it?
The question itself is an act of charity, as it assumes the genocide has actually stopped. In reality, the carnage has merely shifted tactics. Since the implementation of the fragile <a href="https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-hamas-gaza-ceasefire-agreement-10-10-25">ceasefire</a>
on 10 October, Israel has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/20/israeli-troops-kill-palestinians-sheltering-in-gaza-school-hospital-chiefs">killed</a>
over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. Others have perished in the frozen mud of their tents. They include infants like 8-month-old Fahar Abu Jazar, who, like others, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/11/world/palestinian-baby-dies-hypothermia-intl-latam">froze</a>
to death. These are not mere tragedies; they are the inevitable results of a calculated Israeli policy of destruction targeting the most vulnerable.
During this two-year campaign of extermination, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were <a href="https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-20000-children-killed-23-months-war-more-one-child-killed-every-hour">murdered</a>, accounting for a staggering 30 percent of the total victims. This blood-soaked tally ignores the thousands of souls entrapped beneath the concrete wasteland of Gaza, and those currently being consumed by the silent killers of famine and engineered epidemics.
The horrifying statistics aside, we bear witness to the final agonies of a people. We have watched their extermination in real-time, broadcast to every handheld screen on earth. No one can claim ignorance; no one can claim innocence. Even now, we watch as 1.3 million Palestinians <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/spread-famine-gaza-strip-averted-palestinians-face-starvation-128549483#:~:text=Aid%20groups%20say%20nearly%201.3,shelters%20and%20relying%20on%20assistance.">endure</a>
a precarious existence in tents ravaged by winter floods. We share the screams of mothers, the hollowed-out faces of broken fathers, and the haunted stares of children, and yet, the world’s political and moral institutions remain paralysed.
If Israel resumes the full, unrestrained intensity of this genocide, will we stop it? I fear the answer is no, because the world refuses to dismantle the circumstances that permitted this slaughter in the first place. Israeli officials never bothered to hide their intent. The systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians was a primary export of Israeli media, even as Western corporate outlets worked tirelessly to sanitise this criminal discourse.
The record of intent is undeniable. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly <a href="https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-s-ben-gvir-renews-call-to-occupy-gaza-encourage-palestinian-migration/3620645">championed</a>
the “encouragement of migration” and <a href="https://x.com/MarquardtA/status/1714349157144564112?lang=en">demanded</a>
that “not an ounce of humanitarian aid” reach Gaza. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich <a href="https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/57/NGO/107">argued</a> that the starvation of two million people could be “just and moral” in the pursuit of military aims. From the halls of the Knesset to the pop charts, the <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240314-shager-israeli-song-promises-to-erase-gaza-and-shoot-rockets-like-rain/">refrain</a>
was the same: “erase Gaza”, “leave no one there”. When military leaders refer to an entire population as “human animals”, they are not using metaphors; they are issuing a license for extermination.
This was preceded by the hermetic <a href="https://euromedmonitor.org/en/gaza">siege</a>—a decades-long experiment in human misery that began in 2006. Despite every Palestinian plea for the world to break this death grip, the blockade was allowed to persist. This was followed by successive wars targeting a besieged, impoverished population under the banner of “security”, always shielded by the Western mantra of Israel’s “right to defend itself”.
In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world’s “largest open-air <a href="https://www.warchild.net/stories-of-children/rami/">prison</a>”. Whether they utilised armed resistance, threw rocks at tanks, or marched unarmed toward snipers, they were branded “terrorists” and “militants” whose very existence was framed as a threat to their occupier.
Years before the first bomb of this genocide fell, the United Nations <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2015/09/507762">declared</a> Gaza “uninhabitable”. Its water was a toxin, its land a graveyard, and its people were dying of curable diseases. Yet, aside from the typical ritual of humanitarian reports, the international community did nothing to offer a political horizon, a just peace.
This criminal neglect provided the vacuum for the events of 7 October, allowing Israel to weaponise its victimhood to execute a genocide of sadistic proportions. Former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant explicitly <a href="https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-paints-palestinians-as-animals-to-legitimize-war-crimes-israeli-scholar/3030278">stripped</a>
Palestinians of their humanity, launching a collective slaughter directed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The stage is being set for the next phase of extermination. The siege is now absolute, the violence more concentrated, and the dehumanisation of Palestinians more widespread than ever. As the international media drifts toward other distractions, Israel’s image is being rehabilitated as if the genocide never happened.
Tragically, the conditions that fuelled the first wave of genocide are being meticulously reconstructed. Indeed, another Israeli genocide is not a distant threat; it is an encroaching reality that will be finalised unless it is stopped.
The 1948 <a href="https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf">Convention</a>
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was a legal <a href="https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1263&amp;context=gsp">vow</a>
to “liberate mankind from such an odious scourge”. If those words possess a shred of integrity, the world must act now to abort the next phase of extermination. This requires absolute accountability and a political process that finally severs the grip of Israeli colonialism and violence. The clock is ticking, and our collective voice—or our silence—will make the difference.
First published at <a href="https://ramzybaroud.net">RamzyBaroud.net</a>.

Ramzy Baroud

How the world is preparing the ground for the next Palestinian genocide

One night in June 2024, balaclava-clad pro-Israel thugs descended on the Deakin University Gaza solidarity encampment. The next night, a Turkish woman in her 40s turned up at the camp. She mostly sat back from the flurry of activity, but by 3am we realised she wasn’t leaving. She stayed that night, and many more after, as our self-appointed sentry, leaving early each morning to take her kids to school and go to work. 
She later explained that she had been one of the thousands of protesters who camped in Istanbul’s Gezi Park to defend it from demolition in 2013. When Turkish riot police carried out vicious pre-dawn attacks, the protests transformed into a mass revolt calling for the downfall of the president. She sat watching over us all these years later because, to her, we were the next generation, taking up a fight that was in some way the continuation of her fight.
The mass struggles which draw people out of their routines and into the streets shape official politics and the minds of millions. The Gezi Park protests, for example, imbued a sense of defiance and opposition to police in Türkiye. Black Lives Matter spread anti-police consciousness and a desire to fight racism in millions across the world. The environmental movement, especially Extinction Rebellion and the School Strikes for Climate, pointed the finger at the corporations and the rich that are wilfully hurtling us towards disaster. 
These movements showed again and again that, when confronted with brutality and injustice, throwing ourselves into protest is the natural and logical thing to do. To win most of our demands, we will have to go further than this—to mass working-class action—but protest continues to be how the powerless initially demand to be heard. 
The Palestine movement has hit the world in a different way. It has become the core issue animating a bitter anger at the system among a new layer of leftward moving young people and millennials. And, significantly, those who march have felt themselves part of an international struggle, not just a local question. The sheer depravity of Israel’s war has shaken people from all walks of life, the deliberate bombings of hospitals and schools destroying any remaining illusions in the Western powers’ respect for human rights or the rules of war. 
From the beginning of the genocide in 2023 to the aftermath of the latest ceasefire, tens of thousands of people have repeatedly hit the streets in major cities across Australia. The movement overall has involved many hundreds of thousands of people. The movement has had ebbs and flows. When the extremity of the starvation in Gaza began making headlines in May 2025, the weekly demonstrations surged. By August, public anger was at its peak. Sydney-based Palestine Action Group battled the Minns Labor government over the right to march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The activists won, and 300,000 people defiantly marched in pouring rain. This was followed by a nationwide day of protest that mobilised hundreds of thousands across the country, including large numbers in small towns. This defeat of Minns, a more active supporter of Israel than other premiers, was an important political win for the movement. So was the constitutional challenge against his attempted anti-protest laws in October 2025. 
The extremity of the war has laid bare the fact that our world is not governed by rules and that even the most extreme human suffering is tolerated in the name of projecting Western power. Organisations like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, which are meant to stand above nation-states and protect human rights, have proven impotent in the face of atrocities committed by Israel and backed by Western imperialism. 
Mass sentiment shifted significantly over the course of Israel’s war and genocide. In November 2023, 49 percent of Australians said that they thought the government <a href="https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/9398-roy-morgan-islamic-society-of-south-australia-survey-november-2023">shouldn’t</a> take a side in the war. By <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/over-half-of-australians-support-sanctions-on-israel-and-its-leaders-for-ongoing-attacks-on-gaza-poll-shows">October</a> 2025, 57 percent of Australians supported sanctions on Israel and 58 percent <a href="https://apan.org.au/media_release/poll-finds-australians-back-sanctions/">said</a> a genocide was taking place. 
Support for the United States has likewise tanked. In 2020, a Lowy Institute <a href="https://poll.lowyinstitute.org/files/lowyinsitutepoll-2020.pdf">poll</a> found that 51 percent of Australians trusted the US to act responsibly in the world. In 2025, the result has dropped to just 36 percent, with more than 62 percent saying they did not trust the US to act responsibly. This is the lowest level in the history of the Lowy poll. 
The Palestine movement has created a new culture of activism. Groups of friends in capital cities don’t just go clubbing or to gigs any more—for two years they have planned their lives around protesting for a group of people on the other side of the world. Parents of young kids contended with how to explain what they were protesting about to their children, and workers marched with workmates and talked Palestine over lunch. 
All this despite the near consensus on the part of official politics for backing Israel—with the honourable exception of the Greens, who took a commendable stand against the genocide that likely impacted large numbers among their heavily millennial voter base. 
In Melbourne, campaign groups cropped up everywhere early on. At first, they were mostly framed around campaigning to get local councils to pass motions condemning the genocide, pledging to divest or to raise the Palestinian flag. These didn’t just crop up in the leftie ghettos or heavily Arab areas, but across the city. After a few months, many of these groups transitioned to other tactics. Some organised protests outside of local Labor MP offices or focused their efforts on picketing factories that are part of the global F-35 supply chain. 
Workers in all sorts of industries formed union groups to campaign for Palestine. ASU for Palestine, which has organised two walkouts by community and legal sector workers, stands out. Most of these council and workplace groups wound down by 2025, but they left an important imprint and meant the movement itself was deeper than just central demonstrations.
In April 2024, when the demonstrations waned somewhat, student encampments blossomed across the country. Inspired by students at Columbia University in New York, University of Sydney students set up tents and camped out through winter to demand divestment. Many other campuses followed, with the camps becoming an important focal point for activism and education. Activists exposed the links that universities have to Israel, their role in facilitating weapons research and the political nature of the institutions. The camps connected with each other, discussing and updating a shared <a href="https://overland.org.au/2024/05/statement-from-11-palestine-solidarity-encampments/">statement</a> in regular meetings. Socialists played a key role in establishing them in most cases, and in connecting them to each other. University managements have used heavy-handed repression against students, including expulsions at Melbourne University and the Australian National University and suspensions at Deakin. Many students have now been dragged through disciplinary processes for their activism, and notably in most cases they have won. 
To a far greater degree than during the climate movement or Black Lives Matter protests, those who wish to stand with Palestine must take risks to do so. The fight around the political question has opened many more battles over the question of free speech and expression. In 2024, two bakery workers were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/17/melbourne-black-star-pastry-employees-sacked-wearing-keffiyeh-work-discrimination-case?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other">sacked</a> for wearing keffiyehs at work. Academics, teachers and public sector workers have been faced disciplinary processes or had their funding cut. Many have had to fight for the right to wear a keffiyeh or badge at work. This means that even though support for Palestine is widespread, it’s also a real fight in people’s everyday lives and, as a result, more politicising than issues that are less controversial among liberals. 
Cultural institutions have also been forced to take sides and reveal their political affiliations, discrediting their liberal reputations in the process. Melbourne Symphony Orchestra terminated the contract of Jayson Gilham after he dedicated a recital to assassinated Gazan journalists. When three actors in a Sydney Theatre Company production of the Seagull wore keffiyehs on stage during a curtain call, donors pulled funding and three board members resigned. Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre refused to host a performance by feminist activist Clementine Ford, citing “safety” fears for Jewish patrons because of Ford’s strong stance against Israel’s genocide. 
And once again, the highly partisan nature of the Australian media has been exposed. There’s been a systematic burial of Palestinian voices, while Israeli and pro-Israel figures are given a front seat. Journalists have <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/07/04/four-israel-gaza-letter-signatories-departed-nine/">resigned</a> from the ABC, Nine, the Age and other outlets over the coverage of Gaza. In 2024, ABC journalists <a href="https://archive.is/K6B0c">revealed</a> that management had tried to ban them from using words including “genocide” and “occupation” when covering Palestine. 
Australian politicians from both sides have backed the genocide. The Labor government has only strengthened its commitment to the F-35 supply chain for fighter planes to Israel. 
Labor’s political support for the genocide is, if not more so, as important as its arming of Israel. Albanese’s statements have always led with assertion of solidarity with Israel, and he’s done his best to denigrate, demonise and belittle those who protest against Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation. He has appointed an antisemitism envoy to assist in his campaign to portray pro-Palestine feeling as antisemitic bigotry. He travelled to the US to pose with US President Donald Trump, and forced Senator Fatima Payman out of the party for daring to stand firm in her support for a Palestinian state. 
Labor state governments have proved some of the most determined opponents of the Palestine movement. The Victorian and NSW governments in particular have helped the political right charge supporters of Palestine with antisemitism. The Minns government deliberately withheld information that showed organised crime was responsible for the attacks. It did so to use them as a pretext for serious anti-protest measures, knowing that the protesters had nothing to do with the crimes. Now, the Minns and Allan governments are exploiting the tragic Bondi shooting to rush through laws allowing the state governments to ban protests for defined periods. The defence of civil liberties will continue to be a crucial fight for those who stand with Palestine. 
It is important to reckon with the fact that this significant, large and ongoing movement did not stop the genocide. 
When atrocities happen, people find they have no option but to protest. And while the genocide wasn’t stopped, people feel vindicated in their opposition and have been drawn into an international opposition to the brutality of our rulers. Only once people have been convinced to plant their feet on the right side of history, and to act in accordance, can discussions about strategy begin to take on real meaning beyond the ranks of handfuls of people. In this sense, the movement is an important beginning. And the response to government intransigence has largely been not demoralisation but demands to escalate. The mass strike against the genocide by Italian workers in solidarity with the Sumud flotilla showed a small glimpse of the type of action that is and was needed across the world to defeat Israel. Protests and pickets are essential acts of mass defiance, but they do not have anywhere near the power of workers striking at the point of production. 
To defeat Israel’s genocide, we would have needed to see sustained mass strikes in Western bloc nations like Australia and the United States, and revolutionary working-class uprisings involving strikes across the Arab world. This is not an impossible dream. 
Australian workers carried out a general strike in 1917, partly motivated by opposition to the First World War. In 1967, Australian Seamen’s Union members refused to crew the ship Boonaroo, which was meant to deliver military cargo to support the Western war effort in Vietnam, and Melbourne dock workers refused to load ships in solidarity with the struggle against South African apartheid. During the Arab revolutions of 2011, Palestinian liberation both inspired the anti-dictator struggles and was a thread running through them. In 2019, when Algerians rose against their own dictator, the Palestinian flag was draped on buildings and carried in crowds. 
In the words of Joseph Heller in Catch-22, “they have the right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing”. We might not have stopped them this time, but there will be more battles. The challenge for all those on the side of the Palestinians is to keep up the fight and build a movement with the power and the politics to defeat the ruling classes who carried out or backed this genocide, once and for all.

The impact of the Palestine solidarity movement

Two political prisoners in the United Kingdom, Amu Gib and Kamran Ahmed—activists with the protest group Palestine Action—have been hospitalised after weeks on hunger strike. According to Prisoners for Palestine, a prisoner collective, at least eight hunger strikers have now been hospitalised since the protest began in early November.
All eight are being held on remand (not in the same prison) for alleged protests at Elbit Systems’ Filton research hub in August 2024 or at the Brize Norton airbase in Oxfordshire in June this year, during which military aircraft were allegedly sprayed with paint. The airbase protest led to Palestine Action being designated as a terrorist group.
The prisoners report that guards have confiscated their keffiyehs, moved them around arbitrarily and given them non-association orders so that they can’t contact each other. Teuta Hoxha, 29, who has been awaiting trial for thirteen months, says that a scarf she had knitted in red, white, green and black was taken from her, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/dec/20/palestine-action-activist-vows-continue-hunger-strike-teuta-hoxha">according to a report in the Guardian</a>.
At the time of writing, Gib and Qesser Zuhrah have been on strike for 50 days, making this the longest hunger strike in British prisons since the 1981 actions by Irish prisoners. On 1 March that year, Bobby Sands, a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, initiated the strike at Maze prison outside Belfast in Northern Ireland. Twenty-two others joined; ten died after an average of 62 days. 
“[I have] tried every means to avoid what has become the unavoidable: it has been forced upon me and my comrades by four-and-a-half years of stark inhumanity”, Sands wrote in his diary. It’s the same inhumanity that we’ve seen over the last two years that has pushed the Palestine Action prisoners to act.
Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister at the time, refused to concede that Sands and his comrades were political prisoners. She allowed them to starve to death. 
Today, the justice secretary, David Lammy, refuses to meet with representatives of the hunger strikers. Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, when pushed by left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn, had nothing to say beyond some vague mumbling about rules and regulations. Will he follow in Thatcher’s footsteps and allow the prisoners to die?
Another echo of 1981 is the role of mass resistance. When Sands began his strike, 3,500 people marched through West Belfast. More than 100,000 people attended his funeral. 
Two of the Palestine Action hunger strikers were transferred to hospitals only after protests outside the prison demanded that ambulances be let in. Several thousand people have been arrested for showing support for Palestine Action in sit-ins in London’s Parliament Square and Trafalgar Square. 
At its peak, the Palestine solidarity movement brought 500,000 people into the streets of London to protest against the genocide and the UK government’s complicity. The prisoners’ resilience is heroic. If they’re to win freedom, they’ll need the full support of the movement. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/19/hunger-strike-british-prison-arms-to-israel">As Amu Gib wrote in the Guardian</a>: 
“We have the power, agency, responsibility, creativity, resourcefulness and love it takes to be fuelled and moved to action not just once, but every minute of every day ... It doesn’t ever feel like what we’re doing is enough, but in another way it feels like the best thing in the world.”

Vivian Ballenger

Hunger-striking Palestine solidarity activists hospitalised

The news of the massacre at Bondi piled horror on horror. As the narrative developed, every awful fear was confirmed: yes, there were deaths. Yes, there was a Jewish festival nearby. Yes, in fact, the festival was the target: the attack was motivated by antisemitism. Yes, the death toll would continue to climb: and yes, at least one child was killed. At that point, it seemed hard to imagine how things could get worse. But then Tony Abbott, Jillian Segal, Sussan Ley and Benjamin Netanyahu opened their mouths.
Right-wingers wasted no time in using this massacre for their political ends, facts be damned. There was no need to understand the worldview or motivation of the attackers—the long-term advocates of anti-Muslim, pro-genocide politics began grandstanding with no concern for empirical reality or political logic. 
Australia’s anti-immigrant right wing flooded the internet with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab propaganda of the vilest kind. Defenders of Israel’s genocide immediately blamed the massacre on the pro-Palestine movement. Many right-wingers did both, like Abbott, who blamed the massacre on “terrible marches ... across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and elsewhere” and declared that “we just have to be much more determined not to import hatred from overseas”.
Abbott knows something about importing hatred from overseas. He and his hard-right faction in the Liberal Party have spent a decade trying to radicalise anti-migrant sentiment, inspired by the models on offer from European neo-fascists and the MAGA movement in the US. It is unsurprising that he and his co-thinkers would imply, or declare, that immigration is to blame. 
Equally unsurprising, and equally unacceptable, is the rapid reemergence of figures like Australia’s discredited “antisemitism envoy”, Jillian Segal, seeking to use this massacre to peddle their anti-Palestinian political agenda. The facts: in the hours and days after the massacre, little was known about the attackers’ worldview except a potential years-long interest in ISIS. That interest long predates the emergence of the large-scale global Gaza solidarity movement—Australia’s spies were investigating the younger attacker in 2019.
ISIS and their international supporters oppose the Palestinian national struggle, have perpetrated abominable crimes against Palestinian refugees in the areas they control, and have an implacable hostility to the worldview and methods of the international solidarity movement. Although they may opportunistically refer to Palestine at times in their propaganda, they do so as part of a fundamentally counterposed project that seeks to expose the solidarity movement as a dead end that must be replaced with militarised sectarianism. They denounce the cause of Palestinian liberation as an “idol” and view even the most religious advocates of Palestinian national self-determination as apostates. So it is rather hard to see how, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims, the Australian government’s symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state has led to the massacre of Jews in Sydney. Likewise, one struggles to understand the relevance of Segal’s Trumpian proposals to tie Australian university funding to political discipline.
Even more absurd are the widespread attempts to blame the Palestine solidarity movement in general, and the epic Sydney Harbour Bridge march in particular. Dave Rich, a purported expert in “left-wing antisemitism”, conceded in the Guardian that “we are yet to discover the detailed motivations of the Bondi attackers”. But this didn’t stop him from directly blaming the Palestine solidarity movement for the massacre: “[T]his movement has generated and sustained a political culture in which violence is both conceivable and enacted”. 
In fact, the political culture of the Palestine solidarity movement is the direct opposite of the sectarian religious violence of the Bondi attack. The Palestine movement transcends religious boundaries and national borders. It is not based on violence, but collective protest. The mass demonstrations in Sydney, the general strikes in Italy, the multinational aid flotilla to Gaza, and the countless peaceful sit-ins and occupations by enormously courageous anti-Zionist Jews in the United States are just a few examples of actions that could only take place on the basis of anti-racist solidarity.
The Palestine solidarity movement is motivated by opposition to racist violence. Its methods are those of peaceful mass action. One of its central claims is the need to distinguish between the Jewish people and the Zionist political project. The Bondi attackers, just like the state of Israel itself, represent the rejection of these ideas and methods.
In truth, many of the publicists and whitewashers of Israel’s genocide know this, and that is why they are so desperate to slander the movement and jump at any opportunity to repress it bureaucratically. Their attempts to reframe the oppression of Palestinians on sectarian lines—the implication that Jews, by virtue of their religious or ethnic background, are effectively identical with the Israeli government’s oppression of Palestinians, and to oppose that oppression is to hate Jews—reinforce the logic of communal violence. 
That many Jews believe that all Palestine solidarity is an expression of anti-Jewish hatred is a tragedy, and one that opportunistic political forces are seeking to intensify and exploit to break down solidarity between Jews and the Palestine movement. But around the world, more and more Jews like me have reacted with revulsion to this propaganda, and have rejected the idea that being Jewish means supporting genocide against Palestinians, and opposing it is antisemitism. 
The reality is that much of the world today is in a death spiral of racist oppression and violence. Western politics is increasingly dominated by a discourse asserting that any and all forms of violence—from arbitrary imprisonment to assassinations—are justified in the struggle against migrants, minorities, drugs and subversion. Some lost souls are drawn to the apocalyptic mirror image of sectarian murder-suicides.
The conditions have been created for sectarian and racial violence in every direction. Jews and Muslims alike have been the victims of massacres by neo-Nazis, religious sectarians, and state actors. Across the world, the forces of reaction are trying to extinguish the principles of internationalist, anti-capitalist solidarity.
The Palestine movement has been a shining light of solidarity and cooperation in a world increasingly darkened by racist and sectarian brutality. Those who opportunistically use the Bondi massacre to slander that movement should hang their heads in shame, and the activists of that movement must redouble their efforts to assert the importance of internationalism, cooperation and resistance to this unending nightmare.

D. Taylor

Shame on those using the Bondi massacre to slander Palestine solidarity

2025 will go down as the year of the bridge marches. The historic 300,000-strong March for Humanity across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The march across the Commonwealth Bridge in Canberra. On 7 December, it was the Illawarra’s turn, with a procession of several hundred across the scenic Sea Cliff Bridge in Coalcliff. 
Chances are you’ve seen this bridge before. It has featured in dozens of car ads and the film clip for Guy Sebastian’s song “Choir”. In 2011, it was the location for an impressive thousand-strong mobilisation to stop coal seam gas exploration in the region. 
The organising group, Wollongong Friends of Palestine, organises regular rallies in Crown Street Mall and community pickets against Bisalloy Steels, which manufactures armour for Israeli military vehicles. After a series of successful pickets and a great demonstration at the beach in October, we decided it was time to do something bold and take the bridge for Palestine.
Just days before the demonstration, Israel launched a drone strike on a refugee camp at al-Mawasi, burning five Palestinian refugees alive in their tents. The Labor government has accepted the so-called ceasefire as a gift to wipe its hands clean of any complicity in the genocide. US President Donald Trump is orchestrating a process that will allow international armies to occupy Gaza. 
The message at the demonstration was clear: we need to keep the pressure on. Our movement will continue to call for sanctions on Israel and an end to the arms trade. The march across the bridge was one of the largest demonstrations for Palestine in the Illawarra for several years. It brought people from all walks of life: Palestinian uncles and aunts, parents, preschoolers, skaters, nurses, leftists, socialists and community activists. Some keen beans even had the foresight to make it to the top of the escarpment and wave the flag down at us as we crossed the bridge. 
There are several lessons to draw from this experience. One is about existing attitudes to the situation in Gaza. As the genocide enters a new phase, our side will likely lose some momentum. The ceasefire, by design, has taken the heat off Israel. Unlike in August, the media no longer has wall-to-wall coverage of starving Palestinians. It can be easy for people to feel despair at the situation. But many people refuse to let Gaza slip out of their consciousness. These are the people who can keep the movement alive and build greater numbers when the next controversy or atrocity occurs.
Another is the importance of demonstrations to any campaign. The late Marxist art critic John Berger wrote, in “The nature of mass demonstrations”: “Demonstrations are essentially urban in character, and they are usually planned to take place as near as possible to some symbolic centre, either civic or national. Their ‘targets’ are seldom the strategic ones”. As far as we know, the Sea Cliff Bridge has no connection to the state of Israel. Nor did blocking it cause any significant disruption to profit-making and capitalism. But as the slaughter rages on, the cause of the Palestinians should be highlighted everywhere, all the time. Taking this landmark meant we could put the issue front and centre in our region. 
A third is the importance of being prepared to tackle a controversy head-on. Blocking a piece of infrastructure is a divisive thing to do at the best of times. For some residents of the northern Illawarra, who are very rarely inconvenienced, a two-hour traffic delay seems the worst human suffering they can imagine. In any case, this obviously cannot compare to the constant, inescapable suffering of Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza. 
We maintained that we have as much right to our bridge as any popstar, car company or bike race. What helped was reaching out to gain support: the South Coast Labour Council endorsed the event, we gained support from sitting pro-Palestine councillors, and it was promoted by the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association and the NSW Greens. 
A lot of legwork went into spreading the word about the rally far and wide. Local communities were letterboxed, posters were pasted across town, and we even found some friendly lefty baristas who were happy to display a poster in their workplace after a simple ask. We discovered groups we didn’t know existed, like 2508 Parents for Palestine, from the small northern community of Helensburgh. 
It was clear this promotional work would be necessary even before we saw the numbers on the day: the police authorised our protest to march on the road only after weeks of public outreach. As the political right becomes more assertive, the left should be confident that we can stand up to their arguments and can carry working-class people with us. 
Megan Guy is a member of Wollongong Friends of Palestine.

Megan Guy

Hundreds take the Wollongong Sea Cliff Bridge for Palestine

Against the backdrop of the sham “peace plan” for Gaza endorsed by the UN Security Council, student activists from across Australia gathered on 22 November to discuss the future of the movement for Palestine on our campuses. 
Students for Palestine’s first ever conference, held at Brunswick Town Hall, brought together 270 people for a day of panels, workshops and a planning session for the group’s future actions. Delegates from Perth, Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra and Brisbane joined activists from seven Melbourne universities and numerous high schools. 
Between the opening and closing panels—“The Gaza genocide and the mass movement for Palestine” and “Freedom for Palestine: what kind of movement do we need?”—organisers reflected on the positive lessons of the past two years, in which unprecedented numbers took to the streets in support of the Palestinians. Discussion was tempered by a recognition of the ultimate inability of the movement to force the genocide to a halt, and the need now to organise on new terrain as the immediate horror of daily bombardment and starvation is pushed out of the news cycle.
Closing panellist Amal Naser, from Sydney’s Palestine Action Group, posed the challenge to activists: that we must go from being a reactive to a proactive movement, not just waiting for the next massacre, but convincing people to join the fight now. Naser and co-panellist Monica Sestito also highlighted the importance of harnessing workers’ power, drawing on the electrifying experience of strikes that paralysed Italy’s economy in support of Palestine in October.
Educational sessions, on apartheid in the West Bank with Palestinian filmmaker Mohamed Babai, and on the relationship between the US, Australia and Israel, aimed to give activists a deeper understanding of the structures that oppress the Palestinians and ideas to convince others of why the struggle must continue. 
Workshops also critiqued some “common-sense” attitudes frequently met among activists, such as identity politics—the belief that a person’s identity should be the source of their political authority rather than the efficacy of the strategies and tactics they propose. One salient example discussed was the University of Melbourne Gaza Solidarity Encampment, where attempts by Students for Palestine activists to argue for protest action to defend the camp from attacks were shut down on the basis that a prominent Palestinian disagreed. These were essential discussions for activists committed to establishing a robust culture of debate in our movement. 
As to where next for Students for Palestine, the Freedom Flotilla campaigns featured heavily in conference proceedings. Hamish Patterson and Robert Martin, both of whom attempted to break the siege on Gaza in separate missions this year, spoke alongside veteran flotilla organiser Michael Coleman in a Q&amp;A panel. 
With the last Sumud Flotilla acting as a rallying cry for solidarity with the Palestinians, culminating in explosive strikes in Italy and Spain in late September and early October, SfP activists resolved to make the next flotilla mission a focal point for campaigning into the new year. Just as the last fleet managed to capture the world’s attention with its attempt to bring aid to a starving population, another attempt can highlight the enduring brutality that the population of Gaza suffers under a “peace plan” that entrenches the blockade and occupation and keep the issue of Palestine firmly in the spotlight. 
With the suffering in Gaza ongoing, and escalating raids, settlements and killings in the West Bank, it’s a healthy sign for the future that hundreds came together to sketch out plans to continue the fight for justice on campuses next year.

Jack Mansell

Students for Palestine hold first national conference

“BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!”, US President Donald Trump wrote on social media last month after Hamas and the Israeli government agreed to the first phase of the so-called Peace Plan for Gaza. The same day, as Palestinians began the annual olive harvest in the West Bank, armed and masked Israeli settlers descended on the village of Aqraba, south-east of Nablus. They brandished batons and guns, attacking farmers and their supporters to prevent them from accessing the farms. On this day, as on all subsequent ones, these settlers were backed by the Israeli military. 
Two days later, on 11 October, 13-year-old Ayssam Jihad Ma’ala joined his family to help with the harvest. He was teargassed by the Israeli military. For a month, Ayssam lay in a coma, suffering from brain damage. He died on 12 November, joining the ranks of more than 1,000 Palestinians killed in the West Bank and Jerusalem since October 2023. This is what “peace” looks like. 
“Peace” sounds like the cheering and applause that <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israelis-applaud-soldiers-accused-raping-palestinian-prisoner-court-hearing">echoed through the Israeli Supreme Court</a> in Jerusalem on 10 November. The reception was for two soldiers from Force 100, a special unit of the Israeli military, who face charges relating to the gang rape last year of a blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev desert. The soldiers were caught on CCTV carrying out the rape.
According to a report in Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the detainee was so violently assaulted that he sustained a ruptured intestine, a torn rectum, broken ribs and damaged lungs. Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, responsible for overseeing Israeli prisons, described the accused soldiers as “our best heroes”. 
There have been other accounts of abuse at Sde Teiman. Khaled Mahajneh, a lawyer granted access to the site last year, <a href="https://www.972mag.com/sde-teiman-prisoners-lawyer-mahajneh">told +972 Magazine</a>: “The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo”. A spokesperson for human rights organisation B’Tselem describes Sde Teiman as “the tip of the iceberg”. Discussing a B’Tselem report on Israeli prisons, titled “<a href="https://www.btselem.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell_eng.pdf">Welcome to Hell</a>”, Shai Parnes told Al Jazeera’s Simon Speakman Cordall last year:
“We heard similar accounts of sexual abuse, starvation and assault from separate prisoners held in sixteen different locations across Israel. It was depressing. As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.” 
Blessed are the peacemakers. 
Since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, there has never been peace for the Palestinians. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, which <a href="https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&amp;ItemID=5750">released an estimate</a> in May last year, some 134,000 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli state.
In 2020, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs <a href="https://www.ochaopt.org/page/publications1">estimated that 3,624 Palestinians were killed and more than 100,000 injured</a>
over the previous decade. Of the killings, 87 percent were in Gaza, mostly during the 2012 and 2014 Israeli offensives, as well as in the Great March of Return demonstrations that started in 2018. Three out of four Palestinians killed during the decade were civilians, including 805 children. This is the status quo that our political leaders would have us believe is the basis for a peaceful future. 
The violence in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem has a purpose. Israeli politicians such as Naftali Bennet, the former prime minister, have referred to the policy of regular military offensives in Gaza as “mowing the lawn”. Before 2023, this referred to a policy of semi-regular bombings of Gaza as a method of restraining Palestinian national aspirations. The Gaza genocide since 2023 represents something else: an apocalypse of Old Testament proportions, enacted upon a besieged population, designed to settle the question. The goal is to smash the Palestinians in body and soul, once and for all.
“Peace” for the Israeli state and its backers in the West has only ever meant a pause in open warfare—a time in which they could get on with the somewhat quieter project of “everyday” ethnic cleansing and colonisation. In the West Bank, the Israelis have a longstanding project of creating “facts on the ground”—the expansion of Israeli-held territory in order to undermine the prospect of a Palestinian state. This project has been waged nonstop, through “peace” and war. 
“By the end of 2022, there were 483 Israeli occupation sites and military bases in the West Bank, including 151 settlements and 25 inhabited outposts that were considered as neighborhoods following established settlements, in addition to 163 settlement outposts, and 144 classified as other sites (industrial, tourists, service areas and Israeli army bases)”, notes the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics report. By the end of 2022, the number of Israeli “settlers” in the West Bank reached 745,467. 
Under the fog of the most recent war, Israel rapidly increased the number of settlements in the West Bank. Peace Now, an Israeli NGO, <a href="https://peacenow.org.il/en/settlements-watch/settlements-data/population">has documented 121 new outposts</a> since October 2023, representing 40 percent of the 298 outposts established since 1996. <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1165988">Another United Nations report</a>, covering June to September this year, finds that the Israeli state has approved more than 20,000 housing units in the occupied West Bank. The hope among Israeli officials is that the ceasefire in Gaza will allow them to take more and more of the West Bank.
The world’s major capitalist powers, such as the United States, aren’t religiously or ideologically invested in Israel conquering the West Bank. Nor is their sole focus the destruction of Palestine. Nevertheless, they do care about the strength of the Israeli state. And they care about profiting from death. The Wall Street Journal’s Middle East correspondent Benoit Faucon <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/the-gaza-war-has-been-big-business-for-u-s-companies-8830b54a">recently described</a> the “unprecedented arms pipeline from the US to Israel” over the last two years. The trade resulted in billions of dollars in profits for companies such as Boeing, Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. 
Profits are just part of the picture, though. The global capitalist order is built on savagery. In an era of big power rivalry, Israel, the US and their defenders also have a project to normalise extreme violence. They carried out a genocide and now present themselves as peacemakers. If the status quo in Palestine is “peace”, and those responsible for it are the peacemakers, then damn them. We should never leave them in peace.

Vashti Fox

‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Palestine after the ceasefire

It’s hard to think of a starker contrast. 
In Italy last month, Israel’s attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla sparked a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/italys-general-strike-shows-the-way-forward">general strike</a> backed by Italy’s largest union federation and a number of smaller union groups. Strikes and mass blockades shut down the nation’s ports and large sections of rail, logistics, education and other industries. Somewhere close to a million people marched in solidarity with Palestine in Rome the next day, the biggest protest in a generation.
Meanwhile in Australia, record numbers have rallied—most notably 300,000 at the March for Humanity on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in August. 
But the response of the Australian union movement’s official leadership to Israel’s assault on the Sumud Flotilla was largely confined to a couple of <a href="https://x.com/unionsaustralia/status/1974025863126503925/photo/1">tweets</a>. It was moving to see footage of seafarer Hamish Paterson, a member of the Maritime Union of Australia, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/reel/1524377095418162">welcomed home</a> by a crowd of hundreds of supporters at Sydney airport. But the fact remains that not a single branch of a single union in this country has authorised industrial action in opposition to the Australian government’s role in arming Israel’s genocidal military. 
It wasn’t always like this. 
Fifty years ago, Australia’s union movement was <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/when-australian-workers-struck-against-apartheid">famous</a>
for putting bans on companies that did business with the blood-soaked apartheid regime in South Africa. <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C98588">“Stop work to stop the war”</a> was likewise the slogan of the left wing of the movement against the US and Australian war in Vietnam—with many unions turning it into reality. In the 1970s, metalworkers regularly banned jobs connected to <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6837">uranium mining</a>, and sections of the union movement backed strikes, protests and <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7540">blockades</a> for Aboriginal land rights. 
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/recollections-militant">Peter Close</a>, who as a tugboat crew member implemented the bans on South African shipping in Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay, spoke to Red Flag in 2013 about what it was like to be a militant at that time: “Proletarian internationalism, class politics, and class struggle itself was on the menu every day”. 
This doesn’t mean that everything was perfect. I remember Harry Bocquet, a Maoist who had worked on the Melbourne waterfront from the early 1960s, being very critical of the neglect of political discussion and education in that period. On one occasion, wharfies were pulled off a ship by the union leadership—but it was only when the workers got to the pub that they found out the stoppage was a protest against the war in Vietnam. 
The workers were supportive on this occasion, according to Harry. But this downplaying of political discussion and democracy meant any culture of militancy was hard to sustain, especially from the early 1980s, when the Labor government moved systematically to stifle union militancy through the Prices and Incomes Accord. 
The aim of the Accord was to impose sweeping neoliberal “reform”, including privatisations and deregulation of the labour market. This was carried out by the Labor government in partnership with business and almost all of the union movement’s official leadership. 
If you’re a union leader allied to a Labor government imposing neoliberalism on the working class, one thing you definitely don’t want is a politicised, militant current in the union movement. So the sometimes heroic traditions of the 1970s had to be smothered. 
A huge amount of effort was spent—especially by “left” leaderships like the key Metalworkers union—in “educating” union delegates out of militancy and browbeating them into compliance with the class collaborationist approach of the Accord. 
Rates of industrial action fell. Delegate organisation withered. Unions that refused to meekly go along with this shift were smashed, with a key role played by Labor governments. 
The union leadership that sold us this disaster hasn’t improved with time. This is evident from the lack of fight over wages during the recent inflationary surge.
It’s no surprise, then, that Australian unions have overwhelmingly been reluctant even to entertain discussions about Palestine, let alone take industrial action. 
Not wanting to embarrass the Labor government is obviously a factor. Any party that governs Australian capitalism has to respect that holiest of holies—support for the US alliance, and thus for Israel. So long as acknowledging Palestine means criticising Labor, the union leaders will resist.
Added to this, the political forces that led much of the working-class action against war and racism 50 years ago have all but disappeared. The Communist Party helped design and implement the Accord and then voted itself out of existence in 1991. The Stalinist breakaways from the Communist Party also withered under the impact of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the embrace of capitalism by China’s totalitarian rulers. 
Forces to the left of the CPA and its splits were reborn during the late 1960s and early 1970s, but were too small to change the course of the union movement. In more recent years, Socialist Alternative members have compiled an <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/socialist-alternatives-record-of-workplace-organising">impressive record</a> of industrial disputes—including helping to lead the only <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/community-sector-workers-to-walk-out-for-palestine-again">strikes for Palestine</a> in Australia over the past two years. But the sort of active solidarity seen in decades past has so far not been re-created.
This had also been the case in Italy, until the last few months. The wonderful response to the call for a strike in solidarity with Palestine has taken almost everyone involved by surprise.
It’s not hard to understand why. Critical commentary on the state of Italy’s unions isn’t difficult to find. In February this year, the mainstream news agency Reuters <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/big-toothless-italys-unions-blamed-wage-stagnation-2025-02-07/">carried a report</a> with the title: “Big but toothless—Italy’s unions blamed for wage stagnation”, noting that Italy is the only country in the European Union where real wages went backwards relative to inflation over the three decades to 2020. 
More than 90 percent of major strikes in Italy last a day or less, while in the US, 80 percent last two days or longer. “Trade unions in Italy have mutated to become mainly service providers”, according to Filippo Barbera, an academic interviewed by Reuters: “They help you do your tax returns and calculate what your pension will be, but they won't take on employers to secure salary rises”.
This is no surprise, given the politics of the three main union federations in Italy (the UIL, the CISL and the CGIL) and the parties they are associated with (respectively the Socialist Party, the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party—whose main political successor is the Democratic Party). Each has been every bit as committed as the Australian Labor Party and the leadership of Australia’s union movement in wanting to work in “partnership” with capital. 
One sign of this is the series of “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2022.2107044#d1e325">social pacts</a>” involving the Italian unions signing on to neoliberal “reform” from the late 1970s onwards. The intention of these pacts mirrored Australian Labor’s approach with the Accord: to assist the restructuring of capitalism along neoliberal lines. Such accords played a role in the ending of automatic wage indexation, the introduction of “flexible” contracts, privatisation of key state assets and cuts to Italy’s previously relatively generous pension scheme. 
This has not always been a smooth process, but overall, the main union federations in Italy have been ineffective in resisting neoliberal “reform”, and at times have been just as actively complicit as Australian unions. 
There is no system of government registration of unions in Italy. And the Italian far left of the 1970s—though plagued with all sorts of <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/workerism-and-autonomism-in-italys-hot-autumn/">serious political problems</a>—was much larger than the equivalent forces in Australia. These two factors came together in Italy in the formation of “base unions” from the 1980s. Some of these are splits from existing unions, others are the creation of politicised militants who set to work organising the unorganised. 
The main premise of the base unions is to reject union bureaucracy as inherently conservative, and to attempt to build a more combative rank-and-file-driven movement. Even advocates of this approach admit its limitations, however. 
Donato Romito, writing from a sympathetic perspective in 2003 on the anarchist-aligned Libcom website, <a href="https://libcom.org/article/exploring-alternative-forms-workers-organization-anarchist-communists-and-italian-base">noted</a>
that the CGIL “was systematically demonized, but there was never any strategy of dialogue with its members or with its internal opposition”. 
Further, Romito noted that the pressures of having to survive as a union can push towards conservatism, regardless of the formal politics of the leadership. There is also a serious tendency towards fragmentation among the base unions, where “everyone felt they were an alternative to everyone else ... Italian grassroots syndicalism remains trapped between the radicalism of its platforms and the need for bargaining, between its criticism of bureaucratism and the inevitable formation of a leadership class”.
An informative <a href="https://libcom.org/article/port-genoa-first-focaccia-then-class-struggle-article-autonomous-dock-workers-collective">commentary</a>
by Anna Jikhareva from 2022 paints a picture of the Autonomous Port Workers Collective (Collettivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali, or CALP) in Genoa. The CALP were key initiators of the recent strikes in solidarity with Palestine as part of the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) federation of base unions. 
Remarkably, in a major port with an on-site workforce of 4,000, including 1,200 dock workers, the CALP has only around 20 or so active members, according to Jikhareva. All of them are the sons of dock workers and continuators of a militant industrial and political tradition in the port of Genoa. 
Despite these small numbers, in the right circumstances the CALP can pull other workers behind them. Jikhareva describes relatively modest numbers of workers and supporters—dozens growing into a crowd of over a hundred—blockading the port in October 2021, as part of a one-day strike of the base unions on economic issues. 
In the extraordinary circumstances of late 2025, however, with a wave of revulsion sweeping the globe against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the modest forces of the CALP helped set something much more substantial in motion. Heading up a rally of 40,000 in Genoa at the end of August, CALP member Riccardo Rudino threatened to shut down the port—and every other port in Europe—if the Global Sumud Flotilla was attacked. Everyone understood that there was at least the potential of real power behind this threat. 
A series of factors were important in turning this threat into a reality. The fact that the Democratic Party (associated with the CGIL) is in opposition, and that unions are sidelined under the far-right Meloni government, probably removed one obstacle to the CGIL falling in behind the USB federation. The fact that there were two Democratic Party members of parliament on the Sumud Flotilla no doubt helped as well. And when Rudino threatened to “block everything” that night in Genoa, he was building on the substantial “block everything” union protests in neighbouring France.
The mass strikes would never have happened without the movement on the streets and on the campuses in solidarity with Palestine. Also crucial was the presence of politicised militants in a string of workplaces, who were capable of leading something. There are valid and important criticisms of the base unions, but they got enough right to make some history. 
Of course, we don’t know what comes next. We make our own history, as Karl Marx once observed, but not in circumstances of our own choosing. The USB has now called for a general strike against the Italian war budget on 28 November. 
In Australia, those frustrating “circumstances” include the disastrous continuing consequences of Labor’s all-too-effective imposition of the politics of class collaboration on the country’s union movement. Rebuilding a different and more combative workers’ movement requires rebuilding the politics of class struggle. After all, which political forces are organised, and to what end, is one of the few “circumstances” we have some control over. 
But if recent events have reminded us of this, they should also remind us of something else—that not every damn thing is predetermined. 
Marco Bertorello, a socialist and writer who works at the port of Genoa, wrote a moving <a href="https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article9157">account</a> of the 40,000-strong protest in Genoa at the end of August, describing how the long-dormant traditions of struggle in Genoa were taking on a mass character before his eyes. His account is a reminder that, though we can be all too aware of the circumstances we’re in, sometimes we can still roll the dice and make history:
“I think it was an important moment for my city. I don’t know what it might mean for the future and for other cities, but it seems to me to be a possible barometer of the social climate. I hope it is not just a passing anomaly. In difficult times, there is always room for the unexpected, the surprising—in short, for humanity.”

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A tale of two union movements: Palestine and the unions in Italy and Australia

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