Palestine solidarity activists should stand with the people of Syria against the dictatorship they have just deposed. 
Bashar al-Assad would not have been ousted so quickly by militias without there being mass opposition to his regime. Indeed, in the southern cities of Sweida and Daraa, people rose up to push out state officials without needing the intervention of the northern Islamist fighters. The Syrian military effectively dissolved, its soldiers donning civilian clothes and offering no resistance—Assad had no popular support, even within his own army. Likewise, as rebels approached Damascus, government forces crumbled and withdrew. Assad fled. 
Across Syria, mass celebrations across all religious and ethnic lines flowed into the streets. Yellow flags of the Kurds and multi-coloured Druze flags flew among the green, white and black flags of the 2011 Syrian revolution. Tens of thousands are being released from Assad’s torture dungeons, people are loudly speaking the many words banned by the regime, and statues of the dictator have been torn down by large assemblies of people all over the country. 
Syrian revolution, Assadist brutality
The dictatorship of Bashar, like that of his father Hafez al-Assad, rested on extreme repression. The country was known as the kingdom of silence because of its absence of free speech, its co-option and neutering of all trade unions, and its enormous security state, the heart of which was the network of torture prisons now being prised open by the people. 
When the Syrian masses joined those in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and across the Arab world rising in a democratic revolution, they were met with massacres. Yet even then, most of Assad’s military defected. Iran’s Islamic Guard and the Lebanese party-militia Hezbollah intervened to rescue the regime, but even they couldn’t crush the popular uprising. In 2015, Russia finally intervened to rescue Assad, barrel bombing entire cities.
Yet, while the country was being bombarded, tens, even hundreds of thousands of people came out into the streets to march with the revolutionary flag during nearly every ceasefire. Some of the local councils, which the revolution had set up, continued. In 2017, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/syrias-last-bastion-of-freedom">activists in the north-western town of Saraqib</a> held Syria’s first genuinely free election since 1954, illustrating the depth of the revolutionary process that had unfolded before Russia and Iran intervened. 
Just last year, after almost everyone had written off the Syrian revolution, hundreds of thousands returned to the streets in more than 55 locations to protest against the regime. In Daraa and Sweida, workers launched general strikes. This context is important for understanding the current moment as part of a mass process rather than solely an Islamist seizure of power.
Assad and the Palestinians
Some in the Palestine movement have denounced the overthrow of Assad, arguing that his regime was a bastion of resistance to Israel. Even if that had been true, Palestine solidarity activists would still have a responsibility to stand with the people against Assad’s dictatorship. 
But Assad has policed the Israeli border for decades, refusing to challenge the occupation of the Golan Heights. “We haven't had a problem with the Assad regime—for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-12/ty-article/netanyahu-israel-has-no-problem-with-assad-agreements-must-be-upheld/0000017f-e1aa-d804-ad7f-f1faccdb0000">told</a> reporters during a 2018 visit to Moscow. Assad also collaborated with the United States, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190518111450/https:/www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/globalizing-torture-cia-secret-detention-and-extraordinary-rendition">holding</a> and torturing prisoners for the CIA during its “extraordinary rendition” program after 9/11. 
And Assad has persecuted and repressed Palestinians in Syria. In recent weeks, 67 members of the Al-Qassam brigades were released from Sednaya prison, along with 630 other Palestinians. We can only imagine how many Palestinians are among the bodies uncovered in the prisons, having been tortured to death and dumped in graves. Just days before Assad fled, Palestinians in Raml refugee camp in Latakia held a night-time march to call for his overthrow. This was particularly meaningful: 5,000 Palestinians were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/15/syria-palestinians-latakia-assault">expelled</a> from the camp in 2011 for joining the revolutionary protests against the dictatorship. 
In fact, many Palestinians participated in and aided the Syrian revolution from 2011 onwards. In 2013, Haitham, a Palestinian revolutionary, <a href="https://souriahouria.com/palestinian-revolutionary-assad-is-no-friend-of-the-palestinians/">told a Tunisian audience</a> that the inhabitants of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus supported the Syrian uprising by forming committees to organise the intake of Syrians fleeing repression and to smuggle medical supplies to cities held by the revolution. 
“Our first role in the revolution was providing humanitarian and political support to our Syrian brothers and sisters”, he said. The Palestinians in the camp also drove out the Assadists that administered it. 
The so-called Axis of Resistance
Other supporters of Palestine insist that Assad’s rule was a pillar within broader regional Palestinian liberation forces. For example, Ali Abunimah and Asa Winstanley <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-israel-thinks-it-won-syria/50205">write in the Electronic Intifada</a>: “Syria was for decades the backbone of the Axis of Resistance to US hegemony and Israeli settler-colonialism”. 
The Iranian and Syrian dictatorships, the centre of the so-called Axis of Resistance, were never going to liberate the Palestinians. The evidence for this is their despotic rule over their “own people”. In the past three years, there have been mass protests and strikes over the Iranian regime’s treatment of women and workers and its massacres of demonstrators. They will never stand for genuine liberation in Palestine precisely because it could inspire workers and the oppressed in Iran to liberate themselves from tyranny. 
Max Blumenthal, an American journalist and founder of the news site Grey Zone, <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1866724321907052860">declared on X</a> that Netanyahu is the primary winner in Syria, and has repeatedly implied that the rebels are basically Israel’s foot soldiers. Yet Israel has bombed and destroyed arms depots across Syria over the past weeks to keep weapons out of the hands of the rebels. After <a href="https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1865757924594786810">celebrating</a> Assad’s downfall on X, Netanyahu ordered a sustained bombing campaign to neuter the Syrian military, <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/10/middleeast/israel-syria-assad-strikes-intl/index.html">striking the country at least 480 times</a> and reportedly destroying the country’s naval fleet. Israel never felt that threatened by Assad.
Israel has always taken advantage of instability in the Middle East and North Africa to advance its interests and claim territory, just as the United States has long taken advantage of ruptures in that region, the Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America. When imperialist nations capitalise on political ruptures to advance their interests, we should not blame the actors who created the rupture in the first place or label those actors imperialist pawns.
When Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal and attempted to block the waterway to all Israeli ships in 1956, Israel responded by occupying the Sinai Peninsula—a significant chunk of territory—for five months. Did giving the Israelis both a pretext and an opportunity to take over Egyptian land make Nasser an Israeli stooge or mean that he should never have nationalised the Suez? 
The road ahead
For now, the rebels in Syria have defeated a vile dictatorship that was the enemy of both the Syrian people and the Palestinian liberation movement. Importantly, their offensive unleashed the popular movement again, drawing hundreds of thousands into the streets and squares across the country. Palestine supporters have added reason to watch for mass movements across the Middle East and North Africa: hope for the Palestinians is tied to the success of struggles against dictatorship across the region. Freedom for the Palestinians depends on the Arab working classes defeating their own ruling classes, and on whether they’re organised enough to defeat meddling imperialist powers. 
Yet many factors and actors are arrayed against the Syrian people. 
First, the imperialist powers—Israel, Turkey and the United States—will all attempt to safeguard their own interests, rather than those of the Syrian people. Second, Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the insurgency, is an authoritarian Islamist militia with its own agenda. Much of its leadership emerged from Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham, both of which have played a counter-revolutionary role, pressing back on the popular movement and its attempts to create democratic structures. 
After HTS took power in Idlib in 2017 from the locally run councils created by the revolution, it established a new, authoritarian civilian government called the Syrian Salvation Government. Students protested against its closure of the Free Aleppo University; others protested over issues of democracy and living standards, showing some determination to assert themselves on the new government. 
Much Western criticism of HTS has focused on the group’s reactionary Islamism. But the key challenge now will not be its religiosity, reactionary or otherwise. The group has made clear that it wants Syria to be run like other countries across the MENA region (and, indeed, the world): a top-down, capitalist government overseeing a country in which business owners dominate workers and the oppressed. 
It’s hard to imagine the group governing as brutally as the Assad dynasty. But now that that era is over, a new HTS-led government will be the key obstacle to a just society. Hopefully, the democratic politics of the masses—the opposition to authoritarian rule and religious sectarianism that characterised the revolution—can again come to the fore. It’s also possible that, with Assad gone, there will be more room to reconstruct a political left.
We should not write the revolution out of history or ignore the possibilities offered by the mass participation in the process so far. All the Western liberal media outlets, the regional governments and the imperialists are doing this. Whatever happens, those who stand for liberation must have consistent political principles and highlight the heroic role of the Syrian people in trying to determine their own future.

Jasmine Duff

Those who stand with the Palestinians should celebrate Assad’s fall

This year has experienced the largest campus mobilisations for Palestine in Australian history. Thousands of students have marched, walked out of class, organised occupations and taken part in mass meetings to demand an end to the horrors we’re witnessing in Gaza. 
We attend classes at universities with direct links to companies profiting from genocide. At times this fact confronts us starkly, for instance University of Queensland students who might, between classes, wander past the Boeing Research and Technology Centre—run by one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers and a major supplier to Israel. Elsewhere, complicity comes in the form of hidden partnerships and investment portfolios. All of this has sparked justified outrage. 
The first major student actions were nationwide walkouts, organised by Students for Palestine. These started in November last year when thousands of high school and university students ditched class to rally in the city. More than 1,000 students occupied Melbourne Central mall, raising Palestinian flags and chanting to demand that the government drop its support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The strikes continued this year in every major city in Australia. Why should students attend class as usual when every school and university in Gaza has been shut down? 
The right-wing media and politicians campaigned vitriolically against us. After the first student strikes, the Daily Telegraph wheeled out a psychologist to tell us that we couldn’t possibly understand what was happening in Gaza: “Young people’s brains aren’t fully developed yet”. The Victorian and NSW premiers told students that if they wanted to understand and change the world, they should stay in school. We didn’t listen. 
Next came the wave of Gaza solidarity encampments. Brave students at Columbia University in New York fought the Biden administration, university management and the police to maintain their encampment. Students for Palestine activists at Sydney University followed suit, pitching tents and sparking a movement that spread across the country. This movement was about the crimes of the Israeli government. But it was also about the crimes of universities that produce the research for weapons companies that arm Israel’s genocide and partner with the Israeli institutions that produce the propaganda required to generate support for it. 
On every campus where an encampment sprung up, there was an outpouring of community support. Fresh meals, snacks and toiletries were never in short supply. But support didn’t come just in the form of provisions. It was also made visible by the many people who mobilised when our camps were under attack. At Monash University, a dozen pro-Israel thugs attacked the camp on the first night. When they returned the next week, 70 supporters turned out to defend the encampment. At Sydney University, a planned pro-Israel rally of 200 right-wingers was met with a Palestine solidarity demonstration of more than 500 people. 
At Deakin University, management demanded that students leave under threat of disciplinary action after only six days. Students held out and kept their encampment going strong until the end of the trimester. At ANU, management called the police on students, who were then surrounded by a human chain of security guards and threatened with mass arrests if they refused to pack up the encampment. Students held an impromptu meeting, deciding to defend their camp and calling out for community support. Solidarity won out—after a long stand-off, the police were forced to retreat. 
The camps sprung up across the world. In Sydney, we woke one morning to find a video of a young boy holding a sign, hand-painted on a piece of cardboard, reading: “Thank you for the students of University of Sydney. Your voice have reached Gaza”.
More university students got involved in the movement for Palestine in semester two, as student general meetings swept the country. Everywhere they happened, hundreds of students turned out to call on their universities to cut ties with weapons companies and Israeli institutions. 
The University of Queensland kicked things off. On the night of the meeting, the registration line stretched across the campus, and by the time the vote was called students had filled two huge lecture theatres. More than 1,500 students voted to support Palestine and demand the university cut ties with the major arms dealer Boeing. When the meeting finished, students marched to the chancellery in what was probably the biggest ever campus demonstration for Palestine. 
Other campuses followed suit. More than 800 students mobilised at Sydney University, and 300 at the University of Western Australia. Two hundred attended at the University of Adelaide despite the right-wing student union’s attempt to stop the meeting altogether. A similarly obstructionist student union leadership couldn’t prevent 600 students from showing up at Melbourne University. On many campuses, students had to defy management’s attempts to stifle organising attempts. At Queensland University of Technology, university administrators called the police, who told activists they would remove from campus anyone who didn’t fit into the official meeting rooms.
The huge numbers at these meetings demonstrated that support for Palestine has grown rapidly over the past year. But we still have a major fight on our hands. 
Universities have cracked down hard on pro-Palestine activism—dozens of students have faced university disciplinary proceedings due to their activism this year. Now, under pressure from the Australian government and Zionist organisations, vice-chancellors are introducing harsh new rules like the campus access policies at Melbourne and Sydney University. These limit free speech on campus by restricting students’ right to organise protests. We now have less freedom of expression at university than we have in the streets. At Sydney University, the recent Hodgkinson External Review, commissioned to determine how to better repress dissent, recommends banning lecture announcements, the displaying of banners and protesting inside. 
The past year has proved that students won’t give up easily. Gaza has shown us the lengths our government and universities will go to shut down opposition to their support for Israel during a genocide. That they feel compelled to repress the student movement shows us that we are having an impact. We won’t stop fighting for Palestine.

Yasmine Johnson

A year of student activism for Palestine

Sydney’s Condell Park High School recently banned a year twelve Palestinian student from his school formal for wearing a keffiyeh to his graduation ceremony. 
On the school’s website, the <a>principal’s message</a> reads: “We are proud of our diverse student population”. So proud that he is disciplining one of those students for displaying an item of immense cultural significance.
In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, the student said he was being punished for “making a political statement in a public school”. The Department of Education that ordered the keffiyeh ban and Condell Park administrators who enforced it are making a political statement of their own—that it’s not acceptable to express solidarity with those suffering a genocide, even if they’re one’s own family and friends. 
The ban caused outrage amongst students and staff at the school. High-schoolers and Uni Students for Palestine, with support from the affected student, called a protest outside Condell Park High on Tuesday, 26 November.
Noura, a Palestinian year twelve student and protest organiser, told Red Flag that she was protesting “to put pressure on the school to demand an apology for the student and let him go to his formal. He’s had to endure watching his family back home experience a genocide. He deserves to go to his formal wearing a keffiyeh”.
A year nine student at the rally said to Red Flag: “It feels amazing to be here! Everyone posted a photo online to say bring the keffiyehs, wear it on your bag. And if you get in trouble, don’t listen to them”. 
Eva, a year twelve student and activist with High School Students for Palestine who spoke at the rally, pointed out, “This is not the first time institutions are repressing support for Palestine. The NSW State Library security removed me for wearing a keffiyeh this year!”
School administrators attempted to deter people from protesting. They pulled students into meetings, and warned staff not to join the rally, ordering that the school would be under lockdown until 6:30pm. The affected student made a point of blaming the Department of Education, not the regular staff or students, who have no say in this and have been intimidated into silence. 
Despite these measures, the students were not cowed. The day before the rally, about a third of all senior school students wore keffiyehs on their bags in protest of the ban. More than 50 Palestine supporters joined the rally; as school finished, students flooded outside wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags. They held handwritten placards that read: “We all belong” and “Say no to racism”. Students riding the school bus chanted out the windows in support. 
But the Department of Education and Condell Park have doubled down. The affected student prepared a statement for the rally that said he had been told he could attend the formal only if he did not wear the keffiyeh, and that the school refused to apologise. Later, he was told that he must apologise in order to attend the formal (he refused). Dozens of students who wore keffiyehs to the event in solidarity with the student and Palestine had them confiscated at the door or were refused entry. 
Students made it clear that they will not be intimidated. They will continue to wear their keffiyehs with pride and speak up for Palestine.

Gina Elias

Condell Park High School students protest keffiyeh ban

Trump’s victory has sent shock waves through global politics. His far-right government-in-waiting has promised to deport millions of immigrants, block action on climate change, slash and burn social services, further empower the police and more. His administration will be chock filled with billionaires and bigots, and their mission will be to recast the machinery of the US state in their image.
Trump’s foreign policy agenda is less clear. He is without question a champion of US power on the world stage. But he also presents himself as an outsider and a free agent. He likes to dress up his admiration of and dealings with various dictators as an example of peaceful coexistence. He also used his opposition to the Iraq war to attack Hillary Clinton and the Washington establishment back in his first successful presidential run in 2016. 
Trump tried to play the same game with Israel’s war on Gaza. Though a long-time supporter of Israel, he insisted that the current slaughter would never have happened with him in charge. He appealed to those who were rightly furious with the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel’s genocide and declared himself a peacemaker. “The Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan and across the country want a stop to the endless wars and a return to peace in the Middle East”, Trump said in a stump speech aimed at Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan. He also repeatedly attacked Harris for her association with the Cheney family, who were central to the so-called “war on terror” that devastated Iraq and Afghanistan for decades. 
This rhetoric resonated with sections of the Arab and Muslim political class. After being invited to join the stage at a Trump campaign event in Michigan, Imam Belal Alzuhairi of the Islamic Center of Detroit explained his support for Trump in simple if deluded terms: “We as Muslims stand with President Trump because he promises peace”. The Yemeni mayor of Hamtramck, the first city in the US to elect an all-Muslim city council and a Muslim mayor, also endorsed Trump. (Others in the Arab and Muslim community, as well as the Palestine Solidarity movement, chose instead to campaign for a boycott or for the Greens’ candidate Jill Stein.)
It is too early to know whether Trump was successful in relating to the small minority of voters motivated by Gaza. On the one hand, the Council on American-Islamic Relations released a set of exit polls that indicated Muslims saw through his cynical appeals. According to <a href="https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cair-exit-poll-of-muslim-voters-reveals-surge-in-support-for-jill-stein-and-donald-trump-steep-decline-for-harris/">this survey</a>, 21 percent of Muslims voted for Trump versus 20 percent for Harris, down from 69 percent who backed Biden in 2020. If their polling is accurate then the story isn’t the small shift of Muslim voters to Trump, but a collapse in their loyalty to the Democratic Party and a concomitant surge in support for Stein, who according to this poll won a staggering 59 percent of Muslim voters. 
Unfortunately, these positive findings are contradicted by other data points. The Associated Press’ VoteCast exit poll found that 63 percent of Muslims voted for Harris, essentially a status quo outcome. Yet the Arab American Institute conducted pre-polling that showed a split of 41 to 40 for Trump and Harris among Arab Americans, a significant shift given that they have typically backed Democratic presidential nominees by substantial margins. The election results from Dearborn, Michigan, the largest majority Arab American city in the US, signalled an even more dramatic shift. There, Trump won 42 percent of the vote compared to 36 for Harris and 18 for Stein, a radical shift from Biden’s 74 to 24 smashing victory over Trump in 2020.
We may never find out just how many Palestine supporters bought Trump’s absurd claim to be a peace candidate, how many voted for him simply to punish the Democrats for their stance on Gaza and how many backed him for other reasons. The issues aren’t easy to disentangle. 
But regardless, the truth is that Trump is just as committed to US imperialism and to Israel as his Democratic predecessors. This has become increasingly clear as he has begun constructing his administration, a who’s who of war hawks, Zionists and far-right freaks. Trump’s Middle East team is arguably even more extreme in its support for Israeli aggression against the people of Palestine, Lebanon and beyond. 
The headline pick is Mike Huckabee as the nominee for US ambassador to Israel. This is a guy who once declared that “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian”, before conceding a few years later that if these non-existent people insisted on having a country, then it should be constructed on existing Arab territory. He opposes any Palestinian control over land in historic Palestine.
Trump’s proposed defense secretary is Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host and a current white nationalist. He has built his career by defending US soldiers accused of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth has also advocated the construction of a Jewish temple on the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque—a position so extreme that even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not support it.
His pick for United Nations ambassador is MAGA hatchet woman Elise Stefanik, who has championed the repression against Palestine solidarity activists across America. Like most supporters of Israel, Stefanik relies heavily on the spurious claim that opposing Israel’s crimes is inherently antisemitic, accusing both student protesters and their targets in university management of this crime. In a recent speech to the pro-Israeli think tank Endowment for Middle East Truth, she declared her task would be to represent Israel’s interests in the “den of antisemitism” that is the UN.
In many cases, these despicable figures will simply be continuing the genocidal policies already established by the Biden administration. For instance, Stefanik’s Democratic predecessor Linda Thomas-Greenfield vetoed four separate motions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. And while Trump has criticised Biden for not supplying the Israelis with sufficient weaponry, this is purely for show. A <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2023/2024/Costs%20of%20War_US%20Support%20Since%20Oct%207%20FINAL%20v2.pdf">paper</a>
by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates that the Israeli war effort has benefited from an unprecedented $22 billion in US aid and related military expenditure in the last fourteen months, supplemented by an additional 100 arms deals too small to require congressional reporting. Through these measures, the Democrats have granted a state carrying out a well-documented genocide the largest military aid package since World War Two.
But this is no reason to shrug our shoulders at the prospect of Trump. The presence of far-right and ultra-Zionist figures in the Trump administration could lead to dramatic new developments and allow Israel even more scope for aggression. During his last administration, Trump led a number of countries in recognising all of Jerusalem as Israeli territory and moved the US embassy to that city for the first time. Like many of Trump’s worst decisions, the construction of a new US embassy on stolen Palestinian land in Jerusalem was upheld by the Biden administration. 
Trump secured peace deals between Israel and a range of regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. While this was a primarily symbolic move by states that in practice had never seriously sought to confront Israel, these deals, grouped under the umbrella of the Abraham Accords, were a substantial diplomatic victory for the Israelis. Trump and his allies now have their sights set on convincing the Saudis to sign on, a move which would largely complete the political isolation of the Palestinian people, further insulating Israel from anything approaching regional opposition.
While nobody who backs Palestine should mourn the defeat of Harris and the Democrats, we cannot be complacent about the incoming Trump administration. Trump and his monstrous cabinet are primed to enable the Israeli far right’s most violent and expansionist policies. We cannot yet know what horrors they will unleash on the people of Palestine, but we know from the past year that the Democratic Party will be no opposition. It will be up to us. 
As well, there will be opportunities to build new alliances with other groups targeted by Trump’s reactionary agenda and relate to the general instability his leadership will generate. Activists and organisers need to be ready to respond and use the widespread revulsion at the monsters taking over the White House to strengthen the movement for justice, peace and liberation in Palestine.

Omar Hassan

Trump lied about peace, but will deliver only misery in Palestine

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.

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