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.”

Jerome Small

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

For the Australian Labor Party, university campuses are a vital source of recruits and a training ground for future politicians and leaders. Through their control of the vast majority of the country’s student unions, student Labor members learn to manage budgets and bureaucracies, network and harvest votes, and to face down pressure from rival groups, mostly on their left—all vital skills for the Albaneses and Wongs of tomorrow. But they also have to prove themselves effective advocates, which means at times supporting or engaging in activism against governments, in support of education demands as well as broader social justice. 
So two years of campus activism against their party’s support for the genocide in Gaza have put them in an awkward spot. Labor students have had to balance the competing pressures of pro-Palestine sentiments on campus, their own personal views and loyalty to the staunchly pro-Israel line of their party and of university administrations. 
Predictably, and in line with the adult party’s stance, Labor-dominated student unions on many campuses have expressed outward hostility toward Palestine campaigning and used their resources to obstruct it. Labor students who run the University of Melbourne Student Union, fearful of spoiling relationships with the university hierarchy and drawing the ire of right-wingers, have rescinded union support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. 
Last year, the union responded to a request signed by 1,200 students for a special general meeting (SGM) to reinstate a pro-BDS position by hiring lawyers from Labor-aligned law firm Slater and Gordon to find a legal basis to prevent the meeting happening. They then used similar tactics to defeat a campaign by office-bearers to donate $19,000—the remainder of their 2024 budget—to a Palestinian activist group in the West Bank.
The Labor right-dominated Deakin University Student Association has used the precedent created by the disgraceful backdown at Melbourne University to refuse to hear pro-Palestine motions, arguing explicitly that the union should not take “political” stances. 
At Swinburne University, Labor students sabotaged last year’s SGM for Palestine, requested by 400 students, by scheduling it at the remote Wantirna campus. At Monash, Labor-left students reluctantly oversaw a requested SGM, but locked the doors before the meeting had reached quorum, rendering the meeting unable to change union policy. So far, so predictable. 
At some other places, however, the possibility of cynically harvesting pro-Palestine votes has softened their hearts to the plight of Gazans. At La Trobe University, Labor students registered the ticket “Social Justice—Free Palestine” in the student union elections to confuse students and compete with the left-wing ticket organised by Socialist Alternative and Students for Palestine members. And at Swinburne, the same Labor students who sabotaged the SGM called through attendees claiming to be from Students for Palestine to get votes for their group in elections. While not ideal, this sort of deviation from official pro-Israel talking points can be tolerated by Sussex Street so long as there are some votes in it and no-one important notices. 
But then there are the cases where Labor students have outright supported Palestine activism, a position at odds, to say the least, with their party’s policy. At RMIT, the Labor right-controlled union endorsed the campus’s Gaza encampment, even bringing fresh fruit to famished activists. At University of Wollongong, Labor members promoted and attended the SGM organised by Students for Palestine. Through the National Union of Students, leaders of the Labor right have used union resources to promote the People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine—a counter to Labor’s witch-hunt antisemitism inquiry—and endorsed a national day of protest against the government’s support for Israel. 
Even at Melbourne University, where the Labor students have more recently been hostile, their past conduct suggests this may be as much about toeing the line as conviction. In 2022, they supported the very BDS motion that they later rescinded under pressure. During the 2024 encampment, they gave limited behind-the-scenes support, including by booking lawn space for a camp, but avoided any public association with the event. This contradiction raises a question—if support for Israel is the great moral cause that Labor leaders claim it is, why do they tolerate such blatant disloyalty to party policy in their own ranks? 
For two years, Labor leaders have maintained the spurious line that Palestine campus activism is part of a detestable upsurge in antisemitic hate. Labor’s federal Education Minister Jason Clare labelled the University of Melbourne’s Gaza solidarity encampment “repugnant”, while Defence Minister Richard Marles asserted last May: “The levels of antisemitism that we have seen in the past few months are more than any that I’ve seen during my lifetime”. Labor supported a motion moved in the Senate by the Liberal opposition that condemned the traditional slogan of Palestinian resistance “from the river to the sea”, describing it as “used by those who seek to intimidate Jewish Australians via acts of antisemitism”. Labor have staked credibility on a bogus campus Senate inquiry led by Jillian Segal, a bigoted pro-genocide activist, that cynically and dishonestly conflated support for Palestine with threats against Jewish students. And anyone who dares speak up for the Palestinians, from former Labor Senator Fatima Payman to Greens Senator Mehreen Farouqi, has had the book thrown at them.
And yet Labor turn a blind eye to their own future leaders when they associate themselves with this same campaign and sentiments on campuses. If Labor leaders really believe all this, you would expect them to extend their condemnations to party members who have associated themselves with these campaigns. The fact that they haven’t makes it hard not to draw the conclusion that there is a lot of cynicism at work here, and a willingness to say whatever is required in service of Australia’s imperial interests and alliances.
It also reflects a lack of confidence in imposing their political line on their own student groups. Labor’s leaders have to give their student clubs a longer leash with the campaigning they tolerate because the clubs have to recruit from campuses that are populated by young people, the vast majority of whom are well to the party’s left, and where contempt for the party and its conduct in government is at record highs. So there’s an appreciation that pragmatic adaption to the prevailing pro-Palestine sentiment has to happen to keep the machine being supplied with raw material. 
Notably, it has been students from Labor’s right faction (Unity) in particular that have provided the most support to these campaigns. While the Labor left faction has been in long decline, Unity is overwhelmingly dominant and has the largest base amongst students. It recruits strongly among international students, many of who are from backgrounds where support for Palestine is widespread. Adapting to this sentiment is expedient, and whatever is expedient is acceptable, whatever the bombast about the moral righteousness of Israel.
And there is an understanding that all this has very clear limits. Student politicians who want to climb the ranks accept that “serious politics” is ultimately about trading principles away for influence and power. Penny Wong explained how this “serious politics” works when Payman crossed the floor to vote for a pro-Palestine Greens bill in 2024: “Even when we disagree, we have those arguments internally, as you saw over many years in the marriage equality debate”, Wong told ABC Radio’s AM program. “That’s what I did, and I think that’s the right way to go about it.”
Wong, who married her same-sex partner in 2024, adhered to Labor policy by voting against the Greens’ attempt to legalise same-sex marriage in 2008, and spent years publicly undermining the campaign for marriage equality. Her reward was the foreign ministry.
Payman’s case shows what happens when you don't exhibit this highly nuanced and sophisticated conception of politics that involves shutting up about things that are important with the hope of gaining power and influence at some point in the future, and instead say what you think. Payman was immediately shunned and suspended from the Labor caucus, while anonymous Labor sources backgrounded the press that Payman might be ineligible to sit in parliament due to her Afghan background. Payman was the first to cross the floor and vote against party since 2005. 
This is how Labor holds the line. For budding Labor careerists, the stick of discipline and ostracisation goes along with the carrot of career advancement. Some Labor students, as at University of Melbourne and Deakin, prove their mettle by openly defending Labor’s line against the movement, and copping the ensuing student outrage. Some others pretend to care about an issue they have no real interest in to harvest votes in elections. Others who, because of prior political conviction or family background, personally support greater rights for Palestinians, learn eventually to bite their tongues to get ahead. 
For the party to function, it counts on the people that matter becoming too cynical to ever want to really change anything.

Luca Tavan

Labor’s student clubs and Palestine activism

In a timely response to Donald Trump’s phoney “peace plan” and Israel’s continual violations of the ceasefire agreement, the concluding session of a <a href="https://gazatribunal.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“people’s tribunal” on Gaza</a> was held in Istanbul, 23-26 October. Over the four days, an audience of hundreds, plus many more online, heard compelling testimony from dozens of experts and individual victims of Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign, including the mass murder, deliberate starvation and destruction of medical care, housing, the environment and other civilian infrastructure. The statement below was issued at the conclusion of the Gaza Tribunal hearing. All talks from the Istanbul session are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@GazaTribunal/videos">available on YouTube</a>.
--------------------
The Steering Committee members of the Gaza Tribunal issue this conclusion at a historic moment of darkness, but in a continuing quest for the light of justice. 
The Gaza Tribunal recognizes that the current genocide in Palestine, rooted in a century of colonization and oppression, represents a watershed moment in the history of our world. If the Israeli perpetrators and their western enablers are allowed to escape justice, and the Palestinian survivors are left without meaningful redress and, ultimately, their full liberation from the dehumanizing shackles of Zionism and colonialism, the world will have ratified one of the worst atrocities in history. The Tribunal notes that if colonialism, apartheid, and genocide are not moral redlines, then there are no redlines. And the world that presages will be a world of unprecedented horror. Every member of the human family has a stake in Palestinian justice. 
Cognizant of this, the Gaza Tribunal was established in London in November 2024, as a people’s tribunal in the tradition of the Russell Tribunal that was established at the height of US aggression in Vietnam. It convened public hearings in Sarajevo in May 2025, adopting the historic Sarajevo Declaration as a statement of the principles of the Tribunal and of the global quest for justice in Palestine. Its work over the past year has consisted of the collection of information and analysis, the hearing of witnesses and survivors, the archiving of evidence, and the issuing of appeals to humanity for action to end the genocide and to secure justice for the Palestinian people. Its convening here in Istanbul has brought together members of the Tribunal, witnesses, survivors, experts, and an international Jury of Conscience to issue a moral judgement on the crimes of the Israeli regime and those complicit in their perpetration, and to set the course for the next phase of the quest for justice in Palestine. The members of the Gaza Tribunal welcome the findings of the Jury of Conscience, applaud their moral clarity, and commit to the struggle to see their implementation in full. 
The accelerated genocide of the past two years had shocked the conscience of humanity. The images of its audacious cruelty are forever seared in the minds of decent people everywhere, and the echoes of the cries of its victims will forever ring in our ears. We will forget none of it. The brutal attacks on an imprisoned civilian population, the intentional infliction of hunger, thirst, and disease as weapons of genocide, the targeting of bullets and bombs and drones at innocents, the mass arrests and imprisonment in notorious dungeons, the systematic beatings, and torture, and sexual violence of the genocidal perpetrators, the sniping of toddlers for sport, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, homes, refugee shelters, aid facilities, agricultural fields, food stores, even cemeteries, and the deliberate targeting of civilian truth tellers, journalists, medical personnel, aid workers, and other protected persons. So too will we remember the arrogant genocidal threats and declarations of the perpetrators, and their cruel laughter and public celebration of their crimes, all recorded forever in a catalogue of shame. 
We warn the world today that the genocide in Palestine has not ended. The Israeli regime continues to murder Palestinians in Gaza with its Western-supplied bullets and bombs. It continues to obstruct the delivery of food and medicine to the survivors. It continues to impose its unlawful siege on the survivors. Its two-year systematic imposition of hunger, disease, injury, the plaguing of all of Gaza with toxic chemicals and explosive ordinance, its destruction of most shelter as well as the infliction of mass mental disorder and impaired developmental capacities for surviving civilians, will all continue to claim victims of the genocide for years to come. Even as Gaza continues to bleed, the Israeli regime has extended the annihilation phase of the genocide to the West Bank, where land, and livelihoods, and lives are claimed every day in the ethnic cleansing and racist assaults of the Israeli army and its violent settlers. 
Nor do the colonial maneuvers reflected in the so-called Trump Plan, or in the New York plan, offer any hope for end to the genocide, or for freedom or justice for Palestine. Even as we welcome any ceasefire, we note that the Israeli regime has continued to violate with impunity the current declared cessation with daily killings of Palestinians and the continued obstruction of humanitarian aid. We reject the provisions of both plans that would violate fundamental Palestinian rights of self-determination, the essential elements of which are agency, sovereignty, authentic representation and unified leadership. The proposed Plans presuppose impunity for Israeli genocide and apartheid, normalize the Israeli regime, ignore the rights of the Palestinian people under international law, and impose proxy occupation and colonial control over the victims of genocide, while doing nothing to reign in the perpetrators of genocide. Palestinians must lead the restoration of Gaza, and Israel and its enablers must be held responsible for all reparations. 
We demand accountability for the perpetrators and their complicit enablers, redress for the victims and survivors, action to address the root causes of Zionist colonization, occupation, and apartheid, rejection of all efforts to normalize the perpetrator regime and its criminal acts, and freedom for Palestine. In sum, we demand justice. 
To these ends, we call on people of conscience everywhere to intensify their efforts to secure justice for the Palestinian people, through increased and coordinated efforts to isolate the Israeli regime, reject its normalization, and to hold it to account through boycotts, divestment, sanctions, military embargoes, criminal prosecutions of perpetrators and complicit actors, civil actions against those benefitting from harms, education of our neighbors, public protest and civil disobedience, and the amplification of calls for a free Palestine.

Gaza Tribunal: The genocide continues

“‘Palestine will free us all’—you know this slogan, right?” Michael Letwin, a co-founder of US solidarity group Labor for Palestine, was speaking with the enthusiasm of a recent convert, despite his decades of activism, over tea and coffee in Brooklyn’s Iris cafe last year. 
It was some time in May, and northerly gusts whipping off the East River still sent occasional chills through the city, even as summer threatened to burst through the spring. Letwin wasn’t making small talk about the weather, though; he wanted to stress a shift in New York’s political climate. As students in Palestine solidarity encampments across the city were being slandered and smashed by authorities, their defiance seemed only to grow. 
“The activists aren’t going through ‘stages’”, he said, referring to their political consciousness. “It’s more akin to something like ‘permanent revolution’—they are leaping over the old liberal progressive consensus and drawing much more radical, even revolutionary, conclusions.”
I was a little sceptical, having been in Hong Kong five years earlier, embedded in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM7N9XICfes">the siege of the Polytechnic</a>, when police faced seemingly endless volleys of Molotov cocktails, petrol bombs, bricks and arrows from the city’s massive student movement. Almost everywhere across the city bore scars of a dramatic mood shift mobilised ferociously against the government—graffiti, boarded-up banks and shops, excavated footpaths, smashed signal boxes and traffic lights. 
New York, by contrast, appeared totally unaffected as an urban space and broadly indifferent. You wouldn’t have known there was a movement unless you walked onto the campuses or stumbled into one of the demonstrations. Of course, I was comparing apples and oranges. Hong Kong’s rage manifested as a scream of physical confrontations everywhere, but without a noticeably commensurate lifting in the political level of the participants. 
At any rate, despite my unspoken misgivings, it wasn’t hard to get caught up in the excitement of the New York campuses, where spectacular things certainly were happening. And Letwin wasn’t the only person talking about a momentous political shift—anyone with a long history on the left, and particularly Jewish leftists, all were saying similar things: Gaza had precipitated a generational crisis within liberal Zionism, the effects of which would be far ranging.
It has been striking since then to watch the decline of the street-based Palestine solidarity movement in Israel’s key supporter. The resistance has been bigger in countries that matter far less than America: Australia, Italy, the UK, for example. Yet it’s clear now that Palestine didn’t disappear as an issue, and possibly played out in the New York mayoral election in ways that were not so evident from afar. John Ganz, a left-wing writer based in New York, <a href="https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/thoughts-on-a-victory">writes in his Unpopular Front newsletter</a>:
“Israel’s place in American politics was more the unquestioned status quo than ideological, even for many Jews ... Then there was Gaza. Suddenly, all those activists didn’t seem so crazy after all. Maybe they had a point—or two. And so Mamdani’s views [that Israel ought to be a democratic state with equal rights for Palestinians] rapidly go from being an eccentric force in American politics to a central one. It wasn’t so much that the election was a referendum on Palestine, Israel, or, even less, the Jews, as some race baiters want us to believe, but that Mamdani now sounded reasonable and attached to reality, while the people who were defending Israel tooth and nail and calling everyone else antisemites and terrorists now sounded like the wild-eyed ideologues.”
That is, Palestine as a signal of political sanity. Perhaps even more than this, Mamdani’s stance might have become a signal to people that he was genuinely different from other politicians in other ways. “When pressured to temper his criticisms of Israel, Mamdani has barely flinched”, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-mamdani-era-begins">Eric Lach writes in the New Yorker</a>. “These qualities convinced many young voters, in particular, that he might have what it takes to follow through on his promises.”
While bread and butter issues appear to be the singular driving force of the campaign, Palestine figures here not as a background foreign policy issue irrelevant to running a city, but as a bellwether for political character. It not only played a role as a moral question that helped drive the young volunteer mobilisation but as an indication of political spine and integrity that pushed up Mamdani’s vote. 
After all, someone who can withstand the unending and vicious barrage of the Zionist movement surely has a shot at tackling a rental crisis, delivering free child care and buses, and taking two cents on the dollar in tax from incomes above $1 million—none of which are likely to be as ferociously denounced as the call for equality in Palestine. 
In this sense, “Palestine will free us all” suggests something akin to a revelation about the operations of capitalism and the nature of mainstream politics: Gaza shows that the rule of naked, brutal, unapologetic power is ubiquitous. The jettisoning of reason, the silencing of arguments and the resort to brute force are happening not only “over there”, but are mirrored in day-to-day establishment politics, and in the marginalisation of people speaking the truth in workplaces, campuses and the public sphere everywhere. 
Michael Letwin and others, then, might have been proven right, not only about New York’s spring being more than a seasonal change, but about how Palestine became central to even local politics, albeit in ways that many would not have predicted.

Ben Hillier

Did Palestine set New York free?

So this is “peace”. 
Seven days after the ceasefire came into effect, a family of 11 were blown up by an Israeli tank shell. On 19 October, Israel bombed a Gazan school, a makeshift coffee house and the area around Al-Ahli soccer club. The International Court of Justice has just confirmed that Israel is still forcibly starving people in Gaza by refusing to allow in enough aid. Israeli troops occupy 60 percent of Gaza, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has explicitly argued for soldiers to “shoot children and donkeys” on sight if they are deemed to be in the occupied area. This, they tell us, is peace. 
There can be no peace for Palestinians while Israel exists. Israel is an expansionist state committed to ethnic cleansing. The Gaza genocide is merely the latest—and particularly brutal—phase of annexations and forced displacement. Israel can do this with impunity because it is a crucial linchpin in Western domination of the Middle East and North Africa. 
In 2023, then US President Joe Biden repeated a line he first said in 1986: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one”. The Middle East and North African region is oil-rich, home to important trade routes and geopolitically vital. Without Israel, the US would have to maintain a significant—and unwelcome—military presence in the region to guarantee its interests. Instead, in Israel, it has a loyal ally that is well armed and belligerent. 
Israel has carried out a twofold process of ethnic cleansing since its creation in 1948. On the one hand, through intense, devastating wars that fundamentally alter the region’s balance of forces and geographic boundaries. The Gaza genocide has been one of these. Before, it was the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and others. 
These wars are coupled with a continuous strategy of annexation, imprisonment, displacement and periodic massacres. In the words of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, “No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land of Israel. A Jewish state in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning”. 
Ben-Gurion’s vision included all of occupied Palestine, as well as sections of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In its brutal 1967 war, Israeli forces took Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights at the same time as occupying the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East and West Jerusalem. 
Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continue to argue for this expansionist vision, and have used this war to expand further into Lebanese and Syrian territory. In January, Israel began a new invasion of the West Bank and has carried out the largest expulsions there since 1967. More than 40,000 people have so far been expelled in Operation Iron Wall. Israel sent snipers into Jenin refugee camp, conducted home raids and mass arrests, and carried out aerial strikes. The Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur al-Shams camps have been almost emptied. Hundreds of homes have been demolished, and the IDF has outlined a strategy to prevent destroyed roads and homes from being rebuilt. 
In late October, the Knesset passed a bill to annex the entirety of the West Bank, which even the Trump administration is not willing to support. But plenty in Israel do, which means Israeli encroachment in the West Bank could well accelerate in the near future. 
Our leaders talk of peace. In reality, we are witnessing the beginning of the brutality that is to come if the capitalists are allowed to blast their way through in the coming decades. 
Yet a different world is possible. The proof of this is every student who has protested, every grandparent arrested on terror charges to defend Palestine Action, and each of the Italian and Spanish workers who shut their countries down. We know that a radical workers’ movement can be rebuilt. The task of the resistance is to throw themselves into that project. We have to fight like hell with what we have, with a vision for a mass movement that can defeat imperialism and capitalism for good.

Jasmine Duff

The fight for Palestine continues as long as Israel and Western imperialism exist

While the grieving of Israelis has been a media spectacle over the past two years—revisited again and again each time Israeli hostages’ remains have returned to their families—the trauma of Palestinians now returning to their destroyed homes receives relatively little attention.
UNICEF estimates that over the past two years of Israel’s genocide, 28 children have been killed by the Israeli occupation forces every day on average. Let that sink in: a classroom of kids murdered each day.
You won’t hear much about the tens of thousands of grieving Palestinian families in the corporate media. Yet you will hear, again and again, about Israeli trauma, even as Palestinians continued to be killed in their dozens.
US President Donald Trump, addressing the Israeli Knesset on 13 October, claimed that the ceasefire deal he brokered will open a new “golden age” for the Middle East and end some 3,000 years of conflict. It was laughable.
Yet a largely uncritical Western media seriously pondered whether the Trump administration—which, like the Biden administration before it, provided the finance and weaponry to Israel as it carried out genocide—really was some great peacemaker.
The reality for Palestinians, however, is that the war is far from over. 
Israel continues to occupy 53 percent of Gaza, after withdrawing behind an invisible “yellow line”, and continues to prevent vital aid and recovery equipment from entering Gaza. In the first week of the so-called ceasefire, the Israeli army committed 80 violations, killing 97 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. 
Imagine if it had been 97 Israelis killed. There would be no handwringing about the ceasefire holding. It would be wall-to-wall condemnations of Hamas and justifications for Israel to continue the genocide. In the Western media, Palestinian lives don’t matter.
Israel has returned the remains of 1,718 living and 150 deceased Palestinians from Gaza, along with 250 Palestinian political prisoners. However, 154 of these political prisoners were immediately deported to Egypt by Israel, according to Hamas, denying them reunification with their families. 
According to the director of Gaza’s Health Ministry, Dr Munir al-Bursh, documents that accompanied 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians returned to Gaza reveal that they were held in the notorious Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert. According to photos and testimonies <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/23/whistleblowers-allege-widespread-abuses-at-israeli-detention-camp-sde-teiman">published in the Guardian</a> last year, Palestinian detainees at Sde Teiman were held in cages, blindfolded and handcuffed, shackled to hospital beds and forced to wear nappies. 
On 20 October, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/20/mutilated-bodies-palestinians-held-notorious-israeli-jail-gaza-officials">the Guardian reported</a> that several of the recently returned victims were blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs. In one photo, a rope is fastened around a man’s neck. No identification accompanied the victims’ bodies, adding to their families’ grief and trauma.
Imagine for a moment the media reporting if Israeli hostages had been returned like this. The images should have provoked the kind of outrage generated by the revelations of torture by US troops of prisoners at <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/abu-ghraib-twenty-years-on">Abu Ghraib prison</a> in Baghdad in 2004. Yet these crimes received little reporting.
The reunification of 1,718 Palestinian detainees with their families in Gaza was news for a day. Many told their families of brutal treatment in Israeli prisons, including beatings and torture. But those are the “lucky” ones. Some 9,000 West Bank Palestinians remain in Israeli custody, having been kidnapped and transferred to Israel in breach of international law. More than 3,500 are “administrative detainees”, who have never been charged with any crime, while 2,763 are deemed “unlawful combatants” by the Israeli military, according to <a href="https://hamoked.org/prisoners-charts.php">Israel Prison Service data</a>.
Their families’ separation from loved ones—in many cases for years—and their encirclement and harassment by an increasingly aggressive and violent settler movement, is not considered worthy of the media attention given to Israeli families whose loved ones were taken hostage on 7 October.
American journalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times, is the latest to fall foul of the conservative media establishment. After being scheduled to address Australia’s National Press Club on 20 October, Hedges was informed that the event was cancelled. Everyone knows why: Hedges reports the truth, and the truth is embarrassing to Israel, Australia, and the corporate media.
In a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/chris-hedges-national-press-club/105913174">Late Night Live interview</a>, the ABC’s David Marr took Hedges to task for accepting an invitation from the Australian Friends of Palestine Association to deliver the annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture, “Requiem for Gaza”. He claimed Hedges had compromised his credibility as a journalist by accepting such an invitation. 
This isn’t just a disgraceful slur against Hedges, but a racist attack on the Palestinians. If reporting the truth about what they face under the boot of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide is a mark against any reporter, the insinuation is that Palestinian oppression itself is some lie. In the Said Memorial Lecture, Hedges hit back:
 “October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalisation and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.
“The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state.”
The obfuscation and lies of Western politicians and their media mouthpieces have enabled and emboldened Israel, Hedges argued:
“The funding and arming of Israel by the US and European nations, as it carries out genocide, has imploded the post-World War Two international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilisation.”
This loss of credibility—the exposure of the hypocrisy of the capitalists and their institutions—is perhaps the greatest achievement of our solidarity movement over the past two years. It should give us the strength to continue the fight for Palestine.
Nick Everett is the secretary of Friends of Palestine WA.

Nick Everett

Racist dehumanisation of Palestinians continues

Hundreds of thousands of workers and students across Spain walked out of workplaces and schools on 15 October in opposition to the genocide in Gaza. Organised by the main trade union federations, student organisations and pro-Palestine groups, more than 200 full or partial strikes, pickets, rallies and demonstrations took place throughout the day, rejecting the “peace deal” brokered by US President Donald Trump and demanding that the Spanish government sever ties with Israel.
The largest strikes took place in the autonomous northern region of the Basque Country, where 40 percent of public-school teachers and 5.3 percent of healthcare workers went on strike. Due to work stoppages, public transport across the region was paralysed in the early hours of the morning. In Bilbao, an estimated 15,000 people marched through the city, staging mass sit-ins outside companies denounced as complicit with Israel, including clothes retailer Zara and Banco Sabadell. In Vitoria-Gasteiz (the capital), 25,000 people marched out of a population of 250,000.
Significant strikes were also held in other autonomous regions. 
In Zaragoza (capital of the northeastern Aragón region), hundreds of healthcare workers joined students who walked out of the University Clinical Hospital, holding a joint worker-student rally in the Plaza de Aragón. In Galicia (north-west), nearly 9 percent of workers in the legal sector and around 2 percent in the general administration, education and healthcare sectors went on strike. The Balearic islands off the eastern coast reported 563 teachers on strike—around 4 percent of the total.
Protests and pickets took place in more than 40 cities throughout the day, including Léon, Logroño, Vigo, Córdoba, Málaga, Murcia, Valencia, Seville and regional centres with little living memory of struggle. In Pamplona (capital of the northern Navarre region), around 10,000 joined a midday march headed by a tractor draped in the Palestinian flag.
Barcelona saw the most concerted efforts by young people to disrupt economic activity through pickets. In the morning, student-led contingents of thousands blockaded the central square of Plaça Universitat, the Gran Via central business district and key transport hubs, such as the main logistics area in the city, Zona Franca, and the port of Barcelona (where the boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla departed in September).
The Catalan Transport Service reported that road closures and bottlenecks persisted as spontaneous protests of young people broke out throughout the rest of the day. The University of Barcelona suspended all academic activities due to “absenteeism”. In the evening, an estimated 30,000 people took to the streets, intense clashes breaking out between youths and Catalan riot police.
In Madrid, pickets of students and workers sprouted across the city at strategic locations, such as metro stations, Airbus factories and the Telefónica headquarters. Huge numbers of university and high school students walked out of their classes. More than 25,000 predominantly young workers and students flooded Puerta del Sol under the slogans “Stop everything to stop the genocide” and “Peace with genociders is a farce”.
Strike action by workers represents a significant step forward for the Palestine movement because it offers a glimpse of the immense potential power that workers can wield—the power to halt production and stop the flow of profits to the capitalist ruling class. 
Although these were partial work stoppages by a significant minority of workers rather than a concerted national shutdown, the predominance of students and young workers in the mobilisations reflects deep and ongoing opposition among these social layers to the genocide and the complicity of Spain’s centre-left Socialist Party-Sumar government. Everywhere, students and young workers were at the forefront of the actions: the first in the streets, taking over railways and roads, shutting down schools and universities. 
“The Spanish government has tried since the beginning of the genocide to have a pro-Palestine public position, but one that would not have any practical consequences against the rules of capitalism, of which they are organically part”, Ánxel Testas of Anticapitalistas, the largest Marxist organisation in the Spanish state, told Red Flag. 
This has included recognising Palestinian statehood and announcing a largely symbolic arms embargo on Israel, which leaves the bulk of Spain’s military collaboration with the Zionist state untouched, permits ongoing contracts with the Israeli defence industry and establishes no inspection mechanism for Israeli vessels docking in Spanish ports. 
Since October 2023, the Spanish government has purchased more than €1 billion worth of arms from Israel; between June and August this year, the Spanish government sold arms to Israel worth at least €1 million. 
The call for a national day of strikes and demonstrations began in early October, when an estimated 2 million people mobilised across the country in four days of unceasing demonstrations. Beginning in response to Israel’s attacks on the Global Sumud Flotilla, the massive pressure from below, combined with the explosive 3 October general strike across Italy, forced the major trade union federations to call for work stoppages.
The Workers Commissions (CCOO) linked to Podemos and Sumar, and the social-democratic General Union of Workers (UGT), with nearly a million members each, called for two-hour work stoppages in each shift, covering morning, afternoon and night. 
The anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Labour (CGT), with around 100,000 members, called a 24-hour general strike across all sectors and territories. In the Basque Country, the pro-separatist trade unions, including LAB, ELA, Etxalde and HIRU, called for three-hour stoppages and demonstrations in the main cities.
The Student Union (Sindicato de Estudiantes), various youth organisations, pro-Palestine groups and the radical left joined in the calls for a general strike, agitating for a student strike in high schools and universities, alongside joint pickets with striking workers.
“The call for a general strike on 15 October took place at a time of the movement’s rise and reflects both the immense pressure exerted by the movement and, paradoxically, an attempt at demobilisation”, explained Ánxel. “The majority unions [CCOO and UGT] had no intention that the partial stoppages they called would have force because the trade union leaders hoped a ceasefire deal would take the wind out of the sails of the movement. The minority unions, including the CGT, are too weak to achieve a successful general strike alone.
“Although it is true that the rank and file are to the left of their leaderships and eager to mobilise on the Palestinian question, there is no situation of effective overflow from below as in Italy, nor does the fact that the big unions call for an effective mobilisation of the workers. The leaderships of these unions sought to prevent what happened in Italy.”
With the notable exception of the Basque Country, where a more combative left has greater roots in workplaces and unions, Ánxel said, “the low participation in the strikes elsewhere is a clear indication that without strength in the workplaces the movement is very fragile when the peak moments of mobilisation pass”.
Ánxel said that this illustrates the need to build a revolutionary socialist movement with roots among workers and students that can lead people in a radical direction and ultimately overthrow the entire capitalist system.
“Although the ceasefire may slow down the size of the mobilisations, it is necessary to organise and educate the entire activist vanguard that has been born out of these mobilisations with internationalist and socialist politics”, he said. “It must become the engine of growth for both revolutionary and movement organisations to prepare for the coming phases in the ongoing struggle to liberate Palestine.”

Robert Narai

‘Peace with genociders is a farce’: students and workers strike across Spain

For going on 50 years, the left and workers’ movement has been in retreat. There have been important upsurges and small victories, but there has not been a revival of working-class power and radical politics equivalent to that of the 1960s and ’70s in the decades since. Many of the 1960s radicals moved to the right and were absorbed into the system, whether via academia, the media, NGOs or mainstream politics, while countless others have quietly given up on the hope of radical social transformation. The governments and institutions that briefly seemed vulnerable to challenge by mass movements have reasserted their dominance, to terrible effect.
This shift has been reflected at an ideological level. As the possibility of radical change has retreated, so too has confidence in the ideas that underpin it. What was self-evident in the 1960s and ’70s—that the working class has the power to transform society and solidarity is possible and powerful—today seems implausible and, to some, like nothing more than apologetics for those who are part of the problem. Unsurprisingly, then, contemporary progressive sensibility is often characterised by a sense of powerlessness, scepticism and suspicion towards attempts at solidarity, and bitterness at the world’s injustices rather than a confidence they can be challenged and changed. 
This is reflected in a number of what have come to be seen as truisms among progressives in the West. These include that movements against oppression are legitimate only if they are led by the oppressed and informed by “lived experience”; that people who don’t experience oppression are inherently privileged and therefore cannot be reliable allies; that the integrity of movements depends on “centring” or “elevating” the right voices; and that expressions of solidarity are at best paternalistic and at worst do more to perpetuate oppression than ameliorate it. From suffering, in other words, comes truth, and those who don’t suffer are part of the problem. 
In an article written at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, British writer Sam Kriss highlights the paralysing nature of this approach, characterising the movement leaders’ contradictory commandments to would-be supporters this way:
“DO the important work of interrogating your own biases and prejudices. DON’T obsess over your white guilt—this isn’t about you! 
“DO use your white privilege as a shield by standing between black folx and the police. DON’T stand at the front of marches—it’s time for you to take a back seat. 
“DO speak out against racism—never expect activists of colour to always perform the emotional labour. DON’T crowd the conversation with your voice—shut up, stay in your lane. 
“DO educate your white community by providing an example of white allyship. DON’T post selfies from a protest—our struggle isn’t a photo-op.”
There is on the one hand an acknowledgement that wider support is needed—after all, no oppressed group other than the working class is capable of liberating itself—but at the same time a dogged insistence that such support is insincere or a threat. 
The movement in solidarity with Palestine, which has been one of the most prolonged and widespread in recent history, blows all of this nonsense out of the water. 
It has overwhelmingly not been led by those with lived experience of Israel’s genocide, and nor has it been strongest where Palestinians are the most concentrated. 
Palestinians in Gaza have understandably been focused on survival rather than taking responsibility for an international protest movement. But it is not as though the countries that have mobilised the most for Palestine are countries with a large or particularly well-organised Palestinian populations. Of the ten countries which have had the most “large-scale” protests for Palestine since October 2023 according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, only one—Yemen—is even in the Middle East. Australia is second, and the rest are in Europe. 
The country that organised a historic general strike in support of Palestine—Italy—does not have a particularly large Palestinian population (0.002 percent of the population), and nor does Spain, where the strike has now spread. Likewise, the many hundreds of people involved in the various flotillas to Gaza, which provided an important focal point for the movement, were drawn from all over the world. 
The movement’s success therefore cannot be explained by reference to the prevalence of those with lived experience, although undoubtedly many Palestinians have been involved. Millions, if not tens of millions, of people with no direct experience of Israel’s violence have mobilised for Gaza—they’ve given up their weekends, foregone pay and, in some cases, risked their jobs and freedom to make a stand. They have decidedly not stayed in their “lane” or taken a “back seat”. 
Needless to say, this has not been to the detriment of the Palestinian cause. There has been no unnecessary burden of emotional labour placed on Palestinians, it has not crowded out their voices and it has not made the struggle about white people. Instead, it has helped bring the issue of Palestine to the fore everywhere, has made Western government military and political support for Israel more difficult and it has solidified a new generation behind the Palestinian struggle. 
The movement also demonstrates in living colour the underlying premise of solidarity: that an attack on one is an attack on all. Of course, the scale of the horror inflicted on Gaza is a major factor compelling people to act. But so too is a recognition that we all face a common enemy: the same governments lining up to cheer on Israel impose austerity and wage cuts at home. And their willingness to accept atrocities in Gaza when it is politically expedient indicate a degree of callousness that can just as readily be applied domestically. Solidarity is not and has never been about “taking over” struggles. It is about identifying and fighting a common enemy.
Much more than insights gleaned from lived experience then, the movement’s strengths have been drawn from the political culture and traditions that already existed among workers in different parts of the world: the level of union organisation, the political history of the working class, the degree of repression faced and the size and nature of the political organisations on the ground. 
In other words, political consciousness and organisation, rather than personal experience, have proved decisive to building movements that can make an impact. In Italy, the existence of more radical unions independent of the established and conservative union leadership was a key factor in bringing about the momentous and historic general strike in support of Palestine, which has now spread elsewhere in Europe. Here in Australia, the presence of Socialist Alternative clubs on a critical mass of university campuses enabled the Gaza solidarity encampment initiative at the University of Sydney to become a national phenomenon and, later, mass student meetings in support of Palestine. As did the existence of off-campus campaign collectives committed to regular and continued street demonstrations, which have proved important in past campaigns. 
These organisations, and the political activists who constitute them, don’t all exist for the sole purpose of liberating Palestine. But they were nevertheless able to mobilise and make an impact when needed. The strength and organisation of our side, therefore, are crucial to liberating the oppressed and resisting injustice whenever and wherever it emerges.
Of course, the political content of these traditions and organisations matters. Slavish loyalty to the Labor Party on the part of the mainstream union movement here meant the pro-Palestine mobilisations weren’t as strong or as workplace-based as they had the potential to be. On the other hand, this enabled the sort of smaller political forces that weren’t going to be placated by the government’s empty gestures—most importantly its bleating about recognising a Palestinian state once Israel had made it patently unviable—to wield more influence, which was positive. 
Revealingly, those subscribing most strongly to the idea that movements are best led by those affected (Hamas-aligned Palestinians in Gaza) tended to promote the most self-defeating positions, including illusions in the “axis of resistance” (which did precious little to actually resist the genocide) and that the Palestinians were likely to emerge stronger from the supposed tactical masterstroke that was Hamas’ 7 October attack (self-evidently untrue). This is in effect a continuation of the sort of thinking that has long proved disastrous to the Palestinian cause: that fellow Arabs—whether they’re the king of Jordan or a textile worker—will act to liberate the Palestinians. Illusions in solidarity around an Arab identity, rather than a class one, have let down the Palestinian movement repeatedly, from the Black September 1970, when the Jordanian regime drove the Palestine Liberation Organisation out of the country, to the complete inaction in the face of genocide today. 
The flip side of this argument—that privilege creates a conscious or unconscious bias towards the oppressor rather than the oppressed—is likewise not borne out by events. In the US, it has ironically been Jews who have disproportionately been at the forefront of Palestine solidarity actions—the very people in whose name Israel’s war has ostensibly been waged. Jewish Voice for Peace, for example, has organised more than 1,000 protest actions in the US and doubled its dues-paying membership since the genocide began. 
Supposed “privilege” in this particular case is the very thing that has politicised a new generation, understandably horrified at their religion being invoked to justify genocide. This again contradicts a core tenet of modern progressivism: that the division is between the oppressed—whose suffering automatically endows them with unique political insights that must be deferred to—and the non-oppressed, whose privilege automatically ties them into the status quo and the supposed benefits it brings them. 
If we are serious about changing the world and ending oppression, we need to learn from this experience and draw the appropriate conclusions about what actually makes a successful movement, not what makes us feel morally superior or momentarily powerful in a society that systematically disempowers us. 
Part of that is recognising that a perfect level of consciousness about oppression is not actually a precondition for resistance. A far-reaching and nuanced understanding of oppression is of course desirable, but what really makes a difference is having a sense of what side you are on, and our side being organised. 
The millions of people around the world who have marched for Palestine are not experts on the political dynamics or history of Gaza. What sets them apart is their refusal to look away when genocide is going on with Western backing, to keep coming out week after week, to not be intimidated by disingenuous denunciations of antisemitism and their willingness to see Palestinians as fellow human beings, not nameless, faceless terrorism sympathisers, as they have long been portrayed.
The politics on our side will not always be perfect, but this doesn’t mean successful movements can’t or shouldn’t be built. The progressive obsession with policing the ideas, language and actions of people attempting to show solidarity, however imperfectly, gets us nowhere. We need to focus our fire on the powerful: the governments and bosses who run the world. We need to understand what makes them tick, and how they can be stopped.
For all its strengths, the Palestine solidarity movement did not stop Israel’s genocide. To achieve that would have taken a threat to the imperial order and capitalist system on a much more significant scale. But the awesome gains it did make—opening the eyes of a new generation to the brutality and hypocrisy of Western imperial power, discrediting some important tenets of ruling-class ideology and making it clear that, although weakened, our side of politics still has the potential to mobilise and resist—are profoundly important. And, like all struggles whether they win or lose, the movement has been a testing ground for ideas and organisations, with important lessons to teach us. They are lessons we need to learn if we want to have a better chance of winning next time.

Students for Palestine hold first national conference

‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Palestine after the ceasefire

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

Labor’s student clubs and Palestine activism

Gaza Tribunal: The genocide continues

Did Palestine set New York free?

The fight for Palestine continues as long as Israel and Western imperialism exist

Racist dehumanisation of Palestinians continues

‘Peace with genociders is a farce’: students and workers strike across Spain

How the Palestine solidarity movement discredits identity politics

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