Chris Minns’ protest ban has the premise that preventing the murder of Jews in Sydney means consenting to the murder of Palestinians in Gaza. It is not just authoritarian: it is breathtakingly racist and must be resisted, writes Nick Riemer.
One week out from the evil antisemitic attack at Bondi, NSW premier Chris Minns has decided that protesters opposing the genocide in Gaza have Jewish people’s blood on their hands.
Given the gravity and horror of the Bondi crimes, Minns’ responsibility to carefully identify the causes and act on them could not be more serious. There is no shortage of possible angles: if he believed that the terrorists’ crimes at Bondi were facilitated by the broader social climate, he could have named influential antisemitic individuals and highlighted recent antisemitic actions.
Yet neither Neo-Nazis’ recent blood-chilling pop-up protest outside state parliament, nor the spate of explicitly racist far-right marches in Sydney with their odious speakers even rated a mention.
Minns could have laid the stress on the manifest shortcomings of police and security agencies. If he was honest, he could even have invoked some of the structural drivers of jihadist terrorism: decades of Western interference in the Middle East and state-sponsored Islamophobia in places like Australia, including since October 7, 2023 – factors which obviously do not excuse the Akrams’ abhorrent crimes, but are plausibly part of the explanation for them.
Open season on peace protestors
Instead, Minns preferred to declare open season on a broad-based movement for peace and justice in which many Jewish people themselves have prominently participated.
For the NSW premier, a top priority in responding to the Bondi massacre was to make sure that, for the moment at least, there could be no more peace marches in Sydney – or marches of any kind, on any issue. His proposals should make the blood run cold.
Over the last two years, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in NSW have demonstrated behind the banner ‘Stop the war on Gaza. Free Palestine’ or, on August 3 this year, ‘March for humanity. Save Gaza’. They have held countless home-made placards bearing humanitarian slogans like ‘Palestinian lives matter’ or the pleas ‘Ceasefire now!’ or ‘Stop killing kids’.
I have been one of these protesters, on multiple occasions. We have also recently explicitly marched against the antisemitic far-right. Minns sees people like me – people calling for peace and justice for all – as deserving the strongest retaliation.
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Assault on basic democratic rights, media silent
The dangers of Minns’ assault on basic democratic rights have been exhaustively analysed everywhere except in the mainstream media. ‘Here’s to reason,’ the Sydney Morning Herald proclaims in its latest marketing campaign.
Not once has the masthead expressed reservations about a wildly irrational and defamatory witch-hunt against peaceful anti-genocide protesters, which will do nothing to achieve its stated goals of ensuring Jewish safety or community cohesion. The Herald and the rest of the kakistocracy that oversee politics in NSW are in lockstep with Minns’ plans.
Minns proposes to ban protest marches for up to three months across whole tracts of NSW. The premise of the ban is the scurrilous claim that public opposition to the genocide of Palestinians is intrinsically a threat to Jewish safety and must therefore be obstructed.
This position has a clear corollary: the genocide itself should be allowed to run its course unopposed. Preventing another Bondi, for the premier of NSW, requires allowing the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. The racism is monstrous, sickening.
Four days after the attack, at the joint launch of the federal-state support package for Bondi victims’ families, Minns said that the ‘attack has caused unimaginable pain for victims, families and the Jewish community, and it has shaken our entire state.’ Who could disagree? ‘Our responsibility,’ he continued, ‘is to stand alongside people in their grief, provide real support, and help the community recover, not just in the days ahead, but for as long as it takes.…I urge anyone who is struggling or needs help to reach out. Support is available, and we want people to use it.” This measure is a model of the stance governments should adopt to their communities.
But it has a vicious racist flip side.
Over two years into the Gazan genocide, nothing remotely like a support package has once been offered to the hundreds of Palestinians in Sydney whose Gazan relatives have been murdered, dispossessed, mutilated and starved by Israel with the aid of NSW government and business.
Minns has not offered them a shred of help, not even caring words, only persecution and vilification.
Last Friday, Israel killed six people at a shelter for displaced people in Gaza. At the same time, babies continued freezing to death because of its ongoing blockade on humanitarian aid. For Minns, these horrors can just go on, since peacefully opposing them, he claims, ‘unleash[es] forces in our community that are not being contained’.
Jewish safety requires suppressing the most basic moral claim one can imagine: the proposition that killing people en masse, because of who they are, is wrong.
So we are told to be silent while Palestinians are murdered in Gaza.
That is the price for preventing the same thing being done to Jewish people in Sydney.
Not antisemitic
For all the violence of this transaction, Minns’ statement was right about one thing: the Gaza protests really have unleashed forces that can’t be contained. But these forces are not, as Minns imagines, virulent and deadly Jew-hatred. On the contrary, they are the calls for justice, peace, and an end to Australia’s complicity with Israeli crimes.
These demands have been articulated by the most sustained and powerful left-wing street movement we have seen. The strength and longevity of its demands pose a frontal challenge to Minns’ politics.
They challenge his long-term loyalty to the apartheid state of Israel. They challenge his commitment to the deadly NSW arms industry, which is directly implicated in Israel’s attacks on Gaza (Minns was, he said, ‘proud’ and ‘delighted’ to welcome the recent Indo-Pacific weapons exposition to Sydney). Most deeply, perhaps, they challenge his obvious authoritarianism, which the protest movement has repeatedly humiliated, most spectacularly in the Harbour Bridge march in August.
It goes without saying that neither Minns nor any of the others blaming Palestine protesters for Bondi has ever been to a Palestine march.
They have no inkling of what they are like. Jennifer Westacott, the Chancellor of WSU and former chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, claimed on Saturday that the weekly protests hosted ‘signs that called for Jewish Australians to be harmed – actually killed’.
The misrepresentation is unconscionable.
In reality, signs held at rallies held messages like ‘Healthcare not warfare’, ‘Stop supporting genocide in Gaza. Nothing justifies genocide’ or ‘Stop Arming Israel’. Others said ‘Boycott Apartheid Israel. Free Palestine’, ‘Feed Gaza Now’.
Another sign, accompanied by a photo of an emaciated, starving child, read ‘This is not ok. Sanctions now!’. Children were a recurrent theme: ‘I nurse my son. Gaza’s mothers bury theirs’; ‘All children matter’; ‘Israel has created more child amputees in Gaza than in world history. Labor…stop your two-way arms deal with Israel’.
As even a cursory scan of the numerous publicly available photos from the demonstrations will confirm, these signs expressed the overwhelming tenor of the protests from the very first day.
Participants could not have been clearer about the universalism of their politics: ‘I support Palestine because I believe in basic human rights’, said one sign carried by women in hijabs at a Sydney protest. ‘Do you support violent dispossession of me and my family?’, asked another, implying that no one deserves the treatment being meted out to Gazans.
It’s about humanity
The clear message was that, as a different placard stated, ‘It’s not about religion, it’s about humanity’ – or, in the words of another, ‘No one is free when others are oppressed’.
Many placards were about respect for international law and the UN. Some challenged wider government policy, for instance about AUKUS, US bases and arms sales. Most did not even mention Israel. Far from Minns’ paranoid fantasy of a call to jihad, the slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ was cheek by jowl with images of hearts or doves with an olive branch.
The diversity of the movement was celebrated: ‘Samoans for Gaza,’ ‘Bourgeois Anglos for Palestine,’ ‘Aboriginals for Gaza’, ‘Jews against the Occupation’.
A dangerous bias
Minns and Westacott think that these placards are vitiated by a minuscule – minuscule – number of others which obviously – obviously – do not express the politics of the marches. Their bias and selectivity would be laughable were they not so dangerous.
They also think these sentiments threaten social cohesion. Minns says that ‘we need a summer of calm and togetherness, not division.’ He means that we need to be gagged into submission by the most severe authoritarian crackdown we have seen for generations, ‘relaxed and comfortable’ under the genocidal aegis of his politics.
As Michael Bradley wrote in Crikey last week, the political instrumentalisation of the Bondi tragedy, well before the victims’ relatives could even properly grieve, has been obscene. In a less ugly world, the bereaved could mourn their dead without their grief being weaponised.
But if we want to limit politicians’ freedom to use tragedy for their own ends, we have no choice but to respond. Minns’ public comments have made it clear that he regrets the inconvenience of constitutional limitations on his power to ban protest.
For him, freedom of speech and the right to protest are trivialities. They are to be damned. But, as over 1100 people have now written in emails to state MPs, ‘demonstrations and marches are not an optional extra in a democracy: a state that bans protest, even temporarily, suspends its democratic character.’ ‘The proposal to do so,’ the letter continues, ‘is deeply alarming and should send shivers down our spine.’ This, it is impossible not to think, is what it feels like as the walls start closing in.
Defenders of civil liberties must continue to mobilise against genocide and racism regardless of attempts to stifle us. In the wake of last week’s massacre, with fifteen innocent people murdered celebrating a Jewish holiday, dozens of others injured and a whole community terrorised, the premier cannot be allowed to silence calls for peace and justice, and for an end to race-hate in all its ugly guises,
whether at Bondi, in Gaza or anywhere else.
Mary Kostakidis. Forced to argue against Israel’s war in an Australian court