Oz establishment cracks down on Gaza protestors

Muhammad Amin

Opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza are facing a flood anti-Palestinian racism in a bid to shut up their protests as the killing continues.

The Western establishment has given a green light to the genocide, despite warnings it could lead to war crimes charges being brought against institutional and political leaders, and the minions are determined to ensure it continues as long as needed.

Now, Zionists in Australia are waging lawfare against opposing voices, hitting them with disciplinary processes at work and silencing campaigns in public and on social media.

Anyone daring to stand up against the genocide is targeted as advocating hate speech or being “rape apologists” if they dare to stand up against the genocide, even as the Gaza death toll surpasses 38,919.

Apartheid Israel is killing on average a child every ten minutes, but Palestinians are not allowed to express their outrage. Instead, the establishment is trying to keep the focus on Israel’s losses on October 7.

That one day is supposedly more important than 288 days of murder and genocide.

It’s across the board – teachers, students, doctors, nurses, academics, public servants, lawyers, journalists, artists, food and hospitality workers, protesters and politicians – are all being targeted at a frenzied pace in western society.

Australian journalist Randa Abdel-Fattah says in Middle East Eye the ability of the Palestinian movement to criticise and resist Zionism is the target of the lawfare as individuals’ livelihoods and mental health are destroyed.

She accuses institutions, media outlets and employers of being complicit in the silencing campaign.

It harks back to the days of 1950s McCarthyism that choked the US for nearly a decade when anyone accused of communism had their lives destroyed and their reputations ruined.

Abdel-Fattah says she “and Special Broadcasting Service veteran journalist, Mary Kostakidis, were defamed as “7 October deniers” and rape apologists, and as being on a par with Holocaust deniers.

“A week later, the Zionist Federation of Australia announced it had lodged a complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) against Kostakidis, alleging racial vilification for her social media posts on Gaza.

“On 11 July, Australian-Palestinian activist and businessman Hash Tayeh was notified of arrest for allegedly inciting hatred of Jewish people over protest chants including “all Zionists are terrorists” and other statements equating Zionism with terrorism.”

Australian-Palestinian Sara Saleh, employed as legal and research adviser to the AHRC’s president has also been subjected to a public vilification campaign. She has faced months of anti-Palestinian racism and marginalisation at the commission.

And the State Library of Victoria has cancelled a series of writing workshops by Arab and Muslim poet Omar Sakr, Jinghua Qian, Alison Evans and Ariel Slamet Ries over their pro-Palestinian social media posts.

“Despite pro-Palestine voices explicitly critiquing and targeting Zionist ideology and practice in clear distinction to Judaism and Jewish identity, and despite standing alongside anti-Zionist Jews, we are accused of antisemitism,” Abdel-Fattah says.

She adds: “Zionism is not a religious, racial, ethnic or cultural identity. It is a political doctrine that a member of any culture, religion, race or ethnic category can subscribe to.

Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. Jews and Judaism existed for thousands of years before Zionism. These are not controversial contentions. They are borne out by almost a century of academic scholarship and have been adopted by anti-Zionist Jewish scholars, lawyers, human rights organisations and clerics.”

And you don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist, she points out. US President Joe Biden is an Irish-American Catholic and a self-professed Zionist. Australia’s former prime minister, Scott Morrison, is an evangelical Christian and a Zionist. Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, is an Australian-Malay Christian and a Zionist.

Abdel-Fattah says the irony is Zionism is inherently racist because it denies Palestinians the right to self-determination, or even simply to live free of genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism and domination.

“To posit Zionism as a religious or ethnic identity is like saying white supremacy, Marxism, socialism or settler colonialism are all categories of identity. The perverse logic we are being asked to indulge is essentially this: Zionism equals Judaism therefore a white Christian Zionist is a protected cultural identity category.”

That is, in itself, inherently racist.

Indulging the notion that the ideology of Zionism is a protected cultural identity sets a precedent that would be absurd if it were not so dangerous.

“Further, if Zionism is a protected cultural identity, what does this mean for anti-Zionist Jews? And what is Zionism from the standpoint of its victims, as Edward Said famously said?

“What does it mean for Palestinians whose lives are marked by dispossession, exile, refugee camps, land theft and now, as I write, genocide explicitly enacted in the name of Zionism,” she asks.

Even as the world’s leading medical journal, Lancet, warns the Gaza genocide has plausibly already caused about 186,000, governments, institutions and mainstream media are prepared to effectively destroy anything  getting in the way of exceptionalising Zionism and Israel to protect them from criticism.

They are at odds with an outright public majority sickened by months of unending and unanswered massacres. Ordinary people in increasing numbers are daring to question Israel’s actions and the Zionist ideology that underpins it.

That is why major institutions like universities and employers discipline and sack Israel’s critics.

Abdel-Fattah says they will be “held to account for their complicity in the political suppression of our collective protest against crimes against humanity.”