As Victoria Police Targets Protesters, Palestinian Message Rings True: An Interview with WACA’s Sam Castro

Labor leaders jumped to attention last October, as they ardently spruiked the falsehood about Israel and its right to defend itself, while the Netanyahu government was actually perpetrating a wholesale slaughter and starvation project upon the 2.3 million Palestinian civilians of the walled-in Gaza Strip.

Unsurprisingly, large sections of the public have been out on the streets protesting the Gaza genocide, the worst atrocity since World War II. And Albanese, Wong, Minns and Allan, among other key Labor players have all been demonising antigenocide demonstrators as if they were terrorists.

However, when it comes to matching the fighting words that the prime minister has been tossing in the direction of protesters who don’t appreciate his genocide complicity, it’s only been Victoria police that’s actually reacted to the point of getting stuck in to the pro-Palestinian agitators.

As has been reported, at the 9 June Naarm weekly rally for Palestine, a number of Victoria police officers set upon a couple dozen antigenocide protesters with pepper spray in what appears to have been an unprovoked attack that made the rally an unsafe space for the first time in 35 weeks.

But according to Sam Castro, a founder of Whistleblowers, Activists and Communities Alliance (WACA), Victoria police suddenly whipping out the pepper spray, applying force and turning aggressive is all just part of the playbook it’s been applying since 9/11.

Sydney Criminal Lawyers spoke to WACA founder and volunteer Sam Castro about the current use of force on the part of Victoria police not being a first, but what is a first is the sustained nature of the mobilisations for Palestine, which is set to damage Israel’s reputation to the point of no return.

Sam, direct protest actions are key to what WACA does, and there’s been a lot of talk about crackdowns on protests over recent years across this continent, while of late, disparaging pro-Palestine antigenocide protesters has become something of a federal sport.

Much of the comments made by the PM in regard to protests tend to show his preoccupation with those sitting out the front of his electoral office in Sydney’s Marrickville, however the actual physical on-the-street crackdown has occurred in Naarm-Melbourne.

So, what has been happening in regard to the way the authorities are reacting to protest in general on the streets of Naarm these days? Has there been a crackdown? And has Victoria police been targeted in its actions?

The crackdown on activist groups engaging in effective direct action has been going on since 2014, when we held an event over ten days called Disrupt.

It was the first time our lawyers had seen a taskforce assigned, like it was to WACA, in an attempt to intimidate and arrest us, as well as gather information on us.

So, WACA members have a long history in believing the community have a right to lead and intervene when the government refuses to.

Direct action is a important tactic. It’s not the only tactic, but it should be part of a strategy to press all levers, and it is definitely, the type of action that WACA has engaged in for 14 years.

This has included climbing buildings, climbing the Arts Centre spire and going into parliament and supergluing in Canberra.

Of course, we were the group who went in to watch the initial attempt by a previous state government, the Baillieu government, to pass summary offence clauses that would severely curtail the rights of protest and activism in Victoria.

Dan Andrews came to power saying that he would repeal those laws because they were an infringement on our civil liberties and our right to protest, and to his credit, he did do that in his first year in office.

But then we have seen Labor state and federal governments increasingly giving power not just to state police but also federal police and intelligence agencies to really turn the tools of counterterrorism onto effective organising and activism across the country.

And because WACA has been active around the militarisation of refugee policy and onshore and offshore detention, climate and corporate environmental vandalism and, of course, militarism, we see these things intimately linked in the current struggles.

We have seen the police and counterterrorism go after groups like WACA, Frontline Action on Coal and Blockade Australia, as well as the refugee movement in general.

So, the escalation of police violence began many years ago, and it continued to escalate for groups like WACA. So, for members of WACA that have been around for a while, the current escalation is not surprising.

The current escalation is a playbook that they have been rolling out ever since 9/11 – since the antiglobalisation movement began – and they are usually targeted at the groups who are, as one AFP officer put to me, “social contagions”.

They also try to throw as many charges as they can at effective groups, so that some of them will stick. Then they can apply good behaviour bonds and bail conditions to prevent key organisers participating in future actions.

We have also seen a general escalation across all protest movements, with the use of move-on laws and designated areas and zones, as a way to violate people’s rights to attend, to have face coverings and to have goggles to protect themselves from pepper spray.

Then, of course, we’ve seen the escalation of budgets, the use of force and the use of chemical weapons, which has been going on for a long time in Victoria, and has certainly been noticeable.

It all came to a head at the IMARC conference that we had here in the time before the pandemic, and there’s now a class action against Victoria police for that response.

The police also used similar unnecessary force and chemical weapons on a bunch of us at MITA, who were trying to prevent deportations after IMARC.

So, the use of chemical weapons has been escalating. So, there has been shock and horror over the policing behaviour at the general protests, but anyone who has been deeply engaged in fighting for human and environmental rights or against militarism knows that you become a target.

You can be arrested for no reason.

And then on the other side of this is we have continued to see the police facilitate the rise of the far right and the conservative extreme right of the political space over the last decade, across Australia, but particularly in Melbourne, where there is a long proud tradition in coming out against fascists.

So, it’s full credit to the grassroots activists in Victoria. We knew what would happen if the rise of the far-right was allowed to continue.

We have fought to keep Nazis out of our space, and we have seen, over the almost yearlong Palestine protests, the extreme level of resources the state government will expend over policing human rights and environmental protesters, as well as the extreme use of resources they will use to facilitate hate speech and Nazis saluting out the front of parliament.

We know the links between the police force and the extreme right fascists and white supremacists in this state are yet to be fully investigated.

But we do know there are definitely sons of police officers, for example, that are deeply embedded in the neo-Nazi movement in Melbourne.

So, it seems the chemical weapons and the use of force that they do use on people fighting for a liveable planet, refugee rights and for an end to genocide, are not deployed upon Nazis. The chemical weapons are only deployed against us.

There has been the general harassment of the weekly protest, the violation of people’s rights and the arresting of them for doing nothing.

But the use of force, the slamming people into the ground, the use of pepper spray, really came to a head due to the Palestine protests, when we realised that the true way was to directly intervene and cost the Zionist genocidal state of Israel money was by impacting the flow of finance and trade.

So, the protests around the web dock in particular and the series of actions we undertook around Zim ships saw the police not only bring out their pepper spray and batons, but they also brought out their dogs, their horses and eventually, they brought out their flashbang grenades and their rubber bullets.

This was for a bunch of people who were standing on a road. They had been peaceful the entire time. And we had to build a barricade to defend ourselves against the charge of police carrying supposedly nonlethal weapons.

So, yeah, there has definitely been an escalation. It has definitely been at people who are pro-human rights and environmental rights, which really tells you what you need to know about where the police budgets are being expended.

You’ve also raised issue with the way that the authorities are reacting to people expressing opposition in regard to the Israeli-perpetrated genocide upon the Palestinians in Gaza over social media.

So, what has been happening in this regard? How are the authorities approaching social media especially in relation to Palestine and antigenocide posting? And how legitimate is it for law enforcement to be using its time in this manner?

Anyone who’s been involved in organising around the world understands what’s taking place, but it’s unclear whether its pressure from the Israeli government or sympathetic Zionist lobbying groups or our own government’s colluding. It would be great to see an inquiry into what’s actually going on.

But what we do know for a fact, for example, is Meta are cooperating and so, of course, is Elon Musk, and we will continue to call it Twitter until the day it dies. Both those spaces are being heavily interfered with.

At first it was via what they call shadow banning, so deprioritising accounts that are pro-Palestinian within the algorithms. But then it moved on to more sinister things, like deleting accounts or suspending accounts.

For example, WACA has, for the majority of this year, not been able to tag or collaborate with others. People are saying that they’ve been automatically unfollowed by us, even though we haven’t done that.

And then we noticed that there seemed to be a global coordinate matrix that was disconnecting us from our friends like Palestine Action in the UK, the US and France, as well as other Palestine groups we have been working with in the Netherlands.

So, there seems to be a coordinated effort not only to prevent collaboration in terms of posts and reels, but also in terms of organising connections.

Of course, maybe the police are new to all this, and they consider we have just formed these relations.

But the truth is the antiglobalisation movement brought together a global community of antimilitary, anticapitalist and class resisters together with the Global South and those relationships had been building way before the popularity of Instagram or Facebook.

They’re making their best efforts to disconnect us. To put us in Instagram gaol. To make it impossible for people to share.

And a big part of what WACA is, as a community alliance, is sharing what we are all doing and giving voice to people that don’t actually have organisations or platforms and that want to operate in a more antihierarchical way together.

There is definitely something going on. It is clearly coordinated. Our friends across the world are telling us the same thing. And even more important and disturbing is that law enforcement are using Twitter accounts to identify who they think are the people engaging in actions.

For example, we have had people who have had their homes raided because their phone number was linked to an Instagram account.

We’ve had police showing up at other people’s houses demanding they pay outstanding parking fines, or their computers or laptops would be seized.

Warrants to seize property and early morning raids have been happening, when we know personally, we had nothing to do with a particular action.

So, a lot of it is intimidation. A lot of it is false accusations. But it is a good way to silence people, seize their property and build profiles on them via whatever it is they’re looking at on people’s computers or phones.

The bail conditions are another overreach. It’s not just the use of social media. It is how they are using all of the tools at their disposal to prevent people from engaging in democracy.

Then there is the separate pressure to the police, which is coming through Zionists lobbying, where people are losing their jobs and all those other things we know about.

But what the police are doing is using tools to prevent democratic engagement in political process and policies of our government and this is absolutely not their job.

This is thought policing and pre-emptive policing. And when they do finally return people’s property to them, they then place extreme conditions on them, as we have recently seen with Sarah Wilkinson in the UK, who is effectively banned from using a phone or a laptop indefinitely.

The Zionists chats that were leaked in Australia, also point to Zionist lobbyists talking about trying to get groups like WACA declared as sympathisers for a terrorist organisation, as well as reaching out to their contacts in the AFP and ASIO.

And we have no doubt in our minds that Victoria police are executing these types of raids based on situations such as a phone number being linked to a social media account, which sounds like something out of the Soviet Union.

This is unacceptable. It is a complete waste of people’s resources, targeting environmental and human rights activists.

And many of those on the frontline are not only women, but people of colour and queer people, who are fighting these extreme militarised police over refugees and genocide. The police have even been revealed as having leaked information about domestic violence victims.

It seems like the police are using social media and digital access both illegally and ideologically. And it’s complete overreach.

Victoria police are completely out of step not only with their physical violence but with their information warfare and this is the kind of stuff we saw in the early days of WikiLeaks and Anonymous and it’s happening again.

They are not only misguided but often in the raids that I have heard about, they’re completely off the mark about who has been engaging in protest.

Another issue that’s pertinent to WACA at present is the means by which the Australian authorities have been shaping the public discourse around what’s happening in Gaza, and the methods in general that are being employed in order to justify the worst atrocity since the Holocaust.

So, can you elaborate on how the public is being manipulated in this manner and what sort of mechanisms are being used to deflect from criticising the purposeful mass killing of a group of people by Israel for land?

WACA has been protesting against Israel defence company Elbit Systems in Australia since 2013-2014.

So, we’re well versed in the propaganda that is deployed and the cycle that propaganda goes on to ensure that the Zionists maintain the control of the narrative.

What is new this time round is that the intersectional understanding of struggle and the systems of repression that we are facing globally is so much better integrated and understood across the global population.

A leaked audio of a US state department official in the early days of the genocide, back in October, saw him talking on the telephone saying that the usual propaganda was not working because ‘they’ve gone straight to decolonise and liberation” and “why is our normal propaganda of Hamas bad-Israel good not working”?

This is due to decades of organising, mutual aid and struggle that has really sought to put out into the world that the systems of repression that are keeping us down are incredibly intertwined.

There are whole new generations of people who are able to see things that even back during the First Gulf War you couldn’t see. It was easy to manipulate smart bomb data then, whereas these days, we are watching these things happen our screens live.

That’s an important point to make. The current Palestine movement has been able to go so hard and so strong for so long, as opposed to previous iterations where exhaustion comes and it peters out and then Israel and the Zionists come to dominate the narrative because the propaganda is not sticking.

This is due to the Palestinians having continued to resist, resist, resist for liberation, as well as to the work done around the globe to understand the struggles altogether.

It’s understood that there is no justice without decolonisation and dealing with this colonial patriarchal power that is committed to destruction and resource wars.

So, we are just smarter in general as a population about what is actually going on around the planet right now.

Therefore, their propaganda, and their first line of defence, Israel’s right to self-defence, failed and their second line of defence of trying to vilify the legitimately elected government of Gaza, Hamas, as terrorists has also failed because the entire population of Palestine is calling for liberation and an end to colonisation and a brutal occupation and siege.

So, it doesn’t fly when everything is blamed on Hamas, while what the world is interested in is liberation.

The only tools of the oppressor that Israel has been left with is to coopt the language of their allies and governments and, in general, they’re not succeeding in doing that.

The proof of that is the escalation of police powers and violence and the attempt to criminalise everything, like “from the river to the sea”, and Germany has banned the red triangle.

So, governments are attempting to ban geometrical shapes in order to give Israel a clear shot at propaganda on social media and in the legacy media.

There has been a lot more literacy around how the right-wing media operates globally, and people are no longer buying it. The crackdown on and the level of criminalisation of activists mobilising for Palestinian liberation goes to show you that their propaganda has not worked.

Normally, in the cycle where people rise up about liberation for Palestine, there is a point of exhaustion, where Israel then steps in and reclaims and dominates the discourse.

But that’s not going to happen this time, as Israel is forever damaged. There is no clear pathway other than to end the occupation and liberate Palestine.

The Global South and people who are aligned to human rights and global justice will never see Israel as anything other than a genocidal state going forward.

WACA is one of the 40-odd organisations that are joining Disrupt Land Forces, which is demonstrating against this nation’s premier weapons trade show, Land Forces 2024.

Your organisation has been involved in past Disrupt Land Forces, with the last one in 2022 having run the conference out of Brisbane to its current location in the Melbourne CBD.

So, how would you say the impetus to join this arms manufacturers exposition has increased from the last time it was held up north? And why would you say that, as everyone is suggesting, this Disrupt Land Forces is going to involve many more civilians than ever before?

The one that happened in Brisbane last time was on the tail end of COVID, border rules and lockdowns. So, a few WACA people managed to get over the border and get there. There were a lot more people that wanted to go but were, unfortunately, unable to.

So, Melbourne being a bigger town, as well as a stronghold of left activism and the trade union movement, I would expect there will be a lot more civilians.

The significant and decisive moment when the move towards a war economy, eternal war and significant erosion of civil liberties took place with the war on terror and the protests against the Iraq War. And after that time, the “mum and dad” support for the antiwar movement fell away.

The people who are still engaging in protesting things like the Talisman Sabre war games that happen here every couple of years, Avalon Airshow and Land Forces have been a small pool of activists that have maintained our rage against endless war and profiteering off of killing machines.

Land Forces in Brisbane saw a reemergence of people who were stating this is bad for the environment and people, and we need to come together and shut this down before we have completely shifted to a war economy cycle.

Because of what is happening in Palestine right now, as well as the explosion of education and understanding of what is happening that’s taken place in Naarm has been so extensive, we will definitely see a lot more people that aren’t the usual suspects turning up to protest an expo to sell machines designed to do nothing other than kill human beings, and potentially, people currently in the West Bank and Gaza.

Once again, the police are trying to pump up their counterterrorism and their budget in general, so the police commissioner going on television and saying that there will be 25,000 people is not something that anyone takes seriously.

There might be 25,000 police. If we do get 25,000 there for opening day, we’d be very happy. But we have to be realistic.

The police are presenting this as something to be concerned about but actually you’re talking about a bunch of people going to protest machines that are used to commit genocide and companies that are profiteering off that.

There might be 5,000 or maybe 10,000 protesters. I’d be very surprised if we meet the police estimates.

But I do think there will be an absolute increase in people coming out to say that they think it is unacceptable that we are engaging so heavily in becoming a country that profits, not only off fossil fuels that are killing people everywhere, but now we want to make ourselves a leader in an industry that is really designed to kill people and destroy countries that are not ours.

The police are pumping it up as something huge but they’re doing that to set expectations in the public’s mind of their right to beat up and harass activists calling for an end to arming Israel, who is committing genocide.

We don’t want to be complicit in genocide and the police are signalling that they’re prepared and think it is necessary to pull out all the stops to stop people saying, “Please abide by international law and stop arming Israel.”

Effectively, our government and public service is full of people who may, down the track, be charged with aiding and abetting a genocide. And the police force in Victoria are part of that by trying to curb our democratic right to protest.

And lastly, Sam, you’ve also said that you have a fear that the current environment is going to get worse in terms of protesting, and what we’re seeing now occurring in the civil sector is the government turning its war on terror framework on its own people.

So, how is the political climate in this country heating up? And what is it about the current situation that you consider consists of the government’s war on terror policy coming home to roost?

There is a saying in the activist world, for those of us old enough to remember all the war on terror changes that came in, and that is that the war on terror was always designed to be turned on domestic populations.

I’ll stick to Australia, but everything that’s happening in America and Europe, we are in lockstep with.

But in Australia, we are already seeing climate activists being gaoled from Tasmania to NSW to Victoria.

I am old enough to remember protests in the 1990s and the great forest wars and blockades and things like that, and to think that it would come to the point where our government is okay with sending nonviolent people to gaol, who are asking for a liveable planet or for respect of human rights, it is a difficult thing to see happen, especially when you see it happening when this country is being led by a Labor government and Labor state governments, it just goes to show you how far right our politicians in the major parties have moved.

There is no objection to locking up people for effective protest: for trying to draw attention to our participation in policies that require humanitarian and environmental responses. But what we do is punish the people asking for those things.

We know that climate is going to bring much more unrest. We know that there are ongoing struggles across the globe that are colonial and neocolonial in nature, and I can’t see these things getting better.

The Labor Party has completely lost its moral compass on so many human rights issues. They are allowing our courts and our police force to lock up people begging for human rights and environmental and climate justice. So, I don’t see how it’s not going to get worse.

The only way I see it getting better is that if both major parties lose control of the parliament.

I just can’t see any other way. They are both committed to criminalising people asking for help under refugee policy, criminalising people asking to address the runaway climate disaster and criminalising people who are begging them to stop aiding and abetting genocide.

Why would anyone under 50 want to vote for either of the major parties? They are devoid of any ethics or moral compass. They are committed to capitalism and corporations.

The authoritarian responses will get harsher, and people will get angrier and continue to protest.

So, it is a runaway train on every level and our politicians will go down in history in this particular period, as supporting genocide and as doing nothing to stop the ongoing flow of conflict, refugees and the climate disaster, all so they could maintain power for a few more years and have better, cosier jobs in weapons manufacturing companies when they leave politics.

What a selfish generation of politicians, absolutely devoid of ethics, and there only response to the cries of the people is to put them in gaol and make their lives hell.