“Killed, and for What End?”: Tasnim Sammak on Marking October 7th for Palestine

The October 7th vigils marked a year since the Israeli military launched its offensive against the 2.3 million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. And in taking place on Gadigal in Sydney and in Naarm-Melbourne, they were the solemn, peaceful events, as had always been planned.

This was despite the local political class launching a demonisation campaign that involved major party leaders dropping the word “celebration” into their condemnation, which served to distort the purpose of events that facilitated mourning the grave loss of life that is the Gaza genocide.

October 7th, 2024, saw the area before Sydney Town Hall packed with peaceful demonstrators marking a year of mass atrocities, while in Naarm, a procession took place as stretchers used in the Vietnam War were carried down the main thoroughfare before the Marqui Linlithgow Memorial.

NSW police failed in its attempt to shut down the weekly pro-Palestinian protest on Gadigal on its 52nd consecutive week, which was accompanied by Victorian premier Jacinta Allan, lamenting that her state doesn’t have a permit system allowing for the right to protest to be contested.

In the wake of the October 7th vigils marking those killed, what remains, however, is the impression that the Australian political class is more concerned with the local acknowledgement of mass civilian deaths overseas, than in condemning the coordinated mass murder.

Sydney Criminal Lawyers spoke to Palestinian organiser Tasnim Sammak about the importance of marking October 7th as the beginning of the Gaza genocide, the fallout from the Australian political class over vigils, as well as that Israel is taking the same approach to Lebanon as it has in Gaza.

Despite top Australian politicians and law enforcement agencies trying to bring the pro-Palestinian protests in Gadigal-Sydney and Naarm-Melbourne to an end, the 52nd consecutive weekly Free Palestine protests took place, as did 7th October vigils.

Tasnim, you took part in the 7th October vigil in Naarm. What happened on the day, and why was it important that the event went ahead?

Five women in my family were killed in Gaza just a few days ago. Today, we also received news of a young cousin’s murder in Gaza, Omar Jamal Sammak.

Many members of the Sammak family have been killed in Gaza since October 7th, 2023. Killed, and for what end?

The events of October 7th starkly illustrate how the Jewish people and the Palestinian people are once more bound by history.

My family is in Gaza because we were exiled in 1948 from our hometown of Yaffa that has been developed into modern, colonial Tel Aviv.

Although Israel, in its nation-building endeavours, imagines us vanished, my family and thousands like us were placed just kilometres away.

The diasporic Palestinian community, alongside Jewish, Lebanese, multicultural and multifaith communities, held a Vigil for Gaza on October 7th at 6 pm at the Marquis of Linlithgow Memorial, with the shrine in the backdrop.

The formal event involved a silent procession led by grieving families, representing silenced calls for a permanent ceasefire and a just solution that is yet to be achieved one year after Israel declared its genocidal war on this day.

October 7th holds significance for Israeli lives, in whose national defence the occupation dropped the first bomb over Gaza, beginning a yearlong attempted annihilation of Gaza, with the two world wars in the backdrop.

Israeli sources suggest 1,200 Israeli soldiers and settlers were killed, 251 hostages were taken and 91 remain in captivity.

On October 7th, 2023, in a battle within “southern Israel” an unknown number of Palestinians that crossed the border were killed and hundreds were taken captive.

On October 7th, 2023, at least 230 Palestinians were killed and over 1,000 injured by Israel’s first of 365 days of dropping bombs of vengeance over Gaza.

Israelis were killed on this day and Israel decided to go to war against Palestinian existence, declaring it a war against the Nazis.

The official Zionist account of this day has been totalising. And it has been sustained with the signing of western military aid and the bashing of university students for being today’s antisemites.

While we are able to counter Putin’s lie that his invasion of Ukraine is a war against Nazis, we in the west have legitimated every claim made by the Zionist regime.

It’s important that we revisit the ideological grounds that have enabled Israel to commit its genocidal acts with the support of Israeli society, who are on the ground in Gaza, and the support of western nations.

On October 7th, 2023, Palestinian militants launched an attack on “southern Israel” that broke out of the 16-year Israeli created open-air prison that is Gaza.

The over two million population in Gaza that Israel decided to put into a cage are mostly from “southern Israel”.

They are in Gaza because that is where Israel cleansed them when it founded itself.

On October 7th, the problem that is the non-disappearing Palestinians, brought back to consciousness the wrongs of Europe’s approach to the “Jewish problem”.

It became clear that 76 years since the establishment of the state of Israel, Jewish settlers possess a precarious immaterial security.

Prime minister Anthony Albanese and NSW premier Chris Minns both raised the social cohesion card as reason to prevent the 7th October vigils and the Sunday protests a fortnight ago.

Victorian premier Jacinta Allan lamented that her state doesn’t have a permit system like NSW, so she couldn’t attempt to shut down the Naarm rally, which was in response to the NSW police attempt to shut down the Sydney protest which failed.

And now NSW premier Chris Minns appears to want NSW police to cancel the protests up here, this time due to the large costs of policing them.

What do you think about these ongoing attempts to shut down these year-old protests, especially as they are so important to communities?

These efforts to ban and vilify the anniversary protests and vigils are evidence that Australian politicians are invested in October 7th becoming a day to mourn Jewish civilised victims of Islamic terrorism, in all absolutes.

The Australian public is invited by our political leaders to simplistically stand with Israel in its battle against evil forces that perpetrated what keeps being repeated as the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Politicians see our protests and vigils as a threat to their efforts to control the national discourse on violence, and so, they have attacked us for defying Zionism, for providing a strong counter-discourse.

At our vigil, regular people from multicultural and multifaith backgrounds, many who probably have war victims and veterans in their family, carried stretchers that were used in the Vietnam war, to represent the over 40,000 Palestinians killed in the Zionist regime’s war.

Some of us in the movement are engaged in reworking national war memory, which is considered threatening.

On October 7th, the civilised world, including the Australian colonial state pronounced, once more, Israel’s right to self-defence, like its right to establishing statehood on Palestinian land.

This pronouncement was merely a reinforcement of Israel’s settler-colonial national story since its inception in 1948.

The occupation of Palestine, through the foundation of the Israeli settler colony, is a historical wrong that we in the west need to reckon with and correct, but we won’t.

To do so, it is important to tell full narratives, rather than half an account of the events of post- World War I.

Colonial Israel was a late state project, founded in a time of anticolonial independence, in the name of Jewish protection.

The Holocaust and the Gaza genocide are two parts of a story that hasn’t arrived at its end.

It is not odd, therefore, that settler-colonial Australia, more so than even European states, is deeply devoted to the triumph of Zionist claims.

We are working out our own national identity through the question of Palestine and our politicians are frustrated that their lies are broken down by us.

A full narrative of October 7th that the public deserves accounts for the Nakba, which began the persecution and plight of a second people to the Jewish people, the Palestinian people.

One year of exterminating Gaza, our vigils were able to assert the urgency of intervening for the prevention of genocide and war, before there is no one left alive in Gaza, before all of Gaza perishes in the name of retribution against history.

October 7th is an appropriate time to interject into the dominant account provided by the warmongers, wherein we implore that we change the course of history now for both people.

We in Australia must keep contesting the foundational premises which legitimate settler-colonialism to enforce a just solution that reconstitutes Palestinian and Jewish being on this earth – and moves us towards confronting the denialism here.

The reaction from politicians shows how effective and powerful our interjection has been, so I say, let us be brave towards decolonisation.

Our politicians are inconvenienced by the fact that there is a revolt amongst Jews against Zionism –let us join arms in bringing down the occupation once and for all.

The CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry has the attention of the Australian nation when he condemns our vigils, but he has lost us, Palestinians and Jews, in his warmongering statements that defy the Geneva Convention: “Israel’s war is just and necessary”.

Major party Australian politicians have taken issue with the pro-Palestinian protests from the beginning, and this appears to have morphed into the prime minister’s concerns over social cohesion in this multicultural nation over the past six months.

But while advocating for social cohesion these politicians seem to be using the term in a bias way.

What’s your take on the PM’s social cohesion mantra?

Yes, the Labor government wants us to dial down the temperature, so that it can peacefully keep providing support for the genocide of Gaza.

We are Labor’s demons that Labor demonises. Lady Macbeth screams, “Out damned spot”, and then Labor politicians stand in front of the press cameras, lethargic, shaking their heads at us, pleading that we leave October 7th alone.

They want us out, out of this anniversary, out of the nation, out of their MP offices plastered with smiling poses of the good working Australian Labor members that people keep splattering with blood.

The desires expressed through the demand for social cohesion are similar to the desires that drove Labor to hold the Voice referendum.

The referendum was supposed to be a straightforward way for Labor to lead the nation towards correcting the political oppression of First Nations people.

Labor’s political leadership has crumbled in the face of radical interventions which are gaining mass appeal because they can directly confront our national problems.

What Labor cannot provide is necessary truth-telling, antiracism and anticapitalism that the public is finding in the emerging coalitional politics of the antigenocide movement.

Critical intellectuals and activists have long stated that Australian postracial multiculturalism merely utters harmony while entrenching the conditions that maintain supremacies and hierarchies.

A system of rich profits and white power breeds class war and maybe Albanese is foreseeing that.

Local punk artist Mudrat echoes the movement’s temperature well, when he says, “No justice, no peace, we cannot, will not sleep. We were born in the mud, we will die in the mud, take all you want, we are fire and blood”.

It’s a time of battle now: a time now when white fragility falters before the courageous. We should adapt to the temperature change.

Over recent weeks, Israel has further turned its military forces upon southern Lebanon, using the same ferocity as it set upon Gaza with, and I’ve heard a number of people question why Israel would turn on Lebanon in this same way at this point.

So, how do you understand what the state of Israel is currently up to in Lebanon? And how does it get away with it?

The state of Israel is pursuing two connected projects – territorial settler-colonial domination over Palestine and American imperialist domination in a region that has had waning American influence.

Firstly, Israel wants to eliminate the Palestinians that it didn’t wipe out during the Nakba, that is what Israeli politicians have learnt, not that Jewish safety cannot be accomplished through genocide, but that it was a mistake to displace, rather than wipe out, the Palestinian nation: many Palestinians were eradicated during the Nakba, however the overall policy pursued was dispossession.

Secondly, American domination has been waning in the region since Russia and Iran’s intervention in supporting the Assad regime and Israel is reestablishing this control by starting America’s war with Iran.

What interests me as a critical educator is the recycling of the Gaza genocide blueprint, that manufactured consent for the Zionist military offensive, in the attack on Lebanon.

The Zionist regime stated on October 7th, that it is going to war against Hamas and now it is stating that it is going to war against Hizbollah.

Western powers that killed over four million people, mostly Muslims, in the war on terror, will not and cannot untangle us from the commitment to supporting Israel’s military campaign because that would require us to admit to our own barbarity.

An alternative to western humanity must be forged, from beneath the rubble of Gaza.

And as we’re now past the 12-month anniversary and the campaign to stop pro-Palestinian protests to rally against the yearlong genocide, the NSW premier has now shown that he’s not giving up and he continues to consider these specific protesters something of a public enemy.

Tasnim, why are the authorities so concerned about the Free Palestine movement in this country? Why do they consider it must be shut down?

It is in the state’s interest to turn us into the internal public enemy. The state’s function is to maintain colonialist, capitalist structures, that are threatened by the formation of mass opposition in Australia.

The Gaza genocide shows us that the west is abandoning its own modern liberal ideals in favour of old colonial rules.

A few people are still attempting to end the genocide via international law mechanisms, but we mostly understand that sanctioning Israel will come from elsewhere.

We’ve known for a long time that the west is only committed to democracy and human rights, so long as it allows the west to maintain civilisational superiority.

Now, either we internationally resist to break and make another world to that offered to us by the genocide-profiteers, or we succumb to living in a world of mass global suffering of unprecedented proportions.

European colonialism, racism and fascism was never defeated, that is why we are here, that is why we must now forge justice, in this second year of the twenty-first colonial extermination of the Palestinians.

So, we could truly build the political-ethical frameworks we need for the prevention of genocide and war.

Main photo credit: Sangblek