Sydney Pro-Palestinians Call Out Pitiful Major Party Form on Ongoing Gaza Genocide

As they have so many times over the last 18 months, pro-Palestinians from across Greater Sydney gathered on Gadigal land in the city’s Hyde Park to call for an end to the Israeli-perpetrated genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, and as an election looms, those addressing the sizable crowd expressed a general displeasure with the response to the killing from the Australian major parties.

The atmosphere at the 29 March Palestine Action Group rally in Sydney city was different to those prior to the now-failed 19 January-commenced ceasefire in the Strip, as Israel recommenced its blockade on goods, including food and water, entering into Gaza, on 2 March, and then resumed its high-tech military assaults on the civilian population on 18 March.

Palestine Action Group’s Damien Ridgewell told the Saturday crowd that Israel has spent the last 18 months waging its genocidal attack based on the excuse that they were attempting to free hostages, but this reasoning has fallen down since the Netanyahu government returned to its military campaign, despite the successful process of handing back the hostages being close to an end.

Ridgewell further pointed out that since Israel recommenced its wanton slaughter of Palestinian people, it’s again been targeting medical facilities in grave contravention of international law, along with disappearing Palestinian Red Crescent workers, aid agencies are now saying there’s only two weeks’ supply of food left in the Strip, and the targeted killing of journalists continues.

The collective sentiment in the park last Saturday differed too, as with the return to the mass killings, there’s a fear that the genocide is becoming entrenched, and with the more formidable commitment to ethnic cleansing that the Trump administration has provided, the responses from our government and others in the west now comprise of leaving the blatant carnage unaddressed.

“The complicit Labor government”

“Last year at this time, I kept thinking, how could things possibly get any worse? But here we are, a genocide has been livestreamed for the last 18 months for the world to see. It wasn’t hidden. Every single person can see it. So, no one can say that they didn’t know,” Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi told the pro-Palestinians gathered in Hyde Park.

“I don’t think I will ever forget the horrifying images of Palestinian children being bombed, being snipered, being blown to bits, and everyone saw that,” said the Australian Greens candidate for NSW for the federal election. “What was their response? At best, they had some meek criticism, but always couched in Israel has the right to defend itself.”

“That was the best they could do.”

Faruqi called out then members of government who travelled to Israel over the course of the genocide to meet with the war criminals and “watch the destruction firsthand”. The senator further suggested that the constituency vote those members out of parliament out at the coming election in response to their Israel trips.

As the Greens deputy leader put it, the “brief respite” that the Palestinians received over the two months of the ceasefire has now been destroyed. She added that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in “just a few days” of late, and meanwhile, the settler colonial Israeli state is continuing violent assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank, in its attempt to seize more Palestinian land.

“This Ramadan I know better. Now, I know that there is no red line for Labor as far as Palestine is concerned. There are no limits to their inhumanity and their cowardice. There are no limits to their shamelessness, hypocrisy and double standards, when it comes to protecting the apartheid state of Israel,” Faruqi underscored.

“They ruthlessly pursue anyone who dares to criticise Israel or challenge their narrative.”

Inhumanity and cowardice

The Albanese government joined the chorus of western nations at the commencement of the Gaza genocide, characterising the mass commission of livestreamed atrocity crimes as apartheid Israel merely defending itself in response to 7 October Hamas attacks, which succeeded in creating a chilling effect on speaking out against the Gaza genocide, although it failed to cover up the crime.

PM Anthony Albanese, a number of his other cabinet ministers and Liberal opposition leader Peter Dutton became the first western leaders to be referred to the International Criminal Court, when Sydney firm Birchgrove Legal presented the ICC with a detailed complicity in genocide claim against them in March last year, which was accepted by the highest planetary criminal court in July.

The Australian made claim was added to the broader ICC investigation into the Situation in the State of Palestine inquiry, which was the same case that led later last year, to the issuing of an international arrest warrant in the name of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

And since Israel resumed its military slaughter in Gaza on 19 March, the Albanese government has been as good as silent on it, with an 18 March statement from foreign minister Penny Wong calling on “all parties to respect the terms of the Gaza ceasefire”, even though Israel broke it, and while she called out Hamas to release hostages, as it had been doing, she didn’t directly rebuke Israel.

Unprecedented depravity

“I wonder have we ever experienced such an intense display of depravity and violence, as the one that we are currently seeing unfolding in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon?” asked Dr Nick Riemer.

The Sydney University academic then pointed to one of the new truths accompanying the changed circumstances the nation finds itself in post the resumption of the Gaza genocide and that is that in today’s Australia, “supporting this gut-wrenching orgy of annihilation is effectively now the compulsory admission ticket to social and political power in places like here”.

“If you oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, if you assert that a genocidal, apartheid state like Israel simply should not exist, then you can forget about joining the social or political elites of this colony,” Riemer underscored.

A legal action was filed against Riemer and fellow Sydney University academic John Keane, under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) late last year, claiming the pair have been discriminatory in their outspoken support for Palestine, as the complaint equates their criticism of Zionism and Israel as antisemitic. Yet, Riemer and Keane are hardly alone in being singled out.

This comes on the back of the Zionist Federation having filed a racial discrimination complaint against renowned journalist Mary Kostakidis for the similar crime of having called out Israel, while Palestinian Australian academic and author Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah has been slandered and had her academic grant suspended for the offence of speaking out about the persecution of her people.

“Seriously, who are these people?” Riemer put it to the Hyde Park crowd. “They behave as if they think that Gazans were born for no other reason than to be slaughtered in Palestine. You can almost sense them holding their noses whenever they’re forced to speak about Palestine.”

“Forgive me the vulgarity, but I wonder how many of them actually believe that the sun itself shines out of their arses?” the academic asked in concluding. “They are moral and political minnows.”