The Gadigal-Sydney Pro-Palestinian Mass Protest: Six-Months of Nonviolent Social Cohesion

“We the people will not stand for genocide. We the people stand with our brothers and sisters in Gaza and all of Palestine,” said Mohamed Zorob, as he led the 21 April Gadigal-Sydney Free Palestine rally in chant. “We the people stand with our brothers and sisters in southern Lebanon.”

“We the people echo the sentiment of our Jewish brothers and sisters, when they say, “Not in our name,” Zorob, a Palestinian man who came to this country as a refugee, continued. “We the people stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters when they say, ‘Stop the genocide.’”

“We the people stand with our Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homeland,” he said upon unceded Gadigal land. “We the people will not stand by while children are starving.”

Sunday was the 28th Palestine Action Group ceasefire rally in a row. And people can now say six and a half months in relation to a genocide.

The official death toll is around 34,000, which doesn’t account for thousands and thousands of innocent people buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings or simply missing, and in accounting for them, people are then saying about 40,000 people have been slaughtered.

The entire population of the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza are being purposefully starved and they’re slipping into famine. And not only is the state of Israel doing this, it’s further staged military operations against hospitals, so that means against unarmed doctors, nurses and patients.

“We’ve just seen the US pass yet another funding bill for Israel: $26 billion. This is one of, if not the, biggest gift/s the state of Israel has ever handed over,” Josh Lees told the crowd. “And they do it at a time when the entire world knows that Israel is carrying out a genocide.”

The Palestinian Action Group organiser stressed that Israel has been perpetrating an open genocide, as it deliberately destroys Gaza, its people, its infrastructure and its “ability to sustain human life. That is what we’ve seen for six months now: a cold, calculated, methodical genocide”.

“And this is the moment that the US chooses to give the biggest ever aid package to that state to carry on that genocide,” underscored Lees, who’s MC’ed many of the rallies over the last six months.

“I call on this mighty trade union movement of ours, which has been alongside causes through our history, whether it’s peace, which is union business, whether it’s civil rights movements, First Nations causes or rights for workers,” said Paul Keating, MUA Sydney branch secretary.

Keating, who addressed the crowd on Sunday, was amongst those recently arrested by NSW police at the ZIM Shipping Blockade at Port Botany in late March.

Maritime Union of Australia members were key participants in that protest action against an Israeli ship, when police cracked down hard upon it.

The MUA boss was arrested under the 2022 antiprotest laws that he and his union have campaigned against, and Keating insisted that NSW premier Chris Minns is continuing with the authoritarian Coalition-drafted laws, which have emboldened police to exert force against nonviolent protesters.

“I call on every trade union leader to come together now,” said Keating, “bring out your membership and let’s start building this movement, demand a ceasefire and demand sanctions and a total ban forever on exports to and imports of arms from Israel.”

So, if Minns does need assistance with nonviolent social cohesion, he need only seek a meeting with the organisers of the pro-Palestinian protests, or perhaps to participate in them, in order to garner an understanding of living long-term social cohesion in diverse, multifaith and multicultural Sydney.

Sydney Criminal Lawyers was present at the Sunday protest march to show solidarity, as well as to capture the event in photos.