To drive a whole people out of their land—to turn it into something akin to the Zionist myth of Palestine, supposedly “a land without a people for a people without a land”—requires many things. Most obviously, it requires the killing and terrorising of Palestinian people on a colossal scale.
What would you do with $1.5 million? You could put down deposits on ten median-priced Sydney houses, or you could buy one outright and spare yourself the crushing mortgage repayments.
The level of suffering in Gaza is more than the human mind can comprehend. As the war enters its twentieth week, it feels increasingly obscene to be going about daily life while an entire people are being systematically destroyed, their lives, histories and culture blown to pieces or buried under rubble.
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Human Rights Watch, an international investigative and reporting organisation, says that it has “significant human rights concerns” about Australia’s treatment of refugees and Aboriginal people.
Asked how she stays hopeful as a 63-year-old socialist and Palestinian living in the diaspora, Reem Yunis replies: “I don’t have the luxury not to be inspired. My grandparents died without seeing a liberated Palestine, my parents died and were buried in the diaspora. Most of my people are living in the diaspora, and the ones in Palestine are being robbed of water, resources and every bit of land they have. We need to have hope and fight, because if we won’t fight for a free Palestine, who will?”
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Starving a colonised people has long been a favoured policy of imperial powers.
The Banyule Palestine Action Group has collected more than 600 signatures on a petition calling on Banyule City Council, in Melbourne’s north-east, to pass a motion supporting an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, in line with motions passed in other councils across Australia.
Socialist Alternative is the largest left-wing revolutionary group in Australia. We are the only socialist group with a national presence and an expanding membership.
In a hotel near Potsdam, two dozen far-right politicians, fascist activists and wealthy supporters met to discuss a “masterplan” for mass “remigration”. In their scheme, millions of asylum seekers, migrants and “non-assimilated” German citizens would be forced out of the country, some relocated to a proposed new territory in North Africa. This is not an anecdote from the rise of fascism in the 1930s, but the revelations of an investigative report by German newsroom Correctiv.
Mass demonstrations have taken place across Greece in recent weeks, as students protest against a bill, tabled in the parliament in December by conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, which would introduce private universities into the country.
Over the past 128 years, the Zionist movement and later the Israeli state have constructed a web of fallacies that surround the creation of Israel and the ongoing conflict, and which also seek to justify Israel’s ethnic cleansing and oppression of the Palestinian people.
Mass protests change people. The act of collectively standing together pushes aside the powerlessness we experience in everyday life, builds confidence and generates a sense of strength.
The inauguration of a half-completed Hindu temple at Ayodhya, a provincial town in India, is a significant marker in India’s move towards what can broadly be termed fascism, represented and led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, BJP), its parent body the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Organisation, RSS) and its more than 100 affiliates, collectively called the Sangh Parivar (Sangh family).
Update: Protesters will rally again outside HTA’s factory in Campbellfield (Melbourne) on Friday 9 February at 11am—see details below. 250 protesters rallied outside the locked gates of the factory on the morning of 2 February after management closed the facility for the day. The factory was also closed by a smaller protest on 1 February.
Hundreds of police swarmed around the Webb Dock container terminal in Port Melbourne on the afternoon of Monday 22 January—using horses, capsicum spray, assaults, and arrests to break up a peaceful protest that had held up the docking of an Israeli-owned ship, the ZIM Ganges, for four days.
As the genocide in Gaza rages, the Palestine Solidarity movement in Australia has proven itself to be the largest and most sustained anti-war movement in decades. We’ve seen massive and consistent weekly marches, historic high school walkouts and disruptive protests of docks, shopping centres and Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci ignited a minor culture war with the company’s decision not to stock Australia Day merchandise ahead of 26 January. Peter Dutton called for a boycott of Woollies, prompting Banducci to plead that he was not “anti-Australia” or “woke”.
