I was arrested under Queensland’s new directly racist laws, supposedly to combat antisemitism.
I was one of 22 people arrested in Magan-djin/Brisbane on April 18. Whether it was necessary for so many police to arrest one 73-year-old Jew, I’ll let you decide. Perhaps unconscious echoes of a distant, but a never-to-be-forgotten Jewish past.
This abjectly racist law was designed to suppress a liberation movement, targeting Palestinian and Muslim Australians.
There is no mechanism in Queensland’s law to improve social cohesion or protect Jews or anyone else. The law is framed to cow supporters of human rights, carefully worded to avoid capturing the language of the Likud Party’s Zionist expansionism, while Queensland maintains the weakest gun laws in Australia.
The contrast could not be more telling.
If you’ve already seen media and are sick of my appearances, honestly, I’m on your side.
It seems, however, that people may still be interested.
In 1969, aged 16, I first became active in South Africa against apartheid; peacefully picketing in support of Durban dockworkers on strike, broken up by police tear gas and batons.
In 1976, Soweto school students went on strike against the prescribing of the hated Afrikaans as the official language in schools. The police were brutal, firing shots into crowds of chanting and marching children: 176 were killed that day.
Police broke limbs, fired tear gas canisters and it didn’t stop for weeks. Subsequent research indicates as many as 700 were killed across the country. The government claimed the figures were exaggerated. Haven’t we heard that recently, somewhere?
More echoes!
After the Soweto uprising I became more active. My friends called themselves “freedom fighters”. Had they known, the people I knew then would have called my friends and I “terrorists”.
After a period in jail, I had to leave South Africa. I know what apartheid and racism look like. I know the appearance, smell, feel and even taste of massacres.
I made my home here in 1981, with the view that the right to disagree, loudly, was fundamental to the national character.
In the years since, I was a clinical psychologist specialising in trauma and disability. In the 2000s, I ran United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East’s mental health programs in Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, and witnessed Israel’s terrible brutality firsthand. I was working in Gaza during wars that killed more than 5000 people and injured at least four times that number.
What does our “Book” mean, our morality, if we who call ourselves its people stand by in silence? Israeli genocidaires and their political allies in Australia demonise anyone with a Middle-Eastern name; some who are Christian, many Muslims and Palestinians, among them health professionals saving lives in our hospitals, and also artists, writers, musicians, poets and academics; and anyone who might speak in support of a common humanity.
We see the criminalisation of peaceful protest and legitimisation of banning political speech. All this is being done in the name of “combating antisemitism”?
I was arrested alongside a marvelous, upstanding Jew and supported by yet more brave Jews holding banners.
There is a longstanding, proud and loud tradition of Jewish resistance to oppression and defence of civil liberties.
Jews I knew gave their lives in the struggle for freedom in Apartheid South Africa.
Jews have given their lives for democracy and Palestinian freedom; with some killed by Zionists. Some Jews, bearing witness in the West Bank today, are being viciously assaulted by settlers, and the Israel Defense Forces. Even more echoes.
It’s why I stood to be arrested and why I wanted to encourage ongoing, collective resistance in this long tradition.
This repression will continue unless we demonstrate massive and popular opposition.
Have conversations with your loved ones. Organise events in your local community. Talk face-to-face to politicians. Engage with the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
If you can afford to support organisations like the Jewish Council of Australia, please do. You need not get arrested, but we must fight back.
A free society is loud and frequently inconvenient, uncomfortable or even offensive to those who would seek power and control over others, and that is precisely why its protection is essential.
Until it’s “Never again” for everyone, it can’t be “Never again” for anyone.
[Stephen Heydt was arrested in a protest against Queensland’s new racist laws, which target the Palestine solidarity movement.]