The pro-Palestine rally at Hyde Park on June 7 marked Al Naksa (The Setback). It refers to the six-day war, June 5–10, 1976, which led to the Israeli expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land and the unlawful Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip.
The protest paid tribute to the ongoing resistance against Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Among the speakers to address the protest were four Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) activists who, together with more than 360 others from more than 40 countries, were kidnapped on May 18 in international waters by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). They were forcefully detained, physically and psychologically brutalised and spat out after a five-day ordeal.
Anny Mokotow spoke publicly, for the first time since her return, at the rally, as a member of Jews Against the Occupation ’48 and the Loud Jew Collective.
I sat down with Mokotow to create an edited version of her speech.
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I would like to talk about the spirit of the flotilla, the bravery of the Palestinian people and the barbaric and psycho monstrosity known as the IOF.
I do so as an anti-Zionist Jewish person, who sailed on an international mission to break Israel’s illegal blockade of the Port of Gaza. I sailed to defy the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s position, which enables Israel’s piracy in the Mediterranean.
The Global Sumud Flotilla sailed with revolutionary politics and the humanitarian goal to deliver aid, messages of support and hope to those in occupied Gaza and occupied Palestine.
We didn’t make it and this shames me, yet the government’s response shames me more.
The flotilla explicitly embodies the Arabic word for “steadfastness” and perseverance: Sumud. We sailed determined to support the resistance and dedicated to the hope Palestinian people in Gaza continue to have.
Hope for us on the boats became a valued friend: Hope that the engines wouldn’t fail; the sails wouldn’t collapse; the Starlink network would persevere; the batteries would last, that the whole crew wouldn’t get seasick at the same time; that we would get used to washing bodies and plates in the sea; and no matter what, we wouldn’t be afraid and would take whatever came as a consequence of our act of defiance.
I don’t want to talk about our illegal kidnapping and imprisonment as many of you have followed the barbaric actions of Israel’s IOF toward the flotilla participants.
I want to speak about the Israeli Zionist project as an anti-Zionist Jew and child of Holocaust survivors. I want to speak about that in relation to my experience among Zionist jailers.
I have long been aware of Israel’s project to draw the world into its xenophobic, Machiavellian and megalomaniac perspectives. I have seen the government become hostage to the Zionist agenda. I know politicians have literally been bought by the Zionist ideology and that aspects of civil society and cultural heritage are being prescribed by Zionist thuggery.
I see how the capitulation of the Australian government to Zionist Israel and the Stockholm syndrome mentality of Prime Minister Albanese affects so many aspects of our so-called democracy — from decisions about what is portrayed by the media, to what happens in our streets, to who has a voice in Royal Commissions to who holds power in council.
We can easily forget that the project of Zionism is to turn the people of the world against the Palestinians, to incite Islamophobia and hatred of Arabs.
This is an exercise of opportunism in Australia — a colony still in the grip of ongoing racism and governmental ineffectiveness. Such undying indulgence of racism toward our First Nations people testifies to Australia’s easy support of genocidal colonial projects.
We know how Zionist ideology deliberately manipulates Jewish history and persecution for its own ends. This is aimed at wiping out Arab nations that stand in the way of Greater Israel.
The genocide in Palestine desecrates the Jewish ethos that I grew up with: “Never Again is Never Again for Everyone”. By defiling that the genuine understanding of victimhood has become a corrupt and manipulative tool, emblematic of a people who have lost their humanity.
I witnessed that loss.
As hostages, we were terrorised and threatened by a robotic madness carried out by the children of Zionism, who had lost their humanity between the ideologies of victimhood and oppressor. I saw that madness in the eyes of our captors, who call themselves Jews, beating my comrades, violating my friends, their guns constantly trained on us, ready to kill.
These were the depraved children of a grotesque cult playing out a reverse dramaturgy— where the victim becomes the perpetrator and Israelis can live out a fantasy of retribution against a fabricated enemy — the Arab and Muslim population.
When 180 of us, hands high above our heads, were pushed into a narrow space of 10 metres by masked and weaponised IOF soldiers, I could only think of images I had seen as a child: Naked men and women, standing their hands up high, in front of what would become their graves within seconds. Or the small girl, hands up, walking towards the cattle truck that would take her and her family to the death camps.
What is this madness that lets the world relive images of dead children, murdered families, destroyed cities, carried out with impunity by a nation of youths brainwashed into a killing cult?
Palestinians will rise and I believe in their Sumud, their humanity.
I also believe Hamas will do what it does because I understand it plays out the same trauma.
A few weeks ago on our boat, we were in a zoom with a young Palestinian NGO worker in Gaza. He said: “We know you may not succeed but, for us, what matters is that you are coming, that you see us, and that you care. This gives us hope and brings us comfort. That you show the world we are here. Don’t feel bad if you don’t make it.”
But I do feel bad.
I feel like ramming the vessels we sail into the consciousness of the Zionists and the world. Our aid lies at the bottom of the sea and our medicines might wash up in Turkiye. We should not have had to be bringing this aid, but we were our nations’ consciences.
In 2025, the foreign minister Penny Wong told the United Nations that Australia would stand behind aid delivered by community groups.
She didn’t for ours.
Sumud is what they have in Palestine and sumud is what we need as activists. We will sail again, because we are expected there. I hope we will do more than chant. I hope we act.