Janet Parker from Jews for Palestine Western Australia delivered the following speech to the Converge on Canberra: Sanction Israel now! protest, at Parliament House, Canberra, on July 20.
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We come together in rage and in grief both as witnesses and as fierce and unstinting opponents to 22 months of deliberate mass murder.
We can name other genocides … since the Nazis extermination of Jews but what is different here … is that ... we are seeing it on our screens every minute of every day.
We are seeing what [Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967] Francesca Albanese described recently as one of the cruelest genocides in modern history.
Jews for Palestine Western Australia recognises what is happening in Palestine today as the holocaust of our time; it is Israel’s final solution to erase the Palestinian people once and for all.
We know the role that our government and other Western governments have played in actively facilitating this holocaust. We understand that our job is to make demands on our own government, in particular, to sanction Israel, to condemn the action of the Israeli state at every level.
Our protests have been significant. Many have observed that 22 months in, the protests to sanction Israel and free Palestine are probably the most sustained we have seen since the Vietnam War.”
But for our government, like other governments, supporting Israel comes at all costs; they ignore, obfuscate and lie about their complicity.
Furthermore, in a cynical attempt to deflect attention from their complicity in genocide, they have tried to smear those who do support international law, human rights and dignity as “antisemitic”.
This, of course, has deep roots in the grotesque and morally bankrupt project of deflecting Western guilt about European antisemitism, about genocide in Europe, on to the Palestinians — even though they bear no responsibility for it.
This is being done to create a state whose purpose is to project Western and, in particular, United States’ power in the Middle East. Jews of conscience around the world completely reject this exploitation of human suffering to justify yet more suffering.
The governments of the US, Germany and the United Kingdom, unsurprisingly three significant contributors to Israel’s genocide, have launched the most savage attacks on pro-Palestine protest.
We’ve seen people kidnapped, bashed, imprisoned and deported. We’ve seen Palestine Action banned under the UK terrorism act, with those continuing to express their support risking jail sentences of up to 14 years.
What I find most bizarre, in Germany one third of those arrested for antisemitic speech, are themselves Jewish.
Germany is specifically targeting Jewish supporters of Palestinian human rights in the name of combating antisemitism. This is dystopian madness.
Anti-Zionist Jews have a special message for Germany: “You don’t atone for one genocide by supporting another one”.
In this country, we’ve seen special police operations formed and anti-protest laws created to monitor and investigate antisemitic acts. We’ve seen students disciplined; we’ve seen journalists sacked; we’ve seen politicians driven out of the Labor Party.
While I don’t want to make this about us, because our focus must absolutely be on the horror being faced by the people of Gaza and the West Bank, we know that the global campaign for peace and justice in Palestine is crucial, just as it was crucial in ending the war in Vietnam, in bringing down Apartheid in South Africa, and in freeing East Timor from Indonesian occupation.
But right now, we are seeing the most dangerous, the most authoritarian attempt to silence us yet.
Straight from Trump’s playbook we have Jillian Segal’s report to government that seeks to destroy our solidarity movement in every sphere. It would withdraw funding from arts bodies and universities that don’t comply with the IHRA definition. It would monitor, shape and govern media narratives, school curriculums, give police every more special powers in responding to newly defined anti-Semitic acts, regulate social media and dictate immigration laws.
The result would be censorship and surveillance of public institutions, and the repression of expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Of course, this has been coming for some time. And we have a classic example from Western Australia; you may have heard about it. Students at the University of WA have been instructed that even if something constitutes an objective truth it must not be spoken if it causes fear or discomfort to others.
We are told that criticism of the Israeli state makes people feel uncomfortable and unsafe.
As Randa Abdel-Fattah from Macquarie University has asked: Since when do the victims of genocide have to bear the responsibility to defer to, and protect, the feelings of those who enact, support and enable their genocide?
It’s not Jews who feel threatened by the Palestinian solidarity movement, but genocide supporters.
Anti-Zionist Jews are committed to rescuing Jewish identity from fascist sociopaths like Netanyahu, who want to drag us to the gates of hell.
Segal’s report insist that every policy, every practice, in all spheres of public life is premised on the IHRA definition of antisemitism. We all know how this definition has been used.
It says to criticise Israel is to hate Jews. It completely ignores the ever more prominent voices of anti-Zionist Jews who say ‘to be Jewish is not to be Zionist’.
To be Jewish is not to swear an unswerving allegiance to the colonial, settler apartheid, ethno state that commits mass murder in brazen and unapologetic fashion, that is happy to perpetuate the completely discredited lie, as Segal has done, of 40 beheaded babies in the face of the deliberate, targeted murder and injury of in excess of 50,000 children in Gaza.
The lesson of the Nazi holocaust is “Never again” and that meant never again for anyone.
As Australia and other Western governments dig in to support their most precious militarised, colonial outpost in the Middle East, we say: “We will bring you down”.
We will not allow this moment in history, this fight for humanity, to be used to silence dissent and to dismantle our rights.
The Segal plan attacks us all: Educators; journalists; students; protesters; immigrants and so it must unite us all. At this movement in history, we must stand together and fight this with everything we’re got.
We call on the government to sack special envoy Jillian Segal and implement sanctions on Israel. You come for one, you face us all has been the catch cry of the protests in the United States and today echoes through the UK in the wake of the banning of Palestine Action.
The road to peace and justice in the world today runs through Gaza, and we will travel that road alongside our Palestinian brothers and sisters for as long as it takes.
Free, free Palestine!
From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!
[Janet Parker helped initiate Jews for Palestine, Western Australia and is a long-term member of Socialist Alliance.]