Green Left’s Riley Breen caught up with Nasser Mashni, Australia Palestine Advocacy Network President, at the pro-Palestine protest in Boorloo/Perth on June 6, to ask him what the federal government must do to help stop Israel’s genocide. The ABC had recently conducted an interview with Mashni, but then pulled it down.
Do you know why that was, or has the ABC given you any sort of explanation?
I had a phone call from the ABC, and they told me that it was inadvertently posted by a junior producer and that once he realised that he’d posted it, he took it down.
I’ve worked in this space for decades and my voice has been silenced many times; I’ve also been the subject of many smear campaigns. Back in November 2023, when I was slated to appear on Q&A, Zionists, including the new antisemitism envoy, wrote to then-chair Ita Buttrose and Managing Director David Anderson demanding I not be given a platform.
To the ABC’s credit it did not buckle, although this did not stop Patricia Karvelas from asking some unnecessary questions about my personal history, questions irrelevant to the unfolding genocide.
I’m not surprised by, nor exceptional in their silencing of my narrative. Today, it’s me as a Palestinian. Tomorrow, it’s [DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara woman and Senator] Lidia Thorpe as an Indigenous person. Tomorrow, it’s someone speaking out against anti-Chinese racism or the genocide in Xinjiang.
The reality is that the empire will find ways to silence those who it doesn’t find fitting or aiding its narrative. Speaking up for Palestine as boldly and justly as I did in that interview is seen as problematic.
What are your thoughts on the Israeli government’s recent admission to arming criminal gangs in Gaza? What do you think Israel is trying to achieve?
This is a strategy of all colonialists, all empires: Divide and rule.
Israel has been a functioning enabler of the destruction of the entire Arab world. If you go back to the Zionist expulsion and participation in the ethnic cleansing of Iraqi Jews ... through to every assassination in the ‘60s and ‘70s of Palestinians, including, thinkers, academics, writers and activists … through to the splitting of the Palestine solidarity movement. Israeli complicity in those nefarious acts are well documented. They’re real and substantiated by evidence.
Today, they are arming hoodlums, drug dealers and gangs. [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has come clean and admitted they did arm ISIS and others in Syria. What they’re doing now is all part of the Zionist grand plan of the River to the Sea being Palestinian free!
Israel has long wanted a “three-state solution”.
The three-state solution is for Gaza to end up in Egypt and the West Bank in Jordan. I don’t mean the geography; I mean the demography. The citizens of the racist apartheid state become “cleansed”.
To achieve this, Israel has deliberately fragmented society, destroying educational institutions and civil infrastructure. We’ve seen the killing of the Palestinian intellectuals, medics, journalists, professors —consciously and methodically — to make Gaza uninhabitable.
The reality today is that no “normal” person could live there. What Israel ceases to accept, and can’t understand, is the Indigenous connection to the land; the Gazans will live in the rubble of their home, rather than leave Palestine.
Israel wants to get the Gazans out of there. And how do they do that? Make it unsafe for them; make it uninhabitable.
But Palestinians are not going to be broken; they’re not going to be conquered. They’ll be there until Palestine is free — from the river to the sea.
What do you think Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should be doing now?
Palestine has never had a better friend than Anthony Albanese as Prime Minister. It is a shallow pool — when compared with the likes of Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.
Albanese used to chant “From the river to the sea”. He’s spoken up for Palestine. He knows what’s happening; he knows Israel is an apartheid state.
We expected more from him. We expected more on day one. Here we are, day 610, where he may finally be warming up. He has a super majority in the parliament now, with a decimated Coalition and, arguably, nine years in power, or at least six. He has the opportunity to speak truth to power and take a leadership role internationally.
There’s an obligation on him as a human being, and as PM, to lean back into the “old Albo” and demand equality from the river to the sea and for Palestine to be free – for everyone! We desperately need more from our PM.