Heavy rain did not deter about 1000 people from rallying at Sydney Town Hall, on Gadigal Country, on May 15, to mark 77 years of Nakba and demand an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
It was one of many rallies held across the country on the day in 1948when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land by the new state of Israel.
Since then, Israel has continued to expand, particularly during the 1967 war when it occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights.
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Palestinian student Raneem Emad, whose grandparents were victims of the Nakba, told the rally that Israel was “created on and continues to develop on the bones of Palestinians”.
“Seventy-seven years since the Nakba … we have watched the evolution of the Israeli occupation upon the bodies and the blood of more and more Palestinian children…
“It is hard not to feel like every day is another Nakba.”
Emad spoke about the experience of constantly losing friends and family members in Gaza to Israel’s genocide.
A survivor of the Nakba told the rally: “Palestine is our land, our sky, it is our dream which will never die.
“Your voices tonight will touch the bleeding hearts of the children of Gaza. Your solidarity with Palestinians will open a new horizon for hope and peace for all the Palestinian people.”
Palestine Action Group organiser Amal Nasser, who emceed the rally, asked: “As a national liberation struggle, what are we going to do to stop the famine and stop the genocide?”
She said Australians had rejected Donald Trump-style politics in the recent federal election, but Anthony Albanese’s Labor government has not opposed Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Greens Newtown MP Jenny Leong read a statement from new Australian Greens leader Larissa Waters, in which she pledged to “continue to work for a free Palestine”.
Protesters then marched through the CBD to Pitt Street Mall where a Palestinian-Australian surgeon from the Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association, who spent time working in hospitals in Gaza during the genocide, addressed the crowd.
“It has been 11 months since I first stepped foot in Gaza and it is difficult to process how that once fertile and thriving land, in which Palestinians had dreams and hopes, is currently being bombed and people murdered and erased before our very eyes as we helplessly watch them being forcibly starved,” she said.
“Israel has been allowed to carry out these deliberately gruesome and heinous acts of violence with complete impunity while the world watches on.
“I feel anger at the perpetrators of this genocide, but also at those who deny it is even occurring and, even worse, at those who manufacture consent and perpetrate a false narrative to help ethnically cleanse the Palestinians.”
She said she felt helpless watching as every hospital in Gaza is bombed, and healthcare workers are tortured and killed.
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