Marking 51 weeks since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, thousands gathered in Town Hall on Sunday, September 29, to call for an end to the slaughter in Palestine and Lebanon.
The rally opened with chair Damien Rice mourning the 20,000 Palestinians who have been “reported” dead, including 2,000 children, as well as the 1,000 Lebanese civilians killed in Israeli airstrikes. Rice also condemned the hundreds of civilian casualties killed during the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah at a Hezbollah headquarters situated underneath residential buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Rice condemned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly gave the go-ahead for Nasrallah’s assassination after giving a speech at the United Nations. Netanyahu also received a standing ovation from the diplomats who remained in the room, including Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Rice concluded by calling for attendees to continue to oppose Israel, and fight back against their ground invasion in Lebanon.
Palestine Action Group’s Dalia Haj Qasem added: “Kill us wherever you find us, under every stone, in every mosque, we will not abandon Palestine.”
Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi drew similarities between her home country of Pakistan, the ongoing occupation of Palestine and the ongoing colonisation of Australia. She affirmed that this movement was a war for all oppressed people against their oppressors, saying, “I am here to tell you we aren’t going to be dominated. We are not going to be crushed.”
Senator Faruqi reminded protesters that all three genocides were about white supremacy, dominance and control, and that these systems still exist in parliament and the media. She went on to say that Labor’s insistence on social cohesion was nothing more than genocide denial, stating that “resistance runs in the blood of oppressed people…[and] we will continue to fight against anyone who is complicit in genocide.”
The second speaker, a young Lebanese-Australian woman, spoke to the resistance and resilience of Arab peoples. She decried the Australian government who uses the taxes from her local Canterbury-Bankstown council – an area with a significant Lebanese population and with the highest GDP of any council in the country – to murder her family back home in Lebanon. She condemned Netanyahu’s claims that Beirut will be the next Gaza, saying that in the wake of more Lebanese people dead than in the 30 day war, “we are the phoenix and we will rise from the ashes stronger than before.”
Muhammad Salah, a youth worker and swim teacher from Gaza, spoke to his experience teaching children to swim in the Gaza strip. Salah spoke of the pride and joy in the children’s faces as they took lessons in the first Gazan Nippers club. He told the crowd that many of those children are now deceased, killed in the bombings, some buried under rubble and unreachable.
Salah lamented his colleague who was killed as his ambulance was attacked by an Israeli airstrike and spoke to the daily displacement, hunger, death and fear many people are facing, which his family experienced before he escaped.
During the rally, individual protesters held portraits of Nasrallah on placards, while others carried flags bearing the Hezbollah logo. Rice, as rally chair, called for people to refrain from flying “illegal flags”, in order to not provoke the police, though many people objected to this announcement. Rice also mentioned that people would be able to express their mourning at the Palestine Action Group vigil on October 7.
Nick Riemer, former president of the USyd branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), condemned the normalisation of industrial-scale murder of civilians, and detailed his outrage at the hundreds of casualties killed in Nasrallah’s assassination. Riemer then highlighted how the USyd branch’s BDS motion has caused similar motions to be adopted across the country as an example of this mass movement. He condemned the immense waste of money that was the “fruitless” senate inquiry into antisemitism on university campuses, and noted universities as strongholds of resistance and progress.
Palestinian poet Ali Ash Hossein remembered Nasrallah in his speech, and paid tribute to all the martyrs lost to the genocide. He linked this resistance to historic resistance against British occupation, and directed the following statement to Israel: “you have only killed the hand of restraint,” affirming that those who want Palestinian liberation will not rest.
After the rally’s march through Sydney’s streets, Students Against War and Solidarity member Jacob Starling told Honi Soit that NSW police confronted some “Shia [muslim] protestors holding Hezbollah flags. [Police] tried to grab the flags but they resisted, so the cops used capsicum spray on them.” In footage provided by Starling, police can be seen surrounding the protestors and a masculine-sounding voice can be heard shouting, “Allahu Akbar (God is Greatest)”.
Legal Observers NSW (LONSW) released a statement after the protest alleging that police indiscriminately pepper sprayed protestors, including a 13-year-old. They also stated that the police abused their power in confiscating the flags, as they did not contain any discriminatory text and were merely a political symbol. LONSW also alleged that the police did not give a valid reason before attempting to confiscate the flags.
Palestine Action Group released a statement on October 1, directing attention away from media claims about alleged terrorism and towards the astonishing numbers of Palestinians murdered by the Israeli state. They further asked protestors to refrain from carrying flags of groups “proscribed as illegal under Australian law” in order to prevent arrests at their rallies.
