On Sunday, 27th April, Palestine Action Group (PAG) Canberra held a panel on the necessity of voting with genocide at the forefront of our minds and holding Australian politicians accountable for directly aiding and abetting the murder of Palestinians. The panel speakers included Professor Stuart Rees AM, Ali Kazak, John Menadue, Mussa Hijazi, Dr Sue Wareham OAM, and Dr Peter Slezak.
Ali Kazak, former Palestinian diplomat and founder of the Australia-Arab Affairs Council, spoke to the history of Zionism in Palestine, noting “Australia played a major role in this unjust partition of Palestine”. Dispelling myths espoused by the Australian government, he spoke to the history of Zionism in historical Palestine as stemming from the Balfour declaration of 1917, which officially established a Jewish colony on Palestinian land, and was cemented by the partition of Palestine by the United Nations in 1947.
“The Palestinian majority was turned into a minority through terror and dozens of massacres. They ethnically cleansed over 850,000 Palestinians from their cities and villages, only because they were not jews,” he said. “They renamed Palestine as Israel, and Palestine disappeared from the world’s maps, thus the catastrophe known as Al-Nakba, and the Palestinian question was born,” Kazak spoke to the beginnings of Israel’s flagrancy of international law where Israel refused to retreat to the land partition established by the UN and the reality that subsequently continues where “Zionists have now fully occupied Palestine from the river to the sea,” and the “world is witnessing the third Nakba.” He ended his speech urging Australians: “decent Australians do not accept this… no one can say they didn’t know.”
John Menadue is a former secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet of Australia, as well as the founder of the journal Pearls and Irritations. He opened his speech reflecting on disillusionment with Israel after travelling there: “I first went to Israel in 1963 with Gough Whitlam, and I was impressed. When I came back, I went and saw the Israeli ambassador here and asked about the possibilities of my children taking a gap year and living on a Kibbutz. I went back 4 years later, and I changed my mind.” He directly referred to the Six-Day War where he “saw for the first time how an occupation can soil the mind and the heart of people, and that’s what it did to the Israelis I met… that violence has continued year after year in Israel.” He called out the collective failure to respond to Gaza as a result of the “European guilt complex, racism, and Islamophobia”, and “also the outcome of… Zionist lobbying that very few dare to disobey”, aided by a media response that “gives credibility to Israel and Israel’s propaganda… It’s like reporting on the bubonic plague and giving equal treatment to the rats.”
Menadue spoke to the failure of the Catholic church, which “has turned its back on the suffering of Palestinians” and urged the audience to “[heed] the call of Pope Francis.” He said “In Sydney, there have been more than 70 rallies in solidarity with Gaza. Each rally has been done under the shadow of [Catholic churches] in the city. Those buildings stood in the background as cold, hard, stony edifices. The Churches have said nothing.” He ended his speech noting that “October 7th did not occur in a vacuum. It was a result of never-ending violence against Palestinians… October 7th is the excuse Israeli’s use for genocide”, and asking the audience, “If this country had been occupied [would we] believe we have no right to rebel?”
Mussa Hijaz is a Palestinian-Australian lawyer who spoke to the significance of resisting genocide from the Australian settler-colonial context. He spoke to the 2024 Australian National University encampment where the university “went a step further [from calling police] and cut off their electricity,” calling the university response “straight out of Israel’s playbook”. On the topic of Australian politics, he asked, “Have we become so depraved we need to discuss why genocide should be an election issue?” before responding “we have a cost-of-living crisis, a crisis that is not impacting big-oil, Coles, or Woolies”.
In an apt statement on the upcoming federal election, Hijaz said “Albanese tells you he’s going to give you a tax cut” while “Dutton says he’s going to spend more money on defence… but what you don’t hear promised is an increase in unemployment benefits, on Indigenous people, on education.” He concluded his speech by speaking to the “moral bankruptcy” of Australia and asking, “Have we become so morally bankrupt? Have we become so depraved that we need to discuss why genocide should be an election issue?”
Next speaker, Dr. Sue Wareham OAM also spoke to the upcoming federal election stating that “neither of our two biggest political parties regard [Palestine] as something to care about enough to rock the boat politically”. She mentioned the strong diplomatic, defence, and trade relationships between Israel and Australia, as well as the Australian embassy in Israel. In the context of “dozens of active [Australian-Israeli] defence agreements”, she urged the audience to choose the justice that “we are told our soldiers fight for when we go to war”.
She also succinctly provided five reasons for Australians to support Palestine: (1) For a common humanity and preservation of international law, (2) the implications of Israeli actions on healthcare, (3) the normalisation of warfare, (4) to counter the intimidation that Australians have felt over Gaza and (5) to stand in solidarity with Palestine and the Australians affected by the war personally.
Final speaker, Dr. Peter Slezak, is an honorary associate professor at UNSW. He started his speech stating: “My mother survived the Nazi concentration camps and she always asks: why didn’t the world do anything? We now have the answer. We have allowed this genocide to go on for more than a year… 2 million people in Gaza are being tortured, raped, eaten alive… in the final stages of being starved to death.” He also called the genocide in Gaza “one of the greatest moral issues of our time.”
Slezak also spoke to the media coverage of the genocide in Gaza. He said that “if you don’t read [Jewish news platforms] here or internationally, it’s embarrassing to tell you that they are wallowing in the tragedy of October 7th [instead] of paying attention to the genocide.” He also spoke to the failures of the Labor Government that “has been essentially silent over the last year or so, in fact worse than silence… David Shoebridge [has exposed] their direct complicity [which] they have tried to obfuscate.” Slezak called the co-optation of Palestinian symbols, such as the keffiyeh and the watermelon, as symbols of anti-semitism “complete bullshit”. He ended his speech stating that “Gaza looks like Hiroshima after the atom bomb.”
