Power expected fear, expense and exhaustion to silence one journalist. Mary Kostakidis stood her ground, and an important piece of the wall gave way. Andrew Brown reports.
The section 18C case Zionist Federation of Australia’s CEO Alon Cassuto brought against her in the Federal Court has been dismissed by consent, with no order as to costs. There is no finding that Mary breached the Racial Discrimination Act. No apology has been ordered. No corrective notice will be published.
There was no judgment. What Mary Kostakidis got instead was a short consent order noting that the man who sued her had decided not to go on.
The ZFA calls the matter “resolved”. Cassuto filed the case. Mary spent two years preparing to fight it. Then Cassuto dropped it. The person who walked out of the courtroom was the one who chose to walk into it.
The complaint concerned two posts in which Mary shared and commented on a speech by the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Cassuto said the material was racially offensive. Mary denied endorsing anything and argued that a journalist has to be able to report what the people fighting a war are saying.
Mary Kostakidis. Forced to argue against Israel’s war in an Australian court
Mary told MWM, “This is a win for every Australian who values our democratic right to freedom of political expression.”
Zionist zealotry has had to beat a retreat from what was going to be a highly damaging trial.
Lawfare
Cassuto says he got what he wanted because Mary had already issued a qualified apology. He leaves out the timing. She made that apology before he went to the Federal Court. He called it insincere and sued anyway. Two years on, he points to the same apology as his reason for stopping. That is a man looking for the exit.
Call it what it was. This was lawfare. The court process was the weapon, and the target was wider than one journalist.
Every editor and journalist with something to say about Israel was meant to be watching.
From the outside, each move looks separate. A complaint here. A referral there. A story in a friendly newspaper, then a writ. Put them side by side, and you see a structure built to make criticism of Israel expensive enough that most people decide it is not worth the trouble.
The letters are polite. The threat underneath is not. Legal bills keep arriving, and behind them the possibility of losing everything. A case like this does not need to succeed to do its job. Once defending your own words puts your house at risk, the process is the punishment.
Defence won
Mary’s defence put it plainly: the case was designed to discredit her and to frighten others into shutting up. “I have spent two years doing nothing but preparing my defence in a case aimed at silencing me,” she wrote. For an ordinary Australian, she said, that could have meant losing their home.
Each new demand ate into her time and her savings. She could have gone quiet. Instead, she kept publishing and
kept her eyes on Gaza while most of the Australian media looked away.
Ordinary people chipped in to fund her defence. Her lawyers and her husband stayed beside her. But the name on the writ was hers, and so was the house. She did not fold.
The ZFA’s parting statement threw in fresh accusations and described her commentary as repugnant. None of it was ever tested. It reads less like the words of a winner than a door slammed on the way out.
The moral high ground is Mary’s
There is a deeper problem for the lobby, and no writ will fix it. It is impossible to stand on a hill of infant bones and claim the moral high ground. The army of pedants and lawyers trying to trauma-clean the crime scene is doomed to fail. Resentment rises with every scrub.
Will the Zionist lobby ever learn?
Legal attack dogs bark loudly, and often that is all it takes. Then someone stands still and says, fine, put your evidence in front of a judge. The barking stops.
“The purpose of journalism is to get to the truth, fearlessly, and to hold power to account,” Mary wrote, calling the outcome “a win for press freedom, which has prevailed”.
She also thanked Jewish and Israeli people who have opposed the destruction of Gaza, saying:
Our common humanity trumps any form of tribalism.
Standing with Jewish Australians
Mary did not beat Jewish Australians. She beat an organised lobby whose power rests on making criticism of Israel personally costly. A great many Jewish Australians stand with Palestinians and refuse to have their identity yoked to the conduct of a foreign government.
Small wins matter because of what they do to the next person. A journalist sees that someone survived and files the story. An activist feels less alone. Fear moves through a community quickly. So does nerve.
None of this makes Mary infallible. Heroism has never required that. It requires knowing the cost and standing there anyway.
Lawfare is a muzzle made of good manners. Mary has torn a hole in it.
Martin Luther King Jr once famously quoted 19th-century abolitionist minister Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.”
It does not bend on its own. It bends because people like Mary lean their whole weight on it.
Breaking: Zionists legal proceedings against me have been withdrawn after a 2 year battle.
This is a win for every Australian who values our democratic right to freedom of political expression. Zionist zealotry has had to beat a retreat from what was going to be a highly…
— 💧Mary Kostakidis (@MaryKostakidis) September 10, 2026
Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist