Free speech is under threat at institutions meant to defend it. Two Sydney University academics are being pursued for ‘racial vilification’, for speaking out against Gaza atrocities. Author Nick Riemer is one of them.
Over a year into Israel’s genocide, what words exist to express appropriate condemnation of Netanyahu and Smotrich or Biden and Harris? Not even a genocide satisfies them.
That’s hard to grasp, and deserves a few moments to sink in: even the apocalypse they have engineered in Gaza for more than a year now isn’t enough, so they’ve started all over again in Beirut and southern Lebanon. Language breaks when it tries to do justice to this obscenity with words.
In this country, Albanese, Dutton, Wong, Minns and Allan stand exposed: for their slavish Israelism and their moronic formulas about a two-state solution or Israel’s right to defend itself; for their contempt for democracy; for their robotic worship of the police; for their reflexive hatred of protest.
A year ago, they were asked to choose between justice and the short-term pursuit of political advantage. Which choice did they make? They didn’t blink, but drove their careers straight on over the dead bodies of Gazans and the rubble of their lives. Morally and intellectually, they are abject failures, but in their murderous mediocrity and opportunism they are towering, world-class superstars.
The sell-outs who govern us are far more powerful than we are, yet the Palestine solidarity movement has shifted them, most recently in the government’s decision to recognise Palestinian sovereignty in the United Nations, and to cancel a small number of arms export permits to Israel.
How much more could we do, if our movement was stronger.
The few gestures that the government has made are too little, too late. Token resolutions in New York won’t stop civilians being slaughtered in Palestine and Lebanon. No UN vote will prevent IDF quadcopters shooting children while they lie defenceless on the ground.
No resolution will erase the permanent round of evacuation orders, or the sound of Israeli missiles shredding the air, or the screams of terror as the next apartment building is pulverised, or the deadly hush the moment after the explosion and the unbearable cries of agony and mourning that follow it.
Flaccid capitulation
Albanese and Wong can parade their decision in the UN, but they are still treating the Palestine solidarity movement as their opponents. They are still arming Israel, still refusing to sanction its depraved leaders, or to do anything remotely real to end this genocide.
Everywhere we look in our society – the business world, the media, the arts sector, universities – we find the same flaccid capitulation to Israel and its propagandists. The Australian elite preen and strut as self-proclaimed guardians of our democracy, but they buckle at the first demand to justify genocide.
They are calmly overseeing the unravelling of basic democratic freedoms in this country, at the very moment that Trump is unleashing forces of hatred and irrationality more dangerous than at any time in the post-war history of the West.
Could there be anything more sickening than the great and the good of this continent who shrug their shoulders at genocide because, for them, that’s just part of the cost of doing business? Anything more bankrupt than the media organisations that are full of opinions on everything, except the hundreds of journalists getting mown down?
Lest we forget
The university leaders who squash student protesters under their thumbs? The politicians who callously mouth ‘Lest we forget’ while defending arms sales to Israel? With, in the background, the cavernous silence and complacency of the middle class, where the words Gaza or Lebanon are almost never uttered, except in order to lecture Palestine solidarity activists that we are irrational, or divisive, or ignorant, or ‘unbalanced’ when we campaign about them.
A few Zionist colleagues of mine at the University of Sydney are currently trying to take me and fellow staff member John Keane to the Human Rights Commission for racial vilification, because we have dared to oppose this genocide. It’s classic ‘lawfare’, and it’s based on the baseless and absurd argument that when we say ‘Zionists’, we actually – so they tell us – mean ‘Jews’. We are, they claim, toxic antisemites.
If that’s what they thought, they could have come to my office at the university to talk about it. I would have bought them coffee, and made it clear just how far from the truth this is. Instead, they went direct to the Human Rights Commission, making a complaint that miraculously turned up on the front page of The Australian before it had even been acknowledged by the AHRC itself.
Zionists want to turn the Human Rights Commission into a propaganda agency for genocide and apartheid, with no other intent than to silence and intimidate us. They want people to accept that they are the victims, while posturing as courageous defenders of principle and antiracism.
Let them try. Nothing changes the fact that by going after us and other opponents of Israel’s genocide, they are facilitating the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza by trying to silence opposition to it in this country. They have exposed themselves as Netanyahu’s footsoldiers in Australia. They will never succeed, but they will always have to their names the shame of having tried.
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Nick Riemer is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney and academic Vice-President of the university’s National Tertiary Education Union branch. A long-time Palestine activist, he is the author of Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine.Available here. Views expressed here are his own and *not* those of the University