NSW Police have assaulted dozens of peace protestors who gathered to protest the visit by Israeli president Isaac Herzog to Australia. Andrew Brown was there.
I was there. Not watching from a distance. Not reconstructing events from police statements. I was on the steps of Sydney Town Hall, with organisers and MPs, looking out over a vast peaceful crowd and then watching the state choose violence.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog arrived in Sydney for a tightly secured visit. That context matters, because what unfolded was not crowd management. It was a demonstration of power. A message. A deliberate assertion of authority.
An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people gathered peacefully at Town Hall to protest Herzog’s presence. Thousands more were turned away by police cordons. Had the crowd been allowed to assemble freely, numbers would almost certainly have reached 30,000 or more. Families. Elderly people. Students. Health workers. Jews and Muslims standing together. Calm. Disciplined. Focused.
There was no riot energy. No vandalism. No threat.
I stood on the steps with protest organisers and elected representatives, looking out over a crowd that never surged, never damaged property, never turned violent. Beside me were Stephen Lawrence MLC, Sue Higginson MLC, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, Cameron Murphy MLC, and other Greens MPs and MLCs.
At least five sitting members of the Minns government were present. They were not hovering at the edges. They were chanting with the crowd. Standing shoulder to shoulder with constituents. Watching events unfold in real time.
This was not fringe politics. This was Parliament in the street.
Dr Muhammad Mustafa, known widely as Dr Mo, did not address the crowd. He spoke quietly to me. Online, he goes by the handle Dr Mo the Beast from the Middle East, a name that reads like bravado until you understand what forged it.
He told me about operating on children without anaesthetic. About hospitals without power. About performing surgery by torchlight while bombs fell nearby. About the dozens of his own relatives who have been murdered in Gaza.
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. People who have lived through that kind of loss do not perform outrage. They carry it.
That was the moral gravity of the gathering.
And while tens of thousands of Australians stood in the open air exercising democratic rights, Premier Chris Minns was not there.
He was dining.
Dining with a war criminal
Inside the International Convention Centre, Minns broke bread with Herzog as the Israeli president spoke about social cohesion.
This is the same Isaac Herzog who once declared there were no innocent civilians in Palestine. The same Herzog who autographed artillery shells later dropped on Gaza. His government now stands before international courts, its conduct under legal scrutiny.Minns knew exactly what this moment represented.
Last year, more than 300,000 people marched across the Harbour Bridge in support of Palestine.
Minns tried to stop it. He failed.
He lost in court. He lost the argument. He lost control. That march exposed the limits of his authority and the strength of public opposition.
This was his chance to correct that.
Herzog was in town. The optics were international. Minns was not going to lose again.
Peace then the violence
The rally ended peacefully. Speakers finished. People began to leave.
That should have been the end of the day.
Instead, it was the beginning of a deliberate escalation.
New South Wales Police blocked exits and sealed movement south toward Circular Quay. People trying to go home were trapped without explanation. There were no clear lawful directions. No safety rationale. Just containment.
Bottlenecks were deliberately created. Confusion was manufactured. Then force was applied to the disorder police themselves had caused.
This was not crowd control. It was crowd engineering.
Police brutality
I watched police push into a dispersing crowd.
I watched elderly people panic.
I watched bodies hit the ground.
I helped a young girl who had been pepper sprayed in the face and collapsed into a seizure on the pavement. She was convulsing, incapacitated. As she lay there on the ground, police sprayed her again in the face. Again.
That was not operational necessity. It was cruelty.
Attacks on the elderly
Nearby, I helped a 71 year old woman whose eyes and face were burnt red from pepper spray. She was blinded, sobbing, asking what she had done wrong. She had done nothing.
My own family was not spared.
My mother is 84 years old. She was attempting to leave peacefully. She was pushed by police, knocked to the ground, and suffered a fractured arm.
My sister lives with Parkinson’s disease. She was shoved and thrust by police during the same operation.
As the evening wore on, the brutality escalated. Dozens upon dozens were arrested. Protesters were dragged across pavement, punched, kicked, restrained. This was not reactive policing. It was proactive force.
Attacks on people praying
Later, I witnessed a line crossed that should alarm anyone who believes Australia still respects basic freedoms. Sheikh Wesam Charkawi was praying peacefully with followers, prostrate on the ground. Silent. Non confrontational. Police moved in anyway.
People were brutalised while in the act of prayer. Shoved. Dragged. Hauled up by force.
This was no longer just an attack on protest. It was an attack on worship.
There were roughly 500 police deployed at Town Hall and an estimated 3,000 across the CBD. This scale was not accidental. It was a show of force. Police created the disorder they later claimed to suppress. This tactic is known. It is taught. It is deliberate.
And it is political.
Minns owns this
Chris Minns owns this operation from top to bottom. He cannot hide behind operational reviews or police statements. His own MPs were there. Chanting. Watching. Warning. They knew instantly this was wrong.
Minns wanted to prove he was in charge. He wanted to assert authority while hosting a foreign leader accused of mass atrocities. He chose force as his language.
A Premier who dines with a leader accused of genocide, who has signed the very bombs dropped on civilians, while his police break the arm of an 84 year old woman, assault a woman with Parkinson’s disease, spray a seizing child in the face, and brutalise people at prayer has forfeited all moral authority to govern.
This was not a mistake.
It was a tactic.
Chris Minns may still occupy the office. “Thank you friends,” he told the pro-Israel crowd at the Convention Centre to a warm round of applause.
But tonight, in the streets of Sydney, while he clinked glasses with Isaac Herzog, he lost the right to lead this state.
And I watched it happen.
Editor: this is the story we published just as reports of police brutality began to hit social media.
Peaceful, diverse, myriad, then attacked. Herzog protestors demolish the narrative
Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist