Equating Protests Against Gaza Genocide with Antisemitism

Australia Weaponizes Bondi Massacre to Crack Down on Pro-Palestinian Protests

“Hate” Laws Escalate Attacks on Free Speech

SYDNEY, Australia, February 27 – There have been nearly weekly protests in Australia’s major cities against the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza since October 2023. These have been held, in the main, without major incidents. But the evening of Monday, February 9, in Sydney was different. The occasion was a rally and march protesting a visit by Israeli president Isaac Herzog, a virulent Zionist war hawk. The state government of New South Wales (NSW), of which Sydney is the capital, declared Herzog’s visit a “Major Event,” a legal designation normally reserved for large potentially unruly sporting events, allowing police to close off areas and disperse crowds. Minutes before the protest was to begin, the state Supreme Court rejected a challenge to this designation by the organizers, the Palestine Action Group (PAG).

As the protest began, 3,500 police were deployed in Sydney’s central business district. Town Hall square was packed with 10-15,000 demonstrators with another 5-10,000 sealed off by police on streets leading to the main assembly area. When some protesters said they intended to march, a senior police official on a bullhorn (which only those nearby could hear) said that would not be allowed. Then, after an extended stalemate, the police riot began. Suddenly hundreds of cops in massed formation charged into the crowd, shoving and beating demonstrators who had no exit to escape (Consortium News, 9 February). “Punches were thrown and capsicum [pepper] spray was used on dozens of demonstrators as police moved the crowd away,” reported the Sydney Morning Herald (9 February) in a rather sanitized account.

Videos show police (including on horseback) “kettling” protesters, then pinning down and repeatedly punching them. Muslim men kneeling in prayer were violently dispersed, people were knocked off their feet, others were tackled, many were pepper-sprayed and some trampled. Twenty-seven people were arrested. NSW Police assistant commissioner Peter McKenna said he was “very proud” of the cops’ conduct. For thousands of demonstrators, however, this was a police riot they had not seen in their lifetimes. Some commented that it “resembled police crackdowns they had previously seen only on television in the United States” (Stories Framing the Globe, 10 February). PAG organizer Josh Lees said that NSW’s Australian Labor Party (ALP) premier Chris Minns “appears to be trying to import elements of Donald Trump’s America into Sydney.” It was a frontal attack on the right to protest.

As president of the Zionist state, Isaac Herzog is one of the top Israeli politicians – along with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fascist security ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich and former war minister Yoav Gallant – responsible for the horrendous genocide visited on the Palestinian population of Gaza. The son of former president Chaim Herzog, he is a former leader of the Labor Party and long-time cabinet minister. In December 2023 a photo of Herzog signing a bomb to be used on Gaza went viral on the internet. The next month, defending the Zionist military’s annihilation of the Gaza population, Herzog called the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation of the charge of genocide against Israel a “blood libel.” At the February 9 protest, demonstrators chanted, “From the river to the sea, Herzog to the ICC.”

Herzog was personally responsible for instigating the slaughter. A week after the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas and other Palestinian commandos, he declared “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.” In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza regarding genocide held that Herzog’s statement amounted to “incitement to the Israeli security forces personnel to target the Palestinians in Gaza as a group as being collectively culpable for the 7 October 2023 attack in Israel.” It concluded that Netanyahu, Gallant and Herzog were all guilty of “direct and public incitement to commit genocide.” Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission declared: “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.”¹

Aftermath of the Bondi Beach Massacre

The orgy of police violence on February 9 was part of a wholesale crackdown on dissent, particularly on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, since the mass shooting at a Hanukkah festival at Sydney’s Bondi Beach last December 14. In that horrific antisemitic attack on the gathering called by the Chabad movement of Hassidic Judaism, 15 people were killed, and 40 more wounded. The alleged perpetrators were a father – India-born Sajid Akram, killed at the scene – and his son Naveed Akram, being held on charges of murder, causing grievous bodily harm with intent to murder, and committing a terrorist act. According to the police and Australia Security Intelligence Agency (ASIO – Australia’s CIA), the two had been won by “radical clerics” in immigrant milieus to the Islamic State and received recent training in the Philippines.

Government and security officials were quick to label this the deadliest terror incident in Australia’s history, conveniently ignoring the genocidal violence against Aboriginal people. But contrary to raging Zionists and bourgeois politicians there is absolutely no evidence tying the massacre to protests against Israel’s war in Gaza or more generally to the Palestine solidarity movement. The Palestine Action Group immediately declared it was “absolutely horrified by the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, which targeted the Jewish community on the first day of Hanukkah,” reiterating “our complete condemnation of antisemitism and all other forms of racism.” It also hailed the heroic actions of Ahmed al-Ahmed, an immigrant from Syria, who bravely tackled one of the gunmen, saving countless lives.

Nonetheless, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, cynically tried to blame the Bondi Beach massacre on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, notably the 3 August 2025 “March for Humanity” when up to 300,000 marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a downpour to protest genocide in Gaza. Segal is an arch-Zionist and former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. She has called to withhold or terminate government funding for universities, public broadcasters, arts festivals and cultural bodies that promote or fail to act against what she terms antisemitism. Max Kaiser of the Jewish Council of Australia said this use of funding as a pressure tactic echoes “Trumpian” authoritarian tactics. Segal has also called to screen visa applicants for “antisemitic” views and to toughen “hate speech” laws.

After a tongue-lashing from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who blamed the Bondi massacre on Australia’s supposed failure to take action against antisemitism and its formal recognition of a Palestinian state, ALP federal prime minister Anthony Albanese declared that the government would adopt all the “recommendations” of Special Envoy Segal. This includes laws and procedural changes allowing the police to peremptorily ban demonstrations for extended periods of time without getting a court order; to declare whole areas off-limits for protests; to classify expressions deemed to be antisemitic as punishable “hate crimes”; and to designate organizations as “hate groups” whose members and leaders would be subject to imprisonment of between 5 and 15 years.

The ruling Australian Labor Party government, both at federal and state levels, swung into high gear to order the expanded police powers and fast-track the required “hate” legislation. On December 23-24, barely a week after the shootings, NSW premier Minns called a two-day emergency session of the NSW Parliament to rush through the “Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Act.” Claiming that the “implications” of pro-Palestine demonstrations could be seen in the Bondi massacre, a little before 3 a.m. on Christmas eve, Minns got his bill passed restricting access to firearms and demonstrations. Police can now ban protests and marches for 14 days following a “terrorist incident,” which can be extended in two-week increments up to three months. Not even a court can overrule them.²

At the same time as NSW ALP premier Simms was getting his “Terrorism” act passed, on December 23 federal ALP prime minister Albanese announced that he had invited Israeli president Herzog to visit Australia to “honour and remember victims of the Bondi antisemitic terrorist attack and provide support for Jewish Australians and the Australian Jewish community.” In response, pro-Palestinian coalitions in over 30 cities and towns launched calls for demonstrations against Herzog every day over his planned four-day visit. The stage was set for the February 9 police riot and a raft of legislation attacking basic democratic rights, both at the state and federal levels, carried out not by the immigrant-bashing right wing but by the social-democratic Australian Labor Party.

Australia already has some of the most repressive gun laws in the world. In New South Wales, a license to possess a firearm can be denied or revoked if the NSW Police decide that the holder is no longer a “fit and proper person,” an arbitrary standard that could include having “concerning police interactions.” Licenses can also be revoked if police decide it was not being used for the “genuine reason” the license was issued, which reasons do not include self-defence. Now license holders will no longer be able to contest such peremptory police rulings before an administrative tribunal, and thanks to an amendment by the Greens, gun ownership will be denied to “anyone investigated for terrorism-related offences,” a category that will surely be applied to those defying the protest bans (SBS News, 23 and 24 December 2025).

Grounds on which protests can be restricted or prohibited include if police officials are “satisfied” that holding the protest “would be likely to cause,” among other things, a “risk to community safety.” This ultra-vague formulation could be used to criminalise just about any demo. Such a ban would be valid even if it was not made public.³ This effectively cancels the right to protest in periods of tension.⁴ The Bondi massacre was only a convenient excuse: Simms tried to ban the August 2025 pro-Palestinian march across the Harbour Bridge, but was stymied by the state supreme court. As for the Israeli president’s February visit, the NSW government simply declared it a “Major Event,” even though the law explicitly states that its “regulations may not declare an industrial or political demonstration or protest to be a major event.”

This is how the very model of a modern prime minister goes about entrenching emergency police powers: administratively altering exceptions until they are normalized, geographically confining public space, transforming extraordinary security measures into routine tools for suppressing political dissent, and if no other subterfuge will do, simply ignoring the law. This is also what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) police and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents are doing in the United States. But here, lacking any supposed constitutional protection for “freedom of speech” such as the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Australia can go down this route rapidly, with a thin social-democratic veneer. The Australian Labor Party soon did that with its “hate speech” laws.

Simms had indicated that particular chants used at pro-Palestine rallies should be banned, including “Globalise the intifada!” (a reference to the Palestinian uprisings of 1987-93 and 2000-05)⁵ He also proposed to give local councils new powers to shut down “illegal” places of worship (referring to mosques in inner west suburbs in Sydney), which he dubbed “factories of hate.” Meanwhile, federal ALP prime minister Albanese on January 20 rammed through the “Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Acts,” billed as the “toughest-ever” hate laws and sold as providing community protection against extremists.⁶ This creates new federal offences making it illegal to publicly incite “conduct” that would lead a “reasonable person” of a “targeted group” to “be intimidated, to fear harassment or violence, or to fear for their safety,” or that “could incite” others to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate.”

Note that actual intimidation, harassment or violence are not needed to convict, only that a mythical member of a targeted group would feel that some conduct (chanting slogans?) could offend or insult. What’s next, thought crimes? Already included: public statements deemed “antisemitic” are classified as “harmful ideas” and proscribed. And not only ideas: the police may seize harmful “things” with “prohibited symbols” (like a Palestinian flag?). The laws also increase penalties for ill-defined “hate” crimes, empower the government to list “prohibited hate groups” and criminalise their promotion or support. Directing, fundraising, doing training to assist, or providing “support” for a banned “hate group” gets 15 years in prison; membership gets 7 years. So who designates the groups? The ASIO, with no appeal before listing.⁷

Plus, there are new powers for the Home Affairs minister to arbitrarily refuse or cancel visas and deport immigrants based on conduct tied to “hatred” or “extremism,” including if a person “is or has been a member of,” or “had an association with” a “hate group.” (U.S. McCarthyite equivalent: “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”) Parallel firearms and customs laws enable security checks in gun licensing, tighten import controls, and criminalise online material. This horror show legislation was opposed by the Australian Human Rights Coalition, Civil Liberties Australia and numerous constitutional law scholars, as well as the Jewish Council of Australia, the Tzedek Collective and other Jewish groups that warned the laws would criminalise pro-Palestinian advocacy and would not diminish real antisemitism.

Also in January, Albanese abandoned his earlier opposition to calling a Royal Commission on Antisemitism, caving to the Israel lobby with $130 million in funding and a year to deliver recommendations. By early February, the Commissioner, Virginia Bell, stated that the definition of “antisemitism” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) would guide their “investigation” (Green Left Weekly, 25 February). The IHRA definition calls labelling Israel racist or opposing the existence of a specifically Jewish state antisemitic. The peak Zionist organisation, Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), equivalent of AIPAC in the U.S., will undoubtedly play a major role. AIJAC has spent decades building relationships across Labor and the Liberal/National Party Coalition.

But what about real antisemites, like the fascist National Socialist Network (NSN) that built and spoke at the 31 August 2025 “March for Australia” called by xenophobe Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigrant One Nation Party? Combat Antisemitism envoy Segal specifically refused to criticize the neo-Nazi presence. And when 70 black-jacketed members of the NSN staged a rally outside the New South Wales parliament on 8 November 2025 with a banner proclaiming “Abolish the Jewish Lobby” and chanting slogans from the Hitler Youth, it was given a permit by the NSW police who sent a squad to stand watch over it. The NSN has announced it will disband in light of the new “anti-hate” laws, but it will simply rebrand as the White Australia Party.

Mobilize Workers’ Power Against Police-State Attacks

The ALP crackdown on anti-Zionist protest in Australia is of a piece with the July 2025 move by Keith Starmer’s Labour Party government in Britain to ban Palestine Action (PA) as a “terror” group, under a definition of “terrorism” as including “serious damage to property.” (PA allegedly sprayed two military aircraft with red paint symbolizing Palestinian blood.) Under that ban, police have arrested 1,500 people with signs saying “I support Palestine Action,” including nearly 900 at a single protest on 6 September 2025. Demonstrators, many of them elderly, face up to 14 years in prison on charges of supporting terrorism. The United Kingdom High Court ruled on February 13 that the ban was unlawful and disproportionate, but charges have not been dropped, the law is still on the books and Starmer’s pro-Zionist Labour government is appealing.

While demonstrators in Sydney’s Town Hall Square saw parallels to the police onslaught in Donald Trump’s U.S.A., there has been an upsurge in repressive laws and cop violence across the imperialist world in recent years. In Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands and, of course, the United States there have been mass arrests of protesters against the U.S./Israel genocide in Gaza, no matter what government was in office. This is part of an overall drive toward Bonapartist, police-state rule in the decaying capitalist system. Interestingly, the same device of extending repressive measures designed to suppress soccer riots to proscribing political protests as is occurring in ALP-governed Australia has been introduced by the right-wing Italian government led by Giorgia Meloni’s fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party.⁸

It is also in Italy that we have seen the answer to this escalating repression. In September-October of last year, Italy’s combative “rank-and-file” unions called mass strikes that effectively shut down the country on September 22 and again on October 3, in solidarity with Gaza. The union-led strike action shut down ports and rail lines and brought millions into the streets, blocking city centres and motorways across the peninsula.⁹ All such actions had been outlawed by a decree-law enacted by Meloni’s right-wing government in April 2025, but that law was effectively shredded by the workers’ action. In Australia, as a comment to the Consortium News article on the February 9 cop riot put it:

“What that rally needed was big organised contingents of strategic workers to:

“(i) provide the muscle to defend them from the cops;

“(ii) shut down key parts of the economy to show the rulers that the working class can’t abide genocide.

“Imagine if contingents of striking train drivers, air traffic controllers and longshoremen/wharfies defied their sellout leaders and shut down the rail system, ports and airports while Herzog was there and joined the ‘illegal’ rally and march. That would have made the world of difference.”

We can easily imagine, as Italian workers have shown the way.

But it’s also not hard to imagine the obstacles that stand in the way of such a mobilization, starting with elaborate compulsory arbitration system that has crippled the Australian labour movement since 1904, and the betrayals by the ALP and leaders of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) that have sent strikes to a 40-year low.¹⁰ Solidarity strikes and political strikes are already illegal. Even the leaders of the historically militant Construction, Forestry and Maritime Union (CFMEU) have failed to mobilize strike action against the government takeover of its construction division.¹¹ To break the bureaucratic stranglehold that chains Australian workers to their exploiters, it’s necessary to forge a class-struggle opposition in the unions going beyond industrial militancy to build a revolutionary workers party.

To combat the elaborate web of repression being spun to squelch pro-Palestinian protests means taking on a political system in which pro-Israel influence networks are firmly embedded in ruling circles. Australia is deeply enmeshed in imperialist military alliances, particularly with the U.S. and Britain. While there have been protests of unprecedented size against the genocide in Gaza, including marching to the ports, Australia’s alignment with Israel – a key ally of the U.S. and linchpin of Western strategy in the Middle East with its vital oil production – has long been institutionalised. Since the beginning of the current war, over 70 Australian companies continue to supply crucial military components to Israel, notably parts for the F-35 fighter jets that have dropped genocidal ordnance on the largely defenceless people of the Gaza Strip.

Moreover, as a mid-sized imperialist power, Australia is key to the U.S. imperialist strategy of encircling China in the Asia-Pacific. This includes pressuring the federal government in Canberra to curtail economic ties to China, which absorbs one-third of Australia’s total exports. In a similar vein, the U.S. imperialists forced European countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to forgo cheap Russian energy as part of the U.S./NATO imperialist proxy war against Russia over Ukraine. An AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom-United States) alliance submarine program promises Australia eight nuclear-powered submarines by the early 2040s, in order to target China. Yet by mid-2025, two-thirds of Australians wanted a parliamentary enquiry into the deal, while less than half believe the agreement will make Australia safer.¹²

After the recent events, there may be calls for enquiries into police misbehaviour. A few hands may be slapped. But the laws will be in place now, and precedents set for when they are needed again. With the rise of xenophobia since the Bondi Beach massacre, it is the venomous immigrant-bashers of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party (with its neo-Nazi hangers-on) that are garnering support. “For the first time in its 29-year history, One Nation is polling above 20 per cent nationally and is ahead of the combined vote of the Liberal and National parties” (ABC News, 15 February). There is plenty of opposition to the burgeoning repressive apparatus being built on a phony pretence of fighting antisemitism. Also to a foreign policy in lockstep with U.S. imperialism, which both under “Genocide Joe” Biden and its current maniacal commander-in-chief in the White House is heading pell-mell for a nuclear World War III, which will not exempt Australia. What’s lacking is a revolutionary leadership of the workers and oppressed.

Staying within the limits allowed by capitalism is a mug’s game. The machinery of authoritarianism now being assembled is all about stabilising power in a period of global fracture. It will not stop with proscribing protest over Gaza. It will not stop with outlawing chants. It will not stop with designated zones. It will remain and grow more intense until it is confronted by a movement capable of dismantling it. The choice is between accepting the steady normalisation of repression or building the collective force required to defeat it. The League for the Fourth International seeks to build revolutionary workers parties to fight growing authoritarianism, austerity and capitalist privation the world over. It will take international socialist revolution to stop the ticking doomsday clock. ■