Right-wing pundits and politicians say they hate the Gaza solidarity campaign because its protests are racist. They’re lying. They hate it because its protests aren’t racist enough.

In Australia, the attack on Gaza engendered one of the broadest social movements in decades, perhaps ever — and its diversity has broken the conservative brain.

Palestinians are playing a leading role, as they should. The powerful speeches delivered at the regular rallies in major cities by Palestinian men and women highlight how rarely in Australia we hear their voices. In the media, Palestinians remain objects rather than subjects. They’re talked about constantly but are only occasionally permitted to speak.

Claims that, in and of itself, the Palestinian presence at the weekly solidarity rallies makes the streets ‘no-go’ zones for Jews exemplify the casual racism still rampant in relation to Palestinians — who are regularly presented, even in impeccably mainstream publications, as so innately, uncontrollably violent that their mere existence constitutes a threat.

Not coincidentally, the anti-Palestinian tropes echo the traditional bigotry deployed about Indigenous people in Australia. They, too, frighten respectable society simply by walking on the streets. They, too, must be heavily policed, surveilled and scrutinised whenever they assemble. Since Israel’s recent assault on Gaza began began, Indigenous activists have repeatedly noted such parallels — and pledged their support again and again for the Palestinian cause.

In any case, the racist argument that Palestinian rallies threaten Jews collapses in the face of an incontrovertible fact: every rally has a huge Jewish presence. Anyone who has attended knows the proliferation of homemade banners or placards with which marchers identify themselves as Jews and then denounce the assault on Gaza. Anyone who has attended will have heard the speakers on the platform expressing their opposition to their Jewish identity being used to justify atrocities. It’s an indictment on the media’s largely shameful coverage of the solidarity movement that such obviously verifiable facts even need to be stated.

Each week, for months now, large number of Palestinians and Jews have stood together in solidarity. What’s more, they’ve done so alongside people from all over the world. Many protest marches are often overwhelmingly white. These are not. They bring together every conceivable identity and ethnicity, including those often entirely excluded from the public sphere. Somali kids wear keffiyehs but so, too, do old men of Chinese heritage and entire families from Turkey. Women in hijabs stand next to women with green hair. Some people come in drag, some people wear khimars, some people come in school uniforms.

The incredible diversity of the Gaza solidarity campaign represents a story entirely missed by most media outlets. I’ve researched and written a lot about radical history in Australia, and I cannot think of a social movement making such a varied array of supporters feel so welcome.

By way of contrast, after the last federal election, pundits celebrated what was dubbed the most diverse parliament in Australian history. What did this entail? Just 6.6 per cent of MPs claim an overseas non-European background, compared to 23 per cent of the population. A mere 4.4 per cent of MPs possess Asian heritage, whereas for the country that figure stands at 18 per cent.

If we turn to the media, data from the most recent census reveals that only 9 per cent of journalists come from a non-Anglo or non-European background. An intensive study of diversity in broadcast news conducted in 2022 found that more than three quarters of presenters and reports across all networks had an AngloCeltic background.

Quite simply, the Palestinian solidarity movement displays far, far more diversity than those attacking it.

Right now, much of the hostility to the campaign centres on the university campuses and the Gaza solidarity camps erected there. Conservatives say that, by such prominent displays of support for Palestine, activists make the campuses uncomfortable for supporters of Israel.

No doubt that’s true, in a certain sense. It’s not pleasant having your preconceptions challenged. But the same conservatives have been arguing for years that universities exist to contest ideas, not to coddle them – and, on that at least, they’re right.

CNN recently published an account of one of the camps in which Israel keeps its prisoners. The network spoke to multiple whistleblowers who

paint a picture of a facility where doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.

According to the accounts, the facility some 18 miles from the Gaza frontier is split into two parts: enclosures where around 70 Palestinian detainees from Gaza are placed under extreme physical restraint, and a field hospital where wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws.

That’s one example of the atrocities that have led Israel’s campaign in Gaza to be repeatedly and credibly described as genocidal. What value would a university have if it did not challenge students who supported genocide — the crime of crimes — to reconsider their ideas? Is that what’s seriously being proposed in respect of higher education in this country: that Australian campuses should prevent those who agree with the amputation of prisoners’ limbs from even hearing any contrary opinions?

The right-wing argument rests, of course, on a rhetorical sleight of hand — one that equates a political position with particular kinds of students, so that campus opposition to the Israeli state becomes opposition to Jews. The same essentialist logic allows the bigot to hold all Jews responsible for whatever Israel does. Needless to say, it’s a fundamentally anti-semitic argument — and it’s shameful that it receives space in the Australian media.

The Gaza solidarity camps do not exclude Jewish students. They contain large numbers of Jewish students. Again, that is just a fact, something easily verifiable by anyone willing to visit one of the encampments rather than simply make up stuff about them.

By and large, modern universities treat students as individual consumers and so provide few opportunities for them to socialise or interact. Undergraduates respond to these bleak, bureaucratic institution by cleaving to the friends they already know. Higher education in Australia enrols people from many nations but those people don’t necessarily mingle.

In that context, the Gaza encampments stand out not because they’re intimidating but because they provide a rare space of community in a soulless corporate environment. Like the broader Palestinian solidarity movement, the encampments centre on Palestinian and Jewish students working closely together, with considerable Indigenous involvement. In fact, they emphasise the ostentatious inclusivity that conservatives loathe. The organisers provide food that’s vegan as well as halal and kosher. They make spaces for different faiths to pray; they ask people their preferred pronouns.

They’ve done that, for weeks now, with impeccable discipline, even as they’ve faced terrifying physical assaults from gangs of thugs. As far as I know, on every campus, the pro-Palestine camp has been entirely peaceful. At the University of Melbourne, at Monash, at Adelaide and elsewhere, the violence has come from outsiders attacking the camps, usually in the middle of the night.

In a recent piece for The Nation, Will Alden describes the US protests from the perspective of a young American Jew.

The mere fact of the Gaza solidarity encampments amounts to a challenge to the status quo and a source of hope in Gaza, where every university has been destroyed. The mere fact of solidarity between Palestinians and Jews—a capacious, queer, multiethnic, multi-abled, cross-class solidarity that includes interconnected struggles in its frame—represents a challenge that seems to terrify the American Jewish establishment.

That terror extends to the establishment more generally. The mainstream discourse about Israel and Palestine in the Australian public sphere centres on the incompatibility of different identities — a claim profoundly challenged by the solidarity movement.

Zionism emerged in the nineteenth century, when every European country defined itself through an ethno-chauvinism centred on a mystical bond supposedly forged by race, religion or both. The Zionist founders reacted to the anti-semitic nationalism that surrounded them but they also absorbed its central tenet: the idea that Jews and non-Jews could not live together.

The Israeli ethnostate could be sold more easily back in the days when a racially-defined nationalism still possessed some mainstream credibility. If, as the masthead of the iconic Bulletin explained until 1961, Australia was “for the white man”, the claim that every other “race” needed a place specifically for them made at least some kind of sense. But decades of anti-racist struggle have smashed the old equation between ethnicity and state so thoroughly that most young people rightly regard as utterly repellent any nation that creates racialised hierarchies of citizenship.

Within the Australian political class, discussion of Palestine begins and ends with the invocation of the phrase “Two State Solution”, the supposed strategy for peace now used primarily as a rhetorical bludgeon against Palestinians and their allies. But young activists far more accustomed to, and comfortable with, ethnic, gender and sexual diversity don’t feel any necessity to genuflect to that formula. In part, they’re well enough informed to recognise the two-state concept as utterly fantastical, given that every major Israeli politician has declared an opposition to it. But more importantly, they find the idea of segregation conceptually abhorrent, an expression of an old and ugly “separate but equal philosophy.

They chant about freedom extending from the river to the sea, not because they’re racist but precisely because they recognise a single, democratic state offering the same rights for all as the only solution compatible with the commitment to equality they take as non-negotiable. South African apartheid gave way to generalised freedom – and the Israeli variant must, too.

If responses to Gaza often seem to diverge along generational lines, that’s partly because young people recognise what the conflict means for their future. The flagrant indifference to the UN by Israel and its enablers (including Australia) has shattered the norms of the post-war era. The implications will be felt for decades. Not so long ago, Ukraine enjoyed, quite rightly, widespread support, because the devastation unleashed by Putin outraged the conscience of the world. That support has now waned, in part because the willingness of the US and other Western countries to facilitate the IDF’s conduct makes their opposition to Russia seem hypocritical.

The atrocities committed in recent months have effectively destroyed treaties like the Geneva Convention. If, god forbid, the mounting tension between the US and China culminates in actual conflict, nothing now will constrain the barbarities of either side. Gaza taught warmakers everywhere that, if you’re strong enough, you do whatever you please.

The precedent goes further than war. For decades, the political class centred its strategy for climate action on the creation of global agreements such as the regular Conferences of the Parties. If Israel can brush aside international law in Gaza, why would anyone expect climate agreements to hold? More importantly, if western governments can watch — indeed, assist with — the killing of thousands of children to ensure Israel’s regional hegemony, why would anyone expect them to forestall the horrors associated with global heating? We’ve seen how the international elites protect their interests in the Middle East. Only a fool would expect any less ruthlessness in defence of fossil fuels.

That’s the world being prepared for the young — and they know it.

But there’s another reason why students and other young people play such a prominent role in the solidarity movement: they’ve grown up in the wake of the great social movements of the sixties and the seventies, and they won’t accept anything less than equality.

That’s what drives the conservatives crazy.

Image: Popular University for Gaza encampment at the University of Oregon demanding divestment from companies supporting Israel. Day 2, 30 April 2024. (Ian Mohr)