I find very, very, very offensive the fact that a Blak person in Bourke, if he sets one foot in a bloody pub up there, he will get his head kicked in. That is extremely offensive to me. I find very offensive the highest infant immortality rate in the world in this country amongst Blak kids… Now if people find me offensive, I don’t give a damn.

Young Gary Foley

A Free Palestine protester stands accused of throwing horse manure at the cops during the mobilisation against the Land Forces weapons exposition in Naarm (Melbourne). No one else was chuckling about that incident except probably the people in this city who yell “get those animals off those horses” at the mounted units that have been deployed regularly in the past year to break regular community pickets seeking to hinder war profits. That chant is very popular at the 5 am shift anti-weapons pickets. The “antifa” taught it to the Free Palestine groups. The people love it nearly as much as they love the local hooligan song, “All Zionists are Terrorists, all Zionists are Terrorists”, though the verdict has yet to come in regarding whether it crosses the boundaries of liberal speech. I’m unsure if All Cops Are Bastards has ever been contested under Victoria’s fresh hate laws.

Every Sunday, antizionist and ACAB sticker vandalism takes place and that chant roars through the city. The officers are trying to get a pay rise, so they have put ACAB on their own vehicles: “ACAB: All Cops Are Burntout”. We live in their head rent-free. Where do the millions in tax funds for police go? Even that question can unravel the workings of an oppressive system. The regular protesters ask the police who is authorised to police the police while they go on strike. On another week, the protesters taunt the men in blue wearing riot gear, aye you’re on a protest, quit your job!

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I’ve spent every Sunday at the Free Palestine protests as an organiser and a participant. I am Palestinian, my family members have been murdered in Gaza. I have remaining family in Gaza who are surviving the genocidal onslaught. A Palestinian is not odd at a Free Palestine action, I’m the assumed subject of these political activities. Most members of the public opposed to the state’s alliance with the Zionist regime are not Palestinian, yet they have shown up for Palestine in the longest protests in modern history. They show up because they care. They care about the state of the world. They care about the state of this nation.

A person who frequents the rallies expressed to me that coming to the Sunday rally reminds her of going to Church. I hadn’t made that connection, that the rallies are on a Sunday of course. What does Australian colonial modernity offer us as activities to do on the hard fought for weekend? Post-Covid, the city has been truly a ghost town that will become even more ghostly with the public housing demolitions that should enrage all decent people. The Age has published a hit piece claiming that our weekly protests hurt small businesses, but there is silence around how transferring public housing residents out of the homes they’ve lived in for decades might hurt them.

The hurt that matters is hurt to business — that much is blatantly obvious to even Labor’s broad voter base. Before the Sunday rallies, as a single mum of two boys I often struggled to come up with an enjoyable way to spend the weekend. Our life is now re-immersed with meaning, which is better than enjoyment. In the protest site, I no longer have to contend with the dissonance required to embody modern whiteness’ self-help mantras offered to us ordinary people.

Many of the people I rally with were born overseas and grew up on this continent, like myself. Many are white, many were born here, many are Indigenous. The current majority of the frequent base is composed of working people and disadvantaged, unemployed people — retired folks, the homeless, students, ill people, from varied backgrounds, genders and ages..

Those manufacturing consent for war homogenise us as “the protesters”. The representations constructed of the dissenting public often evoke anti-communist tropes, while also racialising demonstrators as the Muslim radical Other. Sometimes we homogenise ourselves, too, and begin to see ourselves in the singular, through the gaze of the powerful. It’s important to make visible the multiplicity that sustains a movement which operates in a movement that has emerged in the decay of the Australian multicultural state. My comrade and friend Jenn Brown has produced more than 100 films that feature over 52 weeks of mass actions for Palestine. Her archive (accessed here) has helped me see “us” through another gaze. I am observing that there lies a powerful, alternate politics of difference within the Free Palestine movement.  The politics we are cultivating is creating a mass of opponents  who have the strength to go one day longer.

Michael Bachelard gestured to this difference when he wrote about the widely condemned October 6, 2024 rally held in Melbourne to protest marking one year of the Gaza Genocide:

Middle-aged doctors from the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, students, hundreds of children, activists of all stripes flooded in from the suburbs to the city. They marched under Palestinian flags, Lebanese flags, a transgender pride flag — even an Albanian flag. Peaceful it might have been, but it had its sharp edges. As the crowd marched past the Starbucks in Swanston Street – protected particularly by police because of the belief by some that the company supports Zionism — the chant turned to “all Zionists are terrorists”. A few doors down, a small group of protesters broke away to go to the doorway of a small skincare shop called Jevoute, to yell the slogan pointedly at the young man inside. The employee, who only wanted to be known as Vlad, said the shop was an Israeli brand, and this happened every time there was a protest.

there, every other day, we are causing a muck in the most liveable city in the world – that’s what the ruling class says in the tabloids. Conservatives usually reminisce to us supposed commies that they grew up in the outback racking up manure but they cannot fathom that someone picked up poo off the concrete. Southbank smells bad. It smells inside MP Peter Khalil’s office, too. It doesn’t smell like social cohesion.

It smells like teen spirit. The racists are coming to terms with the reality that supporters of Palestine aren’t your lefty progressives and definitely aren’t the right’s imagined social justice warriors. The bigots repeat, get a job, you’re not doing your cause a favour. The mainstream reporters fall back on a clichéd narrative — the peace activists are violent, how hypocritical, how ironic. The “protesters” see that and say peace is the coloniser’s word.

Australian headlines report the smell of vomit in the CBD. International news reports that today, Gaza smells of death. The accumulating death toll in Gaza is met by Jacinta Allen’s tears over anniversary appropriateness. We receive a public scolding of how to behave at a national funeral for a foreign falling colony, “show respect”. We learn that it is inappropriate for the denied victims of genocide to really be victims – grotesque, calls it the Herald Sun. We respect the living and the dead so much that the nation may as well imagine the weapons parts we produce to release doves over the holy land. We export doves, not F-35 Fighter Jets that shred loved ones bodies to indistinguishable pieces.

Land Forces, the biannual largest weapons expo in the Southern Hemisphere, was brought for the first time to Melbourne this year despite Melbourne apparently becoming Australia’s Protest City thanks to the Free Palestine activists. Those who vehemently oppose political correctness are very disgusted by the stinky fart bombs that masked kids allegedly detonated around where the CEOs of Bombs were shaking hands. None of this is new, though. In November 1991, the Australia International Defence Exhibition (AIDEX) was held in Canberra. Up to two thousand protesters blockaded the National Exhibition Centre, bringing together “people from a myriad of political causes and countercultural scenes.”

Jacinta Allen does what governments do: she deploys the police to protect the weapons expo that her government sponsored to the tune of millions of dollars, with their weaponry that her government funded with more millions. She cries that the protests are not nice. She says weapons expos are for nice things like tourism. The stun grenades and rubber bullets that she deployed against the masses set another (very nice) precedent of civil rights abuses. The protesters who put their hands up to say don’t shoot at us, they’re the folk devil.

Online footage shows a protester walking away from the thugs protecting tanks-on-display. When she looks back, she sees an elderly priest on a scooter behind her in the firing line. The police exhibit very proper behaviour towards this agent of terror. They push him around in his scooter. She intervenes. The police push her. The police injure her. She seeks his consent to wheel him away so they can both escape. Heroes. We only herald imperial feminists, women like Penny Wong. The far right don’t herald any feminists, so for decades we’ve been brainwashed into neoliberal progressivism all the way to a cost-of-living crisis.

We could get our policies from Defence Connect that hosts this commentary about the anti-Land Forces actions:

What they witnessed was criminal vandalism, anti-establishment chaos, aimless destruction, economic short-sightedness and general banditry on the streets surrounding the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre from 11 to 13 September.

We could get our policies from Dr Richard Barnes, a medical practitioner who provided a testimonial of the protests:

As I watch and read coverage of the events of Wednesday, I am enraged. It is clear to me that the military-industrial complex is now, at least in Australia, a military-industrial-research-government-media behemoth. The actions of the protesters on Wednesday were trivial in comparison to the actions of the police who were acting as an arm of that behemoth; and the actions of the police were trivial in comparison to the state-sanctioned military violence of which Land Forces is a part.

There is little cohesion between the two perspectives. Horrifyingly, a few days after Landforces, Neo-Nazis descended on the refugee encampment to declare in no subtle terms: Fuck off, we’re full. It said so on their banner. They were masked. They were in disciplined line formations. They chanted Australia for the White Man. They were faced off by your regular Free Palestine protesters and the refugees who for twelve years have been waiting for a permanent visa. The neo-Nazis ran off to the battle chants of the sharp-edged Palestine protesters. “The protesters” apparently don’t cry. They return the next day and the next weekend. The children and grandchildren of Australia’s boomers cannot afford soy lattes anymore. Remember when we were grilled for being too effeminate to consume cow’s milk? Now, sensationally, we’re throwing horse shit at the officers.

An ABC 7.30 report featured interviews of a few Middle Eastern men with terror-charge-dodging yellow and green flags at the Melbourne Gaza Genocide anniversary protest. These underdogs told the reporter the colours represent the Socceroos and the Wallabies. (In Sydney, someone was raising a yellow and green flag with Ned Kelly holding a rifle on it.) The ABC reporter asked one man if he thought Israel has the right to exist. The man lit up, responding that no state has the right to exist on military occupation, murder, land theft, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The interviewer put to him that many Australians would find what he is expressing offensive. Viewers can see another member of the public start to agitate. The interviewee calmly gestured to those around him that he’s got it. He then said: “we find the images of babies with their limbs torn apart and blown up and buried under tons of rubble very disturbing”. (A viral clip of the exchange can be found here.)Love them or hate them, using law and order to break them won’t work. While the demonstrators often chant that there is “no peace on stolen land”.

Threats to ban the protests and to use the force of the law brings us to another revelation, perhaps that there is “no democracy on stolen land”. The Free Palestine  masses don’t give a damn about you or your colonial sensibilities. Pardon me, said young Gary Foley who addresses these rallies almost weekly. Pardon me for being born into a nation of racists.

Header image: Cxar.creative