Since when do the victims of genocide have the responsibility to defer to and protect the feelings of those who enact, support, and enable their genocide?
(Randa Abdel-Fattah)

Settlers always think they’re defending themselves.
(Fred Moten)

On the opening night of the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull in November 2023, three members of the cast wore keffiyehs during curtain call in a gesture of solidarity with Palestinian people under siege in Gaza and the West Bank by the occupying forces of the Israeli state. The controversy that followed will likely be known to readers, since it was extensively covered in the Australian media. What may be less known is that on the same evening, Saturday 25 November, across the world in the US, three young Palestinian men were shot in Burlington, Vermont by a man who noticed them speaking to each other in Arabic, two of them in keffiyehs. The gunman shot all three, injuring Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmed, and paralysing Hisham Awartani from the waist down.

‘What was my crime?’ Awartani wrote a week after the shooting: “What heinous deed did I commit for me to deserve to get shot and lose control of my legs? I was Palestinian” (2023). Awartani goes on, recalling an action he took part in at Brown University ten days earlier in which students wrote the names of thousands of Palestinians killed to date — a collective refusal to let the lives of the dead be reduced to the abstraction of numbers.

They gave us a document issued by the Gaza Health Ministry, and out of curiosity the first thing I did was look up my name. There were 30 results. 13 people named Hisham and 17 with Hisham as a middle name. I didn’t know how to feel. My name was not a common one. The list was incomplete and only included around 6,500 names, while an estimated 11,000 had been killed by Israel or according to American media, “had died.” Had I been one of those Hishams in Gaza my picture would not have been on the BBC or CNN. Instead of being interviewed, my mother would be fleeing south or already killed, trapped under the rubble with me.

Awartani’s statement reveals the asymmetrical relations of violence and safety, invisibility and visibility, indifference and care at play in the coverage of the siege. It’s hard not to draw a parallel between the opening of The Seagull and the shooting in Vermont, which occurred on the same day; two events that turn on the keffiyeh as symbol, catalyst, trigger. It’s also hard not to notice the differences in their reporting. Stories on the shooting in Vermont were scarce in the week that followed, and tended to exercise caution by highlighting that police investigations were ongoing and yet to determine the gunman’s motivation. The Sydney Theatre Company “controversy”, by contrast, was extensively covered, and emphasis given to opposition to the gesture of solidarity and the subsequent apology issued by the company, rather than the cause for solidarity itself. The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 8 December that the actors were standing with “the Palestinians caught up in the Israeli war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip”, a description that makes civilian death seem incidental — even the fault of the civilians themselves for getting caught up in the business of war. Most stories followed the accounts of three board members who resigned in protest, as well as donors who registered their discontent and members who threatened to — or did — cancel their subscriptions. Across the different reports, the story hung on the notion of safety: the safety of audiences and the safety of the company’s broader community of workers and stakeholders.

Judi Hausmann, one of the board members who resigned in protest, called for a “one-night pause” of the production; the company agreed and cancelled a performance on the same day that they published their official statement. Safety is invoked in the statement three times. The first two times, safety is called on as a principle of the company as a place of work, underwritten by policy, that mediates the freedom of expression of its employees: “We support individual freedom of expression but believe that the right to free speech does not supersede our responsibility to create safe workplaces and theatres”. This rhetoric is finally invoked in a call for world peace: “Sydney Theatre Company believes everyone has the right to live in peace and safety, and through our art we seek to foster a better and more compassionate world”. The right to live in peace and safety, we must imagine, includes the right to oppose the forms of violence that animate occupation, apartheid and military campaigns. The right to live in peace and safety, we must imagine, includes the right to stand in solidarity with people facing the force of an eliminatory campaign that the International Court of Justice found could plausibly amount to genocide. The right to live in peace and safety, finally, must extend to the three young men shot for doing the very same thing the actors did: wearing keffiyehs in public.

The keffiyeh has become emblematic of Palestinian culture and freedom struggles over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their distinct woven patterns represent trade routes connected by the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the olive trees and fishing nets central to Palestinian life. Like the Palestinian flag, which, after 1967, was banned by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank, the keffiyeh has been made to signify terrorism. The racialised association between Palestinians and terrorism is one part of a larger socio-discursive project that casts the Palestinian struggle for freedom from occupation as the enemy of democracy and peace. According to this racist logic, by which Palestinian people are always already the agents of violence, even in the context of their own subjugation under an apartheid state, the mere presence of Palestinian cultural life is an a priori threat. Palestinian men in keffiyehs are terrorists; non-Palestinian actors in keffiyehs are deputised agents of terror.

Hence the appeal to safety. Implicit in the Sydney Theatre Company’s apology is the notion that this gesture of solidarity put people at risk — this notion, in turn, implies that opposition to the Israeli state is antisemitic and that all Jewish people are represented by Israel and therefore directly harmed by any critique of the state. Hausmann’s letter, widely quoted in the media, stated, “I never imagined my resignation would be necessary because I am a Jew”. Such a statement captures the chain of racialised signifiers that link Israel and Palestine and defines dominant discourse on the relation between the two. According to the binary terms of this discourse Israel is a nation-state created for the safety of Jewish people; and Palestine is the antithesis of that safety. This construction prevails to the extent that, as Randa Abdel-Fattah has pointed out, the feelings of those who support the Israeli state are considered more important and newsworthy than the actual lives of the Palestinian people under siege. Such asymmetry demonstrates the dehumanisation of Palestinians, who are considered responsible for the terms of their own occupation and terroristic for their dreams of freedom.

In December 2023 and January 2024, letters co-signed by more than a thousand Australian artists and arts workers under the banner “Artists for Palestine” were sent to cultural organisations across the country, asking them to take a principled stand against mass civilian death and infrastructural devastation in Gaza and the West Bank. These letters acknowledged the role of art as a site for political engagement and alternative world-making, citing the long history of activist art and its uncompromising visions of justice and freedom. At the time of writing, in February 2024, none of the twelve organisations petitioned by Artists for Palestine — Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Arts & Cultural Exchange (ACE), Artspace, Canberra Contemporary Arts Space (CCAS), Carriageworks, Contemporary Art Tasmania (CAT), Gertrude Contemporary, Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA), Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), and 4A — had taken up the call to make a public statement on the war on Gaza. The MCA and Artspace responded directly to Artists for Palestine to explain their decision. Momentarily putting aside the moral and political question of opposing genocide, the silence speaks volumes to the absence of respect for a community of artists they purport to represent.

In their responses to Artists for Palestine, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Artspace both cited “cultural safety” as the reason for not making a public statement that calls for a ceasefire and an end to occupation. An Instagram account called @artsistsforpalestine2023 has documented the letters and responses. In the response from its board, the MCA wrote: “As Australia’s preeminent museum for the art of our time, it is important for the MCA to remain an open and culturally safe space that encourages discussion and exchange from a diversity of perspectives”. Discussion and exchange from a diversity of perspectives is a reasonable goal for a museum; less reasonable, perhaps, is the notion that the violence of an apartheid state can be described as a matter that requires a plurality of perspectives and that should remain open to interpretation and disagreement. The MCA might look to the report issued by the UN Special Rapporteurs who wrote, in October, that the actions of Israel amount to “collective punishment” of Palestinian people. Less reasonable, too, is the notion that an institution charged with facilitating public discourse be restrained by the unexplained deployment of cultural safety in order to say nothing on a matter of public concern. For whom is it culturally unsafe to oppose state-managed death on this scale? For whom is it culturally unsafe to call for an end to occupation, to refuse the differential logics and death-dealing operations of apartheid? What does it mean for the language of cultural safety — which has a very specific and important meaning that we elaborate below — to be used in this way, as a term that, in its usage here, cannot but accuse its addressee of the intention to act unsafely?

The response from the Artspace board echoes that of the MCA, with a more forceful appeal to free speech: “We believe it is important for Artspace to continue to uphold our mission to provide an open and inclusive space for the freedom of diverse artistic expression, and a culturally, psychologically, and physically safe space for everybody to feel welcome and secure to participate and to listen respectfully to others, especially when in disagreement. Artspace strongly supports free speech.” Here we might pause to consider the weaponisation of free speech by conservative politicians who pay lip service to the notion of freedom of expression as they pass legislation that aims to restrict those protestors engaged in democratic forms of dissent. Artspace’s emphatic commitment to freedom of expression, again, is understandable in a cultural institution — nevertheless, it rings false at a time when critiques of Israel and opposition to its campaign in occupied Palestine are subjected to such suffocating censorship. In December last year, Amnesty International expressed concern over the intimidation of journalists reporting on Israel–Palestine by media companies in Australia, an intimidation that compromises the integrity of the press and contravenes the public’s right to information. This report came at the same time that Antoinette Lattouf was sacked by the ABC for reposting a story on Instagram from Human Rights Watch reporting the use of starvation as a military tactic by the Israeli state in Gaza, a war crime. It must also be read alongside the sobering number of journalists killed to date by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

In these institutional responses, we might note how the concept of “cultural safety” has been dislocated from its original usage. The term was developed in the 1980s by Māori nurses and midwifery students in Aotearoa as a response to Western pedagogy practices and training that failed to account for the impacts of colonisation on health outcomes and were insensitive to cultural practices of Indigenous people and other minorities. The concept was intended to promote reflexivity and positionality among healthcare workers, encouraging them to challenge naturalised ethnocentric viewpoints and understand how social and historical factors — such as colonisation, racism, dispossession — contribute to health inequalities. Central to these original articulations of cultural safety is a critique of neutrality and objectivity. Indigenous healthcare workers emphasised that these concepts do not exist outside of history, culture and politics, insisting that an expanded understanding of safety must take into consideration the harm inflicted under the guise of a Eurocentric thinking.

The Nursing Council of New Zealand offered an early definition of cultural safety as “the effective nursing of a person/family from another culture by a nurse who has undertaken a process of reflection on own cultural identity and recognises the impact of the nurses’ culture on own nursing practice”. Note the emphasis on structural dynamics  — the impact of, and by implication reproduction, of a dominant culture through practice — as well as the weight given to self-reflection and positionality — recognition of one’s relation to structures of power. These crucial factors are absent in the institutional invocations of cultural safety we draw attention to above. The responses from the boards of the MCA and Artspace evade the demand that safety requires an understanding of one’s own relationship to dominant and historical structures of power in favour of a vaguely articulated appeal to inclusivity on the basis of differing opinions and perspectives. What is invoked here is not concern for safety as much as policy as an alibi for political neutrality. Such neutrality is yet another site in which state violence appears to disappear.

The terrain of the siege in Gaza is multiple and varied. Since 7 October, and at the time of writing in February 2024, more than 65,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on a territory roughly 1/35th the size of greater Sydney. Ground troops have followed closely behind the aerial devastation, and demolition crews have flattened critical infrastructure, including in areas where fighting is no longer taking place. As the siege continues, the bombing of hospitals, schools, refugee camps, evacuation routes and safe zones continues. Over the past four months, millions of Palestinians have been kettled into precarious zones in the south of the strip, such as the city of Rafah, under the promise of safety. As we write, that promise has evaporated, and the huge numbers of displaced Palestinians within Rafah have become the latest target of Israeli aggression. A conservative estimate of the destruction of Gaza suggests at least 70% of housing has been permanently razed. We are witnessing the killing of Palestinians en masse in numbers that we have chosen not to enumerate here in order to both resist the possibility that these lives are reduced to crude mathematics, and to note that proper accounting is impossible given the targeting of hospitals in Gaza as well as the speed and scale of the destruction. The immensity of this violence means that the loss of life is continuing every minute, hour, day at an almost incomprehensible rate.

Of course, the siege of Gaza did not begin on 7 October, it stretches back more than a century to the origins of a Zionist project inextricable from British colonialism and European antisemitism. The terrain and techniques of war over this long century include the violence that enabled the creation of the Israeli nation state: the Nakba of 1948, in which at least 15,000 Palestinians were killed and another 750,000 driven from their homelands, transformed into refugees. The terrain of war includes state-sanctioned land grabs and the illegal establishment of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. It includes a 17-year blockade of the Gaza strip that has left Palestinians vulnerable to constant deprivation and rendered it the world’s largest open-air prison. It involves shifting and compounding logics of death and debilitation that draw upon state-of-the-art military technologies and seemingly endless support from Western powers, including the US and Australia. The terrain of this war also unfolds on discursive ground that traverses not only Palestinian territory but reaches across the entire globe.

Take the demonisation of the popular Palestinian liberation chant: “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. The phrase — which can be heard every week as crowds continue to protest ongoing genocidal violence — is a call for decolonisation: land back, self-determination, right of return and freedom. Many Zionists, however, argue that the slogan is a call for genocide, a claim that turns on the presumption that Palestinian articulations of liberation depend upon the extermination of Jewish people. These arguments contain an inversion that seeks to obscure the actually existing genocide being perpetrated by the Israeli state. This inversion relies on the mobilisation of racist and Islamophobic tropes and denies the history of coexistence between Muslim, Christian and Jewish people in Palestine. As Yousef Munayyer has written, “these Palestinians, the logic goes, cannot be trusted — even if they are calling for equality, their real intention is extermination. In order to justify unending violence against Palestinians, this logic seeks to caricature us as irrational savages hell-bent on killing Jews”. The effect of this inversion not only demonises and dehumanises Palestinians, but also demarcates the discursive terrain upon which discussions of Israel and Palestine can take place. Alongside the racialisation of Palestinians that we find in statements such as those made by Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant when he announced that “we are fighting against human animals”, we can locate a rhetorical strategy that attempts to establish a false equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian experience.

The language of grievance and safety is mustered by Zionists to wrest a phrase such as “from the river to the sea”, or an object such the keffiyeh, from its historical context in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and transform it into a signifier of violence that necessitates the relentless dropping of bombs and the deprivation of food, water and medical supplies required to sustain life. In this discourse, signifiers of Palestinian (social) life are presented as irrefutable evidence of harm inflicted. The charge is presented as irrefutable because it is grounded in an individual experience of a perceived breach of safety. Implicit in this construction is the idea that Palestinian existence is always already a threat to Jewish safety, a circular logic that preemptively justifies eliminatory violence. The weaponisation of cultural safety is continuous with a troubling discourse of liberal identity politics that emphasises the individual while failing to interrogate the material conditions that give rise to the collective traumas of colonialism and racism. Yet conditional and asymmetrical conceptions of safety and equality are foundational to liberal democracies, which presume equality for the self-possessed subject while depending on the violent exploitation and dispossession of those excluded from that category: Indigenous people and the enslaved. That this discourse continues to structure nation states such as Israel should not surprise us, yet the ease with which its terms are uncritically, and perhaps sometimes unwittingly reproduced, is cause for alarm. This strategy shifts focus away from actual violence and onto its semantics. It creates a situation where many commentators are left debating what constitutes genocide while a genocide unfolds before our eyes.

The explicit or implicit invocation of safety conflates the critique of the nation state of Israel with a critique of Jewish people. This move further conflates a diverse group of people with the actions of a racist settler-colonial nation state, which can, in turn, be understood as itself antisemitic in that it forcefully advances a homogenous conception of Jewish identity premised on the notion that Israel is the only safe haven for Jewish people. (During his Whitehouse Hanukkah address last year, Joe Biden said: “Folks, were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who is safe.” Many noted that this was an extraordinary statement from the President of a country with a significant Jewish population; many also noted it was a cynical statement from a politician who underlined Israel as a strategic ally by repeating a line famously first uttered in 1986: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”)

While these institutions resort to “safety” to justify silence, we might consider how strange such a justification would be if reproduced in relation to Australia. Indeed, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Artspace are two cultural institutions that seem to pride themselves on producing rigorous, critical exhibitions that contribute to, and shape, discourse relating to the ongoing process of settler colonialism and the litany of horrors it produces. We think back to encountering Vernon Ah Kee’s powerful video work tall man (2010) for the first time at the MCA. The four-channel video installation chronicles the Palm Island riots that irrupted in the wake of the killing of Mulrunji Doomadgee in police custody, a damning portrait of the violence of policing and its perpetuation of racial regimes. The work demonstrates the MCA’s commitment to activist art that addresses contemporary colonial violence. We recall Ah Kee’s text work willilive (2011), which is in the museum’s permanent collection, a text work that removes the spaces between the English words, making them momentarily strange in a process that mimics the destruction of language and culture inflicted by English colonists while also commenting on the disposability of Black life in the colony. We also remember Artspace’s presentation of Helen Johnson’s exhibition Warm Ties, in which intricate paintings the size of theatre backdrops transformed the audience into a player on the stage of history, forcing a confrontation with the originary acts of dispossession and their reverberations into the present. We cannot imagine invoking the “cultural safety” of settlers as a reason for not showing such work nor as a justification for silence on the history and present of colonisation in Australia.

Some might argue that these contexts are incomparable, shaped by different histories and geopolitical realities. While myriad differences do, of course, exist, it was through a comparative analysis of Australia and Israel that the historian and theorist of settler colonialism Patrick Wolfe developed his incisive formulation that the underlying logic of settler colonialism was marked by “a logic of elimination” in which settlers seek to replace the Indigenous population. “Elimination”, writes Wolfe, “is an organising principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence”. For Wolfe, the logic of elimination operates in the service of access to, and acquisition of, territory, and this is common to all settler-colonial societies. The weaponisation of cultural safety has come to act as a defence and distraction from the underlying logic of elimination that, in the case of Gaza, is now on full, genocidal display. The incongruity of speaking in one context and staying silent in the other highlights the hard conceptual and political limits of these cultural institutions.

Silence on the question of Palestinian liberation and the mobilisation of cultural safety as a justification of silence collapses the difference between weaponised charges of antisemitism and the material violence of Israel’s campaign. This, of course, is not to suggest that antisemitism does not exist, nor that antisemitic violence should not be unequivocally resisted by antiracist efforts worldwide. Rather, we stress that critique of the actions and ideology of a nation state is not the same thing as antisemitism, which involves the violent ascription of racial characteristics to a diverse group of people. Antisemitism must be fought as part of a coalitional antiracism that also stands unwaveringly with Palestinian liberation. Articulations of grievance and safety in the language of cultural institutions under the guise of antiracism achieves its very foreclosure. Alana Lentin puts it incisively:

The political utility of antisemitism today is not to illuminate the operations of race, but rather to obscure them. The severing of race, as a technology of rule, from “frozen” accounts of racism has precipitated a public illiteracy about how race works that presents a serious challenge for antiracism (2020:135).

The mobilisation of cultural safety works to silence what Palestinians are calling for when they wear the keffiyeh or sing the phrase from the river to the sea, which is, to borrow Yousef Munayyer’s words, “a state in which Palestinians can live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominated by others nor dominating them. When we call for a free Palestine from the river to the sea, it is precisely the existing system of domination that we seek to end”.

Artists, arts workers and cultural commentators should take seriously the deployment of cultural safety as a screen concept to avoid a clear political position and to preemptively foreclose political positions on the contradictory grounds that they contravene free speech. We should take seriously a cultural landscape in which justice can only be imagined as something we seek to reclaim from the past. We should take seriously moments like these in which the contradictions that animate these conditionally public institutions reveal themselves: a museum neither wholly belongs to its board nor to its audiences, but in fact, lives and dies in the space between, a space where what constitutes the public is both struggled for and obstructed.

Solidarity forges an inclusive space; struggle is always open to those who want to join. This space is not determined by individual opinions and perspectives but rather by the dynamics of history that have produced empire and subjugation. Solidarity also involves the drawing of battlelines, for it is a struggle that, to borrow Frantz Fanon’s famous formulation, “sets out to change the order of the world”.  The task ahead of us is to find ways to cause as much disruption as possible to the systems and structures that reproduce the order of the world — reproduce its rapacious appetite for extraction and its extraordinary capacity for immiseration. This includes identifying the contradictions and complicities of cultural institutions that claim to be invested in the project of justice but whose silence speaks otherwise. And crucially, it includes finding ways to act collectively against such silence. With, without, or indeed against the institutions we work in, we must forge a commitment to a coalitional and internationalist antiracism that understands the shared histories of Islamophobia and antisemitism and that takes seriously the danger presented by ethnonationalism in its attempt to dismantle solidarity and entrench racial violence, beneath a cynical rhetoric of safety.

Works cited

Awartina, H 2023, “From Hisham Awartini, Wednesday, November 29”, The College Hill Independent, 1 December.
Lentin, A 2020, Why Race Still Matters, Polity.
Munayyer, Y 2021, “What Does ‘From the River to the Sea’ Really Mean?”, Jewish Currents, 11 June.