This is the full final version of the circulating open letter calling on the Victorian Muslim community to boycott the Victorian Premier’s Iftar.  Assalamu alaikum. Since 2015, the tradition of hosting an annual Victorian Premier’s Iftar during Ramadan has been welcomed by sections of the Muslim community, with hundreds from the Victorian Muslim community accepting […]

The stumps under our floor are teetering and though not the cause it is nevertheless a cause for alarm, the weight of thousands of books we have partially shelved but also stacked in piles of varying consonance impossible to discard. Yet despite this number, it is the handful of books, missing through loans or misfortune, that haunt me.

We are the artists, producers, front of house staff, audiences & beyond who keep this industry alive. We’re here, unified in ‘Australia’, a colonised country built on the genocide and dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation from colonialism, apartheid & […]

We, the students, staff, and alumni who make up the community at The University of Melbourne, reiterate the NTEU University of Melbourne Branch’s Palestine solidarity statement. We implore The University of Melbourne to stand on the right side of history by condemning Israel’s genocidal attack against the people of Palestine.

It is true that there are Israelis whose ideas are more nuanced than the media’s. Probably these are a subset of the Israelis who do not attend raves mere miles from the perimeter of an open air prison (the world’s largest). One, who I last saw at the American Colony in Jerusalem, in June, where we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes together, wrote on Tuesday, when quite by chance I was at a funeral, “everything [Hamas] is inflicting on us now, we have been inflicting on the Palestinians for years.

We are deeply concerned by the Australian government’s complicity in enabling the Israeli state to suppress the aspiration of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Last week, Australia was one of only two countries (with the Marshall Islands) to vote against a UN Human Rights Council resolution condemning the illegal annexation of significant parts of the occupied Palestinian West Bank by Israel.

If until recently – in the minds of Jewish-Israelis – Palestinians found themselves inheriting the Nazi legacy and perhaps just competing with it, the last twenty years or so have changed their positioning on the hate ladder. In their ambition to have it all – land and domination from the Sea to the River – Israeli institutions, law, and policies went too far with their disciplinary and violent logic against Palestinians, to the point that it makes sense today, for a well-trained Jewish-Israeli, to conceive the ‘Palestinian threat’ as not any less ominous than the Nazi regime was.

‘Students,’ Pyne warned, ‘have been targeted physically and verbally just because they are Jewish.’ It’s no small thing for the Education Minister to publicly identify the universities within his portfolio as seedbeds of racialised violence. You’d think that, to justify such an extraordinary allegation, there’d be some – oh, I don’t know – evidence.

Potentially this year’s most brilliant and unnerving documentary film, The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh, restages and retells the Israel–Palestine conflict, systematically constructing and destabilising his own narrative complexity like a well-played game of Jenga.

The term ‘terrorist,’ Alain Badiou argues in ‘On September 11: Philosophy and the ‘War Against Terrorism’ has become ‘an essentially empty term,’ a ‘non-existent substance, an empty name,’ a void which is ‘precious because it can be filled’. The predicate ‘Islamic’ (or, in the past week ‘Palestinian’) has, for Badiou, no ‘other function than to give ostensible content to that form’.

Republished with permission from Electronic Intifada and Kim Bullimore. In the largest show of support for the Palestinian-initiated boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign so far in Australia, more than 350 persons marched on 29 July in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle – and in opposition to an attempt by Victorian Police to criminalise Palestine […]

After the Camp David negotiations broke down, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared that ‘we have no partner for peace’, and the Israeli public lurched to the Right. Despite promising signs of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators approaching agreement at Taba (unilaterally ended by Israel), the Israeli public elected Ariel Sharon. The Israeli public no longer […]

I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and pay my respects to their elders past and present. When explaining why BDS advocates were banned from presenting at Limmud Oz, the Executive explained that ‘the BDS campaign is an attack on Israel’s basic legitimacy and harms […]

In his op-ed for the Washington Post, Goldstone made the remarkable claim that if he had known during his investigations ‘what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document’. This was supported by two primary claims in support. The first: ‘While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in […]

Richard Goldstone’s recent op ed in the Washington Post has caused a flood of discussion of what we call the Goldstone Report. I think there are three issues relating to the report and its current fallout worth considering. In this post, I will address the bias of Goldstone and the report. In the next, I […]

Below is an open letter to the Marrickville Council (via Antony Loewenstein) from prominent international academics, writers and artists who support the council’s BDS position. Marrickville Council is voting on the boycott again today. Dear Marrickvile councilors, We the undersigned would firstly like to congratulate the Marrickville Council in Sydney’s Inner West, Australia for their […]