Palestinians in the West Bank plant roughly 10,000 olive trees a year, to make up for the roughly 10,00 trees Israel cuts or burns every year, since 1967. People I get but why — why bring trees into this?

We, the undersigned Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance members, condemn the Australian government's support for Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza and its refusal to vote in the United Nations for a humanitarian truce.

We, the undersigned academics from Australian universities, stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. 

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 clear that the political failure to uphold the dignity and inherent value of the lives of the residents of Gaza — the refusal to call for a reprieve from Israel’s relentless bombing campaign and ongoing daily acts of violence and humiliation — gives a greenlight to others to enact a violence and oppression of their own.

We do not create our art merely for entertainment or for profit. We create because it is a human imperative in the same way that speaking out against war crimes is a moral imperative. As an extension of both of those imperatives, and echoing demands from Palestinians in Gaza, we ask you to to demand an immediate ceasefire; demand immediate access to Gaza for humanitarian aid; demand an investigation into Israel’s egregious attacks and war crimes on Palestinians in Gaza; demand an end to Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid regime. 

The discourses of dehumanisation that spread from Israeli narratives and are championed by Western media justify breaches of international humanitarian law in order to further the political economy of occupation. Constructing Palestinians as a sub-human enemy that is freely disposable by the Israeli occupying power, preferably in a spectacular fashion, has been called the symbolic order of our times by Achille Mbembe.

‘To the free spirits of the world, we draw our strength from the unity of oppressed people and derive our resolve from the unyielding faith in our right to reclaim our usurped land and recover our freedom’ – Youth of Occupied Palestine, Statement, October 13, 2023 ‘From the diverse Indigenous nations, languages, and clans that […]

One need hardly be a genocide scholar or historian to observe that the deaths and devastation in Gaza will be forever baked into our collective consciousness. But given the historical tipping point we are living through, the outcome of Israel’s project of extermination will shape the trajectory of our politics and our capacity as historical actors. Every action not taken and every word unspoken will leave its mark on us in the years to come, and will set a precedent for how we confront a world that is unravelling and sliding ever further into fascism and global class Apartheid.

However strong, emotions must not obscure the fundamental facts: Palestinians are a colonised people enduring one of the most vicious and unshakeable oppressions our times have seen. Israel is a brutal, colonising power, intent on crushing the very possibility of Palestinian life and freedom. The cause of Palestine is the cause of justice and freedom everywhere.

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.

Ultimately, reading in community opens up a new way of articulating the demand for Palestinian return. This contemporary writing has a richness which asks more questions than it answers—but in asking them, it extends our vocabulary and imagination for resistance.

In his new book Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023), Nick Riemer mounts a comprehensive argument for the institutional academic boycott of Israel. This edited extract outlines the central rationale for the boycott—Israeli universities’ institutional role in enabling apartheid, occupation and anti-Palestinianism.

In a few weeks, Vice-Chancellors will be discussing a request by a group of federal politicians to endorse the latest weapon in Zionists’ longstanding bid to suppress criticism of Israeli apartheid on campus—the highly controversial definition of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Their decision will constitute a watershed moment for universities’ already somewhat threatened credibility as centres of independent analysis and truth-telling.

Palestine student activists are being reprimanded for refusing to take on the coloniser’s truth at a time of supposed decolonising of academia. That is the situation we expect them to navigate without demanding accountability or critical scrutiny.

The Nakba is ongoing. However, our story of dispossession is not unique, but rather forms part of the many stories of Indigenous populations being uprooted, murdered and having their lands destroyed by violent colonial regimes, including the land we live on.