Biggest protest in history reveals morbidly inadequate action from Government

The Australian people have made a meaningful statement to the elected class of people in Canberra: action is what we demand from our leaders.

There was a protest on the Sydney Harbour Bridge that Australia hasn’t seen since the Iraq War protest of 2003. An incredible site of global significance saw a varied crowd in their masses, with some outlets recording up to 300,000 in attendance, all braving the rainy conditions to walk across the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge to offer a display of support for the people of Gaza and a repudiation of Israel’s genocide. Some were calling it the biggest protest in the city’s history.

International news was made of the iconic imagery of tens of thousands streaming across the national icon, making a significant impact on the gathering global public opinion that is bubbling against the insane actions of Netanyahu’s Israel. Across the protest, parliamentarians joined activists and writers, Libertarians and Labor members marched alongside Palestinians and Jews – and a display of national solidarity was captured on a scale that felt too big to ignore.

You almost wouldn’t know it though, with the media framing the event as a public safety risk, rather than exploring the historical nature of the protests. Articles touching on the purpose of the protest were sandwiched between articles on the police concerns, and Israeli government perspectives. In the wake of the protest, Albanese spoke to the protest on Sydney Harbour Bridge as 'not surprising', while NSW state Premier Chris Minns, who in the wake of the Dural hoax caravan scandal, and who initially chose to oppose the protest on the grounds of ‘logistics’, conceded the significance of the event for Sydney. But that was about it.

The protest is capturing a public desperation that is putting pressure on the government to act, a desperation generated by the news of mass starvation and death of the children of Gaza. People are still being shot at the ‘humanitarian checkpoints’, bombs are still ploughing into tents with families in them, and drones are still targeting children for no reason other than the eradication of Palestinian life. As hunger starts to wipe generations of Palestinians from the planet, the Western world continues to half-step and feign concern, incrementally showing support for Palestine to a point where most of it will disappear from starvation before anything happens, while continuing to support Israel in some kind of covert or direct way, and lightly finger wagging towards Tel Aviv in a hypocrisy that feels disgusting at this point.

A genocidal status quo in suspended animation reveals a leadership in Western democracy that defies the human vote that put them into power, and awakens populations around the world to a cold network of sharks that swim around in our Parliamentary halls. Under the pretence of strategy, after a lecture of the hard decisions of power, and a plea for some kind of empathy for their consequential and ghoulish positions, the Labor government, who has managed Australia’s response to Israel for the entire period of unmitigated genocide in Gaza, scoffs at the swelling public demand for it to do something more than say a word or two.

An Egyptian film crew took footage flying in a transport plane over Gaza, calling what they witnessed 'a rubble city'. There is no food. There is no shelter. There are no vegetables or vitamins. There is no insulin or baby formula. The brutal genocidal occupiers have no intention of allowing them to rebuild a city because it is readily apparent that they have spent so much time trying to demolish it entirely.

Without even batting an eye, an Israeli Parliamentary security cabinet approved Netanyahu’s plan to annex the entire Gaza strip right there in front of us all. As the world is growing in its anger at Tel Aviv, a democratically elected group in Israel has chosen to double down on its nationally popular plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, rather than acquiesce to the tide of global opinion. The plan includes the complete and utter destruction of Gaza, the complete disarmament of the Palestinian people, followed by the complete annexation of the strip by Israel, and some faintly disingenuous declared intention to hand over the strip to an authority of its choosing in the future.

In the rubble city, the people of Gaza are shot at checkpoints stocked with US citizen-mercenaries, who fire indiscriminately alongside IDF soldiers into self-professed ‘killing fields’ full of malnourished, unarmed civilians in a state of sheer terror. Bomb bay doors with ‘made in Australia’ tagged on them open as intended to drop ordinance onto tents, while German, Italian, British and European ordinance is fired at terrified children via mortar rounds and sniper bullets. These morbid stories are not hidden behind the black and white fog of war of the past, the are streamed out on small compressed media files to a world collectively suffering from watching too many dead children.

So absolute and complete and all-encompassing is this active compression being applied by Israel onto the people of Gaza, so absolute is the approval in Trump’s Washington, there is no chance they will survive without intervention and real pressure from those in the international community who claim they are the responsible arbiters of global affairs. Britain might send out limp warnings to Israel, but it also sends out spy planes from Cyprus that send vital intelligence data to the IDF, sitting with the rest of the West in providing the military supply chain and offers of diplomatic cover, either overtly or covertly, that provides Israel with the support it needs to continue thinking and acting the way it does.

In Australia, people are asking why the government hasn’t yet acted to repudiate Israel for this act of mass human slaughter that has been occurring for almost 700 days, and within the words, the caution, the concerns, and the raised eyebrows, and without sanctions, actions, reputations, and global coalition building, the Australian government acts as an enabler for Israel’s genocide. It shields Israel from consequence, at the expense of the global prestige of our nation that generations of Australians have spent their lives building together. The contrast of the Sydney Harbour Bridge protest and Penny Wong‘s words about non-lethal F-35 parts smash against each other in an awkward and unsatisfying way, revealing an uncanny chasm between the democratic resting state of Australians and the disproportionate and concentrated, stubborn and callous political class, who act in the interest of something that appears totally foreign to most of us. And unacceptable too.

A minority of Australians continue to support Israel, but the destruction of the children of Palestine has left a mark on the brain of any who have seen the live streamed imagery. The people of the world have had their head held down and their eyes forced open, and we are forced to witness Israel try to transmute the nature of humanity by inflicting the most devastating form of human punishment on the people of Gaza. This is one injury that is hard to manage, but the salt in the wound is the faux-sincerity of our Labor government in Canberra, that seemingly looks willing to morbidly manage this period of the eradication of Gaza in favour of Israel with mere words, from cradle to grave.

Penny Wong urged Israel not to follow through with its occupation plans, but her tactfully loaded words only added to the rhetorical slag-heap from the Foreign Minister -- all with the echoes of a nation-shaking protest rousing behind her. As Israel seeks to annex Gaza and cover up the crime scene that lies under the rubble, after the extent of the national display seen in Sydney, her options are dwindling, and her words hollower than they have ever been. The Australian people have made a meaningful statement to the elected class of people in Canberra, some who chose to be on that bridge: action is what we demand from our leaders. Perhaps its time that our government is concerned about that for a change.