Thousands of protesters rallied in Australia’s largest cities on Sunday, in the 25th week of mass opposition to Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
The strong current of anti-genocide and anti-war sentiment among workers and young people was reflected in the fact that the mass demonstrations were not diminished by the Easter long weekend. Nor were they deterred by arrests and violent police attacks on protesters in Sydney and Melbourne the previous weekend, as part of a broader crackdown by Labor at the state, federal and even local council level, on opposition to the genocide.
As they have done continuously for almost six months, protesters expressed outrage, towards not only the Zionist Netanyahu regime, but the Biden administration and Australian federal Labor government, which are providing essential political, financial and military support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation.
Reporters for the World Socialist Web Site spoke to participants in the rallies in Sydney and Melbourne. Some of their comments are published here.
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Annie, one of around 4,000 demonstrators at the Melbourne rally, said: “What I’ve learned through what is going on in Gaza is that even if the UN says ‘this is genocide,’ governments will not do anything. This is because for America, they would have to look at their own actions in countries where they have done similar things. Additionally, there are companies that are very interested in getting the land that is in Gaza, and it seems that political parties are aligned to those companies and they cannot go against what those companies want.
“With all things, it is always about money, and it is always about powerful people doing what they want. Recently someone was saying, ‘Oh, they want to buy property within the Gaza Strip, so that they can build a beachfront property,’ and companies in Israel are intending to build hotels in that area. Like all things it is always connected with money, and I don’t think our government will do anything about that because their whole political campaign, the way they got up here is through money from these corporations.
“So unless there is a revolution, I imagine that bit by bit, more and more of this will continue as our rights are stripped away and our voices are stripped away. You just have to look at the UK—their Conservative party are very eager to remove all the human rights, to ship people to Rwanda, so it is just a step in one of many things.
I think [we need] a whole changing of the way we elect people. I think that, originally, democracy meant that the power lay in the people to choose who will represent you and your decisions, and that they will be held to account at the end of that, if we go by the Greek terminology.
“But now politicians are not held to account for what they do. Additionally, if politicians during their campaigns are not allowed to get money from corporations—it should be that campaigning is free, you can do that easily nowadays with social media and just being there for people. I don’t think money should be involved in it because once that’s done, from the get-go that person is no longer for the people, but rather for the corporations.”