Why Australians are taking to the street to protest the Israel Gaza war

There are days when Emad can’t get out of bed.

On others, he’s frantic — running from a rally to a community radio station — trying to get the word out, to make people care.

The 27-year-old’s life barely resembles the one he led six months ago.

Back then, he worked nine-to-five for a corporate organisation. He wasn’t glued to his phone, watching atrocities play out on screen, or helping organise protests.

That was before October 7.

What’s driving thousands of Australians to take to the streets, week after week, and protest the war in Gaza? While some are intimately connected to the cause, others are embracing activism for the first time in their lives.

Half a year has passed since Hamas’s deadly attack in Israel, which killed 1,200 people and saw 240 kidnapped. Around 100 hostages are still believed to be alive .

Since then, more than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli military response.

British non-profit Oxfam estimates that the number of average deaths per day for Gaza is higher than any other recent major armed conflict, while a recent UN-backed report found that half the population of Gaza (1.1 million) is now at risk of “catastrophic food insecurity”.

The human tragedy — livelihoods decimated, children orphaned, families on the brink of starvation — has struck people around the world.

And many are taking to the streets to make themselves heard.

According to Brian Martin, emeritus professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong, only certain global conflicts receive media coverage.

The current war in Gaza, he says, is “one of those rare cases where there’s mass killing in the public eye”.

Erin O’Brien, an expert in political activism and advocacy at Griffith University, says the “horrific” and visceral imagery being broadcast in mainstream media and social media has captured mass attention.

“In some instances, people are more motivated to protest because they have a personal connection to the issue, but that’s not always the case,” she says.

“We can all feel empathy for people who are being harmed by a situation that has nothing to do with us or is completely foreign to us.”

In Australia, thousands of people — including those who’ve never protested or been politically active — have joined rallies and vigils, written to politicians, and advocated on social media.

For Sydney-based Emad, whose father was born in Gaza and mother in Ramallah, West Bank, the movement is building hope.

“It creates this sense of togetherness and uniqueness in history,” he says.

“This doesn’t happen often, and it’s a very galvanising force.”

Since October, he’s become involved in organising pro-Palestine events, such as the recent “die-in” outside Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s office in Sydney.

“It’s become very hard to do anything that’s not related to Palestine,” he says.

“You just hear too many personal stories for you to be comfortable knowing that it’s going on and you’re sitting there, complacent.”

He says he was “floored” by the number of Australians attending rallies — particularly during October and November — as well as their diversity.

“Honestly, it’s maybe half Arabs — probably less than half — and everyone else is from somewhere else,” he says.

“[There are] Anglo-Saxon-looking people, you see Asian people, Africans, everyone, which is really lovely.”

Purpose amidst pain

Fifty-one-year-old Regina is a relatively new member to the movement.

After Israel’s invasion of Gaza, she attended a vigil in her hometown of Cairns and put her name down with the organisers.

The Swiss immigrant says she’s always been interested in humanitarian issues, but the war in Gaza was the catalyst for her to “actually get involved”.

“For me, it was the severity of the situation … Once I saw it, I had to keep witnessing what was happening, and it got really painful,” she says.

“I decided that, rather than falling into a hole myself, it was probably better to take action.”

Since then, Regina says she’s assisted the group with newsletter writing, graphics and social media.

“This has really helped me to feel more purposeful,” she says.

“Connecting to people in the group … we could choose to share the grief.”

But her decision to outwardly support Palestine hasn’t come without friction.

“I have some Jewish friends that didn’t agree with what I was doing or saying or sharing,” Regina says.

“I’ve tried to reach out and reconcile because I don’t actually think the sides are that different. In the end, everyone wants peace.”

For Regina, being a “pro-Palestinian activist” doesn’t mean she’s against Israel or Jewish people.

It’s for this reason that she regularly shares social media content from the group Standing Together.

“They are a community organisation in Israel — [made up of] Israeli-Palestinian people organising together for peace,” she explains. “They’re really doing amazing work.”

Keffiyehs and watermelon kippahs

Shula’s entry into activism is also relatively recent.

Just a few weeks ago, she co-organised her first sit-in to protest the war in Gaza.

The 29-year-old is part of Tzedek Collective. The group describes itself as an anti-colonial, anti-Zionist Jewish community.

Members of the group wear Palestinian keffiyehs and kippahs that resemble watermelons. The fruit has become a symbol of Palestinian solidarity.

They unfurl banners reading ‘Never Again Means Never Again for Anyone’, and recite the Kaddish, a Jewish mourning prayer, in memory of lives lost.

Anti-Zionism is a position Shula is now aligned with.

Indeed, it’s a minority-held view among Jewish Australians. A poll released in June 2023 found that 77 per cent of respondents identified as Zionists, while 86 per cent viewed the existence of Israel as essential for the future of Jewish people.

Shula describes Tzedek as a space for Jewish people who “feel alienated from the mainstream Jewish establishment that’s here in Australia”. She joined the group in October.

“To me, it felt important to say, as someone who has Jewish heritage … that what Israel and the Israeli government is doing is not what’s best for Jewish people,” Shula says.

“It’s not what makes us safer.”

‘It made me confront what I value’

Shula was born in Israel and raised in an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community. The daughter of a Russian mother and Jewish Ukrainian father, she moved to Russia aged five, before the family relocated to Australia 14 years ago.

In her religious community, Shula says she wasn’t educated about Palestine or Palestinians.

“It wasn’t even that we [were] taught to hate, but it was more that there was no acknowledgement of their existence,” she explains.

“What we were told is that there are some Arabs [in Israel] that come from different other parts of the Arab world — like from Lebanon and Syria — but … this is our land, a Jewish land.”

While her upbringing was “not the most representative”, it wasn’t uncommon either, Shula says.

After leaving her Hasidic community almost a decade ago, she began accessing information that she says was previously unavailable to her.

She met Palestinians, read about the Nakba, and started questioning the strong military presence in Israel.

But her relationship with Israel irrevocably changed after that government’s response to the October 7 attack.

“When Israel, in return, started bombing Gaza and then the ground invasion, that made me feel very sad and angry,” Shula recalls.

Support for Israel was a default in her former community.

“It made me really confront what I believe in, what I value,” she says.

“I had to draw a line [and say] ‘I cannot get behind such atrocities’.”

Since voicing her opposition, Shula has been labelled a traitor by some in the Jewish community.

“It hurts because … no one wants to be called traitor,” she says.

“But also, to me, it’s just untrue.”

Having grown up in Israel and as part of the Jewish diaspora, Shula understands that way of thinking. Yet, she wishes to offer a challenge.

“Why would I be a traitor for wanting equal rights for everyone?” she asks.

“For wanting freedom for everyone, and not wanting innocent people to be killed?”

Being on ‘the other side’

Like Shula, 21-year-old Ariel was born in Israel, before his family moved to Australia.

He’s deeply enmeshed in the Jewish community here — attending synagogue, playing in a Jewish rugby team, and even leading a local youth movement.

Ariel agrees that Gaza is “an awful place to be right now” and says he has empathy for Palestinian lives.

“Just [like] I’ve seen the videos of Jews being indiscriminately slaughtered, I’ve [also] seen the effects of the Israel offensive,” he says.

However, Ariel believes there is a clear difference between the Hamas attack and Israel’s response.

“One was ‘find whoever you can’, and the other is a coordinated, intentional attack against a terrorist group embedded in civilian population … and that’s extremely difficult to navigate.”

Yet since the Hamas attack, Ariel has felt there is a lack of empathy for Jewish people like him.

Back on October 7, he recalls staying up to 3am, scrolling through images and news updates about the attacks.

“I remember feeling really angry,” he says. “I mean, this was my people being killed for no reason other than living near Gaza.”

At university the next day, Ariel was shocked to see a pro-Palestine student group handing out leaflets.

Then, on October 9, he watched the rally outside of the Sydney Opera House, where protesters waved Palestinian flags and chanted “free Palestine”, “shame Israel” and “f… the Jews”.

An organiser of the rally and member of the Palestine Action Group condemned the anti-Semitic phrases and said there was no tolerance for racist behaviour.

Ariel remembers feeling discouraged by what he saw.

“I mean, this [was] two days after the largest killing of Jews since World War II,” he says.

For Ariel, it felt like multiculturalism — a value, he says, that Australia prides itself on — went “out the door”.

For a while, he became “numb” to news coming out of the region and tried to disassociate. But by February, Ariel felt ready to re-engage.

He travelled to southern Israel and visited the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas, in a trip funded by the Zionist Federation of Australia.

“It was, as you expect, very intense,” he recalls. “Seeing firsthand scorched houses and playgrounds with bullet holes … kindergartens torn apart, houses just ravaged.”

Some in the Jewish community have held regular vigils, remembering those killed in the attacks and agitating to keep those kidnapped in the public consciousness. Ariel says he has attended a couple of these events, but prefers to “process the experience” in a personal setting.

He finds it perplexing that many Australians, particularly those without cultural or religious ties to Israel and Palestine, are so focused on the conflict.

“Of course, there are Palestinian Australians, Muslim Australians, Jewish Australians — on both sides — who have family and friends affected,” he says.

“But the vast majority of Australians are not affected.”

He’s reticent to link the support for Palestine with anti-Semitism — “some people would consider that the cheap, cop-out answer” — but believes Israel has become a “convenient scapegoat”.

“When I’m seeing it tied to Indigenous rights, Aboriginal rights and LGBTQ issues … I just don’t understand how the two correspond,” he says.

“I know there’s different narratives, like, colonial narratives and genocide and apartheid … But it’s mind-blowing to me. I have issues with those words. Just as I don’t want to cheapen the words anti-Semitism and Holocaust [by misappropriating them], I don’t think those words [like genocide and apartheid] should be cheapened.”

For Ariel, both the Hamas attack and subsequent rise of anti-Semitism demonstrate the continued need for a Jewish state.

It’s a point, he believes, that anti-Zionist Jews forget.

“I think a lot of them come from the best intentions, but I think they’re misguided,” he says.

His theory is that enough time has passed between the Holocaust and present day that the need for Israel is no longer as evident as it once was.

He points out that the Jewish population has finally reached pre-Holocaust levels — “which is kind of saddening at the same time” — and Jewish people now live prosperous, social lives in the West.

But for him, Israel is a necessary safety net: “Fifty years down the line, if needed, I could move [there].”

‘A place of healing’ 

Shula says that in some pro-Israel circles, protests supporting Palestine are depicted as being filled with hate and anti-Semitism.

“I personally did not experience that,” she says.

“I felt quite welcome, to be honest, as a Jewish person. [People] were actually quite thankful that we were standing up.”

She adds that many of the protests have included Jewish speakers, such as Peter Slezak and Antony Loewenstein.

Both Regina and Emad describe pro-Palestine rallies as “cathartic”.

“It’s a space where you’re allowed to feel the emotions,” Regina says.

Emad views the Sydney-based events — often filled with young families — as a place of healing.

“It’s a humanitarian movement, and people are coming together because they want to see people not die,” he says.

“There is a lot of anger and frustration, fundamentally within the protests, but there’s a lot of love there, too.”

While Emad’s world has turned upside down since October 7, he is grateful to see “a lot more attention on the topic”.

“I’m being given more of a platform to discuss things and that brings me a lot of joy because this is something that I’ve been talking about for a long time,” he says.

One of his greatest hopes is that Australian politicians begin paying attention to the concerns of their constituents.

“The streets and the people are clearly calling for something,” he says.

On April 9, Foreign Minister Penny Wong suggested the Australian government could consider recognising Palestinian statehood.

While Emad is concerned the weekly rallies could see a reduction in numbers as the war continues, he’s confident that the movement isn’t losing steam.

“I don’t think the people who have now woken up to this topic are going to forget about it.”

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