This week, I attended the Canberra Convergence webinar organised by Sanction Israel Now. It was an information only session outlining the reasons why the convergence is needed.
At the outset, Sanction Israel Now organizers invoked two prior events as historic inspirations: March on Washington and the 1972 Aboriginal tent embassy.
I am assuming the organisers are referring to the “March on Washington for jobs and freedom” where Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous ‘I have a dream speech‘ at the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of over 250,000 people?
A less well-known march led by MLK Jr was the Bloody Sunday March after police murdered Jimmie Lee Jackson, 600 people began on March 7, 1965 from Selma to Montgomery to confront racist Democratic Party Governor George Wallace about the lack of justice served for the officer who committed the murder, and to protest the violation of their constitutional rights to vote. The segregationist Wallace later ran for President of the United States against Richard Nixon. Wallace attempted to moderate his racist views in that campaign, to no avail, he lost to the Republican Nixon.
Sanctions Now have received positive feedback from Palestinian groups throughout Australia.
They are probably being deluged by requests for information and assistance. Their Instagram page shows events planned for the three days beginning on Sunday, the 20th of July, 2025.
Sanctions Now!
The demand to sanction Israel for crimes against humanity has a long history. In 1982, following the Sabra and Shatila massacres of indigenous Palestinian refugees sponsored by Israel, the United Nations General Assembly called for sanctions against Israel.
More recently Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, has called for sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel and for global corporations to be held accountable for “profiting from genocide” in Gaza.
This is a pretty tall order given that the whole economic structure of the West is bound up with these global corporations that are manipulating the genocide to their advantage. Holding global corporations to account, weapons companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin to IT Giants like Microsoft and Meta, is likely to have a major impact on a US economy heavily bound to these global corporations.
“Now is the time to pressure Labor to end its support and complicity in genocide?”
It is no secret that successive Australian governments, strangely, feel bound to the United States. CIA involvement in the dismissal is one concern specifically by Labor Party members who were alive back in 1975. It is hard to see how convergence, like similar actions outside the American Chamber of Commerce, is likely to be anything more than symbolic.
The oft quoted example of sanctions against apartheid South Africa ignores the military campaign against South Africa conducted by the Frontline States, the ANC, and Cuba. Nelson Mandela was a proponent of the armed struggle, something conveniently airbrushed from history by conservatives and progressives alike.
Martin Luther King himself was drawn into the March on Washington because of strikes organised by black sanitation workers in the racist south of the United States. King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, while supporting the sanitation workers’ strike.
One of the failures of the Palestine solidarity campaign in Australia is its lack of engagement with workers and their organizations, Labor Party dominated unions. Unionists for Palestine have found it difficult to cut through particularly here in Brisbane where there has been only one rally by the unions in support of Palestine and the logistics behind that rally were organised largely by Justice for Palestine Magan-djin 🇵🇸.
Martin Luther King’s assassination intensified the strike and the Poor People’s Campaign, leading to a silent march of 42,000 people in Memphis. Black America is yet to achieve civil rights as the black lives matter campaign shows.
National Convergence on Canberra – Sanction Israel now!
When
1:00pm Sunday 20 July to 3:00pm Tuesday 22 July
Where
Parliament House
Canberra ACT
Australia
Why
Join the National Convergence on Canberra for the opening of the 48th Parliament to demand the Labor Government sanctions Israel now.
Israel continues to commit genocide, occupation, and crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people while the Australian government continues to sit by and watch.
We demand action. We demand sanctions.
Sunday, 20 July 2025 : National Rally at Parliament House
Monday, 21 July 2025: National campaign planning day
Tuesday, 22 July 2025: Rally at Parliament House on the opening day of Parliament
@all.ride.for.gaza
@freepalestineaustralia