The children of the stones have scattered our papers, spilled ink on our clothes, mocked the banality of old texts … Mahmoud Darwish.
Today I learnt the meaning of the phrase from the river to the sea. I thought that it meant that all peoples between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea will, one day, be free under a single democratic state. Despite a short time frame over 700 organisations and individuals put in submissions to the Justice, Integrity and Community Safety Committee. I put in a submission myself.
The parliamentary Justice and Integrity committee says that I was wrong. The LNP chair of the committee says I was wrong. The Jewish Council of Deputies says that I was wrong. The member for Thuringowa says that I was wrong. The only group that attended this august committee meeting that had any sympathy with my understanding was Keysar Trad from the Islamic Council of Queensland.
As I walked into the Queensland Parliamentary annex, the security guard called John with the USA flag tattooed on his forearm said that I could not enter because my t-shirt had from the river to the sea written on it. John suggested that I turn my t-shirt inside out. I demured in polite disagreement because my friend Lachlan had put so much effort into designing the t-shirt.
Of course, Remah Naji, steeped in Palestinian tradition and culture, knew exactly what from the river to the sea. but she was denied an audience before the prestigious Justice and Integrity committee of the Queensland Parliament!
REMAH NAJI – excluded from the hearings about the anti-semitism bill
The legislation is supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the Queensland Government is complicit by allowing weapons to be manufactured here in Brisbane and sent directly to Israel to destroy Gaza.
The Sergeant at Arms said, turning my t-shirt inside out wouldn’t be enough and told me to leave.
I offered a compromise and said that I would put my keffiyah over the top. He said that’s just as bad, it’s political. I said no it’s not, it’s cultural … he said I’m not going to argue with you. Get out. So much for the people’s house.
Excluded from the Parliament, I watched the Justice for Palestine spokesperson sitting patiently on the live stream of oral submissions by two Zionist organizations including the special envoy into anti-semitism, several lawyers groups including the Queensland Law Society, the Bar Association, The Ethnic Communities Council of Queensland representing multiculturalism and the Islamic Council of Queensland. But the very group the legislation was targeting, namely the Palestinian people, was once again denied a voice. So much for inclusivity and social cohesion.
On my phone app of the live stream, Keysar Trad from the Islamic Council of Queensland warned the committee that criminalising language via the proposed hate-speech laws risked turning ordinary political expression into a crime, suggesting that focusing on policing vocabulary would not address deeper social issues, and that subjective interpretations of terms could be problematic.
He said that once the legislature begins to police vocabulary based on subjective trauma, it would be damaging to legal norms — implying that the bill’s framework for banning phrases like “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the Intifada ( which he said means shaking off)” could be dangerous for free speech.
Who would have thought that when we printed the Big Ride for Palestine Australia t-shirt some years ago that it would be banned by the Queensland Government?
When combined with the Commonwealth legislation, the intent is to proscribe organizations that actively support the Palestinian people’s right of return from the river to the sea.. Fancy banning a bicycle group that raises money to support people in Gaza and women in the refugee camps in Lebanon.
The Fighting Antisemitism and Keeping Guns out of the Hands of Terrorists and Criminals Amendment Bill 2026 is designed to suppress the anti-genocide movement in Brisbane led by Justice for Palestine Magan-djin organization. JFP, founded in 2009, has organised over 100 demonstrations supporting a free Palestine during the past two and a half years. These demonstrations have attracted a significant portion of the population, reaching as many as 50,000 people participating in one protest on a single day.
Outside while waiting for the press conference that followed Remah Naji’s exclusion by that august body the Justice and Integrity committee I was reminded Ghassan Kanafani’s story about a child in Palestine
I heard you in the other room asking your mother, ‘Mum, am I Palestinian?’When she replied, ‘Yes,’ a heavy silence fell over the house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its sound echoing and then silence. Then I heard you crying. I couldn’t move. Something greater than my consciousness was being born in the other room through your confused sobs. It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting open your chest to place your heart inside it. I couldn’t move to see what was happening in the other room. But I knew that a distant homeland was being reborn. Hills, olive trees, dead people, torn and folded flags,all were making their way to a future of flesh and blood,being born in the heart of another child. Do you believe that people grow up? No, they are born suddenly. A word, a moment, pierces their heart with a new beat. A single scene can plunge them from the roof of childhood to the rough road.
طفل في فلسطين:سمعتُك في الغرفة الأخرى تسأل أمَّك: «ماما، أنا فلسطيني؟»وحين أجابتك: «نعم»، ساد البيتَ صمتٌ ثقيل.كان كأنَّ شيئاً كان معلقاً فوق رؤوسنا قد سقط، دوّى صوته ثم عمّ الصمت.بعد ذلك سمعتُك تبكي.لم أستطع أن أتحرك.كان هناك شيء أكبر من وعيي يولد في الغرفة الأخرى من خلال نشيجك الحائر.كان كأنَّ مشرطاً مباركاً يشقُّ صدرك ليضع فيه القلب الذي يخصك.لم أستطع أن أتحرك لأرى ما الذي يحدث في الغرفة الأخرى.لكنني كنت أعلم أن وطناً بعيداً كان يولد من جديد.تلال، أشجار زيتون، موتى، رايات ممزقة وأخرى مطوية،كلها كانت تشقُّ طريقها إلى مستقبل من لحم ودم،وتولد في قلب طفل آخر.أتؤمن أن الإنسان يكبر؟لا، إنه يولد فجأة.كلمة، لحظة، تخترق قلبه بخفقة جديدة.مشهد واحد يمكن أن يهوي به من سقف الطفولة إلى وعورة الطريق.
Not since the pronouncement by former Premier Joh Bjelke-Peterson Peterson declared that the day of the political street March is over has a government put forward such an attack on democratic rights in Queensland. Taken with the federal legislation proscribing Palestinian organisations, this law heralds an era of repression that must be challenged and fought.
It is absurd that this legislation should be rush through the Parliament under the pretext that there is a link between Bondi and anti-semitism in Queensland.
Ian Curr
20 February 2026
Justice for Palestine Magan-djin submission to the Justice Integrity and Safety Committee
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:AP:eb025216-36be-48d5-889c-2c37902175ee
The slogan “Globalise the Intifada” did not originate as a Palestinian slogan.
That is the essential historical point missing from The Guardian article, “What does ‘globalise the intifada’ mean, and why does NSW want to ban the chant?”, published on 23 December 2025.
Instead of beginning by asking where the particular expression “Globalise the Intifada” came from, the article begins its historical explanation with the Palestinian intifadas themselves. It moves from the Arabic meaning of intifada — an uprising or a “shaking off” — to the First Intifada and then to the Second Intifada, where considerable attention is given to suicide bombings and attacks on Israelis.
That framing risks conflating different things: the history of Palestinian resistance; acts of violence committed during the First and the Second Intifada; whether they were justified given the extreme violence of the Israeli occupation; and the subsequent political slogan “Globalise the Intifada.”
They are not the same thing.
The intifadas and the slogan are not the same thing
The First Intifada, beginning in 1987, was a mass Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. It involved demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, popular committees and stone-throwing, as well as violence. The Second Intifada was considerably more desperate and included suicide bombings, as well as large-scale Israeli military operations to suppress te resistance..
None of that tells us where the expression “Globalise the Intifada” originated or what those using that particular expression necessarily intended it to mean.
The historical record points somewhere else.
Where did “Globalise the Intifada” come from?
One of the earliest documented appearances of the expression was in Washington, D.C., in April 2002, in the milieu of the American anti-globalisation, global-justice and anti-war movements. A conference at American University was called “Global Intifada: Globalization, US Militarism, and the Struggle for Justice in Palestine.” Writer Esther Kaplan subsequently wrote an essay titled “Globalize the Intifada.”
The expression therefore appears not to have originated as a Palestinian slogan that was subsequently exported to Western demonstrations, but as an international solidarity slogan attempting to connect the Palestinian struggle with wider struggles against militarism, imperialism and global inequality.
That history matters.
My experience in Brisbane
For the past three years I have done the sound at virtually every major rally and event conducted under the leadership of Palestinians and their supporters in Brisbane. I have participated in nearly all the marches and listened to nearly all the speeches and chants.
I have never heard “Globalise the Intifada” chanted at those demonstrations.
I am not saying nobody has ever said it. It may have been used by an individual or a small grouping. I can speak only from my own experience. But it has not been a significant slogan of the Palestinian-led movement in Brisbane.
I was subsequently asked whether I would challenge the Queensland law by saying “Globalise the Intifada” publicly at a demonstration. I declined. After forty or fifty years of organising in solidarity with Palestine, I had never used the slogan. I saw no reason to begin using it simply because a government had decided to prohibit it.
There was a more fundamental reason as well. Palestinians have the moral authority to decide how they describe and frame their struggle. My role is solidarity. It is not to import a slogan from an American or international political movement and impose it upon Palestinians.
The wider problem in reporting Palestine
There is a wider problem here in the reporting of Palestine. Palestinian resistance is frequently discussed through the lens of its most violent episodes, just as reporting after 7 October 2023 often gave enormous prominence to allegations of atrocities by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. Some allegations of war crimes have substantial supporting evidence; other highly publicised early claims were unsubstantiated, disputed or subsequently corrected. Claims concerning sexual violence likewise need to be assessed according to the evidence for each particular allegation, rather than treated as established merely through repetition.
The same discipline should be applied to “Globalise the Intifada.”
Indeed, The Guardian itself quotes UNSW academic Luke McNamara warning about precisely the problem involved in legislating a single meaning for disputed political language: governments should be extremely cautious about fixing one interpretation of a contested expression and making that interpretation the basis of criminal liability.
The historical questions therefore come first:
Without answering those questions, moving from the words Globalise the Intifada to the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada risks doing precisely what a serious historical analysis should avoid: treating association as meaning and then turning that asserted meaning into the justification for criminalising political speech.
Ian Curr
4 October 2026
Reference
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:AP:73b739b6-8fa7-43e1-82d3-b830a8f8f8bd
In April I’m joining the Global Sumud Flotilla, with thousands of people from all over the world attempting to break an illegal blockade and take hundreds of tons of food, water and aid to Gaza.
I don’t take this lightly, I know there are risks, and I will do everything I can to get home safe. But there is no legitimate ceasefire. The people of gaza are starving, being denied medical care, being denied shelter and are still being bombarded.
I feel so strongly about this because I can see what was done and is still being done to my own people happening in Palestine right now. It’s genocide, it’s colonialism, it’s racist violence, and by standing against it I’m standing against the government here that continues to oppress my people, because it’s also supporting the oppression of Palestinians.
I’m drawing strength from my ancestors who took action against injustice despite the risks and changed the world for the better, surviving massacres, dispossession, displacement and apartheid.
Keep showing up to protests, keep demanding that governments here sanction, stop arming and cut ties with Israel, and keep fighting against colonialism everywhere.
If you want to follow along I’ll be posting on Instagram on @samw.mp4 and if you want to support me you can donate here: https://chuffed.org/project/169135-support-sam-watson-sailing-with-the-flotilla
The Editor
The Canberra Times
having declared the Dissent Bar a crime scene, why have the ACT police not done the same to the Dendy and Palace Cinemas for screening Nuremburg which displays Nazi symbols and Hitler salutes?
Humphrey McQueen
The Bar Association is mistaken if they think there will be a successful constitutional challenge to the repression the government has levelled at the target organization that being Justice for Palestine Magan-djin 🇵🇸
No Court has definitively ruled against repressive laws denying free speech and democratic rights in Queensland.
The three comparable political struggles where governments in Qld have introduced repressive laws are:
1. the anti free speech laws following the general strike in 1912;
2. the declaration of a state of emergency against the anti-apartheid demonstrators in 1971; and,
3. the ban on street marches from 1977 to 1979
were never the subject of successful Court challenges in either the Supreme Court of Queensland or in the High Court.
No victory in the struggles was definitive; however the 1977 to 1979 street marches led to the most liberal laws of assembly in Australia, that being the Queensland Peaceful Assembly Act of 1992.