We sent it down in the night of power.
But how can you know what is the night of power?
The night of power is better than a thousand months.
In it, the angels and the Spirit are sent swarming down,
by their Lord’s leave, attending to every command.
Peace is that night, till the break of dawn.
– The Quran, a new translation by Tarif Khalidi, Sura 97:1-5.
Earlier today, Palestine solidarity activists marched from the Queensland sea to the New South Wales Tweed River, to highlight the absurdity of the repressive Crisafulli anti-freedom of speech laws.
Protesters head to the border to chant River to Sea in freedom.
The Queensland contingent arrived aboard a Freedom Bus following in the footsteps of past civil rights freedom buses in Australia and the USA.
They met with Northern Rivers activists at the Coolangatta Tweed Heads border and crossed into New South Wales, where 200 protestors could freely chant the popular phrase used to call for the freedom of the Palestinian people from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The six-word phrase has been outlawed for six months now in Queensland, with the threat of a fine of $25,000 and up to two years in prison.
Justice for Palestine have launched their High Court challenge, and are calling for the laws to be repealed, arguing that these laws are unconstitutional, and impinge on human rights.
This protest occurred after another week of watching children and families being slaughtered in Gaza, in what the United Nations has now declared Genocide.
Among the activists was 84 year old Khalil Hamdan a 1948 Al Nakba survivor who was expelled from his childhood home at the age of 6 years. He explained that, “I believe the people of Australia should know more about Palestine. Israel was established on a lie, that it was a land without people.”
On the way down to the border Khalil told me so many stories about Palestine. He spoke to me about his grandfather’s farm, of growing oranges in Al Jamieson, near Jaffa in the 1800s. He said his family were farmers and that they got long with the Ottomans because they were Muslims. He said also that they got along with the Palestinian Jews because they had been there for so long and were their neighbors. They even got along with the Christians when they arrived because so many of the Palestinians were Christians. They did not like the Crusaders or their bloody king Richard. Nor did they like Napoleon when he came rampaging through Jaffa. They hated General Allenby when he brought the British troops and gave them guns to fight the Ottomans. Guns that he said fired backwards. Did Allenby use the jordanians as cannon fodder. I don’t know.
But most important of all he spoke of how he and others like him must be a voice for the people in Gaza so that they will not be forgotten. His heart went out to the refugees in the camps constantly under Fire in the West Bank.
“The reason I am on the bus is as a voice. I believe the people of Australia should be able to speak up for Palestine and against genocide.”
Lest We Forget
As we marched through the flannelette curtain we were confronted by drunken bogans shouting abuse and pushing the marchers.
We crossed the border into New South Wales, where their behaviour was ignored by the New South Wales police. We arrived at a park containing a shrine commemorating the soldiers of the First and Second World Wars.
But nowhere at that shrine will you find any account of the Surafend massacre.
In December 1918, during the British campaign to seize Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, soldiers from the ANZAC Mounted Division attacked the Palestinian village of Surafend and a nearby Bedouin camp and massacred up to 100 people in reprisal to the killing of a New Zealand trooper. Even the head of the occupation forces, General Allenby, condemned the perpetrators describing them as murderers and cowards but his condemnation did not lead to justice for the villagers.
If we are to say “Lest We Forget”, then remembrance should not be selective. It should include not only the events that are publicly commemorated, but also those that have been intentionally omitted or marginalised. A truthful remembrance requires confronting the whole historical record, including the Surafend massacre and the suffering it inflicted on Palestinians.
Ian Curr
2 August 2026
