Every time there is a violent incident or alleged terror event, a resistance movement is blamed. Sometimes those incidents are ordinary criminal acts. For the most part, they are carried out by individuals with no connection to the grassroots movement.
Often, accusations are made that incidents may involve provocateurs or false-flag operations, although such claims require evidence and should have been investigated by the royal Commission into anti-semitism. But no, the RC prefers slander to evidence.
What is clear is that peaceful protesters are often expected to answer for actions they neither organised nor supported.
Over the past three years, Australia has seen the longest-running resistance movement in its history in solidarity with the Palestinian people and in opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The movement has continued week after week across the country. It has outlasted many previous mass campaigns, including Queensland’s democratic rights movement of 1977–79, during which more than 3,000 arrests, and the SEQEB dispute of 1985.
The Aboriginal struggle is of a similar historical character, spanning more than two centuries of resistance to colonisation.
Today’s large Invasion Day marches demonstrate that it, too, remains a mass movement. Many participants see common ground between Aboriginal struggles for land and sovereignty and Palestinian struggles for self-determination.
The following speaker is a lawyer Nick Hanna who has become well known during the Palestine solidarity movement that emerged after 7 October 2023. Here are his remarks outside the Royal Commission yesterday.
The elephant in the room of course is Justice for Palestine’s High Court challenge to Queensland’s anti-semitism laws which conflate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism.
Ian Curr, 6 August 2026