Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak about current events in Gaza and protests in our universities. Increasingly, we are seeing those who oppose the unfolding genocide in Gaza labelled antisemitic. There is no place for antisemitism in our society. History shows us that, over centuries, Jewish people have been discriminated against, driven from their homes and murdered. Many Australian families bear the long legacy and consequences of that history.

As a teenager, my now ex-partner of 22 years, John Wishart, discovered that his mother was Jewish when she burst into Yiddish in an argument with her mother in their Sydney kitchen. Prior to that moment, John had no idea that his mother was Jewish, spoke Yiddish and had arrived on the wharves of Australia after a long, intergenerational, multicentury dispossession that began in the bloody streets of Minsk in 1905 in one of the many murderous pogroms that drove millions of Jews out of their homes in the centuries before the Holocaust.

Selina and her mother did not feel safe to be Jewish in the Sydney of the 1940s when they arrived from Minsk via decades in Burma and India. All throughout their lives, Selina never willingly discussed her history or her Jewish identity, and this is not an uncommon experience. Today John, her son; and our kids, Jake and Indi—her grandchildren—are proud of their Jewish heritage. And they are all protesting against the carnage in Gaza.

This week marks the 76th anniversary of the Nakba, the violent displacement, dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people—a human rights disaster on an astonishing scale, occurring with such speed and in plain sight of countries awash with human rights obligations, yet, like Australia, supplying arms to enable genocide.

This is an historical witnessing that is an international first of appalling scale and horror. We see it every night in real time—a genocide viewed on iPhones for the whole world to see. We will never be able to say we did not know. We know that at least 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, 14,500 of them children. Like many others, I found it hard to celebrate Mother's Day this year, thinking of all those mothers in Gaza grieving for their children, trying to feed their children, while making their way—1.5 million of them—to safe ground, having been bombed out of their homes in the north and now in unsafe shelter in Rafah in the south.

I took my first protest action in the streets of Adelaide in protest at the Vietnam War, a war that killed at least two million Vietnamese citizens and stole the homes and health of so many more. Our protests were right. We were accused, however, of wild radicalism, of violence on the streets and of betraying our country's interests.

I've spent years of my life working in universities, and they must be places of protest and free speech and, at the same time, places where antisemitism has no place.

History will judge us. It will judge the shutdown of the protests of students against genocide in Gaza. That is the true huge crime that we are witnessing right now: genocide. As my colleague Senator Mehreen Faruqi said yesterday morning, we should not feel threatened by university students registering their moral opposition to the State of Israel's genocide of Palestinians. We should instead be concerned about the genocide itself currently under way. I have no tolerance for antisemitism, but I add my voice to those who support the actions of students who have the courage, integrity and humanity to peacefully protest against this genocide.

The Australian government should take their example and acknowledge that the State of Israel's genocidal campaign has no end in sight, with expansion of its military operation in Gaza. We should expel the State of Israel's ambassador and sanction Prime Minister Netanyahu and his war cabinet. We should end the two-way military trade with the State of Israel and call for a permanent ceasefire and an end to the occupation of Palestine.

The history of genocide hangs heavily over humanity. We should remember all of that history and we should stand up for students' right to protest as we reject the poison of antisemitism and insist that protesting against the horrors of Gaza does not make anyone antisemitic. (Time expired)

Senate adjourned at 20:00