Sunday witnessed one of the largest protests in Sydney’s history, with a massive crowd marching across the Harbour Bridge in opposition to the imperialist-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The New South Wales (NSW) Police, who were intensely hostile to the demonstration, begrudgingly acknowledged that 90,000 or more people participated.
Organisers have estimated the rally at 300,000. That is plausible, given that protesters simultaneously stretched across the entire 1.1 kilometre (0.7 mile) bridge, at the same time that more people were massed several city blocks from even setting foot on the structure.
Whatever the exact number, the demonstration was the biggest in Sydney since the 2003 protests opposing the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq.
The rally expressed immense hostility to the genocide, and particularly its latest phase in Israel’s deliberate mass starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.
There was a sense that participants wanted to send a message to the world, including the Palestinians themselves, by taking over one of Australia’s most iconic landmarks for several hours.
The crowd was diverse, including workers, youth and middle-class people from all backgrounds. In an indication that the genocide is politicising a new generation, there were many teenagers and young adults. Signs and chants denounced the federal Labor government for its ongoing complicity in the mass slaughter.
The march was led by a number of prominent figures, including Julian Assange, who made one of his first public appearances in Australia since being freed last year and defeating US attempts to imprison him for life for exposing war crimes.
Journalists Antoinette Lattouf and Mary Kostakidis, who have both been targeted by the Zionist lobby for their defence of the Palestinians, were also there.
In addition to teeming rain, the protesters were defying official threats.
The NSW Police, acting at the behest of the state Labor government, had unsuccessfully attempted to have the demonstration banned in the Supreme Court. Labor Premier Chris Minns, an ardent Zionist, had declared that the protest would cause “chaos” and would be an unacceptable “disruption” to the city.
In rejecting the police case, Justice Belinda Rigg pointed to the dictatorial logic of that argument. If such claims of unacceptable “disruption” were accepted, “no assembly involving inconvenience would be permitted.”
The judgement pointed to fears in the state apparatus that an attempt to suppress mass sentiment, on this occasion, could backfire. Under conditions where it was clear that people would march whatever the ruling, Rigg warned that a ban “would inevitably lead to resentment and alienation.”
The attempts by Minns to suppress the protest probably made it larger, with many demonstrators stating they were also taking a stand for basic civil liberties.
The NSW Labor government has, over the past two years, repeatedly sought to illegalise pro-Palestinian protests. Last month, it oversaw a major mobilisation against a small protest, during which the police violently assaulted lawyer and former Greens candidate Hannah Thomas, who may permanently lose sight in one eye as a consequence.
More than such threats of violence, protesters were rejecting the relentless campaign to brand opposition to Israel’s genocide as antisemitism. That bogus line, promoted by the Labor governments and the corporate media, was exposed by the rally itself, including by the substantial participation of anti-Zionist Jews.
Sections of the corporate media, which has slandered opponents of the genocide as bigots and faithfully repeated every lie of the criminal Israeli regime, have felt compelled to adapt to the mass sentiment.
A prominent comment in the Sydney Morning Herald, for instance, declared that horror over the catastrophe in Gaza had gone “mainstream,” adding: “No one should suggest that the city had turned its back on our Jewish community.”
A number of reports, however, including from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, have led with declarations by the NSW Police that the march was a “perilous event,” which could have resulted in a mass crowd crush.
That was the argument the NSW government and the police eventually fixed on in their court attempt to ban the protest, having previously denounced it publicly only as an inconvenience.
The circumstances of the rally raise concerning questions about the actions of the police. As the front of the march had crossed the Harbour Bridge, the police sent automated text messages declaring they had cancelled the protest, in collaboration with the organisers, for fear of a crowd crush.
Protesters at the front were instructed to turn around and return to the city centre. But, prior to this directive, police officers had withdrawn from the bridge, despite earlier having a substantial presence. That created a confused situation where for a period, protesters were marching in opposite directions, without any pretence of on-the-ground police crowd management.
It is legitimate to ask whether the police were attempting to engineer the crowd crush that they had warned against. In the end, protesters left the bridge without incident, due to the sense of solidarity of the crowd itself.
In Melbourne, police openly blocked a large anti-genocide protest. There, the state Labor government directed police to forcefully suppress an attempt by some 25,000 demonstrators to march across the King Street Bridge.
Having declared that the closure of the bridge by protesters would be an unacceptable disruption and risk to emergency services, Labor shut the bridge to block the rally and deployed aggressive riot police to guard it.
The mass opposition expressed in the Sydney march raises the issue of what action is required to end the genocide in Gaza. The speakers before the march did not have any answers.
Several Palestinian and human rights activists spoke movingly about the unfolding horrors. Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, whose research funding has been targeted at the behest of the federal Labor government, gave a defiant speech against Zionist threats and censorship. Jewish-Australian journalist Antony Lowenstein spoke strongly against the relentless conflation of Judaism and the Israeli state.
But the political line was set by federal Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi. She advanced the same perspective of endless protests, aimed at pressuring the powers-that-be, that has manifestly failed over almost two years to stop the Israeli onslaught.
Faruqi referenced recent statements of Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other government leaders who have cynically and belatedly bemoaned the mass starvation. They are clearly trying to contain the mass anger expressed in the demonstration.
Faruqi pointed to the threadbare nature of the statements and said that “words are not enough.” But she claimed that popular pressure was moving Labor “inch by inch” towards a defence of the Palestinians. That is simply a lie.
Labor stands full square behind the atrocities. Days before she made that claim, Faruqi was in the Senate when Foreign Minister Penny Wong thunderously defended Australia’s military exports to Israel, which the Labor government had previously denied were continuing. And Faruqi was addressing a protest that Labor had sought to ban.
The claim that Labor is shifting, or can shift, serves to subordinate anti-genocide opposition to the very government that is a party to it. That is the role of calls for Labor to sanction Israel. The fact that a member of the Labor government, Ed Husic, was present at the protest and raising the call for sanctions points to its entirely toothless character.
Its function is to divert attention from the central question, the independent action of the working class.
The rally was addressed by Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) Sydney branch secretary Paul Keating. He gave a demagogic speech, declaring that the fight against the genocide was a “working-class issue,” and that his union was unwaveringly committed to taking it forward.
Keating’s noisy bluster was dialled up to compensate for the conspicuous absence of any substantial contingent organised by the trade unions, despite the massive size of the protest.
Moreover, the MUA has not taken action to halt the genocide, but has suppressed it. The union has enforced the orderly loading and unloading of cargo from the Israeli Zim shipping line, which has committed to aiding the Israeli war effort.
When, in November 2023, members of the Socialist Equality Party asked Keating if the MUA would uphold the call by Palestinian trade unions for industrial action to cripple the Zionist war machine, he reacted with fury.
Halting the genocide means building an independent movement of the working class, in a political fight against the Labor government, the Greens, the corporatised union bureaucracy and the entire political establishment. That is the only means of unleashing the social and political power of the working class, including through industrial action, to halt the ongoing Israeli war crimes and the broader eruption of imperialist militarism of which they are a part.