The violent actions of the NSW police force against those protesting the Israeli President's visit to Australia are on display for all to see. This record of police brutality is a grim reminder of how vulnerable human rights are to manipulation and abuse, as is the very fact of the presence of a war criminal in the social discourse of the broader community.
Aligning the presence of one of the leaders of the Israeli war machine with the need to address people's deep distress about the horrific slaughter at Bondi risks contesting and erasing the fact of the destruction and genocide in Gaza. This serves no form of justice for anyone. If this person were acting as a 'private citizen' mourning personal loss, a case might be made for a private visit even in the fallout of his being a 'signatory' to the crimes of the Israeli state, but this visit was hardly ever (just) about that. He comes as the war criminal he is, supported by the state.
It seems clear that the reality of anti-semitism being the driver of the Bondi massacre cannot and should not be negated by defining it as an extension of the conflict in Gaza. To do so is to excuse the inexcusable, to negate the humanity and agency of each murdered individual, and to offer a pathway for justifying the heinous.
The acts of the NSW police fit the pattern of state control, and the refusal to offer a right of protest against a figure identified directly with slaughter, coming as a representative of a war machine that has so far escaped any real scrutiny and consequences for its genocidal actions, is such a disturbing mixing of registers of suffering that it offends basic human rights. Bigotry — be it anti-semitic or anti-Palestinian — is the bloody divider between oppression and justice.
Having spent a life resisting fascism, often enduring death threats and even beatings in my younger years, I find any attempt to rationalise murder and violence as justice absolutely unsupportable. The shift from colonial aggression into 'decolonising' aggression is a contradiction so easily presented as the 'real' form of activism, as opposed to declaration that all forms of violence are wrong. There is too much manipulation and control going on across discourses that seek justice by trying to render void other ways of seeing (by which I mean non-violent ways of seeing and dealing with wrongs)... an aggressive censorship that would remove all opposition around pathways to peace and justice.
We are sadly dealing with what amounts to a new racism - a racism that refuses the label as part of its process, and that justifies itself in the context of resisting what it perceives as an indefensible racism (which it is, of course) ... resulting in more hate and a deepening racism. Semantics can't alter that fact that ALL racism is wrong.
I personally stand for all those who are oppressed and all those who are harmed. Even the oppressors don't deserve harm — what they need is to be prevented from causing harm and to be shown a way past their own hate and bigotry. Disarming in the material reality as well as in thought is a start. We must all hold violent policing to account and the state and policing system that would justify the violation of basic human rights all in the name of thwarting hatred. The irony is deadly and a negation of human rights.
Hate is the word of our age only because it is underwritten by histories and stories of hate.
John Kinsella
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