The pro-Palestinian movement is a social revolution in a changed Australia

There seems to be every sign that Israel’s publicity machine, and Israel lobbies around the world, have been taken by surprise by the global pro-Palestinian movement that has developed. 

In Australia, it has been able to turn out large protests five weeks in a row; the most recent in Melbourne was put by media at 45,000 and by organisers at considerably more. In London, the remembrance day march was anything between 300,000, the police estimate, and 800,000 or more, the organisers estimate.

This is an extraordinary achievement, matched across the world, produced from a deep ethical response that will not consent to the evisceration of a people, that uses as license a ghastly event that nevertheless did not constitute anything remotely resembling an existential threat to a major military power.

What’s behind it are two big things: a new type of ethical pulse, and a change in social composition in Australia from sustained immigration. To take the second first: nearly 30% of Australians are now born overseas, and nearly half have one parent who was born overseas. Anglo-Celtic ancestry (it’s a bit hard to measure exactly) has fallen, according to the statistics, from 71.4% in 1996, to 58% in 2016, and 51.7% by 2021. That was after 19 years of conservative rule out of 25.  Our ravenous need for labour — and a desire by both sides of politics to suppress the power of labour — has seen us open the door to one new migration source after another, in the Middle East, India, East Asia and Africa.

Australia is thus not only Anglo-Celtic with margins anymore, and nor is it even European. If you import people from the former colonies of Europe, amazingly they may well have a different experience and view of colonialism and world history than you do. And they don’t need to be members of the Monash Uni decolonisation collective to hold them. 

So, at the weekend marches one can see a broader attendance of non-white people who are, by dress and style, very definitely suburban. The protests have reached deep into communities and drawn people out who might otherwise look askance at the act of demonstrating, and who are otherwise embedded in family, jobs and making a life. How could they not attend, given a moral emergency such as this?

The first point is the cultural shift as a whole. While many, perhaps a majority of people, can be lulled into a shrugging consent to Israel’s open-ended killing because it is conducted as a high-tech military operation, for an unprecedented number of others, especially of a younger generation, it simply cannot be consented to with silence. Thirty years of globalisation has widened the idea of who counts as human for millennials and gen Z. The narrative of human rights that has been put at the centre of the curriculum to legitimise the West has been… taken seriously. 

The demographic shift has combined with the cultural-ideological shift in a new movement, a recombination of social forces brought into play by the genocide in Gaza. The strong communal ties of non-European communities are giving it a social grounding that other movements lack.

The Israel lobby appears to have been caught short by this enormous occurrence. They had expected smaller protests, based around the radical left, students, and selective Australian Muslim activists. Their thinking has been sluggish, conceiving of an earlier Australia, Anglo-dominated, which had swung its support behind Israel in the 1970s. To a degree, organs like the Australian Jewish News and others may have blinded themselves to recent social shifts by trying to maintain their sense of a cultural outsider status to a dominant Christian society that no longer exists in the way it once did.

In response, the Australian right and the Israel lobby have been blaming everything but the Gaza invasion for the global wave of anger against Israel. It has blamed TikTok, for the distribution of — shock — pro-Palestinian messages, contrary to the authorised media version. Tenured radicals in our universities have been blamed for filling young people’s heads with foolishness. And so on. And of course, the great beast, multiculturalism. 

Multiculturalism, as policy, has become a fetish object for the right, to demonise, here and in the UK. Really, it’s a false lure to cover the fact that if you ship in a lot of people from a lot of different places, the culture will cease to be a set of common habits and beliefs and start to be a zone of difference and negotiation. Multiculturalism didn’t create that. It is a state-cultural technology designed to manage it. Assimilation doesn’t work beyond a certain scale.

The vague assimilation politics that people such as John Howard speak about — as at that clownish right-wing ARC junket a few weeks ago — are misdirection designed to hide the role of high immigration in cultural change. Howard kept the entry numbers high. The great post-Anglo-Celtic shift occurred in his premiership, and future historians will see it as the most significant occurrence within it. It has been most dramatic in Sydney and Melbourne, which are now Eurasian cities. Hilariously, both Howard and his supporters and enemies have conspired to believe he did the opposite of what he caused to come to pass. Truly, the things that unite us …

Multi-ethnic societies demand civic pluralism in which great differences must be tolerated with full equality, up to certain limits. This is all the more so in a world where borders have become very partial. To immigrate somewhere was, up until the 1980s, to be cut off in daily life from your wider cultural world. Now, no-one ever really fully leaves anywhere. The nation’s values were once shaped by bounded, channelled media — the city newspaper and broadcast TV. Now multiple versions of everything are available. 

The Israel lobby have very visibly stuck to the old media, where they have fervent support, and it shows in their clunky product. Statements one day that Israel isn’t bombing hospitals and that to suggest so is a “blood libel”, are succeeded by warnings to evacuate 22 of them immediately as the battle zone is extended. 

An annotated copy of Mein Kampf is found in the “child’s room” of the house of a Hamas terrorist. That would be Hamas, the group that believes in the annihilation of the Jews? Quelle surprise. One could well be expecting dozens of copies. And so on.

The Israeli government’s kitsch, it must be said, is sometimes matched by that on the other side. The nature of this new movement puts the responsibility on organisers to have as much control over the protests as they can manage. There are anti-Semitic signs that appear (“from the river to the sea” does not count as such, for the record), whose holders are not stopped and ejected fast enough. There are aspects of a guerrilla chic style in these protests, which have a masculinist edge.

They’ve got every right to be there but it needs to be factored into where and what one does and doesn’t do — like calling a protest, and moving it to near a synagogue on a Friday night, for example — and not merely to avoid PR disasters. Many people get justifiably angry at the discounting of persistent white-skin racism when anti-Semitism is discussed. There is a special character to anti-Semitism in Western societies, a degree of high-velocity memetic transmission — which has to be taken into consideration, in the management of words, bodies and flow for a movement such as this. It’s a moral requirement, and one becoming more insistent by the day. It’s also a strategic necessity.

But my observation is that these protests are positive in character, Palestine-focused, and that a lot of the air of menace in the mainstream media is produced by photos angled to find half a dozen kids who look like a PFLP fan club. The monolithic Israel lobby has no idea how to deal with any of this. It’s driving them crazy. They’re going nuts about the School Strike for Palestine planned for next week, blaming it on adult influence and childishness, as if 16, 14, 13-year-olds, online and enmeshed in a world of media aren’t now categorically different and connected to the world in new ways that make them capable, en masse, of an autonomous political-ethical response, of speaking for the oppressed in a new way, that smashes through the engineered complacency of our time.