Fallout from Gaza Genocide Used to Justify Increasingly Repressive Regime in NSW

The United Nations recognised Israel is perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza in September 2025, despite sustained denials by Israel and its allies. The illegal mass murder and attempts to hide it have too caused broad social upheaval, rising divisions and circulating disinformation right across the western world that’s dramatically shifted Australian civil society.

The 14 December 2025 Bondi Beach massacre that saw 15 people murdered at a Jewish religious festival held on Gadigal land at the iconic Australian site is considered to be related to the Gaza genocide. This was despite the father and son killers having been inspired by ISIS, which is a recognised terror group that is not affiliated with the Palestinian cause.

Jewish organisation Community Security Group had warned NSW authorities in late November 2025, that the Hanukkah event that was targeted at Bondi could be vulnerable to attack, as “hostile actors” to Israel have often targeted overseas Jewish interests. 

Indeed, an “antisemitic” crimewave staged by organised crime over the last summer in Greater Sydney was too fallout from the genocide.

The new laws in NSW that at present ban all protest across a large section of Greater Sydney are an outcome of the mass slaughter in Gaza and attempts to deny it. Multiple vandalism attacks on MPs’ offices and arms manufacturers have been due to the illegal mass killing in Gaza. The entire edifice of international law, in fact, has been thrown into question due to the long-term genocide.

The ongoing denials around the Israeli state’s highly visible perpetration of what is considered to be the most heinous international crime of all, along with all the local changes that have been implemented to ensure that this deception can be maintained over here, has not subsided since the Trump-brokered ceasefire either.

Keeping up appearances

Following the Bondi Beach massacre, PM Anthony Albanese announced on 18 December that the nation will be implementing antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism, which is yet again another development being foisted upon the people of this country primarily to block criticism of Israel, and especially its Gaza genocide, and it has nothing to do with the mass shooting.

The July 2025 released plan to stamp out antisemitism, or hatred towards Jewish people, in Australian society involves 13 recommendations, with the key one being that all levels of government and institutions adopt the IHRA working definition on antisemitism, which is a rough draft that’s been promoted as a standard because 7 of its 11 examples of prejudice involve criticism of Israel.

As US political commentator Noam Chomksy has explained, proponents of the Israeli state, which is a settler colonial society that’s been established on historic Palestine, commenced propagating this conflation of political criticism of Israel with the kind of anti-Jewish prejudice that led the Nazis to commit the World War II Holocaust in the late 1960s. 

Albanese has agreed to establish this plan to placate the Zionist Lobby, the Coalition and the Murdoch media post-Bondi because they’ve charged him with not cracking down on antisemitism, which apparently created a climate for the shootings. One only has to tune in to Sky News post-Bondi to find people regularly being charged as antisemitic for criticising Israel.

Segal was suddenly announced antisemitism envoy in July 2024 by Albanese, in response to the Gaza genocide, which Australian governments have never recognised as the grave international crime that it is. However, it has since come to light that the envoy system has been operating across the western world for decades, and its chief aim appears to be the adoption of the working definition.

A hasbara agenda

Currently, a blanket ban on all public protests is in place across three policing districts in Greater Sydney. These laws were enacted directly in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre because NSW premier Chris Minns suggested that a pro-Palestinian/antigenocide demonstration in the post-mass murder climate could stir up more social division, despite no evidence of any link between them.

The Minns government is also considering expanding NSW hate speech laws to cover phrases like “globalise the intifada” and perhaps even, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. These phrases have been raised because of their link to the movement against the Gaza genocide. Although there are serious constitutional questions about whether the premier can legitimately do this.

These phrases have been singled out following a terrorist-related mass murder in Bondi, which was perpetrated by ISIS-inspired father and son killers, Sajid and Naveed Akram. The phrase about the river to the sea is supposed to be antisemitic, however Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Likud Party adopted a version of this statement at inception.

As for the heated debate that the premier has been having in regard to “globalise the intifada”, Palestine Action Group organiser Josh Lees pointed out that no one in Sydney has been chanting this phrase. Rather the New York Times ran the post-mass shooting headline Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like, and it developed a life of its own to the point of future legislation.

Screws set to be tightened further

The 10 October 2025 Gaza ceasefire remains in place, but so does the Gaza genocide itself. And there are no real plans to bring it to an end. Israel has killed over 400 people in post-ceasefire attacks. The amount of aid trucks allowed to enter over this time has been considerably low and the population continues to starve. People midwinter in makeshift tents are being flooded by the rains in Gaza.

The value of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and the Geneva Conventions has been significantly reduced due to Israel’s commission of genocide in plain sight, along with the attempts to deny what is being livestreamed to the planet is taking place. The edifices had, in part, been established to prevent future genocides, like the Holocaust.

Whilst the pseudo-ceasefire reigns, there is the understanding that the Trump administration is considering leading a revamping of the Gaza Strip to turn the site of a high tech genocide into an international city, or something of a billionaire’s playground. And these sorts of proposals indicate further atrocities for the Palestinian population of the area.

The suggestion has been that Israel just recognised Somaliland in order to facilitate Palestinian relocation from Gaza to the African region.

While 26 months into the Gaza genocide and the state of NSW currently has a blanket ban on protests in place and it’s also undergone two sets civil liberties-eroding lawmaking in order to have measures in place that limit the ability of constituents to speak out about the holocaust underway in the Gaza Strip.

But with the crisis in Gaza far from over, it would seem that ongoing repressive lawmaking and denials of free speech, the right to political communication and the right to assemble in public, will be further repressed and perhaps slowly be made to become the norm.