“The Last Setter Colonial Project”: Gadigal-Sydney Won’t Stop Demanding Gaza Ceasefire

“I stand before you here as someone who has lost 70 members of the Zorob family since the start of the genocide and many others before,” local Palestinian man Mohamed Zorob told the 20th Palestine Action Group rally of Gaza in Gadigal-Sydney on Sunday.

“May you never know the agony of not reaching your parents during a genocide,” said Zorob, who hails from the besieged city of Khan Younis in Gaza.

“May you never know the pain of confirming that seven members of your family have been massacred through the Al Jazeera network.”

Zorob shared this tragedy on Sunday, reminding that while the pro-Palestinian rallygoers gathering in Hyde Park North week-after-week represent a broad multicultural cross section of the community, local Palestinian people are being terrorised by Israel whilst living on this continent.

“How dare the Albanese government stay silent on the genocide,” Zorob declared.

Wiradjuri Wailwan descendant Ethan Floyd reminded that “it’s because we are here in so-called Australia that we know what we are witnessing in Palestine is a genocide.” And he added that Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid were intimately understood here because they were practiced.

“We were abandoned to rot on government missions: our families torn apart and our traditional way of life smashed. We were condemned to live on the fringes, marginalised in our own country,” Floyd recalled. “There was no place for us in this modern nation.”

After 20 weeks of massacre and mass starvation, with over 30,000 murdered and more than 100,000 killed or wounded, 1.5 of the 2.3 million Palestinians are in the southernmost point of the walled-in region of the Gaza Strip, Rafah, and incomprehensibly Israel plans a ground attack upon them.

The International Court of Justice ruled in January that Israel is plausibly committing a genocide and that it must stop.

Yet, Australia, along with more than a dozen other states, then cut funding to the main aid line into Gaza, UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, based on unsubstantiated Israeli claims.

“The organisers of this rally have done more for peace, done more to end the violence, than our entire government,” Greens Senator David Shoebridge told the crowd. “Indeed, our entire government is quite happy to fuel the violence, to be complicit in” it and to “gaslight us”.

The senator listed examples of how the Australian weapons industry directly supplies the Israeli war machine, and that every time he raises this with his chamber colleague foreign minister Penny Wong, she flatly refutes the claims, despite the figures posted on her department’s website.

“When we ask her in the Senate why she will not stop Australia’s arms exports to Israel, she stares us in the face, and she says, ‘Australia has not sent any arms or weapons to Israel in the last 5 years’,” Shoebridge outlined.  

“How dare she, how dare the Albanese government, gaslight us and lie to us.”

Indeed, such is the scale of the atrocities in Gaza that Israel is setting new precedents for warfare in the post-World War II era, where international humanitarian law can be overridden to the point of mass civilian deaths, mass child death, hospitals become battle zones and medical staff targets.

“We will not bow down to tyranny. We have stood 75 years against this colonisation: the last European settler colonial state – the last project,” Zorob made clear in concluding.

“We will not bow down to this regardless of the discrepancy of power.”