Down With Zionist-Led Witchhunt Against Pro-Palestinian Activists!

As the ferocity of Israel’s recent attack on Gaza mounted so too did the orchestrated smear campaign by Zionist forces to silence its critics. In Australia, journalists, academics, leftists and other pro-Palestinian activists have all been targeted. Aiming to muzzle opposition through legal action and intimidation, key to the campaign has been the classic slander that any criticism of Israel equals anti-Jewish bigotry, or even support to “terrorism.” Well-known journalist Mike Carlton was hounded out of his job at the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) following a 26 July article in which he stated some basic truths about the brutal impact of Israel’s military onslaught on the population of Gaza. In his article, Carlton predicted “the customary torrent of abusive emails calling me a Nazi, an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, an ignoramus.” He was not wrong. Carlton later noted “When for weeks you’re called Nazi scum and a lot worse, eventually it gets to you and I told a few people where to go” (SMH, 6 August). After a campaign by the Murdoch media he resigned from the SMH when he was outrageously threatened with suspension. Prominent left-liberal journalist John Pilger similarly recounts receiving death threats “at a rate of one a day” after the television broadcast of his documentary, Palestine Is Still the Issue, in Britain.

Particular targets of Zionist vehemence have been supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which has long been pushed by small “l” liberals and the reformist left on campuses and at pro-Palestinian rallies. In 2013, the Israeli law centre, Shurat HaDin, brought a Federal Court action against Sydney University professor Jake Lynch, claiming that Lynch’s promotion of the BDS campaign put him in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act. Shurat HaDin, exposed by a leaked 2007 U.S. diplomatic cable as having links with Israel’s sinister Mossad intelligence service, finally withdrew its action in July this year.

The reformist Socialist Alternative (SAlt), who have been in the forefront of those pushing BDS, have also faced sustained attacks by campus administrations, the bourgeois media and federal government. In August, the University of Western Australia Student Guild attempted, unsuccessfully, to suspend the campus SAlt club. On 2 September, Monash University’s Clubs and Societies Executive voted to deregister SAlt’s club on that campus following a relentless smear campaign spearheaded by pro-Zionist groups such as the Australasian Union of Jewish Students and backed by the campus administration. Pro-Palestinian activists at Monash face “misconduct hearings” while a SAlt member at La Trobe University has been threatened with expulsion for alleged “harassment and intimidation” of a Jewish student council leader. We oppose political censorship and demand all disciplinary charges against SAlt and other supporters of BDS be dropped!

The federal education minister, Christopher Pyne, whose attacks on tertiary education have sparked sizable student demonstrations, joined the campaign with a scurrilous article in the right-wing Murdoch mouthpiece, the Australian, declaring “Unis hit by anti-Semitism” (29 August). Accusing SAlt of anti-Jewish bigotry, Pyne sought to equate leftist defence of Palestinians with the rise of right-wing and fascist anti-Jewish attacks in Europe. He declared “We must not let that old hatred grip us in Australia. It is our obligation...to call out extremism.” This grotesque smear job is only topped by its hypocrisy.

Pyne is a senior cabinet minister in the Australian government, which aggressively backs the fascist-infested Ukrainian regime. The shock troops of the February coup that installed the Kiev government included the extreme fascist Right Sector. The leader of its west Ukrainian section pledges to fight “Jews, communists and Russian scum until I die.” The Ukrainian government includes members of Svoboda, which derives from the nationalist group led by Stepan Bandera, who collaborated militarily with the Nazis during World War II. Meanwhile the white supremacist anti-Semite Azov battalion prosecutes Kiev’s war against the mixed population of eastern Ukraine carrying flags emblazoned with the Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s hook) symbol.

The ongoing attempts at political censorship, successful or otherwise, on university campuses expose the myth that universities are bastions of intellectual freedom. Through campus administrations, the capitalist ruling class runs the tertiary education system to serve bourgeois interests, including propagating bourgeois ideology and training the necessary administrative, technical and cultural personnel. This elementary class understanding escapes the self-professed “Marxists” of SAlt. More than once they have threatened to call campus security, the private cops of the administration, against Spartacist League supporters in an attempt to suppress our Trotskyist views (see Spartacist leaflet, “Socialist Alternative: Cheerleaders for Capitalist Counterrevolution,” 4 March 2008). We say: abolish the university administrations; for staff-student-worker control!

Whatever their differences with our Marxist worldview, we defend SAlt along with the other advocates of BDS against any attempt to censor, ban or persecute them for their political positions. But we do not agree with the BDS campaign, which appeals to the U.S., Australia and other imperialist powers to act on behalf of the Palestinians through trade and other sanctions against Israel. This only serves to sow illusions that the blood-drenched imperialist bourgeoisies can be pressured to act against their own class interests. Thus BDS campaigns stand as an obstacle to the international working-class struggle that is so necessary for the liberation of the Palestinians, who have suffered more than six decades of brutal treatment by the Israeli state. Defend the Palestinians! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the Occupied Territories! Down with the starvation blockade of Gaza!

The root cause of the oppression of the Palestinians is that in Israel/Palestine two peoples have legitimate, conflicting claims to the same piece of land—a problem for which there is no just solution under capitalism. What is necessary is joint class struggle of Jewish and Arab workers extending beyond the confines of that territory to the whole region—including the multiple countries where Palestinians are oppressed by Arab regimes. The only solution lies in workers revolutions against the Zionist butchers, Arab dictators, mullahs and monarchs, and extending to the imperialist centres. Such a task requires the forging of Leninist-Trotskyist parties that are proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist.