After being arrested in Brisbane for wearing a T-shirt that read ‘Jews for a free Palestine from the river to the sea’, a 73-year-old Jewish protester writes that the law is suppressing dissent and targeting supporters of human rights.
Last weekend, I was one of 22 people arrested in Brisbane. Whether it was necessary for so many police to arrest one 73 year old Jew, I’ll let you decide. Perhaps unconscious echoes of a distant, but never to be forgotten, Jewish past.
This abjectly racist law was designed to suppress a liberation movement, targeting Palestinian and Muslim Australians. There is no mechanism in Queensland’s law to improve social cohesion or protect Jews or anyone else. The law is framed to cow supporters of human rights, carefully worded to avoid capturing the language of the Likud Party’s Zionist expansionism, while Queensland maintains the weakest gun laws in Australia. The contrast could not be more telling.
If you’ve already seen media and are sick of my appearances, honestly, I’m on your side. It seems, however, that people may still be interested.
In 1969, aged 16, I first became active in South Africa against apartheid; peacefully picketing in support of Durban dockworkers on strike, broken up by police teargas and batons. In 1976, Soweto school students went on strike against the prescribing of the hated Afrikaans as the official language in schools. The police were brutal, firing shots into crowds of chanting and marching children. Some 176 people were killed that day. Police broke limbs, fired teargas canisters and it didn’t stop for weeks. Subsequent research indicates as many as 700 were killed across the country. The government claimed the figures were exaggerated. Haven’t we heard that recently, somewhere? More echoes!
After the Soweto uprising I became more active. My friends called themselves freedom fighters. Had they known, the people I knew then would have called my friends and me terrorists. After a period in jail, I had to leave South Africa. I know what apartheid and racism look like. I know the appearance, smell, feel and even taste of massacres.
I made my home here in 1981, with the view that the right to disagree, loudly, was fundamental to the Australian national character.
In the years since I have been a clinical psychologist specialising in trauma and disability. In the noughties I ran UNRWA’s mental health programs in Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria and witnessed Israel’s terrible brutality firsthand; working in Gaza during wars that killed over 5,000 and injured at least four times that number.
What does our ‘Book’ mean, our morality, if we who call ourselves its people stand by in silence? Israeli genocidaires, and their political allies in Australia, demonise anyone with a Middle-Eastern name; some who are Christian, many Muslims and Palestinians, among them health professionals saving lives in our hospitals, and also artists, writers, musicians, poets and academics; and anyone who might speak in support of a common humanity. We see the criminalising of peaceful protest and legitimising of banning political speech. All this in the name of ‘combating antisemitism’?
On Saturday I was arrested alongside a marvellous upstanding Jew and supported by yet more brave Jews holding banners. There is a longstanding, proud, and loud tradition of Jewish resistance to oppression and defence of civil liberties. Jews I knew gave their lives in the struggle for freedom in apartheid South Africa. Jews have given their lives for democracy and Palestinian freedom; with some killed by Zionists. Some Jews, bearing witness in the West Bank today, are being viciously assaulted by settlers, and the IDF. Even more echoes.
It’s why I stood to be arrested on Friday, and why I wanted to write to you today; to encourage ongoing, collective resistance in this long tradition. This repression will continue unless we demonstrate massive and popular opposition. Have conversations with your loved ones. Organise events in your local community. Talk face-to-face to politicians. Engage with the Royal Commission. If you can afford to support organisations like the Jewish Council financially, please do. You need not get arrested, but we must fight back.
I greatly appreciate you taking the time to read this and for your support of the Council. A free society is loud and frequently inconvenient, uncomfortable or even offensive to those who would seek power and control over others, and that is precisely why its protection is essential.
Until it’s “never again” for everyone, it can’t be “never again” for anyone.
Stephen Heydt
Stephen Heydt is a clinical psychologist specialising in trauma and disability. In the early 2000s Stephen ran UNRWA’s mental health programs in Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.