Your rights are being eroded so Israel can commit genocide without criticism 

As sure as the sky being blue and Elon Musk being a waxy, heinous prick, Israel is colonising Palestine. That is not an anti-semitic slur, nor should it be a controversial thing to say. It’s not even an opinion. It is a statement of historical, political and cultural fact. It is the truth. 

And though it appears to matter less than it once did, truth does still matter. The further we move away from it, the more danger we find ourselves in. Israel supporters are free to argue in favour of colonisation using political, racist, religious, or even moral arguments, but to deny that this is happening at all is ahistorical. It is cognitive dissonance. And it is an assault on the truth of this world. Yet somehow stating this reality is not without consequence, not without risk. 

What do I mean by ‘Israel is colonising Palestine’, and, more to the point, why am I feeling compelled to state such an obvious point at this moment in time? Great questions, Dave! Just like 2 million displaced Palestinians, I am going somewhere unpleasant with this.  

Colonisation is the process of a place becoming a different place – in this case Palestine becoming Israel – and the majority population against their will becoming an oppressed minority with little power. You could call this ‘doing an Australia.’ This has happened a bunch throughout history; ruling class monarchs and hyper-wealthy oligarchs, in particular, love this shit. 

Now the beautiful thing about history is you can glimpse patterns before they’ve reached their conclusions. (This is the opposite of what the news does, routinely and deliberately removing context, muddying causality, outright distorting the contours of reality.) 

The pattern with colonisation is that the people being colonised never, ever willingly cede their land and power without resisting. Not only is this resistance inevitable, it is legal under international law (not that that matters anymore). Thus far, across human history, colonisation has not happened without violence, without ethnic cleansing, without genocide. Of the Palestinians, former Israeli diplomat and MP Abba Eban, said: ‘If they had submitted to Zionism with docility they would have been the first people in history to have voluntarily renounced their majority status.’ 

Essentially: You build a Death Star, you inevitably end up with a Rebel Alliance. Always. It is a cycle we either break, or double down upon, and Zionists have chosen the latter. 

All this means the Zionist project is inherently reliant on brutal military aggression. It simply could not exist without it. (If reading this feels at all jarring, it’s because we’re doing the logic thing, not the gaslighting thing, today.) And this historic truth was both foreseeable in advance, and has been proven today by countless human rights reports, by livestreamed slaughter, by 78 years of atrocity, land theft, and cover up. If anyone ever asks you the disingenuous gotcha question, ‘Does Israel have a right to exist?’ the only response is to answer with another question: ‘Can Israel exist without committing genocide?’ At that point, you have a real discussion.

Not only is this colonial violence realllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllly obvious, it is also routinely embraced by Zionist leaders, from before the foundation of Israel to today’s openly bloodlusting psychopaths in Netanyahu’s government. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a founder of Revisionist Zionism, in 1923 wrote that, ‘Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers… That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel”’. 

Early Zionists understood that to inflict the decades – most likely centuries, given the cases of the USA and Australia – of atrocities needed to create Israel, they would need to harden their hearts and souls to the horror they would need to inflict. Palestinians would need to be dehumanised and erased, silenced and turned into monsters; the oppressed would need to become oppressor, and vice versa. Israeli education would emphasise a clash of religions and the historic status of persecution inflicted upon the Jewish peoples. The military force aggressively seizing Palestine would be the Israel Defence Force; journalists selling the West’s colonial project would blabber on about Israel’s right to ‘defend’ itself (as it offensively seized land). Violent colonists would become ‘settlers’. And any critique of such horror would be slandered as anti-semitic. Slandered as anti-semitic despite the fact that across 78 years, 96% of all deaths in this conflict have been Palestinian. 

This world is upside down.

Now, again, why am I writing such a basic, supposedly uncontroversial account of the roots of the Israel Palestine conflict in 2025? Because I am concerned that one day soon I might not be able to do so. And I am concerned about this, again, because of historic patterns. 

In the United States, Donald Trump is attempting to send a legal permanent resident of the US, Mahmoud Khalil, to Syria for the sin of peacefully criticising Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and standing in defiance of US imperial foreign policy. ICE agents seized him last Saturday, which, ya know, is a super fucking fascist thing to do. Khalil helped organise protests at Columbia University, an institution that this week had US$400 million in public money cancelled at Trump’s behest. Super chill. 

Amidst this climate, all major Australian universities have adopted the Holocaust Memorial’s controversial definition of Anti-Semitism, equating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. Zionist MP Josh Burns of the ALP brought the motion to Parliament. My question for our universities, specifically to their ludicrously overpaid Vice-Chancellors, is this: Is describing the colonisation of Palestine, by Israel, as I have just done, while making moral judgments about the manner in which this occurred, anti-semitic? In a history essay? In free speech voiced on university lawns and plastered across placards? Is plainly stating the truth of Israel’s violent colonisation of Palestine now considered hate speech? And, if so… how do you take yourselves seriously? 

In Melbourne, Hash Tayeh, a Palestinian man and owner of a burger joint that was torched in a politically motivated attack, has been charged for chanting ‘All Zionists are terrorists’ at a peaceful rally.

New hate speech laws have been rammed through parliament after a false-flag caravan filled with 40-year-old explosives was dressed up as an anti-semitic terror attack waiting to happen. Despite the bleatings of the media and politicians, Federal Police stated that the ruse was conducted by ‘foreign criminals’ and was never a danger to Jewish lives. You work it out.

Now, here’s the crux of everything…  

The top half of this piece argued violent conquest is inherent to Zionism. Which means terror would inevitably be inflicted upon civilian populations. Which means that yes, Zionism, run to its logical outcome, would be a repeated onslaught of state terrorism. Which means Zionism IS terrorism. I cannot see this commonplace protest chant as anything other than a statement of a fact, and today, we have an Australian man threatened with legal action for stating that fact at a peaceful protest. At a rally against genocide. For a ruse, for a series of lies, Australia is in the process of giving up the right to state this truth. 

As a white person, as the descendant of colonisers and the privileged beneficiary of the atrocities inflicted in Australia, can I get away with saying ‘Zionism is terrorism’? Zionism is terrorism. What if I italicise it and make it bold? Zionism is terrorism. Or is it just brown people and Palestinians that can’t say these things anymore? Finding the answer to this will tell us a lot about ourselves as Australians.

Even expressing sympathy for slaughtered Palestinian children is not without consequences today. You might lose your gig at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Or your grant money at a university. Or your role at the ABC, or SEN. And these are just the high profile examples. All of this will ripple throughout society countless times with untold knock-on effects, chilling free expression, stifling the ability to resist. Stand against this now before it is too late. As I’ve laboured into the ground, history has patterns. You know where this goes.