Abolition.Feminism.Now and Free Palestine: Fighting for the rights of all oppressed peoples

Professor Angela Davis speaks at the Blackfella-Palestinian solidarity symposium in Magan-djin.

This feels like an unprecedented time. A time when we can see clearly the machinations of settler-colonialism and how we are all linked as Indigenous peoples. Last week, in Magan-djin (Brisbane), there were a number of events that brought this message into sharp focus. One was the Blackfella Palestinian Solidarity Symposium, and the other was the Sisters Inside Abolition Feminism Now conference. At both events, we heard from Palestinian, Aboriginal, and international voices, people like Rihab Charida, Jamal Nabulsi, Boe Spearim, Uncle Lionel Fogarty, Uncle Shane Cogill, and the legendary Professor Angela Davis.

At Sisters Inside, we heard the thinking and work of abolitionist organisers and academics, as well as families of Aboriginal people who had been killed in custody. I was honoured to share a panel with three of these families: Dr Raelene Nixon, the mother of Steven Nixon-McKellar, Salote Tafaifa, the daughter of Selesa Tafaifa, and Latoya Rule, the sibling of Wayne ‘Fella’ Morrison.

We heard from a panel of former incarcerated women, who asserted their right to speak in a system that had silenced them and continues to silence them. We heard from solid, staunch poets who spoke truth to power and brought us all to tears. As Prof Angela Davis said, feminism has been redefined by people in black and Indigenous communities and in the working class. We must think of it, she says, as a methodology, a method of thinking and acting, and a way of bringing issues together out of isolation from each other. And this is where she sees the struggle to free Palestine as an important part of abolition. Our methodology must be anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-carceral, she says.

In that spirit, I’m bringing to you my speech from the Blackfella Palestinian Solidarity symposium, with some parts added from other panels and speeches I’ve given this week. The media silencing campaign continues.

First of all, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land I’m speaking from today – the Turrubal and Yaggera peoples – I would like to acknowledge their continuing sovereignty, and the sovereignty of all First Nations people. I want to acknowledge my elders and ancestors and the elders and ancestors of all people here today. I am here today as a Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman and journalist, to say I stand in solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters.

We are currently witnessing a genocide being perpetrated before our eyes. And yet, the outlets that are supposed to be bringing us the truth, that are supposed to act as the ‘fourth estate’ – the mainstream media – are wilfully blind. Their actions, or inaction, go beyond silence, even beyond acquiescence, and emerge towards complicity. Our mainstream media outlets – including the ABC – are so cowardly that they refuse to even mention the word ‘genocide’. This was demonstrated recently when the ABC released a statement after an interview with Labor minister Tony Burke – who spoke out against the silencing of Palestinian voices. It was retweeted by one of the most high-profile ABC journalists Patricia Karvelas, who wanted to clarify that “ Karvelas did not use the word “genocide” herself.” On Friday, I sat in on another panel on news media reporting of Palestine, hosted by UTS, and heard another prominent journalist, also from the ABC, claim that we should not use the term ‘genocide’ until it had been determined by international law. This suggests we should only speak of acts of genocide after they have been perpetrated, and not now, to stop them.

In a time when Palestinian journalists are risking their lives to document the truth of what is happening in Gaza, across the ocean, Australian journalists feel it so important to remind us that they had not uttered the unspeakable: the word genocide.

Why is it unspeakable? I think I know. They purposefully do not want to speak of genocide, because by doing so, they would have to also acknowledge that they are speaking from lands which are stolen Aboriginal lands, which were secured not just through genocide, but also maintained through a continuing genocide. The term ‘genocide’ was clarified for use in settler colonial contexts by the landmark Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women inquiry in Canada. It said in its supplementary report: “genocide encompasses a variety of both lethal and non-lethal acts, including acts of ‘slow deaths’… this reality must be acknowledged as a precursor to understanding genocide as a root cause of the violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada”.  

But what is happening right now in Gaza, and throughout occupied Palestine – is unprecedented, the brutality so intense, and the silencing so fierce, that it feels incomprehensible. And yet we must comprehend it. I was honoured to share a stage earlier this year with Palestinian writer Saree Makdisi at the Adelaide Writer’s Festival, which was targeted by Zionist lobbies after Jewish Australian publisher Louise Adler programmed an extensive line up of Palestinian voices. Earlier this month Saree wrote: “What we are witnessing, in other words, is perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st...What’s worse, if anything could be worse, is the near total indifference on display by so many in and out of government in the Western world.”

We are seeing how genocide is carried out when there is a devastating indifference from the Western world and the media and a nuclear-armed state that feels it has impunity to kill and kill and kill. But, through this, Aboriginal people in Australia know that this is also an old story – a story of settler -colonialism. We know this is a genocide because we have seen how a genocide is committed and why it is committed: to disappear us from our land and to secure a settler colonial state.

So how do you commit a genocide?  

A genocide is committed when an Indigenous population are forcibly displaced and expelled from their homelands, massacred wholesale, with their villages destroyed – like what happened in 1948 with the Nakba, when  750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from the homelands of their ancestors and denied a right to return. This is what happened on the Queensland frontier, when our own ancestors were massacred by tens of thousands to make way for white settlers to build a colony - our graves were in rivers, and by the bottom of cliffs.

A genocide is committed when settlers are armed with guns and weapons to remove Palestinians from their homes and villages – like what is currently happening in the West Bank – where footage has shown images of armed Israeli settlers entering villages to expel and kill Palestinian people. This happened on the Queensland frontier as well, when white settlers were given an ‘unofficial license to kill’ to clear the land of our own people.

A genocide is committed by the re-shaping of ancestral country into colonial borders, in which spatial configurations determine which bodies matter in which spaces, what bodies are seen as threats to public order, and which are seen as need of protecting from. This is happening under the apartheid regime of Israel, where Palestinians have their lands seized, where illegal settlements are built, where Palestinians can not walk freely in certain spaces, where there is one set of laws for Palestinians and one set of laws for Israeli settlers. Queensland was the model for ‘apartheid’: our Aboriginal Protection Act, which forcibly removed Aboriginal people from their homelands and into reserves and missions, with their entire lives strictly controlled and their movements inhibited by the protectors and the police, was the very inspiration for Apartheid South Africa.

A genocide is committed when there is a forcible amnesia of history: in which the histories of these blood-stained places we walk on are mythologised to make settlers and the colony seem victorious, brave, and benevolent. Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah has written of this as “illegal mourning”, in which Palestinian histories of the Nakba are silenced in what she calls an “Israeli version of terra nullius”. This is true, ever so true, of this place: in which there are national celebrations on our day of mourning, on our nakba – January 26. A day of invasion canonised by the colonisers as “Australia Day”.

 A genocide is committed when thousands of Indigenous people are disappeared into jails and detention centres – like the 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners – so many of them children – locked away in Israeli jails – out of sight, and contained and tortured. We are seeing a mass incarceration of black men, women and children in this place, right here: in which our people are seen as ‘criminals’, and an affront to the supposed safety of white society.

And a genocide is committed with the erasure of Indigenous bodies from Indigenous lands – and in the poisoning of the country, which is intimately tied to our survival as peoples. On the Queensland frontier, they poisoned the water holes, they decimated the country and they continue to do so – through extractive industries, which deny our own right to return and sicken our lands and waterways. In Gaza and throughout the occupied territories, I have seen not only the bombing of country but also the wilful destruction of ancient olive trees. As the Israeli genocidal machine rains down white phosphorus on the people of Gaza, burning the bodies of women, men and children, I also see how it contaminates the waters, white phosphorus seeping into the lifestream that sustains land. The destruction of country is an attempt to destroy a people. It is part of the genocide.

These are all the reasons why Patricia Karvelas and other Australian journalists can not utter the word ‘genocide’, even as numerous genocide scholars have said that what is happening in Gaza right now is a ‘textbook case of genocide’ and another chapter in the Nakba. But we will remember them for their silence. We will remember the more than 10,000 men, women, and children who have been murdered and the thousands who are still disappeared under the rubble. We will remember them not as numbers, but as names, and lives, who deserved the right to live. We will remember them through the media silencing.

When I speak of silencing, I don’t speak of the fact that Indigenous people – both Palestinian and Aboriginal – are voiceless. As we know, Palestinian people have been speaking for decades about the truth of their lived experience, as have our own people over here. When I speak of silencing – I speak of it as the discourse – the more acceptable discourse – that displaces the less acceptable discourse – the language of the oppressed.  This ‘acceptable discourse’, is operationalised against us, so that when we speak, our voices become too radical, or ‘biased’ or untruthful so they go unheared, unless we become legitimised by coloniser voices, and authoritative voices – those who are perpetrating the violence. It is used to both make invisible a shockingly visible colonial violence, while also constricting the limits of what we can say so that we in turn become the violent ones – it is only the violence of the oppressed that is made visible.

There is a common question that has been asked repeatedly of every Palestinian in the media, and always in Australian media. It is “do you condemn Hamas?” That question has a certain function. It is used to put an ultimatum to Palestinian people: that you can have a voice but a conditional voice. It is conditional on whether you speak within the parameters of the discourse that has already silenced you. It also says something else about the nature of Palestinian resistance and suggests that Palestinians do not have a right to resist, which by proxy, suggests that Palestinians do not have a right to speak at all about the reality of the occupation, about the reality of the siege, about the reality of the apartheid, and about the reality of the genocide - because everything is still conditional upon the discourse already set by the occupier. They can’t say any of this, without first condemning Hamas - and if they don’t -everything else they say afterward is silenced or deemed too radical and even untruthful.

I wanted to include a word on ‘resistance’ through my own lens - the lens of the Aboriginal, or what I call Black Witness. When I think of all the countless cases of black deaths in custody we have had in Australia, I realised that there is only one case that really resulted in wall-to-wall media coverage, the coverage that every single black death deserves. That was the death in custody of Palm Islander Mulrunji Doomdagee. Now Mulrunjis’ death was not an aberration - there are many black men who have been bashed to death by police officers. But what made this different, what resulted in a different media coverage - was resistance. Black resistance. In every black death, or killing, in custody - families always resist - but it is particularly when black resistance is framed as violent, that the media finally takes notice.

The Palm community were able to attract media coverage because they staged an uprising, burning down the site of Mulrunji’s death - the Palm Island watchhouse, and the house of the man who had killed him: Snr Sgt Chris Hurley (Hurley was later acquitted of charges of manslaughter). Now, this is one case where I would also concede there were GOOD examples of reporting: there were campaigning journalists who held the QPS accountable, who refused to believe their lies, and who worked to tell the truth of what happened to Mulrunji. That pressure was important.

But in the midst of this, there was one event in which every single media outlet, other than Aboriginal media, failed. And that was coverage of the ‘uprising’, which they labeled a ‘riot’, and which we call resistance. This suggests to me that the media may sometimes be equipped to understand the violence and understand the victims, but they never, ever, understand the resistance - in any of its forms. Because to understand the resistance, you have to name the perpetrator - and what we are seeing now is passive language and an outright refusal to name Israel as the perpetrator of genocidal violence, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. To understand the resistance, would be to understand settler-colonialism, for which mainstream media is intimately entwined with the state in this country. The media can’t speak of resistance, because it can’t identify it. Resistance is never seen as what it is - the battle between an occupied people resisting an occupier. The context is important and vital.

Resistance is not part of the ‘acceptable discourse’. This ‘acceptable’ discourse, that which silences the voices of the oppressed, rests on the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples – in Palestine and here, in this place. A genocide, finally, can not be perpetrated without first putting in place dehumanizing regimes of representation that see Palestinians as not people – as less than people – as ‘human animals’, ‘as terrorists’, as ‘unworthy’, and as ‘ungreivable lives’. Just as we are people, so are Palestinians – they are not human animals, they are not terrorists, they are not ungrievable or unworthy. They have a right to live free, they have a right to liberation, they have a right to resist, they have a right to defend themselves, and they have a right to their sovereignty, which has never been ceded – and never will be ceded despite the genocidal attempts to destroy it. Silencing is insidious because not only does it cement the status of the ‘other’ as unworthy of grief, and as bodies marked for destruction, but it also refuses to acknowledge the imaginings we have of a future: it sees this future only through the prism of the destruction of another people, and not on the very right of an Indigenous people to enact a sovereignty never ceded. The Palestinians should not be denied their right to imagine a just future.

I want to end by condemning the mainstream media – the cowardly Australian journalists who shield themselves behind false pretenses: journalistic notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ which only serve the powerful. Just as they say we are not journalists, that we are ‘activists’ or have ‘agendas, I say that they are also not journalists: they are propagandists and stenographers for the powerful – for the shameless ALP, and the Coalition - who are indistinguishable to me anymore. I pay tribute today to the 35 Palestinian journalists – and this only what has been confirmed – who have been killed by the Israeli genocidal regime, and their families, who have been targeted for their truth-telling.  They are brave truth tellers, so powerful that they pose one of the biggest threats to Israel. Every day, they hand us the mantel of bearing witness – and we must take our responsibilities as witnesses seriously. We must never stop speaking, never stop fighting, and never stop resisting for our Palestinian brothers and sisters. In doing so, we must assert their humanity as Palestinian people – we must share their horror and grief, and we must mourn those who are lost – those beautiful jarjums, those courageous women, those brave, tireless men.

Just as we are STILL HERE after hundreds of thousands of years, we know that our Palestinian siblings are also STILL HERE. And we will love and support and fight for you – today and tomorrow, until the siege ends, until the occupation ends, until the wall is brought down, until the olive trees regrow.  

From the River to the Sea, Always Was Always Will Be.