Pro-Palestine protests are intimidating Jews. Moving them doesn’t harm anyone

Of all the images published from the roiling, pro-Palestinian rallies that have occupied the centre of Melbourne every Sunday for the past 15 months, there is one that remains impossible to reconcile.

It is a portrait of two protesters, a young, handsome man and a woman, in stylised pose. She has dark hair and a distinctive tattoo; he is sporting a hipster beard, framed by an elegantly knotted keffiyeh scarf, and is holding with apparent reverence a picture of Yahya Sinwar.

Pro-Palestine protesters hold a placard of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at a rally in Melbourne’s CBD in October 2024.Credit: Getty Images

Sinwar, the Hamas leader shot dead by Israeli troops in October, was a principle architect of the atrocities in southern Israel which resulted in the murder of 1200 people and abduction of 251 hostages and provoked a war in which Israel is estimated to have killed nearly 47,000 Gazans.

He earlier made his bones as Hamas’s cruel and manipulative leader of al-Majd, an internal security apparatus which enforced the terrorist organisation’s strict morality code. He tortured and murdered anyone he suspected of collaborating with the Israelis. He spent 23 years in an Israeli jail for murdering a dozen Palestinians.

Long before his men butchered young Jewish and Arab Israelis at a music festival, he was terrorising Gazans – the same people Melbourne protesters are marching for.

It was tempting to dismiss this image of the two protesters as the product of ignorant but harmless cosplay. The protesters haven’t attacked Jewish people or destroyed their property. Their demonstrations have been with rare exceptions non-violent. But through their public demonisation of Israel, Zionism and by extension, the overwhelming majority of Jewish people who support Israel’s existence as a Jewish homeland, they have fuelled a fire burning out of control.

If there were any doubts about the nature of the menace confronting Australian Jews, it has been made alarming clear by the antisemitic attacks in Melbourne and Sydney, which include the firebombing of a synagogue, cars in Jewish neighbourhoods and a child care centre.

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw told federal, state and territory political leaders in a hastily convened National Cabinet meeting on Tuesday that his detectives were investigating whether people suspected of carrying out the attacks were radicalised by overseas actors and potentially paid to import deadly social discord to Australia.

Through the information they share with Australia’s Five Eyes security partners, they can see this is not a threat unique to Sydney and Melbourne.

This is one of the messages Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an expert in online hate with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights organisation headquartered in Los Angeles, delivered last week to Australia’s Ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd.

His other message is that the regular Melbourne protests – which commandeer the heart of the CBD and render it a no-go zone every Sunday afternoon for anyone who is identifiably Jewish – need to be shifted to another, less disruptive and intimidating location to reduce the vitriol and hatred being directed at and felt by Australian Jews.

As Cooper explains, this is not an attempt to police the speech or thoughts of people outraged by war in Gaza or plight of Palestinian people. “The right to be heard and protest is absolutely sacrosanct in any democracy,” he says. Rather, it is striking a more reasonable balance between those rights and the rights of Jewish people to go about their lives without fear or harassment, violence or worse.

He cites as an example a decision by Scotland Yard earlier this month to ban pro-Palestine protesters from gathering outside the BBC’s London headquarters, which is just around the corner from a synagogue.

According to Cooper’s account of his 45-minute discussion with the former prime minister inside the Australian embassy, Rudd expressed surprise that the protests were staged in the middle of the city and agreed a public park would be a better location. Rudd promised to convey the rabbi’s concerns to his political masters in Canberra.

Consider, for a moment, the context of this meeting. Rabbi Cooper, a founding member of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, meets regularly with world leaders to advocate for the rights of Jewish people. He sat down with Rudd last Tuesday, at a time when Washington was brimming with foreign dignitaries ahead of the Trump inauguration. And one of the key things he wanted to talk about was the Melbourne protests.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, when asked about the Melbourne protests on her first day back at work after a summer break, made it clear that now that a ceasefire in Gaza had been reached, her tolerance for ongoing demonstrations was at an end. She declared that the Sunday protests should stop and got no argument from Opposition Leader Brad Battin.

The idea of a government dictating to protesters where they can and can’t demonstrate will alarm civil libertarians. As barrister Greg Barns, a spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance and supporter of the pro-Palestinian movement puts it, protests are meant to disrupt and confront; feeling discomfort about this is not a valid reason to curtail free speech.

“Freedom of speech is an essential and precious right and in my view, you should err on the side of defending freedom of speech unless there is a demonstrable risk to life or a demonstrable risk to other members of the community that can’t be adequately policed under existing laws,” he says.

It is an important point well-made. It is also difficult to argue that critics of Israel, including those who advocate for the abolition of the Jewish state, are lacking a voice. Shifting the protests from central Melbourne won’t silence the pro-Palestinian movement, but it might just dial down the hate.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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