As we enter a new year, Australian leaders and the media have expressed outrage at acts of hateful graffiti, including swastikas painted on a synagogue – rightly condemning these racist attacks on places of worship. All racist acts must be unequivocally opposed.
However, we cannot ignore the glaring disparity in the response when hateful graffiti and racist abuse and attacks target Muslims, Palestinians and their allies. Why is there not the same level of outrage and urgency in addressing anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia?
This disparity is amplified by Australian leaders’ and media silence on the atrocities Israel continues to commit in Gaza. Where is the vehemence of condemnation and urgency of action when it comes to the genocide Israel is perpetrating against Palestinians?
For a 15th month, Israel continues to slaughter Palestinian children, wipe out entire families, and obliterate communities in Gaza.
The Israeli regime has manufactured starvation in Gaza, forcibly displaced over 1.9 million Palestinians, maintained a siege in northern Gaza, and subjected the people there to ethnic cleansing.
At least eight Palestinian newborn babies have frozen to death in displacement camps, stark and horrifying evidence of the dire humanitarian crisis manufactured by Israel.
Gaza’s health system has been deliberately destroyed by Israeli bombings and its restrictions on aid supplies, leaving hospitals without power, medicine or capacity to save lives.
More than 1000 healthcare workers, and more than 217 journalists and media workers have been targeted and killed by Israel. Israel’s Occupation Forces have also assassinated around 500 Palestinian imams and sheikhs in Gaza.
Others, including Kamal Adwan Hospital Director Hussam Abu Saifa, have been detained by Israel’s Occupation Forces. Horrifying reports by civil society organisations have described the Israeli prison system as a “network of torture camps” in which Israeli authorities subject Palestinian detainees to unrelenting physical and psychological abuse, including sexual violence.
Yet, the outrage over these crimes pales in comparison to the fury expressed over defaced walls in Australia.
Graffiti, as abhorrent as it may be, can be painted over. Palestinian lives brutally snuffed out by Israel can never be reclaimed. This disconnect is not merely absurd – it is rooted in a system that refuses to recognise and confront anti-Palestinian racism.
We must also question why anti-Palestinian hate – whether through words, actions or policies – fails to elicit the same universal condemnation as antisemitism. Palestinian voices are silenced, their humanity denied, their resistance to oppression criminalised, and their suffering minimised and even explained away.
The prioritisation of outrage at graffiti, rather than at Israel’s mass slaughter and forcible displacement of Palestinians is a reflection of complicity in systems enabling these atrocities.
The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network demands that Australian leaders, the media, civil society organisations and the general public not only condemn acts of hate perpetrated against Palestinians and their supporters on this continent, but also act decisively against Israel’s ongoing genocide, apartheid and illegal occupation in Palestine.
Anything less is an abdication of moral responsibility and a betrayal of the values of justice and equality.