Thousands gathered in Harmony Park outside Surry Hills Police Station on February 10th in protest of police brutality against protestors who were peacefully protesting Israeli President Isaac Herzog's visit to Sydney on February 9th.
Organised by Palestine Action Group, the protest called for the resignation of NSW Premier Chris Minns, charges for arrested protestors to be dropped, and for the Israeli President to be arrested under international law for genocide.
Despite falling outside of the Public Assembly Restrictions Declaration (PARD), which was put in place after the Bondi Beach Terror Attack, organisers were met with a wall of police on Goulburn Street preventing the protest from starting directly outside of the police station. In an Instagram video posted to @studentsforpalestinesydneyuni, Students For Palestine Co-Convener and USyd SRC Vice President Shovan Bhattarai is seen arguing with a police officer, asking for legal justification for the police response in an area outside of the PARD. The officer is seen saying, “The justification is we’re telling you.”
Despite this setback, thousands filtered into Harmony Park under the gaze of members of the police force watching from within the station, with Palestine Action Group organiser Josh Lees opening the rally up by commending the estimated 20,000 people who attended the protest on February 9th.
Lees also spoke and condemned the Australian government's decision to “roll out the red carpet” for President Herzog despite the president’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
“In order to roll out the red carpet for him, they crushed the rights of the people of this city to protest against him,” he said at the rally.
“The government really had to make Isaac Herzog feel right at home by imposing a military occupation [in] our city, by attacking anyone with a Palestinian flag and by denying the most basic democratic rights in this country,”
“Reminiscent of the brutal apartheid and genocidal regime that he has presided over and supports in Palestine.”
Lees also called out “the increasing authoritarianism in every institution,” where showing solidarity with Palestine has resulted in sackings and sanctions, as was the case with Indigenous singer Jayden Kitchener Waters. Waters was fired by the NSW Premier’s Department over a sticker on his guitar which read “NO PRIDE IN GENOCIDE”. Lees also drew similarities between the heavy-handed and violent tactics which were used by police during the February 9 protests and the actions of ICE agents and police officers in the United States of America.
NSW Greens MLC Sue Higginson, who also attended the February 9 protest, spoke to the rally, condemning NSW Labor's attempt to block a debate from being discussed on the February 9 protest, as well as condemning Premier Chris Minns’ comments on the police being “put in an impossible position”, saying: “Chris Minns put them there, and we know that it was not you, that it was not me, that it was not any of us, that’s what we call gaslighting your community, it was him,”
“It’s his laws, it’s his months and months of intolerant rhetoric, talking about peaceful protests as if somehow, we are the cause of the violence and hatred,” she said.
“We call bullshit on that”.
Higginson also further spoke on police accountability, saying she has written to the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, calling for the commission to open an independent investigation into police action and for all charges against protestors to be dropped.
At the time of writing, the LECC has confirmed it has opened an investigation into police conduct at the rally.
Addressing the police’s attack on Muslim worshippers who had received permission to pray from a senior officer, Sheikh Wesam Charkawi spoke on the experience of getting assaulted by police mid-prayer.
“We decided to move away from the road, we complied with NSW Police directive,” he said.
“We had our backs to NSW Police based on the direction of prayer, we weren’t threatening in any way, we were engaged peacefully in the prayer, and the first line to be attacked was the line of women praying in the back.”
A wave of booing and calls of shame filled the park after Sheikh Charkawi mentioned the indiscriminate grabbing and shoving of a line of Muslim protesters praying, with video taken on the night showing police advancing on worshippers facing their backs towards the line of police before being violently grabbed and thrown.
Amidst speeches, several protesters were heard yelling at police to stop laughing during mentions of police violence against Muslim worshippers, with one protester sharing a photo with Vertigo showing an officer grinning from the elevated section overlooking the park from the police station.
Image by Riley
Echoing similar sentiments to Sheikh Charkawi, Students for Palestine Sydney Uni Convener and USyd SRC Education Officer Jasmine Al-Rawi spoke on how the Muslim community became racist scapegoats to justify Australia’s complicity in aiding the United States in its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 after the September 11 Terror Attacks.
Like previous speakers, Al-Rawi also called for the resignation of the NSW Premier as well as for police officers to be charged instead of protesters.
“They [police] are the ones who are responsible for the violence in this city,” she said.
“Keep protesting about Palestine. They want to criminalise our protests. They want to criminalise our free speech, they don’t want us to keep talking about Palestine, they don’t want us to say from the River to the Sea, they don’t want us to say intifada.”
“So we have to keep fighting so we can continue to stand with Palestinian people and keep up with our movement.”
Former Greens candidate for Grayndler, Hannah Thomas, who was assaulted by a police officer during a protest in Belmore last year, also spoke about police action.
“Like Belmore, it was a deliberate, brutal plan from the top,” she said.
“Chris Minns, the Zionist puppet and chief umbrella holder for the State of Israel, instructed his cop dogs, and that's exactly what they did. Those racist pigs pulled up and assaulted Muslims as they prayed, they kettled crowds, they sprayed hundreds of people, they trampled so many elderly people, they bashed up a kid who is restrained on the floor, beaten to a pulp,”
“All of them playing out their disgusting IDF fantasies.”
The rally was wrapped up with a final speech from Judith Treanor, an anti-zionist activist from Jews Against The Occupation 48, who recalled her time at the February 9 rally.
“I’m completely heartbroken about last night, I turned up [at] about 4 PM with our big sign that says ‘Jews say no to war criminals’,” she said.
“It has a picture of Herzog signing a bomb, it has that other monster [Doron] Almog who’s seem to have forgotten all of this [complicity in genocide],”
Doron Almog is a former Israeli commander who the British government failed to arrest in 2005 after being suspected of breaching the 1949 Geneva Conventions by committing war crimes across the Gaza Strip between 2000 and 2003. Almog also travelled with President Herzog across Australia as Chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
“Those are the guys that this police force is protecting,” Treanor said.
After her speech and a few more minutes of chanting, PAG organiser Josh Lees concluded the protest. However, hundreds stayed in the park, chanting at police and moving en masse closer to police lines.
Vertigo witnessed organisers quickly spring into action by forming a “safety line” of people to block protesters from getting too close to the line of police, after one person was seen getting pulled into the station by police.
An hour after the protest was called to an end, protesters eventually dispersed from the park.
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