Interview: “Killed and for what end?” On marking october 7th for palestine

Paul Gregoire interviews Tasnim Sammak for Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 14th October 2024:

What do you think about these ongoing attempts to shut down these year-old protests, especially as they are so important to communities?

These efforts to ban and vilify the anniversary protests and vigils are evidence that Australian politicians are invested in October 7th becoming a day to mourn Jewish civilised victims of Islamic terrorism, in all absolutes.

The Australian public is invited by our political leaders to simplistically stand with Israel in its battle against evil forces that perpetrated what keeps being repeated as the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Politicians see our protests and vigils as a threat to their efforts to control the national discourse on violence, and so, they have attacked us for defying Zionism, for providing a strong counter-discourse.

At our vigil, regular people from multicultural and multifaith backgrounds, many who probably have war victims and veterans in their family, carried stretchers that were used in the Vietnam war, to represent the over 40,000 Palestinians killed in the Zionist regime’s war.

Some of us in the movement are engaged in reworking national war memory, which is considered threatening.

On October 7th, the civilised world, including the Australian colonial state pronounced, once more, Israel’s right to self-defence, like its right to establishing statehood on Palestinian land.

This pronouncement was merely a reinforcement of Israel’s settler-colonial national story since its inception in 1948.

The occupation of Palestine, through the foundation of the Israeli settler colony, is a historical wrong that we in the west need to reckon with and correct, but we won’t.

To do so, it is important to tell full narratives, rather than half an account of the events of post- World War I.

Colonial Israel was a late state project, founded in a time of anticolonial independence, in the name of Jewish protection.

The Holocaust and the Gaza genocide are two parts of a story that hasn’t arrived at its end.