In spite of pouring rain, government opposition and a failed police ban, ninety thousand people massed across the Sydney Harbor Bridge yesterday. It was the largest pro Palestinian protest in Australia's history. It was a moment of mass demonstration against twenty one months of war in Gaza, where tens of
thousands of civilians, including children, have been killed. Despite warning that the march would become dangerous, the protests remained peaceful and marked a powerful expression of a shifting public conscience. I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven AM today Walkley Award winning journalist and author David Laser while he joined the protest not in spite of his Holocaust heritage, but because of it. It's Monday, August fourth, David, thanks
for speaking with me. They have of course been regular pro Palestinian rallies in cities around Australia since the war began. But what did it mean to have a protest take over such a significant and iconic landmark as the Sydney Harbor Bridge.
Well, I think it's all there. In the word iconic, I mean that Sydney Harbor Bridge is what the world sees every New Year's Eve as we are in the new year. So in terms of the representation of a collective sentiment on that place at this time, I saw a very very very large demonstration in very very wet conditions and an extremely civilized, well behaved collective howl of protest. I think is a very very powerful moment.
Yeh New South Wales estimated that around ninety thousand people attended. Organizers said they were expecting fifty. What does that say to you about public sentiment at this particular moment.
Well, I think public sentiment is boiling over. I just think that it's impossible to see these images of famished, desperate people dying of malnutrition, skeletal, particularly children. I mean, there are moments that photographers and journalists capture that galvanize sentiments, and it seems to me that the photos that we've been seeing recently of starving children has done just that.
Last week, the New South Wales Premier Chris Min's said he didn't support the protests going ahead and didn't want Sydney to descend into chaos.
I can't close down the central artery for a city as big as Sydney, even on a short term basis, but even if we had a massive heads up to do it now.
The police then took matter to the Supreme Court to get a prohibition order over safety fears. They lost because the judge ruled that the right to freedom of expression ultimately outweighed the safety risk. But what did you think when the Premier intervene just try and stop the protest in the first place.
Well, I didn't agree with it. I don't think the decision by Men's or the New South Wales Police to prevent that march going ahead was the right action at the right time. It smelt of politics and it was a denial of a boiling public grievance. So to say I'll look take another route for your march, do it somewhere else, I mean, it's just not going to cut it. Not while millions of Palestinians are facing death from starvation
or shelling from Israeli forces or malnutrition. I mean, there is a people on the steering into the abyss, and I think we need to be able to release the valve when public sentiment gets to this point in order for people to come together as a kind of a common humanity in a moral community and express themselves together. So I think he got that wrong. I do think what we're seeing right now is we are asking ourselves what has happened to our humanity that we could allow
this to be proceeding the way it is. And I, certainly, as a Jewish Man, do not accept this idea that it is anti Semitic to protest vehemently about the treatment of the Netnyahuu government against the Palestinians. And so we need to get clearer about definitions about how we use words. And I don't even see this as a war right now. I see this as a slaughter, because a war suggests that you've got two equal sides, or more or less equal sides fighting each other. This is just mass murder.
David, you've recently written that you supported this protest not in spite of your Holocaust heritage, but because of it. Can you tell me about how your heritage informs your position during this time.
Well, my father was born in Germany. It was eight years old when Hitler came to power and fled the Nazis in nineteen thirty nine, a few months before World War two began, was shunned at school, was expelled from school for being Jewish, was frog march through the streets of Coburg in the Old East Germany as a Jewish boy and pelted with stones and rotten fruit along with his peers from this Jewish boarding school. So he fled
Germany along with my grandfather and my step grandmother. And on my mother's side, Latvian Jewish forty one relatives executed in the forest outside of Riga, the capital of Latvia, the Rumbula forest, or forced to dig their own graves and then shot in the back. And that's been burnished in my heart and soul and mind since I was a young boy growing up. I think the fact of
that Jewish background informed my intellectual search. Well, how did the people who survived the ovens survived the gas chambers of the most sophisticated extermination campaign in modern history? How did the survivors of that infamy become the persecutors of another people? And I think you know Gabor Marte, you know the famous psychotherapist. He talks a lot about trauma and how trauma begets trauma, violence begets violence. So I have for the past forty to forty five five years
studied the Middle East. Gone there several times lived in Jerusalem to try and work out the nature of this conflict that sits very close at the center of what's informed my thinking and my impulses on.
This After the break, will this be a tipping point? You've been outspoken about what's been occurring in Gaza for a long time now. What has been the personal cost of that to you, David?
Well, nothing like the personal cost of being a Palestinian in Gaza, and nothing like the cost of being a Palestinian in the West Bank, where Jewish settlers have been led off the leash by the net Yahoo government. This is a very, very, very traumatic moment for Jewish people. So the quick answer to your question, Daniel is I've lost friends. I think there are people who just don't want to have anything to do with me now because they see me as having portrayed the tribe made the
Jewish people less safe. I take the view that unless Jewish people are being seen to speak out on this issue, then it would be understandable, if not inevitable, that the majority of people would take the view that all Jewish people are supporting what the State of Israel is doing to the people of Gaza. And I think it's absolutely urgent that there is seen to be which there is a plurality of voices within the Jewish community who have
different views on this horrendous, never ending conflict. I think what Nednyahu has done is two things. The first and most important is he's brought a catastrophe down on the heads of the Palestinian people. And he has committed mass murder as an act of revenge for the horrors of October seven. And in the process he has made Jewish people less safe. And he has brought a moral catastrophe down on all Jewish people. And we are at odds with each other. The Jewish community is divided in a
way that I've never seen before in my lifetime. And I'm nearly seventy, you know, So the fact that I may fall out with certain friends, I think there's been fallings out every which way across the board.
Day the weather. We're at a political tipping point kind of remains to be seen. But Anthony Albernezi has joined many other countries, including the UK, Canada and France, in speaking about how to recognize a Palestinian state and how it would actually practically be implemented. What have you made of Australian a government's approach to this in recent weeks.
I don't know why he's dragging his feet on this. I mean, I personally think that the declarations by France and Britain and Canada that they'll recognize a Palestinian state. It feels to me like a platitude. I would say, when you start saying, like Slovenia did, we are going to stop all shipment of arms to Israel, then I think you're getting serious. I mean, to me, the two
state solution is kind of dead and buried. Politicians talk about the two state solution all the time, but a two state solution presupposes that the Palasins have actually land to set up a state of their own. Well, part of that land, Gaza, is all rubble, and the other part of it the West Bank. There's seven hundred and fifty to eight hundred thousand Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem included, who are torching Palestinian villagers,
who are running amok. And how on earth would Israel remove seven hundred and fifty thousand Jewish settlers in order to make way for a Palestinian state. So very nice for Makron Karnei and Code to actually call for a
Palestinian state. I think Albanese should do so too. I think there's all sorts of legal and economic implications that flow from the recognition of a Palestinian national entity and what Israel is doing and the consequences for Israel by doing what it's doing to a people who have a state of their own recognized by the United Nations, as opposed to a dispossessed people. But I would like to see something more than that. I would like to see
government saying we're not sending arms or we will. Actually we've been prevaricating about boycotting or sanctioning Israel, but we cannot sit by now and in all good conscience watch what Israel is doing to these people and not respond. And I think that's what the demonstration on the Harbor Bridge was all about, this cry from the heart of the people of Sydney that enough is enough.
Well, David, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for having me, Daniel.
Also in the news, Anthony Albernezi has delivered the keynote address at the Garma Festival in northeast arnham Land over the weekend. Outlining a new plan for a first nation's economic partnership between the government and First Nations people. Any speech to Prime Minister also acknowledged the work of the europe Justice Commission, the first truth telling process in the country. His comments have led some to speculate whether a national truth telling process could be on the table. We'll have
more on that tomorrow. And the Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions says it's time to bite the bullet on negative gearing reform. Sally McManus told the ABC over the weekend she'll be calling for an overhaul or the tax break at the government's Productivity round table this month. The ACTU will argue negative gearing should be limited to one investment property. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.