Australia's Invasion Day: Palestinian and First Nation liberation as one

This Invasion Day, or so-called Australia Day, as we bear witness to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, we as non-Indigenous communities committed to the Palestinian struggle must reflect on the ongoing genocide right here in the land we call home.

For 112 days, thousands of Palestinians and Palestine solidarities communities have been marching weekly in cities across the country, calling for the end of the colonial theft of Palestinian land and the genocide of Palestinian people.

The sustained anti-war movement we have built is historic.

As we mobilise to end genocide, we have also worked to make visible the reality that we march on stolen land where genocide is ongoing and must end. As we fight to stop Israel’s large-scale massacre of Palestinians, we recognise the massacre sites that built this settler nation, and fight to stop the elimination of First Nations peoples by the colony.

While we embody a Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty in exile, we cannot simultaneously impinge on the sovereignty of First Nations people and communities on whose lands we dwell as settlers.

"On Invasion Day, we reflect on the role that Australia’'s own history and failure to meet the demands of Indigenous peoples here play in its material and ideological support of the Israeli settler-colonial project"

Indeed, the 26th of January marks the symbolic start of the genocide, the massacres, the rape of Indigenous people that formed the foundations for an Australian state. It also marks the date where over 40 to 50 Gamilaroi people were murdered by British colonial mounted police and armed settlers in 1838.

In the over 200 year period since the Invasion and the start of the Frontier wars, between 20,000 and 60,000 Indigenous people have been murdered by armed settlers and colonial mounted police to sustain the Australian white-supremacist, capitalist project.

Today, this ongoing genocide of Indigenous people manifests as incarceration in prisons and deaths in custody. There have been over 500 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Two deaths have occurred over the past 100 days: Wayne Ugle, a Noongar man, and Cleveland Dodd, a Yumanji boy. Despite the fierce mobilisation of The Black Sovereign Movement, their deaths have gained little national attention.

Aboriginal Deaths are absent from the white nation by the same Australian media and political class that absents Palestinian deaths and silences pro-Palestinian voices, whose objective is to maintain the colonial myth of a free, democratic Australia.

Across Australia’s political spectrum, Palestinians have been failed as leaders talk of empty humanitarian pauses amid Israel's war on Gaza, instead of calling for a #ceasefireNOW. They've shown their true politics, writes @RandaAFattah.

Read 👉 https://t.co/1GZhiexXcw

#auspol pic.twitter.com/Qd8U13tUjI

— The New Arab (@The_NewArab) November 21, 2023

In 2022, Cassius Turvey, a Noongar-Yamatji child, was lynched in broad daylight. In 2019, Warlpiri man Kumanjayi Walker was shot and killed by a police officer inside a family home. After the killer was allowed to walk free in 2022, Warlpiri elder Uncle Ned Jampinjimpa Hargraves demanded a police ceasefire in Aboriginal communities.

Calls for ceasefire echoed in communities across Australia at a time of a global Black Lives Matter movement, when the world was reflecting on the role of police and state violence.

Today, calls for ceasefire echo across the world as we witness one of the most brutal, and most documented, genocides of an Indigenous people in history.

We are not surprised by the Australian government’s entrenched, continued support of Israel. On Invasion Day, we reflect on the role that Australia’s own history and failure to meet the demands of Indigenous peoples here play in its material and ideological support of the Israeli settler-colonial project.

Demonising calls for ceasefire coming from Indigenous communities shows us where this state stands on genocide against Indigenous peoples. The absence of a mass movement after these national calls for ceasefire also reflects the ignorance and comfort settlers here in Australia feel towards a more silent and discreet genocide.

We are able to march the streets in the face of a genocide so clear, so violent, and so bloody in Gaza. We must be able to do the same here.

From its origins, Australia has been built on state violence against Indigenous peoples and it continues to maintain dominance through this violence. Of course it sympathises and supports the use of state violence elsewhere: one settler colonial state will always provide moral, political and material support for another.

As Steven Salaita argues, “Colonial power must be rendered diffuse across multiple hemispheres through reciprocal struggle.” As such, all Indigenous peoples, “must, of geopolitical necessity, be liberated together”.

We therefore understand that one of the key ways that we can fight Israeli settler-colonialism from here is resisting the ongoing colonisation of so-called Australia.

This means Palestinians and our allies must not just fight for ourselves. It is simply not enough to call for a ceasefire in Gaza from within a colonial government enacting its own genocides. It is not enough to march only in our name.

It is a moral imperative to centre and demand the end of the genocide here, for a ceasefire here. We are committed to decolonise this place, centering Indigenous sovereignty. It is only then that we will be able to see the moral, political and material support of Palestine that we have demanded.

And we have been doing this well. Blak-Palestinian solidarity is rooted in and empowers our cause. The day after the racist No Vote succeeded in the Australian referendum, rejecting an Indigenous voice in parliament, that Indigenous people showed up in masses in solidarity for the Palestinian people.

Indigenous people did not wait for the death toll to reach a certain threshold, or for Palestine to become a mainstream, popular issue. Indigenous people showed up in solidarity instantly, understanding fully the nature of colonial state violence and the need to oppose it.

Blak Caucus on Gadigal Country quickly put together an event bringing together Palestinian and Indigenous activists to discuss the importance of resistance and our shared enemy, the Western Imperial machine.

"Indigenous people did not wait for the death toll to reach a certain threshold, or for Palestine to become a mainstream, popular issue. Indigenous people showed up in solidarity instantly, understanding fully the nature of colonial state violence and the need to oppose it"

As Keiran Stewart-Assheton, president of the Black People’s Union put it at our Hirak forum, “Our solidarity arises not just from our shared struggle but our shared enemy… Australia is an imperialist force… and provides so much resources, arms and logistical support to Israel… as part of its imperialist project”.

Tearing down Australian support to Israel means breaking the Australian war machine, Australian colonial capitalism and imperialism. This starts here. We can only do that by following the lead of Indigenous-led struggle.

Our solidarity cannot be transactional, it must be rooted in the idea that our freedom is intertwined. It will not come unless we dismantle the structures of oppression woven into the fabric of this country and become accomplices to revolution, not to genocide.

From the river to the sea. Always was, always will be.

This article was written by Dr Jamal Nabulsi, Amal Naser, Dr Lina Koleilat and Tasnim Sammak.

Hirak is a collective led by young Palestinians in so-called Australia, committed to community, knowledge-sharing, building solidarities & decolonisation.

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