I am a Sydney Jew who witnessed police brutalise protesters in my name

By Bart Shteinman

I am a Jewish Australian. No amount of context can tell me that police brutality makes me safer, writes the Jewish Council’s Bart Shteinman.

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Image: Ari Balle-Bowness

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By now, most Australians have seen the footage of police brutalising peace protesters on Monday night in Sydney. The Premier of NSW, Chris Minns, would like us to think of the ‘context’ before judging their actions. Such actions, we are told, were necessary to protect the Jewish community that was mourning the Bondi massacre in Darling Harbour alongside the Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

I am a Jewish Australian. No amount of context can tell me that police brutality makes me safer.

Having attended the rally against Herzog’s visit myself, the violence was, of course, a physical danger to my body. But more than that, such traumatic state violence against our fellow Australians - done in the name of Jews - can only compound the antisemitism that has emerged because of the discursive conflation of Israel’s violence and Jewish identity.

For many attendees, it was as if the police were doing a tribute act to the Israeli occupation to coincide with Herzog’s visit. I witnessed a police officer theatrically hurling an Aboriginal Flag pole off a ledge, and it struck me that it was the same kind of gratuitous violence Israeli police inflict on those who simply dare to raise the Palestinian flag.

The Prime Minister likes to accuse protesters, including Palestinian-Australians mourning their loved ones, of ‘bringing the conflict here’. But it was Albanese who invited President Herzog, a key figure in that conflict, to our shores. And it is the NSW Police that bear responsibility for the assaults, the kettling, and the militaristic charges we all saw with our own eyes.

I stood and watched as Muslim worshipers, doing their evening prayers far from any street confrontation, were rough-handled and dragged by police officers. I saw Greens MLC Abigail Boyd get thrown to the ground and battered by police in what appeared like a targeted attack. Any attempt to portray last night as just a confrontation of agitators and the law is to ask those of us who were there to reject the evidence of our own eyes and ears.

What is even more remarkable is how completely unnecessary it all was. The police had been herding thousands of people into Town Hall plaza when the practical thing would have been to facilitate a march to State Parliament as demonstrators asked.

Authorities have sought to gaslight us with the suggestion that such a march risked a ‘clash’ with Jewish mourners, even though the ICC memorial was in the opposite direction (and never mind that there were scores of Jewish protesters at the rally). Instead, the police were hemming thousands of demonstrators into the undersized Town Hall plaza, needlessly escalating the situation until eventually the order was given to break up the crowd.

A peaceful, uneventful march would have been consistent with the years of successful coordination between demonstrators and police, notwithstanding that the courts had to overrule the Minns government and force such cooperation. That success, particularly the triumphant march across the Harbour Bridge, had evidently been too much of an embarrassment for authorities who have sought to smear and spread fear about these peaceful expressions of popular will.

The escalating restrictions on protest have been about fomenting chaos, not preventing it. That responsibility lies entirely with the Minns government, who were warned that exactly this situation could occur. When the latest restrictions were being rushed through the NSW Parliament in December, Minns was warned by his own Labor parliamentary colleagues that the laws could lead to violence.

As Labor member of the NSW Upper House Stephen Lawrence warned in parliament:

“we could potentially be in 1978 Mardi Gras territory. Violence may occur. Protests may be ended that are non‑threatening and in a way that is fundamentally inconsistent with free speech and the right to free association and assembly…

“It is us, not the police, who will decide by passing this bill to up the ante; to remove the pressure valve of protest; to create a pressure cooker; and to tell the community that summer should be a time for barbeques, a time with family, and not a time of protest and politics—a dystopian vision, if ever I heard one. But our hardworking police will have to enforce it, and I wish them all the best of luck.

“This could go so wrong.”

Wrong it indeed went. But anything less than a full and independent inquiry into police conduct and NSW’s draconian protest laws will confirm that the chaos of Monday night is what Minns wanted.

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About the author

Bart Shteinman

Bart Shteinman is a Jewish advocate for Palestinian liberation from Gadigal/Sydney. He is an executive member of the Jewish Council of Australia.