Thousands of workers and young people joined rallies across Australia last weekend marking three years since the start of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. In all the state capitals, as well as regional centres and smaller towns, protesters expressed their furious opposition to the Zionist regime’s imperialist-backed onslaught and the ongoing complicity of the Labor government.
The demonstrations showed that while the regular mass protests supporting Palestine have been essentially liquidated by their organisers—especially since the December 2025 Bondi mass shooting was used as a pretext to tighten already harsh anti-protest laws—opposition to genocide and war has not diminished among Australian workers and youth.
As has been the case throughout three years of protest, the pseudo-left, Greens and Palestinian bourgeois nationalist speakers at the rallies had no perspective to offer beyond appeals to the same Labor governments that have denounced opposition to genocide as “antisemitism,” conflated peaceful protest with terrorism and continued to arm the Israeli war machine, and which have forthrightly supported the criminal US war on Iran.
Socialist Equality Party members and supporters attended the rallies in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Newcastle, speaking with workers and young people and raising the need to build an international anti-war movement in the working class, the only social force capable of ending war and genocide and defeating their common root cause, capitalism.
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At the Sydney rally, Amal said, “I’m here because of my kids, so they know what’s happening. The way the world is going, I’m scared for them by the time they’re in their 20s and 30s.
“I believe that the government is against us. I don’t believe that the Labor Party wants peace. I don’t think that they want the Palestinians to have freedom. I think they want us to shut up, and that’s what I’m not willing to do.”
A Sydney teacher who asked to remain anonymous said: “I’m here today because of the atrocities that are occurring in Palestine and the ongoing genocide.
“I feel like our government’s let us down. Our thoughts are not being taken into account. I’m a taxpayer—why are my hard-earned dollars being sent overseas to kill children? They’ve made us complicit. Our government is contributing to the F-35 fighter jets. They are helping these war criminals and rolling out red carpets for them when they come to our country.
“I think the time for just being silent and being polite and not being angry is gone.”
Isabel said “I still think that protests are important. Even if we already know where the government stands, it’s important for them to know that we still care in showing up, and where we stand, even if it’s not doing as much as it should be.”
Her friend Johaan said: “I have mixed feelings with the protests. There was a time when I was out every week but this is the first one I’ve been to since the Harbour Bridge. Protest has its place, but it is going to solve everything? No.
“There needs to be revolution. There needs to be full change. The status quo of how we’ve grown up, it can’t stay like this. There needs to be massive change.”
In Melbourne, a Year 12 student explained why he continued to attend the demonstrations: “Just because the length of the genocide has increased, doesn’t mean it’s gotten any less morally reprehensible. They’re still carrying out the genocide in broad daylight and it’s clear for everyone to see.
“I’m happy that we’re still making an effort to come out and remind everyone that we’re still here, and the issue’s still ongoing,” he said, arguing that protests needed to be accompanied by “practical means” of pressure, including “sanctions.”
He said the Labor government’s position was “morally unjustifiable.” The treatment of Senator Fatima Payman [who was suspended from caucus and compelled to resign from the party in mid-2024] after she crossed the floor, and the blocking of debate at the Labor Party’s national conference in July, had convinced him the party could not be reformed from within.
“I used to think maybe that’s a decent strategy—internal pressure,” he said. “But then after that Ed Husic thing was like, ‘that’s it, that strategy doesn’t work.’
“I know the Socialist Equality Party does a lot of work around a more radical perspective, looking at the whole system as something that’s illegitimate, and that needs to be changed from a fundamental level as opposed to just reformed.”
Gabrielle, who grew up in apartheid South Africa [photo], linked Australia’s support for Israel to its broader alignment with the United States, including the military build-up in the Pacific: “It’s just all part of the same thing. We’ve been spying for Israel for decades,” she said, referring to Pine Gap and the “new bases that they’re setting up.” Asked what the bases were for, she answered, “against China.”
“America has long had a plan to try and take over China, that’s what America wants. I mean, not Americans, but the guys that control America. I think they’re just trying to hold on to power. I think it’s a money thing and it’s a fight among the elites.”
In Newcastle, Adinah said: “The fact that we have to gather here today is because those in power cannot decide to do the right thing.”
Adinah agreed that the Labor government was complicit in the genocide and commented, “It’s capitalist greed—it is time for a change. This world war that we’ve been on the brink of for how many years now? It’s disgusting.”
Responding to the need to mobilise the working class, she said: “Absolutely, if it’s not international then it’s not actually going to make a big impact on the global scale. Australia is right behind America—we are sending troops over. It’s time for the greater population to stand up to the government itself. It is rotten to the core and we do need a change.”