The following article has been published in J‑Wire by Julie Nathan.

Around 200 people attended this year’s Al-Nakba protest in Sydney last night. Numbers were down on previous years and the crowd seemed tamer.  The Hezbollah flags and neo-Nazis, con­spicu­ously present in the previous two years, were gone.  

But the rhetoric has changed little.  Israel was defamed, mis­rep­res­en­ted and demonised. Speaker after speaker asserted that the Palestini­ans, but not the Jews, are a distinct people entitled to national self-determ­in­a­tion.   The double standard did not phase one speaker.  No anti­semitsm here, she insisted, irrel­ev­antly citing her own Jewish back­ground as “proof”.

Greens State MP, David Shoebridge, addressed the crowd and accused Israel of being “an apartheid state”. He claimed there was a “two-tiered structure in Israel” for Jews and Arabs. He called for “the end of apartheid roads in the West Bank which only Jews can go on”.  (Fact check: Shoebridge is wrong. There are no “Jewish-only” roads, only Israeli-only roads for Jewish and Arab Israelis alike).

Shoebridge also voiced his support for the so-called “right of return” of Palestini­an refugees, but omitted to mention that the Palestini­ans claim that they define “refugees” to mean not only the Palestini­ans displaced during the 1948 War who are still living (currently estimated at around 30,000), but also all their des­cend­ants, ad infinitum (currently estimated at 6 million people), who were born and have lived in other countries for their entire lives, including those who are citizens of those other countries. Thus, persons born and raised in Lebanon, Syria, the UK or Australia, who have never left or fled from their homes, are con­sidered to be Palestini­an ‘refugees’ if they are descended from 1948 refugees.  The notion of refugee status being inherited and passed down in per­petu­ity is without parallel in inter­na­tion­al law. It is not applied to, nor is it claimed, by any other people.

Most sig­nificantly, a ‘right of return’ is sought not only into a future Palestini­an state, but also into Israel itself. The clear under­ly­ing aim of the demand for a “right of return”, is to transform the demo­graph­ic balance of the state of Israel by turning the Jewish majority into a highly vul­ner­able minority, so that Israel will cease to be the State of the Jewish people.

Shoebridge char­ac­ter­ised the Arab-Israel conflict as “one side having all the tanks and planes, while the other side has youth with rocks”, con­veni­ently ignoring the invasions by Arab armies and years of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.

This was not pre­dom­in­antly a Palestini­an event.  It was a show put on by an extreme-left local fringe.  They were incapable of artic­u­lat­ing their case in anything other than con­tem­por­ary western, far-left terms.  At times the speakers were reduced to appro­pri­at­ing other people’s cultural motifs.  One of them declared that the whole country (including Israel) “always was and always will be Palestini­an land”, a slogan copied directly from Australia’s indi­gen­ous people. (And never mind that the Jews were there first).

Most pathetic of all was the song which ended the evening.  By singing it, the pro­test­ers were unwit­tingly affirming what they had earlier vehe­mently denied – that the Jews “always were and always will be” a nation.  The song was entitled “Next Year in Jerusalem”, an attempt to appro­pri­ate to the cause of Palestini­an nation­al­ism the millennia-long yearning of the Jewish people to return to their homeland and its capital city, recited for centuries by Jewish families at the Passover dinner table.

Julie Nathan is the Research Officer for The Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry.