We stand with those who took the streets of Sydney against the genocide in Palestine. We stand with those who refused the visit of a representative of a settler-colonial ethno-state. We stand with those met not by dialogue, but by pepper spray, intimidation, and police violence. For many, this repression came as a shock. In Australia, brutality is meant to happen elsewhere. Dissent here is supposed to be polite, fragmented, exhausted. What unfolded was no error. No excess. No failure. It was the state recognising a refusal it could no longer safely ignore. It was power responding to solidarity that no longer asks permission. Fear was shifting sides.
None of us are for violence, but we refuse the official definition. Poverty is violence. Hunger is violence. Precarity is violence. Unemployment is violence. The housing crisis is violence. Borders are violence. Racism is violence. Colonial occupation is violence. These are not slogans; they are the material conditions of everyday life. People do not take to the streets because they enjoy confrontation. They act because life has been organised against them, because dignity, security, and the possibility of a liveable future have been stripped away. And now, because they are forced to witness genocide.
We are subjected not only to repression at home, but to the constant spectacle of mass death elsewhere—death enabled by our governments, funded by our taxes, justified in our name. We are told to watch. To accept. To be silent. To witness genocide, to be made complicit through inaction, to be punished for refusing that complicity—this too is violence. And when people refuse this role, what greets them? An armed force for order and property: clubs, shields, chemicals, guns. Injuries are not accidents. Fear is not collateral. Arrest is not prevention. These are methods. No one risks their body lightly. No one gambles their freedom for fun. We react because we are acted upon.
The obsession with the “violence of protest” is a lie told loudly to hide a deeper truth. If revolt contains violence, it is infinitesimal compared to the permanent violence of the system itself. This system survives by force. Eviction by force. Discipline by force. Education by force. Borders by force. Police by force. The cost-of-living crisis is not a storm—it is engineered. The housing crisis is not a failure—it is policy enforced with law and batons. This is the difference: between the violence that defends domination, and the refusal that interrupts it. Across NSW and Australia, the mask is slipping. Protest is criminalised. Police powers expand. State violence is insulated from consequence. Solidarity is named extremism. Care is reframed as threat. Meanwhile, rents explode, mortgages suffocate, wages collapse, people are pushed further out into endless suburbs, endless commutes, endless exhaustion. This is not disorder. It is management. The police are not outside this system. They are its visible edge.
Our solidarity with Palestine is total. But it is not a call to reproduce the same structures that created this catastrophe in the first place. Genocide does not arrive from nowhere. It grows from borders, sovereignty, exclusion—from states organising life through domination. Palestine exposes this with brutal clarity: settler colonialism, nationalism, militarised order, permanent war. But this is not unique. It is the rule wherever belonging is enforced by force. We speak from stolen land. Australia is built on invasion and maintained through law, police, and prisons. We do not speak for Indigenous peoples. We do not prescribe land, life, or liberation. Those struggles are autonomous and self-determined. Our task is refusal: to undermine the system we benefit from, to weaken the institutions of dispossession, to practice solidarity without domination. To stand with Palestine is not to demand a different flag. It is to reject capitalism and the state form itself—while recognising that liberation takes many paths, chosen by those who live its cost. We affirm liberation without borders, without armies, without police—a liberation lived daily, not administered from above.
We are told: vote. This is your power. This is realism. But what is actually offered? Reactionaries. Conservatives. Or a Labor Party managing the same economy, policing, borders, and obedience to capital and empire. Deep down, most people already know this system does not work for them. They know it in rent notices, in mortgage statements, in the impossibility of living near work, in hours stolen by traffic and fatigue, in fear of being discarded, in the images of mass death scrolling endlessly past, in the isolation manufactured as normal life. They feel it constantly—and are told there is no alternative. Elections do not disrupt this order; they ritualise it. They turn shared anger into private gestures and return power to the structures that created the crisis. The problem is not apathy. It is imagination under occupation. We are made powerless not because change is impossible, but because the idea of another life is systematically erased. And yet—everything could be different. This world is not inevitable. It is enforced.
If elections cannot free us, then the question is how to live otherwise. We expand the struggle by refusing separation. Palestine is not a single issue. Police violence here is not isolated. Borders, housing, war, work—they form a single reality. We respond by creating its opposite: mutual aid, collective care, shared resources, self-organisation. Horizontal forms of life that contradict the present. Structures that do not ask permission. That do not wait for leaders. That allow people to decide, act, and defend each other directly. This is not about replacing one government with another. It is about abolishing domination itself.
The struggle for Palestine is a breach. A crack in the spectacle. A moment where refusal becomes visible. A refusal of a world organised around death. An opening toward one organised around life. The liberation of humanity will be total or it will not be. Against state violence and capital. For mutual aid, self-organisation, and collective liberation.
Some Anarchists – In Solidarity
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