By Tamara Kayali Browne, World BEYOND War, July 28, 2025
It is a cruel irony that many people will not be moved to resist the curtailment of their civil liberties until the police state is sitting right on top of them. It is ironic because by the time almost everyone feels the personal impact of losing their civil liberties, gaining their rights back becomes a gargantuan task. On the other hand, when democracy’s downward spiral is still in its early stages, pushing the government to reverse that spiral is comparatively easier as the laws restricting citizens’ freedom to protest and expression are much lighter. During that stage, there is a window of opportunity to make the government change course. Yet that window is lost if not enough people care to pressure the government to do so.
As the genocide in Gaza continues, those protesting against it are increasingly becoming subjected to serious injuries from police violence, or labelled as anti-semitic, with the Special Envoy for Anti-semitism in Australia attempting to force schools, universities, cultural organisations and the media to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-semitism. The window of opportunity to save those in Gaza appears to be closing along with the opportunity to safeguard our civil liberties. In other words, the fate of our world is bound up with the fate of Palestinians. This is made plain when we consider that if Israel is to survive in the long-term, it has two options. It can either:
respect international law and grant justice and human rights to Palestinians so that they can live as equal citizens on their ancestral land; orsuppress resistance to its crimes and brutality at any cost, not just within Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, but also in the countries around the world that are enabling its crimes – essentially, to “pull down the sky”.
Israel appears to have chosen the second option. Not only does this appear to entail fighting endless wars enabled by the US and its allies, but it also entails suppressing the civil liberties of citizens around the world. Hence, we have discovered that in order to free Palestine, we must free ourselves; and in order to free ourselves, we must free Palestine.
As we in Australia attempt to end our government’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, we find that our governments have evolved to make civil disobedience much harder than it used to be. For example, although [the right to strike is a right](https://webapps.ilo.org/static/english/dialogue/ifpdial/llg/noframes/ch5.htm#%3A~%3Atext=However%2C+the+right+to+strike+is+not%2Cthe+Right+to+Organise+Convention%2C+1948+(No.) that has been recognised internationally, the Australian government has made it such that an employee who strikes outside an Enterprise Agreement bargaining period could be disciplined or sacked and/or fined up to $13,320 (up to $66,000 for unions). Other anti-protest laws that have recently been passed have been for blocking a road, which in NSW could result in fines of up to $22,000 and up to two years imprisonment.
Anti-protest laws rushed through the NSW parliament, police violence and attempts by the Zionist lobby to silence individuals speaking out about the genocide (such as Antoinette Lattouf, Jayson Gillam and Mary Kostakidis) are just some of the indications that our democratic rights are under attack. As Irene Khan, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, has stated, the genocide in Gaza has created “a global crisis of freedom of expression”.
When those in power deem calls for self-determination, justice and equality (“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”) to be incitements to genocide, and when Israel deems calls for a ceasefire not to be calls for peace but rather incitements to terror, not only is the Orwellian irony lost on many people, but they are in danger of being ignored because the smears and silencing only seem to impact those fighting for self-determination, justice and equality for people living elsewhere. It does not occur to many that by attempting to repress such calls, those in power are setting a precedent to censor any other calls that they do not like.
If one’s freedom of speech comes with the exception that one cannot call out a genocide, and cannot call for self-determination, justice and equality, it sets an ominous precedent. It is not much of a leap to realise that if one is only permitted to speak when the content of one’s speech does not irk the powerful, then public communication is essentially reduced to either propaganda or pointless fluff.
The same is true of the right to protest. It does not take a rocket scientist to realise that it would be pointless to protest and call for something that the government already supports. Protests against government policies, by their nature, demand changes that the government does not currently support. By banning protests based on whether the government is okay with the subject of the protest or not, the government would therefore be effectively banning all protests.
Perhaps there is an underlying assumption that totalitarianism only occurs in developing countries, as though it is in their DNA. But many countries that once enjoyed democracy slid into totalitarian states. While Germany’s descent from democracy to dictatorship before the second World War is well known, a more recent example is Hungary. No country is immune to such slides. Indeed, with Donald Trump’s persecution of those who speak out in support of Palestinian liberation, LGBTIQ+ people, migrants and Muslims, we may be witnessing the US slide into totalitarianism.
It may seem as though Australia is a far cry from Trump’s America, but the legal status of freedom of speech is even more fragile here than it is in the US, as we do not have Commonwealth legislation protecting it. Laws protecting whistleblowers are also weak, with individuals such as David McBride currently in jail for exposing allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.
We are thus left in a catch-22 situation, which has almost become as much about regaining our own civil liberties as it is about freeing others who have none. The key question then becomes, What does it take to make enough people care about the gradual curtailment of their civil liberties when they are not yet feeling the painful impacts of losing those liberties?
The answer, it appears, is that we need more activism to push back against our curtailed right to enact civil disobedience. If calling for self-determination, justice and equality is to be repressed, then its repetition becomes an obligation and the right to say it, a test of our own freedom.
Dr Tamara Kayali Browne is Senior Lecturer in Health Ethics at Deakin University, a Palestinian activist with Canberra Palestine and Climate Justice, and a Gaza Representative and member of the ACT Activist Leadership Committee with Amnesty International.
The post To Free Ourselves, We Must Free Palestine; And To Free Palestine, We Must Free Ourselves. appeared first on World BEYOND War.
From World BEYOND War via this RSS feed