No free trips, but Black Palestinian solidarity is stronger than ever

Nova Peris’ with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog

The vast majority of First Nations people in Australia don’t read Rupert Murdoch’s favourite newspaper, The Australian. Not only is it behind the paywall, but it also has a long history in slandering and dehumanising Indigenous peoples, while also acting as a government press agency for Indigenous policy. In the past two years, the paper has also been focused on trying to break the powerful political praxis of Black Palestinian solidarity; utilising Indigenous voices with long links to Israel, like Professor Marcia Langton.

But because so few of us bother to read The Australian, many would have missed the reporting of the paper’s non-Indigenous Indigenous affairs correspondent Paige Taylor, who is currently bunkered down in Jerusalem with black Zionist Nova Peris.

Indigenous affairs report Paige Taylor

Within a couple of weeks, Taylor shifted from failed attempts at confecting outrage over the use of ‘genocide’ by Indigenous people here, and instead got on a plane to propagandize for a settler colonial state currently committing a genocide in Gaza.

Taylor is currently on a Zionist junket arranged by the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), along with black Zionist Nova Peris, and other First Nations people - including Australia’s first Indigenous ophthalmologist Kristopher Rallah-Baker, Maurice Goolagong, Renee Fowlestone and Jody Hampton. The chair of the AIJAC is powerful Zionist lobbyist Mark Leibler, who was co-chair of the Referendum Council, which led to the Uluru Statement.

Before Israel’s attack on Iran earlier this week, Rallah-Baker was posting on his social media accounts about his visit to Israel, failing to mention that Israel has attacked every hospital in Gaza, has massacred paramedics in Gaza, and that Israel’s genocide in Gaza has collapsed the healthcare system, even as Israel continues to slaughter Palestinian men, women and children. He also didn’t mention the Palestinian doctors killed in custody - like Dr Ziad Mohammed al-Dalou or the widespread torture of Palestinian doctors in Israeli detention.

Peris meanwhile has spent the past two years constantly propagandizing for Israel. She also flew to Israel in March 2024 with Wangkumarra/Barkindji man Sean Gordon, who is the managing director of Gidgee Group.

Nevertheless, Taylor has continued reporting from the bunker, on her Zionist junket trip to propagandize genocide, proving that western journalism’s adherence to any semblance of ‘objectivity’ is as much a joke as having a long career at The Australian.

In a piece yesterday, titled ‘Bunkered down in the war zone, Indigenous figurehead has some sage words for Australian extremists’; Taylor quotes her bunker mate Nova Peris, in urging “hard left Indigenous activists and Australians pro-Palestinian movement to understand the Jewish story’.

In a follow up op-ed published today in The Australian, Nova Peris refused to mention the word “Palestine”, instead claiming that Israel reminds them “that every life matters”. She wrote, without a hint of irony, that Israel “minimises civilian death when fighting its enemies”, despite the fact that the official death toll form Israel’s killing mission in Gaza is over 55,300, so many of them children, and that this is likely a very conservative estimate. Israel is also being accused of targeting civilians in Iran.

Peris then went on to make an argument she has made several times: that Jewish Australians had been involved in the fight for black justice for a very long time, drawing the implication that blackfellas are being ungrateful. What it really reveals is a perception of solidarity which is the very opposite of the praxis of Black Palestinian solidarity, and that is the idea that solidarity is transactional.

In her op-ed, and in Taylor’s piece, Peris’ does not claim that there is wide reaching Aboriginal support for the Zionist project, because it is very obvious by now that there isn’t. Instead, she continually pleads for blackfellas to support Israel or ‘Jewish’ people, refusing to accept the long tradition of anti-Zionist Jews who also stand with blackfellas on the frontlines, or the fact that yes, blackfellas can also read, and yes, we also can make up our own minds.

Palestinians have never made pleads to Aboriginal Australia to do this. Blackfellas have witnessed for themselves the genocide that is being livestreamed in our hands; and they have also been very clever in drawing out the links, the solidarities between the forces of extractivism here, and the Israeli war machine.

For example, as the Wangan and Jagalingou continue to fight the Indian mining giant Adani, who is threatening their lands and waterways, activist Gurridyula drew out the links between Adani and the IDF. In 2018, Adani established a deal with Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems to manufacture military drones for the IDF. It also operates Haifa Port. It has over a billion dollars in investments in Israel.

Black Palestinian solidarity is not transactional; it is a solidarity grounded in the understanding that settler colonialism, colonialism and imperialism is intertwined, and so our resistances to this violence is also intertwined in each other.

And the moral depravity to accept Zionist junkets to Israel as evidence grows of the massacring and slaughtering of Palestinian men, women and children needs to be placed on record. Because if you support genocide over there, you can not come back here, and claim any moral high standing in the continual fight against racist violence on our own shores.