Free Palestine? Or free pass for terror?
So many people are talking about Israel, yet so few are getting it right.
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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
People often ask, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes with suspicion: “Why do you talk about Israel so much?”
Fair question.
Recently, Sydney hosted a rally so huge you’d think it was a national holiday. Officially it was for the Palestinian people. In reality, it looked more like a parade for theocrats.
This is Australia. A vibrant, multicultural democracy I’ve always called home. Police estimated 90,000 people marched across the Harbour Bridge under banners of “humanity,” mostly with Palestinian flags, but among them were Taliban and Hezbollah-style flags, and portraits of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
From the front row, a portrait of Ayatollah Khamenei could be seen. The leader of a regime that beats women for showing their hair, hangs dissidents from cranes, and guns down teenage girls for chanting “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
Islamist groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir were there too. They’re banned in Germany, the UK, and much of the Arab world, but apparently welcome in Sydney. The only Australian flag I saw was the one they set on fire.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it a “peaceful” march for Gaza. Odd. The one I saw looked more like cheering on the same jihadist forces that dragged Gaza into war, hide behind civilians, steal aid, and refuse to end the fighting.
After 20 months of the largest protests in decades “for the Palestinian people,” not once have they called on Hamas to surrender, even as many Gazans plead for it. Their aim doesn’t seem to be ending what they call “genocide,” but keeping the accusation alive. When footage or casualty claims collapse, they are not relieved; they are disappointed, because worse stories mean better weapons against Israel.
I used to think Australia was a few years behind the moral rot engulfing Western Europe and North America. But I’ve since realised “Free Palestine” is a smokescreen, a way to smuggle in a war on Western civilisation under the banner of compassion. The world’s oldest hatred, dressed up as resistance to Israel, is just the entry point.
Let me rewind.
For years, most of my posts were about animal rights or the occasional rant about how the Left, my side, was drifting into authoritarianism. I was sympathetic to the Palestinian people, but I wasn’t confused about their jihadist leaders or Israel’s right to exist. I had a decent grasp of the history, yet Israel wasn’t on my radar. Then everything changed, or rather, global attention did.
On October 7th, the world witnessed one of the most barbaric terrorist attacks in modern history, filmed proudly by the attackers themselves. Civilians butchered in their beds. Children burned alive in front of their parents. Elderly Holocaust survivors dragged from their homes. Women raped, mutilated, and paraded through the streets while jeering crowds spat on their bodies. Babies and toddlers among the hundreds taken hostage. Peace activists who’d spent years building bridges with Palestinians hunted down and executed. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Where was the outrage? The solidarity? The celebrity hashtags? When Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls, the world lit up with #BringBackOurGirls. When #MeToo took off, the abuse of women dominated headlines for years. When George Floyd was murdered, Black Lives Matter became a global rallying cry — yet it stayed silent when Hamas terrorists gunned down Black African farm workers on camera, with some chapters even expressing solidarity with the attackers.
No wall-to-wall coverage. No Instagram squares. No rainbow flags for the only country in the region where you can be openly gay without being flogged or hanged.
Almost overnight, Israel became the internet’s moral battleground. But the crowds in Western cities weren’t condemning the terrorists; they were defending them. Some openly celebrated. Others went for a polished version of moral inversion: “Israel had it coming.” I saw humanitarians describe the massacre as Gaza “breaking out of prison,” as if the slaughter of civilians were an act of liberation.
Imagine if, after 9/11, protesters in London, Paris, and Sydney marched with Al-Qaeda flags and Osama bin Laden’s face under banners of “humanity.” The October 7th massacre was Israel’s 9/11, many times worse in proportion to its population, yet on the very same day it was met with global justification and applause.
What stunned me more than the celebrations was how quickly NGOs, universities, media outlets and governments rushed to legitimise them. They didn’t wait for months of fighting or rising civilian casualties before turning on Israel. It happened on October 7th, before Israel had fired a single shot in return.
For anyone who thought civil society could not turn on Jews in broad daylight, this was the wake-up call. I heard it loud and clear. Those around me didn’t, and I still don’t understand how. The West had done this before, turning away Jewish refugees before the Holocaust. The majority can be catastrophically wrong. Antisemitism, long thought banished to the fringes, had come roaring back into fashion dressed as political virtue.
None of this is about claiming Israel is beyond criticism. No democracy is. But the obsessive condemnation, the grotesque double standards, and the free pass given to far worse regimes are hallmarks of antisemitism. The world’s oldest hatred, refitted for today’s politics by projecting ancient tropes and libels onto the Jewish state. And the pushback was far too weak.
It quickly became clear this was not just another regional dispute, but a civilisational fault line — between flawed but free liberal democracies and authoritarian movements like Islamism and hard-Left revolutionaries, united in their hatred of those freedoms. Iran says it openly: Israel first, the West next.
Equating a democracy with a jihadist terror group is not a serious argument. It is moral confusion. Yes, Israel has been accused of war crimes, as has every nation that has fought a war. But for Hamas, war crimes are the strategy, using civilians as shields and targeting civilians as policy. They are funded and armed by Iran, part of a broader civilisational axis that exploits Western freedoms to destroy them. Their information war has been so effective they have recruited university students and well-meaning Left-leaning activists in democracies to do their bidding.
Most people do not realise how central propaganda has been to the conflict. Since the 1960s, and even more so since the 1990s, Israel’s enemies, unable to win on the battlefield, switched tactics. They set out to delegitimise Israel in the court of public opinion until its destruction feels like justice. It has worked brilliantly, especially on well-meaning people who think they are standing for what is right.
This is not some distant issue I can ignore. It is right here in my backyard. Another march for Gaza is being pushed for across my city’s most iconic bridge.
Whenever I see those crowds, I think of the student protests in Iran before the Islamic Revolution: young, idealistic, certain they were fighting for freedom. They never intended to hand their country to religious hardliners, but that is exactly what happened. Even then, anti-Israel sentiment was a unifying rallying cry, laced with Nazi imagery and portraying the Shah, the United States, and Israel as a single axis of evil.
I don’t want that for Australia. I don’t want my children growing up under an ideology that crushes freedom, erases women’s rights, and punishes dissent with brutality. When I look at them, I care far more about the world they will inherit than about strangers on the internet calling me a “genocide supporter.” Their future matters more than my reputation with people who have lost their moral compass.
At those rallies, two kinds of people march side by side. One walks in ignorance, convinced they’re standing up for human rights. The other knows exactly what they’re marching for, and it has nothing to do with peace.
Many of my friends fell into that first camp of compassionate ignorance: well-meaning but hopelessly misinformed. When I replied to a few early on, most said they knew very little and “just wanted to help.”
Following the October 7th atrocities, many embraced a neat yet false narrative: in 1948, Israel appeared out of nowhere, ethnically cleansed the Palestinians, and has run a genocidal, apartheid regime ever since. Hamas? Iran? Jihad? Never heard of them. Just a side issue. Or, more often, “a justified response to Israeli oppression.”
Every so often, someone I know posts about “Palestine” for the first time, and I get that sinking feeling: not you, too. Then it snowballs into daily updates. Moral righteousness is a hell of a drug. And if this many people in my small circle are this easily duped, what does that say about the wider population? Is this how revolutions happen — not with a sudden bang, but with a slow drip of moral certainty that no one stops to question? Because that is exactly what Palestinian leaders have relied on for decades.
It is why they have never accepted statehood. Statelessness is their greatest weapon, winning them global sympathy to wield as a bludgeon against Israel. Most wars create refugees, and in every other context refugees are resettled and rebuild. The Palestinians were kept in place — not by Israel, but by the Arab world with help from UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestinians), the only UN agency devoted to a single group. Not to solve the problem, but to freeze it and pass it down as political leverage. In almost any other conflict, there would be no distinct Palestinian people today. Here, the grievance was preserved, nurtured, and marketed.
That grievance has found natural allies far beyond the Middle East. In Australia, “Abolish Australia” activists have linked arms with “Free Palestine” supporters. On the surface it looks like solidarity between Indigenous Australians and Palestinians. In reality, it is a convergence of activist factions, united by an ideology that frames liberal democracies as illegitimate colonial projects to be dismantled.
If they truly cared about decolonisation and Indigenous self-determination, they would support Israel’s right to exist. For the historically challenged: Jews are from Judea — the ancient name for the southern part of today’s Israel. Zionism is one of history’s most successful decolonisation movements.
Seeing Palestinians, an Arab ethno-national group, rebranded as the “First Nations” of the Middle East as they marched across the Harbour Bridge was one of the most audacious marketing coups of our time; a showcase in how completely we have inverted reality by erasing the far deeper Jewish connection to the land.
And so here we are. Another march in another city, on another bridge. Another crowd convinced they are on the side of freedom, standing shoulder to shoulder with those who would be the first to destroy it.
This is why I talk about Israel. Because history is full of moments where people cheered for movements that ended in tyranny. We are watching it happen again. And if we can’t even name it when it’s aimed at the Jewish state, we will be powerless to stop it when it comes for the rest of us.
The question that runs through my head daily is: Why are so many talking about Israel, yet so few getting it right?
Warning for Australians:
“First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people “
We have a safe refuge.
Where will you go when they come for you?
I don’t understand why Israel and organized Jewry worldwide has not even tried to combat this Goebbels level Jew-hating propaganda. It’s now a life-or-death proposition and still almost nothing to answer the feral animals.