- by Andrew Brown
- The Guardian
- Issue #2179
Photo: michaelwest.com.au
NSW Police have assaulted dozens of peaceful protestors who gathered to protest the visit by Israeli president Isaac Herzog to Australia.
I was there. Not watching from a distance. Not reconstructing events from police statements. I was on the steps of Sydney Town Hall, with organisers and MPs, looking out over a vast peaceful crowd and then watching the state choose violence.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog arrived in Sydney for a tightly secured visit. That context matters, because what unfolded was not crowd management. It was a demonstration of power. A message. A deliberate assertion of authority.
At least five sitting members of the Minns government were present. They were not hovering at the edges. They were chanting with the crowd. Standing shoulder to shoulder with constituents.
This was not fringe politics. This was Parliament in the street.
Dr Muhammad Mustafa, known widely as Dr Mo, did not address the crowd. He spoke quietly to me. Online, he goes by the handle ‘Dr Mo the Beast from the Middle East,’ a name that reads like bravado until you understand what forged it.
He told me about operating on children without anaesthetic. About hospitals without power. About performing surgery by torchlight while bombs fell nearby. About the dozens of his own relatives who have been murdered in Gaza.
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. People who have lived through that kind of loss do not perform outrage. They carry it.
While tens of thousands of Australians stood in the open air exercising democratic rights, Premier Chris Minns was not there.
He was dining.
DINING WITH A WAR CRIMINAL
Inside the International Convention Centre, Minns broke bread with Herzog as the Israeli president spoke about social cohesion.
This is the same Isaac Herzog who once declared there were no innocent civilians in Palestine. The same Herzog who autographed artillery shells later dropped on Gaza. His government now stands before international courts, its conduct under legal scrutiny. Minns knew exactly what this moment represented.
This was his chance to correct that.
Herzog was in town. The optics were international. Minns was not going to lose again.
PEACE, THEN VIOLENCE
The rally ended peacefully. Speakers finished. People began to leave.
That should have been the end of the day.
Instead, it was the beginning of a deliberate escalation.
New South Wales Police blocked exits and sealed movement south toward Circular Quay. People trying to go home were trapped without explanation. There were no clear lawful directions. No safety rationale. Just containment.
Bottlenecks were deliberately created. Confusion was manufactured. Then force was applied to the disorder police themselves had caused. This was not crowd control. It was crowd engineering.
POLICE BRUTALITY
I watched police push into a dispersing crowd.
I watched elderly people panic.
I watched bodies hit the ground.
I helped a young girl who had been pepper sprayed in the face and collapsed into a seizure on the pavement. She was convulsing, incapacitated. As she lay there on the ground, police sprayed her again in the face. Again.
ATTACKS ON THE ELDERLY
Nearby, I helped a 71-year-old woman whose eyes and face were burned red from pepper spray. She was blinded, sobbing, asking what she had done wrong. She had done nothing. My mother is 84 years old. She was attempting to leave peacefully. She was pushed by police, knocked to the ground, and suffered a fractured arm.
My sister lives with Parkinson’s disease. She was shoved and thrust by police during the same operation.
Later, I witnessed a line crossed that should alarm anyone who believes Australia still respects basic freedoms. Sheikh Wesam Charkawi was praying peacefully with followers, prostrate on the ground. Silent. Non-confrontational. Police moved in anyway.
People were brutalised while in the act of prayer. Shoved. Dragged. Hauled up by force.
This was no longer just an attack on protest. It was an attack on worship.
There were roughly 500 police deployed at Town Hall and an estimated 3,000 across the CBD. This scale was not accidental. It was a show of force. Police created the disorder they later claimed to suppress. This tactic is known. It is taught. It is deliberate.
And it is political.
MINNS OWNS THIS
Chris Minns owns this operation from top to bottom. He cannot hide behind operational reviews or police statements. His own MPs were there. Chanting. Watching. Warning. They knew instantly this was wrong.
Minns wanted to prove he was in charge. He wanted to assert authority while hosting a foreign leader accused of mass atrocities. He chose force as his language.
A Premier who dines with a leader accused of genocide, who has signed the very bombs dropped on civilians, while his police break the arm of an 84-year-old woman, assault a woman with Parkinson’s disease, spray a seizing child in the face, and brutalise people at prayer has forfeited all moral authority to govern.
This was not a mistake.
Chris Minns may still occupy the office. “Thank you friends,” he told the pro-Israel crowd at the Convention Centre to a warm round of applause.
But that night in the streets of Sydney, while he clinked glasses with Isaac Herzog, he lost the right to lead this state.
A Sydney comrade writes: the protesters numbered in the tens of thousands. Police also numbered in the thousands, including cavalry, AFP, sound cannons and riot squads. It got violent – most of what you’re seeing are stray clips but it was so chaotic a lot of things were missed. 27 arrests including one of our members. There was some disarray which enabled police to kettle us at Town Hall. They pepper sprayed indiscriminatingly, charged the crowd, and beat people who were trying to disperse. They ordered people to go in one direction and then blocked it off to trap people. They issued move along orders to trapped protesters and arrested them for disobeying it. After dispersion began towards Central, they chased after protesters and continued spraying and beating people. The state was out in full, militarised force, gleefully inflicting violence on unarmed civilians. I am frankly shocked that no one was killed and there are many more serious injuries than the handful on the current news.
A large party contingent was present with representation from all NSW branches. This was a radicalising experience for many of our younger comrades for whom this type of confrontation was a first.
(more on Herzog protests ‘NSW defends Israel with anti-protest push’)
