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Opinion

Recognising Palestine is a distraction. We need sanctions to stop Israel killing my people

Amal Naser
August 11, 2025 — 5.35pm

They are killing my people. My family. My homeland.

I am the granddaughter of Nakba survivors. In 1948, my grandparents were expelled from Lydd, Historic Palestine, along with 80 per cent of its people by Israeli militias. My father grew up in a refugee camp, no home, no stability, only the dream of return. I grew up with their stories, and I grew up watching Israel’s ongoing crimes: the occupation of the West Bank, the siege of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of villages across Palestine. I never needed a state to tell me I was Palestinian or grant me my self-determination. We did that ourselves by keeping our struggle alive.

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Amal Naser, centre, with fellow Harbour Bridge protest organiser and Palestinian Action Group member Josh Lees, and NSW Green Jenny Leong. Credit: Wolter Peeters

Witnessing these injustices gave me the determination and stamina to fight for my homeland. For years, I have witnessed institutions of power fail us, allow crime after crime to occur against the Palestinian people with full impunity. I knew it was us, the people, the masses, who could end this torture.

For nearly two years, I have organised weekly rallies with the Palestine Action Group to stop what Amnesty International, B’Tselem (the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights) and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories have called by its name: genocide.

Last week, we led one of Australia’s largest ever demonstrations on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We were driven there by the images from Gaza: children starved to skeletons, families crushed under rubble, messages from our families pleading that we fight, and a disgust that our government – by its inaction – is complicit in this slaughter. We also knew that a march this big and this symbolic could never be ignored. Our demands were clear: sanctions on Israel and an end to the two-way arms trade.

And yet, the government instead offers us “recognition” of a Palestinian state, as though that is what we have been demanding. Recognition, while I watch my homeland be exterminated, while Netanyahu vows to occupy Gaza indefinitely, while Israel expands its settlements across the illegally occupied West Bank, is as hollow as the condemnations Western leaders have offered as Israel’s crimes escalate.

Recognition is not enough. You cannot “recognise” a state while you allow Australian-made components to help arm the regime destroying it. You cannot fight for the dead while helping make the weapons that kill them. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, has made record profits on the back of the genocide and has confirmed that every single F-35 jet contains Australian parts and components. (I note that I can no longer find this mention on its website.) UN experts have noted that exporting parts could be a violation of international law.

These jets are destroying and obliterating Gaza. It is the bare minimum that we cease exporting these parts to Israel, along with the armoured steel used in Israeli armoured vehicles. Instead, Defence Minister Richard Marles declares that we are an F-35 country while seeking to recognise the state whose extermination his government, by its failure to stop exports, participates in.

The reality is that Israel acts with impunity because of the ongoing support it receives from governments like Australia. The same impunity that allowed my grandparents’ expulsion in 1948, that sustains the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza, that today enables the deliberate starvation of a population.

For nearly two years, I have watched bombs fall on hospitals and schools. I have seen my family members killed. I felt alone as I saw videos of screaming children on my screen and the world had abandoned us. I was enraged when Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced a complete siege on the Gaza Strip on October 9, 2024, and declared that the people of Gaza, my people, my family, would be treated as “animals” – and the world failed to stop it.

“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” Gallant said.

Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, has indeed been wildly disproportionate and a violation of international law.

I have listened to leaders issue hollow words as the massacres escalated: the invasion of Gaza, the killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab by 335 bullets, the flour massacre, the tent massacre in Rafah, the killing of more than 60,000 people. The crimes grew. The condemnations got louder. The actions stayed the same.

Israel will not be stopped by speeches or hand-wringing. It will only be stopped by cutting off supplies to its military killing machine: sanctions, an arms embargo, an end to trade with this regime. Indeed, this is the bare minimum that Australia must do to meet its legal obligations to prevent and punish Israel for this genocide.

This is not abstract for me. I carry the grief of generations, and I get messages from family in Gaza begging us not to stop protesting against this atrocity. I will not.

Our movement is being heard. The pressure is rising. The government is scrambling; not out of principle, but because the people are demanding it. In 2003, the Howard government rejected the mass opposition in the streets and went on to invade Iraq, leaving millions dead in war and occupation, for nothing. The Albanese government must reflect on its legacy, on how it would like to be remembered: a government that serves the interests and desires of its people, or one complicit in a genocide.

History is watching. Lives are hanging in the balance.

Recognition is not enough. It never has been. Only action can end a genocide. On August 24, 2025, we will be in the streets again as part of a massive Nationwide March for Palestine. And we will not stop.

Amal Naser is a third-generation Palestinian refugee and organiser with the Palestine Action Group.