From the Tweed River to the Coral Sea, Queenslanders must push back against Zionist fascism

While my law degree has certainly informed the opinions expressed here, this article is not formal legal advice and shouldn’t be relied upon as such.

You can tell your government is sliding towards outright fascism when you’re seriously contemplating driving interstate before hitting ‘publish’ on an online opinion piece.

It’s only been a couple days since Queensland’s Liberal National Party government partially criminalised the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada,” but already the move is having its intended effect – making people nervous about what they are and aren’t allowed to say about Israel’s brutal genocide of the Palestinian people and its illegal invasion and occupation of Palestine.

I say ‘partially criminalised’ because contrary to some reporting, the relevant section of the “Fighting Antisemitism and Keeping Guns out of the Hands of Terrorists and Criminals Amendment Act” (no, not satire – that’s actually what the LNP called it) still falls short of an outright ban.

The new section 52DA of Queensland’s Criminal Code prohibits these phrases if they’re used “in a way that might reasonably be expected to cause a member of the public to feel menaced, harassed or offended.”

Legal experts will take differing views on how broadly that should be interpreted and how high the threshold is. But the depressing reality is you can find members of the public who’ll get offended by just about anything these days.

And hilariously (or troublingly, depending how you look at it), sub-section (5)(a) says “it is irrelevant whether or not a member of the public has heard or seen the prohibited expression because of the recital, distribution, publication or display.”

Yes you read that right. Reciting the phrase in public or even posting it on an obscure online forum could theoretically be illegal even if no-one actually hears or sees it.

But sub-section 52DA(2) of the act lists some ‘reasonable excuses,’ the precise definitions of which Queensland judges and lawyers are going to waste a lot of time arguing over. You can also have a reasonable excuse even if it’s not one of the specific excuses listed.

It seems I am still allowed to use the phrase ‘globalise the intifada’ if I’m doing so for an ‘artistic purpose’ or indeed for ‘religious,’ ‘educational,’ ‘historical,’ ‘legal’ or ‘law enforcement’ purposes.

I’m pretty confident that my decision to publish this article you’re currently reading would be protected by s 52DA(2)(a)(ii) – I’m using the phrases for the genuine political purpose of arguing that the LNP’s new laws are an unjustified, unconstitutional, idiotic attack on Queenslanders’ freedom of speech that ought to be resisted through every available channel. I also believe that my writing serves a genuine educational purpose.

(But having said that, I still want to assure any QPS employees reading this that I drove one hour and ten minutes down the M1 to Tweed Heads, New South Wales before I posted this article on my website and social media pages.)

The problem we have is that under s 52DA(3) the ‘evidential burden’ is on the accused to prove that they have a reasonable excuse.

So if the police want to make your life difficult, they could still arrest you and drag you through the court system for months. In the end, you may well be able to convince a judge that you did have a reasonable excuse as defined under the legislation, but you’re probably not going to be compensated for the significant inconvenience and stress.

We are being governed by dangerous buffoons.

I’m sure other articles will explore in detail when it is and isn’t safe to use these words “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada,” and the precise legal ramifications of what appears to be the greatest attack on Australians’ free speech in living memory (as far as I’m aware, even Queensland’s overtly-authoritarian former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen never went as far as banning the use of specific phrases).

But for those who are still catching up on why the LNP have gone to such great lengths to restrict free speech in this way, I wanted to explain why I've concluded that pro-Israel lobbyists are spewing pure horseshit when they claim Queenslanders chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ are really calling for ethnic cleansing of Jewish people.

Are these slogans inherently anti-semitic? (Short answer: No)

People who chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” at a rally do so with a range of different intended meanings.

Some will say that they’re specifically opposing Israel’s Apartheid-like web of discriminatory laws that treat Palestinians as second-class citizens in their own land.

Others are calling for the land of Palestine to be free of violence and oppression in general.

And still others would say that for Palestine to be truly free, the colonial nation-state of Israel must cease to exist in its current form and be replaced by some kind of genuinely democratic, secular governing entity or federation.

This article by Palestinian history scholar Maha Nassar offers a pretty detailed overview of the phrase’s history and contemporary meanings. She writes:

“Most Palestinians using this chant do not see it as advocating for a specific political platform or as belonging to a specific political group. Rather, the majority of people using the phrase see it as a principled vision of freedom and coexistence.”

Now I'm not a "no speech should ever be limited" ideologue. I'm willing to accept that a society might reasonably want to place limits on language that incites violence or discrimination against oppressed groups, and prevent people making direct threats that are intended to cause fear.

But the logical leaps required in order to place the phrase "from the river to the sea" into that category are so fantastic they'd put an Olympic triple-jumper to shame.

The mere fact that a phrase spoken by a certain type of person (regardless of that person's intention) "makes others feel unsafe" is not sufficient justification for classifying the phrase as hate speech. There must be some objective, rational basis to that feeling.

I'm sure that at various points in recent history, there would've been a lot of Australians who, due to a torrent of Islamophobic, anti-Arab propaganda and pop culture stereotyping, might have felt unsafe if they saw a brown-skinned man shouting the Arabic words 'Allahu Akbar' (commonly translated as 'God is the greatest') in a public space. But even if that was a genuine feeling, that doesn't make the fear reasonable, or justify criminalising the use of the words themselves.

Heck, I personally feel a little unsafe and uncomfortable when I see a bunch of drunk white guys in the middle of the Valley yelling the words "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi!" Maybe my fear isn't even entirely unreasonable. But I don't think they should get two years in prison just for shouting.

In its strongest, least-hysterical version, the Zionist argument for criminalising this common protest chant seems to be that:

- almost everyone who uses the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ actually means that they want to abolish Israel

- the continuing existence of the Israeli nation-state is a necessary precondition for preserving the culture, religious practices and physical safety of Jewish people living in the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea

- therefore, implying indirectly that you don’t believe the modern Israeli nation-state should exist necessarily means you must want Jewish cultural identity in the region to cease to exist

- if you want Jewish cultural identity to cease existing, you want all Jewish people in the region to be killed or ethnically cleansed

The key problem with this line of argument is that it would be entirely possible for Jewish people to survive and for Jewish culture and identity to persist and thrive even without the modern nation-state of Israel.

The words ‘homeland’ and ‘nation-state’ do not mean the same thing.

For centuries prior to the British invasion of Palestine (in which thousands of Australian soldiers played a crucial role), Jewish, Muslim and Christian Palestinians had been living side by side. I won’t pretend everything was always perfect, but the premise that Jewish people cannot possibly exist without the 78-year-old nation-state of Israel is kinda ridiculous when you think about it.

I'm sure life for Jewish people would be different if Israel didn't exist. But saying you don't want Israel to exist is very obviously not the same as saying you don't want Jewish people to exist.

Most ethnic, cultural and religious groups around the world do not rely upon a violent, expansionist ethno-state for their survival. I would go so far as to argue that modern capitalist nation-states are inherently hostile to the preservation of cultural and religious traditions that challenge or compete with capitalist ideology.

So even if you accept the premise that everyone who chants “from the river to the sea!” wants to abolish Israel (which, again, I don’t think is true), it doesn’t logically follow that they are also thus calling for ethnic cleansing or extermination of Jewish Israelis, as some have claimed.

The arguments for banning the phrase ‘globalise the intifada’ strike me as even weaker when you take the time to understand both the literal translations of the word ‘intifada,’ and what protesters say they mean when they use that phrase.

With all that in mind, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for Queenslanders to continue using these slogans, and that the LNP’s ham-fisted attempt to ban them is a gross over-reaction and capitulation to forces who are seeking to suppress peaceful protests against Israel’s genocide.

So what should we do now?

The challenge I have in writing and thinking about this is that while I’m pretty confident I do have multiple ‘reasonable excuses’ for using the now-prohibited expressions, I still worry that some hot-headed copper who wants to get their arrest numbers up might lock me up just to impress their mates.

Even if a judge eventually decides in my favour, police officers still get paid for the time they spend in court. I don’t.

So this new legislation isn’t just making me second-guess using the phrases itself – it’s pushing me to self-censor how I talk about activism strategy more generally, and what I feel comfortable encouraging other people to do.

But we must not do the fascists’ work for them.

As a good friend pointed out, social media censorship has helped prepare us all to navigate this kind of thought-policing. Algorithms routinely bury posts containing words that American tech bros don’t like, and activists who post on platforms like Tiktok are already accustomed to substituting key words and using alternative phrases and symbols to work around the automated censors.

It’s important to understand that while the initial 10 February version of the LNP’s bill sought to ban the use of any phrase “that so nearly resembles a [prohibited] expression... that it is likely to be confused with or mistaken for that expression,” the final version of the bill that was voted through on 5 March and received the governor’s assent on 11 March did not include this broader prohibition.

The new law only bans the exact phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada.” You don’t have to be particularly creative to come up with substitutions that convey the same ideas without uttering those exact words. Even “from a river to a sea” is probably still legal (but remember that cops – who've been conditioned through years of training to dislike protesters – might still arrest you for saying it, even if they know the charge is going to be dropped later).

So one of the easiest and safest ways to subvert this criminalisation of free speech will be to switch to chants and banners that gesture at the prohibited phrases without repeating them word for word. The LNP may have inadvertently launched a new, hopefully amusing, political slogans contest here in Queensland.

But I’m not satisfied by that kind of ducking and weaving. Such a direct, unprecedented attack on freedom of political communication has to be challenged head-on. If we all just comply with this, we open the door to the LNP gradually and inexorably expanding the list of things we’re no longer allowed to say.

When Joh Bjelke-Petersen tried to outlaw protest marches, Queensland activists didn’t respond simply by switching tactics and focusing on other forms of dissent. They marched anyway, and knowingly accepted the risk of arrest and prosecution. These courageous acts of mass civil disobedience contributed to rising pressure that ultimately flipped Queensland politics on its head, and consigned the National party to years of political obscurity.

The most powerful way to challenge this assault on democracy is for everyone to continue using the prohibited phrases as often as possible, while insisting (honestly) that we are doing so not with the goal of making Jewish people feel menaced, harassed or offended, but in service of the public interests in asserting and defending our freedom of political communication, and in applying political pressure on the Australian government to stop supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

We should do this in street marches, in public meetings, in online forums and through our art and music. And we need to make sure that anyone who is charged and arrested as a result receives as much support as possible.

We must stretch the limits of this crackdown on free speech to the point where the whole framework of oppression crumbles into farce.

That’s not to say we should make it easy for the police to arrest us. If you’re shouting one of these prohibited phrases at a rally, don’t do it when a police officer is standing right next to you with their bodycam on. And if you’re posting the words online, maybe don’t use your full name. If cops really do believe it’s a good use of resources to lock up peaceful protesters just for saying words, we might as well make them work for it.

I confess that I'm genuinely a little scared about all this – not just the LNP making it illegal to say certain words in a certain order, but the broader nationwide creep towards authoritarianism and fascism. As a father of a 6-month-old, I really don’t want to get stuck in prison right now. But I also don’t want my child to grow up in a world where the freedoms I once enjoyed are being brutally suppressed.

When you think about it, amplifying calls for liberation is pretty much the least we can do for our siblings in Palestine. Perhaps the worst consequence of these laws will be if they distract us from what needs to be our core focus: pressuring the Australian government to withdraw its support for the genocidal rogue state known as Israel, the authoritarian Trump regime, and the weapons companies that are profiting from escalating war in West Asia.

The underlying goal of these laws is to scare us all into being quieter. If we do the opposite, the LNP’s farcical attempt at censorship will backfire.

If pro-Israel lobbyists are going to such extreme lengths to stop us chanting these slogans, maybe that’s a sign that we should chant them even louder.

Writing articles like this north of the Tweed River is becoming an increasingly risky proposition. If you value this kind of work, please consider supporting it by signing up for a paid subscription to my newsletter.

I encourage you to also follow the work of Action Ready Queensland – a volunteer collective who, among other things, do great work advising people on how to exercise their rights to peaceful protest.