No other way to spin it: Police brutalisted protestors at Port Botany
Protestors overlook Botany Bay and the Calandra, a Zim ship, 21 November, 2023. Photo courtesy: Aman Kapoor.
If there is an image that will haunt the different tiers of Australian government, complicit in genocide, for years to come, it is the photo of a pram containing a toddler being held aloft by pro-Palestine protestors at Port Botany, Sydney, on Tuesday night. That photo captures the moment a supposedly unruly crowd swept a child to safety, as mounted and riot police officers herded protestors into an increasingly tight space, pushing them up against a fence and leaving them with nowhere to flee.
That photo is a symbol of solidarity. Like the rally itself, which exposed the absurdity and cruelty of the state’s anti-protest laws, that photo is proof of people power and our innate desire to offer ad hoc mutual aid.
For the NSW Police Force and NSW government, that photo is a PR powder keg waiting to explode.
At a moment like this, it becomes nigh impossible for the public to ignore the repression of political dissent. It becomes difficult as a news journalist to remain an impartial observer.
As Labor and Liberal politicians merge ranks, accusing protestors of violence, of antagonising police, that photo ruptures the farce and the lies blanketing Australia’s political leadership. It obliterates the fantasy that the role of police is to serve the people.
In light of the events at Port Botany and continuous protest in support of Palestinian independence – some 100,000 people attended the last pro-Palestine rally in Sydney – the question now becomes: how tenable is it for both NSW and Federal Labor, the factions in power, to maintain their support for Israel?
* * *
At Port Botany, for the last few weeks, activists have turned up in droves to protest and obstruct the activity of Zim, an Israeli shipping company known for transporting military equipment and aiding the Israeli war effort. By creating enough ruckus, they hope port authorities will suspend the contract with Zim.
It’s a tried and tested union tactic – “nothing new” as Emad Al Hatu, a Palestinian activist living in Sydney, told No Filter.
Dee, a member of Unionists for Palestinian and RAFFFWU, said, “the war machine is going at full steam but the people who make it run can also make it stop.”
“We are doing this because Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinian Federation of Trade Unions have told us this is how we stop the bloodshed.”
Protestors took to the water, 21 November, 2023. Photo courtesy: Aman Kapoor.
On Tuesday morning this week, word got out that one of Zim’s container ships, Calandra, had docked at Port Botany. Activists scrambled, sounding the alarm.
By the evening, with less than 12 hours warning, 500 people had turned up to protest. It largely ran like any other protest: speeches, rallying cries, fists in the air, the usual drill.
Police did not let protestors take to the road. Instead, they contained them to a footpath near the entrance to Port Botany. The throng eventually staged a peaceful sit-in, blocking Sirius Road, not Foreshore Road, the larger access road to Port Botany, as police have told media. People began to prepare food, planning to feed both protestors and dock workers as a sign of goodwill.
Protestors at Port Botany on Tuesday night, 21 November, 2023. Photo courtesy: Aman Kapoor.
Then, lightning quick, the cops moved on the crowd, grabbing people at random on the permitter and arresting them. Police horses pressed the entangled mass of body parts against a fence.
People were trampled, kicked by the police, even punched in the face. Others were forced to leg it over the fence. Shrieks. “SHAME”. “DOGS”. Desperation and fear coalesced into an invisible force, a passive voice, doing the shoving and cornering protestors from all sides – a response to police aggression rather than an action.
Harpreet Kaur Dhillon, an activist there that night, said, “the cops on horses almost crushed people on the ground. We genuinely thought people could have died.”
There appeared no concern on the part of police for the children and elderly present. Emad said that police grabbed a middle-aged woman, who posed no threat, by her hijab and threw her headfirst towards the ground, displaying “a blatant disregard for protestor safety”. Even the high-vis vests of safety marshals failed to offer protection from rampant police aggression.
Dee, a RAFFFWU member and unionist for Palestinian who attended the rally, told No Filter that police actively obstructed communication between protestors, arresting a marshal and isolating a man with a megaphone who was helping to direct the crowd when police descended upon them.
Many in the crowd did not know what was happening or what they were doing wrong. Dee and Emad did not hear police issue a move-on order at any point or provide any reason for the sudden arrests.
“They were not interested in giving us time to process their orders. They were not interested in letting us leave in a safe or orderly fashion. They were not interested in letting us organise ourselves. They were interested in creating confusion and assaulting us basically,” Dee said.
The premise for the arrests appears to be that protestors were hindering economic activity at a port. In April 2022, the former NSW government passed legislation in April 2022 imposing a $22,000 fine or 2 year maximum prison sentence for any protestor who damages major roads and infrastructure or disrupts economic activity. The anti-protest laws, intensely strict even by global standards, received bipartisan support from both Labor and the Coalition.
In a joint statement published yesterday morning, the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Human Rights Law Centre and Australian Democracy Network assert that no vehicles attempted to enter the port via the road blockaded by protestors. It’s an important detail because it means an unlawful move-on order gave police license to arrest protestors. In short: this was an over-extension of police power.
“Move on orders can only be validly given to a genuine demonstration when there is a serious risk to the safety of any person or persons are obstructing traffic,” the statement explains.
In the end, police made 23 arrests. The aftermath resembled a late-night, high street brawl: shocked faces, tears, lost items of clothing, bruises, cuts. Photographic evidence of clothes torn to shreds speaks volumes.
The mainstream press is saying that protestors at Port Botany were “violent”. On Channel Nine’s Today, Federal Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil asked supporters of Palestinian independence to “calm down a bit”. The state’s premier has claimed that police acted responsibly.
This framing is not accurate.
From the perspective of those caught in the crowd crush, it was police, not protestors, who escalated the situation. It’s hard not to see police in this context as the shock troops of neoliberalism and the law as a capitalist bludgeon squashing any threat to property and colonial capital, as Unionists for Palestine – the group that organised the rally – has declared publicly.
There was a heavy police presence at the Port Botany rally, 21 November, 2023. Photo courtesy: Aman Kapoor.
Emad told No Filter that “police were there to disturb the peace, not maintain the peace.”
“They found what they thought was the weakest link in the protest chain. They came and tried to make it violent to feed into the usual rhetoric of Lebos from the area being dodgy, aggressive Arabs.”
“We’ve seen them try it before so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the tactic here,” he asserted.
In many ways, the recurring protests at Botany, which has seen Palestine supporters take to both water and land, encapsulates western Sydney. If there’s ever been a symbol the city’s west, it’s the sight of jet skis buzzing like a swarm of bees across the waters of Botany Bay with Palestinian flags flapping in the wind.
Further, as anyone who has attended pro-Palestine rallies across the country will know, these are family affairs. There’s a noticeable diversity in age among attendees. Bound by intergenerational trauma, religious ties and Arab solidarity, families roll out from Western Sydney, prams and all. Protests against Zim have been no different.
Protestors on jet skis, 11 November, 2021. Photo courtesy: Trade Unionists for Palestine/Facebook.
But this identity is a double-edged sword. It’s clear that activists working in this space, hyper conscious of their identity, tiptoe around normative standards of decency. The threshold that protestors of Middle Eastern background must step over to be deemed respectable and non-violent is far higher than the threshold for their white allies.
When the crowd became antsy under police pressure at Botany, anti-police chants broke out. Speakers had called out police all night for their opposition to peaceful Palestinian protest; this isn’t exactly a group of humans infatuated with the boys in blue. But, even within the cauldron of the crowd crush, key organisers sought to stay on task.
Dee recounted, “whenever an anti-police chant would start, the organisers would move it, after a couple of rounds, towards the central message of the rally, which was ‘free Palestine’.”
* * *
State surveillance has plagued activist spaces in NSW for a number of years but many feel it has escalated even further as pro-Palestinian activism has ramped up in recent weeks.
As recorded by Legal Observers NSW, a grassroots collective that monitors police activity at rallies and facilitates legal aid for activists, cops have pulled over vehicles displaying Palestinian flags near pro-Palestine and demanded their removal, using minor infringements as pretexts for the traffic stops. They have indiscriminately filmed protestors. They have threatened to use special police powers, first introduced after the 2005 Cronulla race riots, to ensure public safety. It’s an exhaustive list.
At Tuesday night’s Port Botany rally, one dock worker, microphone in hand, alleged that undercover police have even tried to infiltrate the Hutchinsons Port workplace.
According to Legal Observers NSW, police were still present at the Port Botany boat ramp car park at 7 AM on Wednesday morning, the morning after the street demonstration. They harassed and photographed one group who returned to pick up a car, recording their ID details.
Dee said that the presence of officers from Operation Shelter on Tuesday night reflects a heightened level of monitoring.
Last month, NSW Police established Operation Shelter to increase surveillance of protest activities – the third strikeforce announced in the last 2 years that targets protests in NSW.
In Dee’s words, it’s a “concerted effort to weaponise antisemitism to protect Zionist interests”.
“The fact is they’re trying their best to treat the issue of peaceful Palestinian activism as a terrorism issue and a hate crime issue. That comes along with increased scrutiny and more underhanded violent tactics than might be applied to other movements.”
Harpreet said that police have stalked and followed them in recent weeks due to their activism. Two days after an action against Israeli arms dealers in Darling Harbour, police pulled over and swarmed their Uber near Central Station to arrest them. It’s as scene more akin to a Hollywood espionage thriller than grassroots Sydney activism.
However, neither Harpreet, Dee nor Emad say that police repression has reduced their resolve.
Ahmed Abadla from Palestine Justice Movement Sydney, who helped to organise the Port Botany rally, said, “we will not be intimidated. Our peaceful, non-violent boycott campaigns and protests will continue against all companies complicit with apartheid Israel in Australia.”
Emad sees an irony in the fact that activists in Sydney are brutalised and stifled by colonial uniforms and blank faces, just like his kinsmen in Palestine.
“People in Palestine have been oppressed in a manner similar to this for 75 years. Do you really think that the people organising protests will be deterred by Australian police blurring the line and being aggressive? It’s not going to work. I’ve had double digit family members confirmed dead in the past seven weeks and the police just tried to run a horse into me: I don’t give a shit.”
A placard at the ‘block the boat’ protest at Port Botany, 21 November, 2023. Photo courtesy: Aman Kapoor.
