Hundreds of Australian students attend meetings to oppose Israeli attack

Special General Meetings (SGMs) of student unions and representative bodies are being called at universities across Australia to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza, with strict requirements requiring hundreds of signatures to be collected on most campuses before a meeting can take place.

At the University of Sydney, SGM took place last week, only the fifth since 1971. It was attended by as many as 700 students. Similar events have been held at the University of Queensland in Brisbane and RMIT University in Melbourne, while SGM will be held at the University of Melbourne and Queensland University of Technology on Thursday. Petitions are underway at other campuses.

Students starting SGM at RMIT University in Melbourne on 13 August 2024

International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth and student wing of the Socialist Equality Party, supports the convening of such meetings. The response they have generated shows that students are determined to fight genocide, despite vitriolic attacks from the Labour government and the entire political establishment.

The attendance at the meetings testifies to the growing politicization against the background of growing militarism, the development of fascist movements in the international arena and disastrous social conditions.

The significance of the meetings, however, will be determined by what they decide. The students know that the meetings themselves will not end the genocide. The task of such meetings is to formulate a course of action, a path for the future struggle, which must be based on the developed political perspective and the lessons of the past period.

Critical questions have been raised. How can genocide be fought and ended after ten months when everything that has been tried, all the protests and appeals to governments, have clearly failed?

What is the connection between the war crimes in Gaza, sponsored and supported by the imperialists, and the broader situation in the world, and above all the global rise in militarism that threatens a new world war?

The IYSSE states bluntly that there are no easy answers to these questions. They will not be resolved by endless chanting or by repeated appeals to governments and university administrations.

By now everyone knows that the Labour government will ignore such appeals while it sends weapons to murder Palestinian children and insists on “Israel’s right to defend itself” through ethnic cleansing. Military-linked university authorities will throw your resolutions in the bin while they take disciplinary action against students who oppose genocide.

What we are witnessing in Gaza is the true face of the capitalist system, which is in its deepest crisis since the 1930s. Governments around the world are once again taking the path of war to balance their own crisis at the expense of their rivals. This means a revival of the worst barbarism of the 20th century, a war against the social conditions of the working class and a turn towards authoritarianism and dictatorship. If not stopped, it means a nuclear world war that will annihilate humanity.

Governments support the atrocities against the people of Gaza because they are part of a broader war plan.

Solving the “Palestinian problem” through murder and displacement is seen by the strategists of American imperialism, who finance and oversee the genocide, as a stepping stone to war with Lebanon, Syria and, above all, Iran. Such a region-wide conflict is currently unfolding with the provocative killings of Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr in Israeli attacks in Lebanon and Tehran, and the dispatch of additional US warships to the region.

This in turn is part of a global strategy focused on confrontation with Russia and China, the aim of which is to maintain the hegemony of American capitalism in decline. The US is already fighting a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, the largest war on the European continent since the end of World War II, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and threatens nuclear catastrophe. In this region, the entire Indo-Pacific is being transformed into a potential battleground in the US-led militarization of the war with China, which in Australia is being implemented by the Labor government.

This important context shows that the fight against the genocide in Gaza can only go forward as part of the fight against imperialist war around the world. This means not appealing to governments, but politically fighting against them. And it raises the need for a socialist perspective directed against the capitalist system, whose innate drive for resources, markets and profits is the root cause of war.

None of these political questions are addressed in the resolution that will be presented at the University of Melbourne meeting. The first part of the resolution simply states that the students’ union “supports the immediate and just end to Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip,” including an end to the bombing and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.

But how will this happen? Who will establish this peace? The resolution says nothing. It does not even condemn the Labor government, probably for fear of alienating Labor members of the Students’ Union and its fringes who pretend to oppose genocide while supporting Albanese.

There remains the suggestion that appeals to the government will fix the situation. But that was the prospect of protests every weekend for the past ten months. It was part of the purpose of the student camps earlier this year. Albanese responded by calling them “divisive” expressions of “hatred” that “have no place” in society and helped to shut them down in concert with Zionist attacks and repression by the university administration.

The second element of the resolution is an appeal to the university to divest from Israel. This was also a central plank of the camps’ agenda. University authorities responded with mass suspensions and even expulsions.

Fighting genocide is a political issue. It means drawing conclusions about the role played by specific political forces. These conclusions include:

The Labor government supports genocide because it is a party to the imperialist war. By supporting the mass murder of Palestinians, it completes Australia’s transformation into a frontline state in the war with China and inflicts on workers the biggest change in social conditions in half a century.
The Greens pose as anti-genocide but have no response other than to call on the Labour government to “do the right thing”. This is a trap and a dead end. At the same time, the Greens continue to work with Labour on other issues. Their main goal is to strike a power-sharing deal with Labour after the next election, in which the genocide in Gaza will not be an obstacle.
Corporate unions are complicit. They effectively rejected the desperate appeal of Palestinian unions last October for action to stop the genocide. Australian unions have not called a single strike against mass murder, and not a single shipment to Israel has been delayed, let alone stopped.
Groups like Socialist Alternative, which promote “pressure politics” focused on appealing to the government, are engaged in deliberate and conscious deception of students. They are part of a false left that represents the interests of the affluent middle class in academia and union bureaucracy. Socialist Alternative has a long history of supporting imperialist war, including CIA regime change operations in Libya and Syria and the US-NATO war against Russia.
To defeat imperialism, an even more powerful force must be mobilized. This force is the working class.

The working class is the international class that can put an end to the division of the world into antagonistic capitalist nation-states that are the cause of war. It is a propertyless class whose struggles are objectively directed against the private ownership of social resources and the domination of a small stratum of billionaires.

The same contradictions of capitalism that drive the capitalist class to war are giving rise to mass struggles of the working class, which are already beginning. The task is to link these struggles for jobs, wages and living conditions with the struggle against imperialist war. This means rebellion against the unions and political struggle against the Labour government. It is an international struggle, posing the need for a united global anti-war movement based on a socialist programme.

Take up the fight for this socialist perspective! Join IYSSE!