To disclose this upfront, I’m opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza and I’ve signed several open letters in support of that position. As a university lecturer and an education union representative at Monash University, I’ve also seen the pro-Palestine university protests up close.
It’s from this vantage point that I’ve been struck by the disconnect between the protests and the media coverage of them. Since the first Australian encampments began in April, the majority of reporting has painted them as chaotic, hateful and violent, and focused on contested interpretations of protesters’ chants rather than the issues about which they are protesting.
The polarised media coverage reflects an environment in which the middle of the debate has collapsed, in which even peaceful protests calling for an end to war and occupation can be characterised as exercises in hate speech.
The reality on the ground is the majority of Australian encampment protests have been polite, well-mannered and surprisingly well-organised, even as the political statements they have advanced have received scathing criticism from politicians, journalists and commentators.
A careful scan of the public record suggests pro-Palestine protesters have been overwhelmingly non-violent. Although there are verified reports of bad behaviour such as trespassing and property damage at the University of Queensland and intimidating lecturers at the University of Sydney, so far the only pro-Palestine protesters to have been charged are two men who sat on a roof at UQ.
This has been despite violent provocation from pro-Israel counterprotesters across several campuses, including the University of Adelaide, the University of Melbourne and Monash University.
To understand how these protests have been reported, I’ve examined mainstream media coverage in Australia since late April, chronicling the reporting by popular mainstream newspapers and broadcasters — including Nine, Seven, News Corp and the ABC — trawling through more than 70 articles, segments, podcasts and broadcasts published since April 30.
Protesters’ language
When the media settles on a narrative about a particular issue, coverage often coalesces around a small number of themes. In the case of the university protests, these haven’t been the horror of Israel’s war in Gaza, but rather the conduct and speech of the protesters campaigning against it.
No-one should deny the well-documented and real rise in antisemitism in Australia since the Hamas attack against Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. Jewish students and staff have well-founded and legitimate concerns about the rise in racism, vilification and harassment over the past seven months. The federal government has funded the Human Rights Commission to run a study on racism in universities, and according to race discrimination commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman, “there are countless stories of discrimination, targeted hate and harm at universities”.
But the way the media has covered the university protests has taken this important issue one step further, conflating legitimate political protests against war and genocide with racism, antisemitism and hate speech.
Indeed, speech itself has become a key issue of the debate. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been asked repeatedly in media appearances to parse “from the river to the sea”, a common chant at pro-Palestine rallies that has been labelled genocidal and antisemitic. On May 16, the Senate proceeded to pass a motion specifically condemning “river to the sea” as a “very violent statement”.
The phrase made it into Parliament last week when raised by Labor Senator Fatima Payman, who argued it doesn’t imply the erasure of Israel but “a desire for Palestinians to live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominating others nor being dominated over”. A joint media statement by several Australian Arab and Palestinian groups over the weekend defended Payman, arguing that historically it has “been associated with the Palestinian cause for self-determination and statehood”.
Another focus has been the word “intifada”, which many outlets have interpreted as a form of hate speech or incitement to violence. While the history of the conflict in Palestine offers many possible interpretations of contested language, “intifada” is also a common Arabic noun with a long and specific meaning in Palestinian resistance movements.
It’s clear there are multiple contested and competing interpretations of these phrases, as University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott has admitted. Yet few Australian media outlets have attempted to unpack the historical context or even mention that multiple meanings exist. Instead, they have largely followed the interpretations put forward by pro-Israel lobbies — echoed in the text of the Senate motion — where, with an easy elision, hate speech interpretations have simply been asserted with little explanation or justification, perhaps accompanied by a critical quote from a Liberal politician.
Exemplary of this style of reporting is a Daily Telegraph article by Clarissa Bye on May 3, entitled “Anti-Semitic incidents, bullying, harassment of Australian jews rising tide ‘spiralling out of control’”. On the same day, the Tele’s editor Ben English sent out a newsletter to subscribers entitled “It’s 1938 all over again”, explicitly comparing the protesters to Nazis, and carrying a prominent drop quote by Liberal education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson asking “Why haven’t the universities called in the police?”
The Australian’s Natasha Bita also took a settled position against the protests early, writing on May 3, too, that “the chilling sound of children chanting ‘intifada’ proves that pro-Palestine student protests are far from pacifist”.
At Nine, David Crowe made a similar argument in an opinion piece on May 10 headlined “When uni students endorse terror, it’s time for political intervention”. “Universities should be open grounds for free speech, not platforms for antisemitism and violence,” Crowe wrote, calling for the federal government to “move fast to ban hate speech”.
The Tele has also prominently reported on former treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s warnings against the rise of antisemitism. On May 7, the newspaper featured an article quoting Frydenberg claiming, “In the last week we have seen the flag of a terrorist organisation hoisted on campus and chants of ‘from the river to the sea’ which is an inherently violent statement, as well as calls to ‘globalise the intifada’.”
The headline drew an analogy between the campus protests and Nazi repression during the 1930s.
Protesters’ demands
Missing from much of the media coverage has been any substantive engagement with the demands of the university protesters, or even much in the way of attempting to explain why they are protesting.
Many casual news media consumers might be surprised to learn the various Australian student protest camps have relatively specific and articulated demands around the divestment or boycott of university activities associated with military industries and the Israeli Defence Force.
For instance, at the University of Queensland, the protest coalesced around the university’s relationship with the aerospace and armaments giant Boeing, which has a building on its St Lucia campus. However, the protest only gained media attention after a window of the Boeing building was smashed.
This illustrates a central conundrum for protesters, where their key demands are not covered by media outlets until events escalate, with those demands then overshadowed by media preoccupation with objectionable protest behaviour or the remarks of fringe individuals.
For example, The Courier-Mail carried an article quoting “pro-Palestinian students at Queensland’s largest university … admitting they would be terrorists if involved in the overseas conflict”. This involved two students who soon left the Schools for Palestine group, the leaders of which condemned their comments. “I’d like to make it clear that the views expressed in that video don’t represent the views of our camp,” one said.
Some journalists have attempted to talk to protesters and grapple with their demands. The ABC’s Jason Om filed a reasonably balanced story for 7.30 on May 3, taking the time to interview the president of the University of Sydney’s student association, Harrison Brennan, in a damp tent.
“As students, we have a responsibility to the people of Gaza,” one protester told him. Om reported that students demanded that the university “cut ties with Israel and scrap a research partnership with the company Thales”.
Om also reported the protests “have made some Jewish students feel unsafe,” mentioning an organiser at ANU expressing support for Hamas and the use of the word “intifada.” He interviewed Sara Lupton of the University of Melbourne Jewish Students Society, who complained about the encampments. The Age’s Sherryn Groch has also covered the Victorian protests with better balance, reflecting her expertise as a specialist higher education reporter.
However, stories like Om’s have been rare. In part driven by the strident calls of Liberal Sarah Henderson for a Senate inquiry into campus antisemitism, much of the coverage has instead focused on the language used by protesters and whether it is antisemitic.
News Corp titles have repeatedly reported on instances of protesters chanting slogans such as “from the river to the sea” using a conflict frame. In contrast, they have largely ignored violent incursions by pro-Israel protesters, such as the repeated violent attacks on the pro-Palestine encampment at Monash University’s Clayton campus.
On May 9, the protest encampments at 10 Australian universities released a combined statement. It reiterated the protests were non-violent and stated that “opposition to the state of Israel and to Zionism as an ideology is not antisemitism.” Guardian Australia’s higher education correspondent Caitlin Cassidy has been one of the few to have reported on it.
Protesters’ actions
Depicting protests as chaotic, disorderly or violent is a common theme of media reportage on protest movements in Western nations, such as the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, the 2011 Occupy movement, and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
American academic Douglas McLeod has termed this the “protest paradigm”, which highlights disorder and unrest while ignoring the political demands protesters make.
As scholar Danielle Brown points out in a recent article,
Rather than focusing on the grievance of protesters — that is, concerns about the deaths, injuries and looming famine affecting Palestinians — in reports of the campus encampments, it has been the confrontations between protesters and police that have become central to the news media coverage.
The media’s framing of the protests as violent and hate-fuelled has tacitly reinforced claims made by Liberal politicians such as Henderson and Dave Sharma, which are that the pro-Palestine protests are racist, even as the actions by Israel’s military that sparked the student protests in the first place have intensified.
The collapse of any reasonable middle ground in reporting on the university protests mirrors the larger polarisation of the media and civil society as a result of the conflict. An authoritative media content study in the UK from March found “most TV channels overwhelmingly promote ‘Israel’s right’ to defend itself, overshadowing Palestinian rights by a ratio of 5 to 1.”
A prominent example occurred as we headed into budget week, when the media frame of campus unrest and hate speech was well established.
On May 13, Monash University held a Yom HaZikaron memorial event at the Clayton campus’ Robert Blackwood Hall to remember fallen IDF soldiers and victims of terrorism. A pro-Palestine demonstration also turned up, featuring many of the members of the protest encampment. According to participants I spoke to, the protest was peaceful. The Yom HaZikaron event proceeded without disruption and there was no violence. Police made no arrests.
Media coverage, however, reported the Monash event using language like “clashes”, “confrontations”, “chaos” and “tensions”. The Herald Sun carried an article headlined “Scores of pro-Palestine protesters disrupt Israel remembrance day event at Monash University”, while Sky News’ Amy Roulston reported the event was “ambushed by pro-Palestine protesters … with police called in to manage the chaos”.
The ABC also covered the Monash event through a conflict lens, reporting that “pro-Palestinian demonstrators … disrupted a Jewish event at Monash University”, that they “were heard chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ — a statement criticised as opposing a two-state solution” and that “there were several confrontations between members of the groups, but police said no arrests were made.”
The unrest frame again proved salient for journalists covering the protest occupation of a building at the University of Melbourne’s Parkville campus on May 15.
“Pro-Palestine activists descended on two major Victorian universities and the state Parliament on Wednesday, creating chaos and vowing they wouldn’t leave until their demands were met,” the Herald Sun reported, while the ABC reported on “another day of student protest activity” in which “hundreds … stormed the Arts West building at the university’s Parkville campus.”
The coverage painting pro-Palestine protesters as hateful and violent has been rather quieter about the role of pro-Israel supporters, who have regularly attacked the university encampments (although, again, it has been reported by Caitlin Cassidy at Guardian Australia).
At the University of Adelaide, pro-Israel protesters used firecrackers against the camps, while at the University of Melbourne they threatened protesters with bats and fire extinguishers. At Monash University, protesters claim they were assaulted by pro-Israel counterprotesters on May 5. As Tom Tanuki has noted, it’s interesting to imagine how such violent acts would be covered if they were carried out by pro-Palestine demonstrators.
On budget day, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese fronted up for an interview with 3AW’s Tom Elliott. Elliott asked him about the “clash between two groups of protesters” at Monash University the evening before. Elliott played the PM an audio clip of protesters chanting “from the river to the sea”.
“You’re on record saying this is a form of hate speech, should something be done about these protesters?” Elliott asked. Albanese answered by arguing that “unfortunately, what that chant says essentially, is that there should be one state.” The prime minister went on to suggest that “if you asked those people chanting it, heaps of them wouldn’t have a clue, wouldn’t be able to find the Jordan on a map”.
By mid-May, University vice-chancellors started to respond to the media and political pressure by issuing misconduct charges against student protesters. At Monash University, nine students were issued with misconduct allegations on May 16. On May 20, the University of Melbourne locked the doors of its Arts West building, where students were camped, and threatened to call police. ANU, Deakin and La Trobe also issued directives to students to end their protests.
On May 21, the policing of protest speech on campuses reached its logical conclusion when the University of Queensland wrote to students to advise them that the chant “out, out, Israel out” could be considered misconduct.
Disconnection
The debate over protest speech seems strangely disconnected from the reality on the ground in the Palestinian territories. As the media has increasingly focused on the speech of campus protesters, the ground war in Gaza has moved to its most brutal and violent phase.
On May 14, the day Tom Elliott asked Albanese about whether something should be done about student protesters’ chants, the UN issued a statement estimating that approximately 450,000 civilians had been forcibly displaced by Israel’s military campaign in Rafah. On May 21, the day UQ told protesters that “out, out, Israel out” was misconduct, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes.
On May 17, Overland published an open letter from Australian academics and university staff entitled “the students must be defended, the university reimagined.” The letter condemned “the relentless media campaign to demonise student protesters, and the refusal by university leadership to engage with the reasonable and urgent political demands of the liberation camps.” At the time of writing, more than 1,000 people have signed it.
In the course of the current conflict, Israel has bombed or demolished every university campus in Gaza, leading to the deaths of thousands of students, teachers and professors. A UN report from March claims more than 80% of schools have been damaged or destroyed. After six months of military assault, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured, the UN report alleges.
It is this “scholasticide”, as the UN has called it, that protesting students have repeatedly referred to in explaining why they are occupying campuses. And yet, in calling attention to this horror, it is the students who have been labelled as violent and hateful.
Disclosure: Ben Eltham is a delegate of the National Tertiary Education Union at Monash University. He has signed a number of letters opposing the war in Gaza and supporting the rights of students to protest at universities.
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