Labor senator Fatima Payman has rejected claims her use of a politically charged phrase promoting Palestinian freedom is antisemitic, describing these accusations as a “moral absurdity”.
In an email to Guardian Australia, the first-term Western Australian senator clarified her interpretation of the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is that it means “a desire for Palestinians to live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominating others nor being dominated over”.
Payman had used the phrase in a statement on Wednesday marking the Nakba – an Arabic phrase meaning “the catastrophe” that refers to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians around the time of the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Speaking to SBS and Capital Brief, Payman accused Israel of committing “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza and questioned how many deaths would prompt prime minister Anthony Albanese to declare “enough” before she concluded using the phrase. The Israeli government maintains that its military operations are a legitimate response to the Hamas attacks, and has dismissed allegations it is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza as “false” and “outrageous”.
Payman’s comments drew two days of criticism, including a bipartisan Senate motion condemning the phrase and Coalition senators linking its use to the “support” of terrorism.
Payman broke her silence on Friday evening in a statement to Guardian Australia, responding to claims made by the peak national body for the Australian Jewish community the chant was “antisemitic”, saying it called for “the destruction of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of its Jewish population”.
On Wednesday the co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), Alex Ryvchin, said the chant was “an old Arab supremacist slogan calling for the destruction of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of its Jewish population”.
Ryvchin said Payman “should immediately apologise for stoking hatred in such a vile way” and reconsider her position “if she can’t refrain from using racist slogans at a time of extreme tension in our society”.
Payman said the peak body needed to understand the “implications” of calling the chant antisemitic, referencing the founding charter of the ruling Israeli Likud party, which said “between the sea and the Jordan river, there will only be Israeli sovereignty”.
“That sovereignty has come at an actual extreme loss of Palestinian lives and the destruction of any peaceful prospects,” she told Guardian Australia in a statement.
“The slogan of the dispossessed, ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ is not a call for the annihilation of Jews. Rather, it asserts a desire for Palestinians to live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominating others nor being dominated over.”
The Labor senator said it would be wrong for all criticisms of the policies of Israel to be labelled as antisemitic “despite those criticisms coming from Israelis or Jews themselves”.
“Like crimes being investigated by the accused, it is a moral absurdity,” Payman said.
Palestinian authorities report that 35,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel began its military response to Hamas’s 7 October attacks, when about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 were taken hostage.
The criticism continued on Friday with opposition leader Peter Dutton calling for Payman to be booted from her seat on the parliamentary foreign affairs committee and sacked from the Labor party.
“I don’t understand why the [prime minister] doesn’t sack this senator, and the sooner the better,” Dutton told 3AW radio.
The science minister, Ed Husic, supported Payman’s right to express her concern, saying it “takes a lot of guts to go out on an issue as tough as this as a first-term member of parliament”. Husic, however, said she shouldn’t have used the phrase.
“Fatima chose to use that, I wouldn’t have done it, and I don’t think she should have,” he told Sky News.
Guardian Australia contacted the prime minister’s office to clarify whether Albanese had spoken to Payman since the comments were made.
A spokesperson pointed to comments made by Albanese on Thursday, where he said he hadn’t yet spoken to the senator. The prime minister has said the phrase is “not appropriate”.
