Saturday’s planned pro-Palestine march through the streets of Sydney will go ahead unless police launch an 11th-hour legal challenge amid rising concern about unrest.
The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, said a final decision on the event would be up to the police while warning the government had been briefed by senior officers who had expressed concern about the event due to “changed circumstances”.
“The reason I’ve got concerns is primarily not because of the largely peaceful protests last week, but there are changed circumstances on the ground in the Middle East and a mobile protest would be more difficult … to contain,” he said on Thursday morning.
The premier said there was a right to protest in NSW, but “we … and the police will have absolutely no tolerance for hate speech on NSW streets”.
Minns said he believed the protesters did not want people “promulgating hate speech within their march”.
“But we’ve got to make a decision so that bad faith actors or just straight out racists don’t turn up and try and hijack it and spew hate speech on Sydney streets,” he said.
The premier and police vowed to crack down on protesters inciting hatred and violence after video of a protest earlier this month appeared to show some people in the crowd chanting antisemitic slogans, including “fuck the Jews” and “fuck Israel”. Organisers claimed those people were in the minority and police are investigating.
After a subsequent peaceful “static” protest of about 6,000 people in Hyde Park on Sunday, organisers from the Palestine Action Group (PAG) have been liaising with the police about how to safely conduct a march on Saturday.
Organisers said they had agreed on a “well known” protest route for the march with police who “have been working cooperatively and collaboratively” with them.
“We do not stand for racism, antisemitism, or Islamophobia. There is no place in our movement or at our protests for abhorrent and criminal conduct,” a PAG spokesperson said.
“We call on all people of conscience to stand with us and demand an end to the war, an immediate ceasefire, and an end to the disastrous occupation and blockade of Palestinian land.”
A NSW police spokesperson said the officers “remain in consultation with organisers”.
The NSW Greens MP Jenny Leong will be speaking at the event. She was one of 20 signatories, including 12 Labor MPs, of a letter publicly declaring support for Palestine and calling on all involved to follow international law.
The letter was released on Thursday by the NSW Parliamentary Friends of Palestine group after the federal Labor frontbencher Ed Husic warned that Palestinian-Australians had been largely forgotten in the political conversation about the war thus far.
Husic pointed out public landmarks had been lit up in support of innocent Israeli lives following the initial attack but not in support of the innocent Palestinian lives since then.
“We don’t see any public landmarks in Australia that have been lit up in red, black, white and green,” Husic told ABC RN.
“It goes to the heart of what Palestinians and those who care for them in Australia – it goes to the heart of what they think, which is that Palestinian lives are considered lesser than.”
Minns defended his choice to light the Sydney Opera House.
“We’ve got to be careful about context and we have to understand timing,” he said.
“Lighting up the Opera House in the Israeli flag was in the immediate aftermath of vicious and brutal mass murder and given those circumstances, I thought that was the right decision.
“We don’t have plans and we won’t be lighting it up further in relation to this conflict and I think that that is the appropriate decision.”
