Dear Palestinian Protester,

Your movement stands at a crossroads. Around the world, the Palestinian cause has attracted unprecedented attention, yet instead of using this moment to build genuine peace and coexistence, you have exposed yourself once again as contradictory and hypocritical in your anti-war, social-justice, humanitarian stance.

The killing of two Jews in Manchester on October 2, 2025, which was Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day, and the subsequent pro-Palestinian protest that went ahead in Manchester and across the UK demonstrates again the true nature of your aggressive and intolerant campaign.

Week after week, your rallies have not focused on coexistence, negotiation, or peace.

Your slogans include ‘One solution, Intifada revolution’, ‘We don’t want two states, we want 1948’, ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free’, ‘All Zionists are terrorists’, ‘Globalise the Intifada’, ‘Keep the world clean (of Jews)’, ‘Israel are the new Nazis’, and ‘Victory or Death’.

You have unmistakably cast the entire movement as one-sided, nihilistic, and hostile.

In Australia, I watched how a pro-Palestinian protest hit Sydney streets, perhaps even to celebrate, only days after the massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.

Flares were fired, Israeli flags burned, and chants of ‘Where’s the Jews’ and ‘F**k the Jews’ could be heard.

Within days, police officials claimed nothing happened.

The Deputy Commissioner of NSW Police fronted the cameras and announced that no evidence of anyone shouting ‘Gas the Jews’ was found and instead that protesters had merely shouted ‘Where’s the Jews’ – a phrase that makes no sense at all but would provide the backdrop for a campaign of national gaslighting and two years of relentless Antisemitism.

The largest of your Palestinian protests, the so-called March for Humanity, featured portraits of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s theocratic ruler who calls for the destruction of Israel and funds genocidal terror groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi militias. It featured the burning of the Australian flag, the familiar ‘death to the IDF’ chants, and the usual gaslighting by our national broadcaster which still described the rally as ‘peaceful’.

But peace is not measured by the absence of police incidents – it is measured by intent. The rhetoric, imagery, and chants made it unmistakably one-sided and aggressive.

By contrast, at every pro-Israel rally, synagogue, and Jewish community event I have seen or attended here in Australia, I have heard calls for peace in Gaza, for peace with Palestinians, and for the return of the Israeli hostages.

There is a consistent rejection of Hamas terrorism, but not of Palestinian lives or self-determination.

The difference in tone between our two camps is the difference between wanting peace and demanding annihilation. People remark that we shouldn’t create an ‘Us and Them’ divide – but it seems inevitable at this point.

Even our own government’s recent efforts to address this divide have fallen short because they refuse to confront its underlying causes which are the real drivers of today’s Antisemitism and Islamophobia.

The primary driver of modern Antisemitism is the false narrative that Israel is committing genocide, practising apartheid, is an illegitimate state, and is ethnically cleansing ‘Palestine’ of Palestinians.

These claims have created a subculture where harassment, doxxing, excommunication, and even physical intimidation are recast as moral acts; the targeting of Jews and Israel’s supporters are a new form of justice.

Violence against so-called ‘Zionazis’ (Zionist Jews) is reframed as a humanitarian duty, because what could be more righteous, apparently, than ridding the world of these ‘new Nazis’ conveniently embodied in the collective Jew known as Israel.

It is rarely acknowledged that the United Nations is a political body of 193 member states and it is not a court. Its Human Rights Council and commissions issue advisory opinions, not legal judgments. The only international judicial bodies with authority, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, have not found Israel guilty of genocide. If anything, the ICC’s warrants concern alleged war crimes, not genocide.

Moreover, few realise that the UN Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda item devoted solely to Israel. It’s called Item 7 and it guarantees that Israel will face more resolutions, debates, and condemnations than any other nation on Earth. In practice, this means that Israel is discussed at the UN more often than countries engaged in mass atrocities, ethnic cleansing, or systemic repression such as Iran, China, Russia, North Korea, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose human rights records are objectively far worse. I think we can reasonably ask whether that helps peace or entrenches polarisation and bias within our global institutions.

But these nuances are lost in a culture that glorifies ‘resistance’ above reason.

By refusing to acknowledge this reality, we deny Australians an honest discussion about social cohesion. If we are serious about building that cohesion, we must refuse to showcase terrorist propaganda as fact, show leadership by rejecting Nazi slurs and Holocaust inversion routinely thrown at the Jewish people, recognise that relentless demonisation of Israel is the greatest driver of Islamist radicalisation and Antisemitism across the world, and call out genuine anti-Palestinian and anti-Islamic rhetoric by all extremists.

The opportunity for coexistence exists, once again. We have been at this junction before. From the Oslo Accords to Camp David and now with the Trump Gaza Peace Plan. Will it be met with the same routine violence that has followed every other attempt at peace?

We are two years on from the horrors of October 7 and mass polarisation has filled every crevice of our society. Our government has taken a symbolic step in recognising a Palestinian state, is now not the time to stop glorifying violence? Stop chanting intifada? Stop promoting Palestinian rejectionism of Israel? And start calling for peaceful coexistence.

I have no wish to see my children fighting the same war in another generation. Do you?