Internationally, some major unions have responded to the cost-of-living crisis by taking serious industrial action. Though results have been mixed, the UK has seen the most significant wave of strikes since the 1980s. In the US, some workers have won significant breakthroughs—including wage rises of 80 percent or more for some university staff, and for low-paid United Auto Workers members after their nationwide “stand up” strike campaign last year.
To drive a whole people out of their land—to turn it into something akin to the Zionist myth of Palestine, supposedly “a land without a people for a people without a land”—requires many things. Most obviously, it requires the killing and terrorising of Palestinian people on a colossal scale.
Update: Protesters will rally again outside HTA’s factory in Campbellfield (Melbourne) on Friday 9 February at 11am—see details below. 250 protesters rallied outside the locked gates of the factory on the morning of 2 February after management closed the facility for the day. The factory was also closed by a smaller protest on 1 February.
Hundreds of police swarmed around the Webb Dock container terminal in Port Melbourne on the afternoon of Monday 22 January—using horses, capsicum spray, assaults, and arrests to break up a peaceful protest that had held up the docking of an Israeli-owned ship, the ZIM Ganges, for four days.
“The Australian Government continues to work with the United States and other partners in support of the international rules-based order in the Middle East and surrounding region.”
As Israel launches a murderous offensive designed to make Gaza unlivable through bombing, starvation, thirst and a ground invasion, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong declares her solidarity. “We stand with Israel, and we always will”, she tells the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce.