Who We Are
Free Palestine Coalition Naarm
is a Melbourne-based antizionist, anti-imperialist coalition for building working-class mass organising to end the occupation of Palestine, in solidarity with First Nations and oppressed peoples across nations and borders.
The Zionist regime is accelerating the military offensive on Gaza and provoking a regional war. Australia supplies arms to the Zionist regime and provides diplomatic, economic and political support for its genocidal campaign. We have campaigned for 10 months against Australian support for the genocide.
Australian capitalism is in crises, caused by the inability of capitalists to generate sufficient profits. Issues of unaffordable housing, inflation, joblessness and homelessness are soaring, while the Australian government is investing in the arms industry to save capitalist, imperialist interests. Since October, the Australian Labor Government has not withdrawn its policies regarding military trade with Israel and manufacturing weapons parts, instead expanding Australia's militarisation.
The west and western-allies support the Zionist regime militarily and economically. Very few states have cut diplomatic or economic ties with the Zionist regime despite its massacre of over 40,000 Palestinians.
The international community and its post-Holocaust order has made false promises to the Palestinians and colonised nations since 1948. Global capitalism, upheld by the international order, is dependent on war-making to sustain itself, expanding military budgets and investing in the war machine to solve the capitalist problem of excessive production, falling profits and to defeat competition.
History and the current experience of mobilising against the Gaza Genocide suggests that appealing to liberal-democratic capitalist governments does not work. It also shows that the ‘duty to protect’ is only enacted when it aligns with western imperialist interests and it is against western imperialist interests to militarily intervene against the Zionist regime. After the Arab Spring, organised groups in the region that call for the cutting of ties with the Zionist regime are met with authoritarian repression, mass incarceration and torture, disappearances and other forms of intimidation. Although Palestinian liberation has mass support, organisers have not achieved mobilising populations to aid Gaza under the conditions of Western-supported military rule and dictatorship.
In Western states such as settler colonial Australia, Palestinian liberation has minority support, facing opposition, racist scapegoating and isolation. However, an organised mass movement in ‘Australia’ and first-world western capitalist contexts has the potential power to hinder the Zionist regime’s ability to enact the genocide when workers cease the means of production.
Free Palestine Coalition Naarm seeks to build the local power necessary to stop the Zionist genocidal war by stopping the supply of arms to Israel. To do this, The Coalition seeks to participate in the workers movement, proposing industrial action campaigns and industrial bans on the Zionist regime, moving the workers movement towards imposing sanctions that hinder the Zionist regime’s ability to continue its genocidal attack.
Organising to stop the genocide
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Free Palestine Coalition Naarm opposes Zionism and considers it a colonialist, racist ethno-supremacist ideology governing the capitalist, settler-colonial apartheid Jewish state.
The Coalition rejects normalisation deals with the Zionist regime and opposes the two-state solution. The Coalition opposes investing in efforts to rehabilitate progressive, liberal Zionism; we support oppressed and working class Israelis fighting together with Palestinians to end the occupation.
To defeat Zionism, The Coalition supports international sanctions on Israel and a process of decolonisation in Palestine that ends Apartheid, dismantles settler-colonial and capitalist structures, frees Palestinian prisoners, grants Palestinians the Right of Return and initiates a process towards Palestinian justice and Israeli accountability.
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The Coalition is committed to building solidarity with First Nations people and working-class, racialised, colonised and oppressed groups in ‘Australia’.
The Coalition is also committed to opposing authoritarianism, in solidarity with revolutionaries in the SWANA region struggling against western and non-western imperialism and postcolonial capitalist authoritarian regimes.
Members of the Coalition live and struggle on the unceded sovereign lands of First Nations peoples. Members recognise the importance of growing Black-Palestinian solidarity in supporting Indigenous Sovereignty and disrupting Australia’s alliance with Israel.
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The Coalition understands imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, recognising that the Australian colonial capitalist state acts as a middle imperialist power that wages, finances and supplies war.
The Coalition recognises that the shackles of western imperialism strangle the Global South, shackles that can be broken through revolutionary transnational, internationalist workers solidarity.
“Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution.” — Ghassan Kanafani
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The Coalition learns from and draws on radical lineages of anticolonial, anti-capitalist revolutionary mass struggles, those that won revolutions and those that failed.
We understand that Palestinian resistance to the occupation is a collective obligation and a right that must be defended by the Free Palestine movement.
The Coalition is an aboveground organisation that is committed to strategies and tactics that encourage the participation of working-class and disadvantaged communities.
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The Coalition acknowledges the need to build mass workers power, Black power, and Migrant and Refugee power organising coalitionally with groups and individuals from different political backgrounds around shared agreements.
The Coalition builds a culture of working coalitionally to oppose the forces of fascism, racism, capitalism and imperialism.
