"What is there to fear if we speak the truth?"

On Friday, around 350 federal, state and territory public servants released an open letter addressed to Anthony Albanese and members of his government in which they demanded that Australia “take swift and decisive action to end its support of the genocide, ethnic cleansing and illegal occupation of Palestine by immediately ceasing all military exports to Israel.”

Since then, the open letter has been signed by nearly 2500 public servants from all levels of government. Unusually, each signatory took the additional step of signing their name. In some cases, signatories included information about which government department employs them.

As laid out in the Australian Public Service Code of Conduct and its state and territory equivalents, public servants are typically prohibited from expressing political viewpoints in their work capacity to prevent the perception of bias in the public service.

However, numerous public servants are speaking out in defiance of that prohibition.

Hash Abdo has been a public servant in the NSW Department of Housing for 20 years. His father and grandparents were expelled from Jaffa in 1948, and his family eventually settled in Australia. He has four kids.