What if the cookies were Hamas

Antisemitism is sweeping across university campuses, or at least it is if you have the bad judgement to still be reading The Saturday Paper in this year of our Lord 2024.

In last weekend’s edition, Saturday Paper associate editor Martin McKenzie-Murray largely rehashed an article published in The Australian in May, only five months later and in twice as many words. At the centre of both articles is University of Sydney director of European studies Professor Peter Morgan, who was confronted by pro-Palestinian student activists during a lecture and has been sooking about it ever since.

Besides the fact that the students chanted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — described by Morgan as “sinister” and by McKenzie-Murray as “sufficiently ambiguous that its justification is elastic” — Morgan claims the intrusion into his lecture was antisemitic “at the deepest level” because “it identified Jews, per se, as the executors of military operations which you as a pro-Palestinian object to”. It’s at this point, some 1,600 words into the article, that McKenzie-Murray remembers to mention Morgan himself is not Jewish.

McKenzie-Murray’s thinking is more fully on display in ‘Hard Choices, Parlous World’, a recent interview published on his Substack. (I apologise for making you aware of the title.) In a 5,000-word exchange with conservative commentator Gray Connolly, McKenzie-Murray writes that “Hamas must wear responsibility” for “Israel’s response to October 7” and engages in some misty-eyed and baffling historical revisionism in which Israel and Bill Clinton’s tireless efforts to broker peace were scuttled by intransigent Palestinians.

I could go on about this but Abraham Edwards has already unpacked the many journalistic failings in McKenzie-Murray’s Saturday Paper article, and there are more important things to get to.

Last week, pro-Palestine groups on uni campuses around the country organised a National Week of Action for Palestine. Students and staff held film screenings, staged strikes and hosted tree-planting events and educational webinars.

One of these hotbeds of antisemitism was courageously shut down by University of Sydney security last Tuesday. The campus Autonomous Collective Against Racism organised a bake sale on Eastern Avenue to (antisemitically, one assumes) raise money for a family of one of their member's friends, who are in Gaza and are trying to evacuate to Egypt. (You can donate to their fundraiser here.)

"We had a really fun time the night before — cupcakes, Mars Bar slices, different cookies," says Hazel, who helped organise the event. "It was a very cute vibe."

(Reports that Hamas were physically inside these baked goods remain unconfirmed, although the fact that the cookies have not yet been carpetbombed by the IDF suggests any Hamas militants once within them have since vacated.)

About half an hour after the bake sale set up shop, students noticed a security guard "lingering," taking photos and talking on his radio. After a University of Sydney representative arrived, they were informed that the bake sale was "not in line with the campus access policy".

"They said we needed to shut down in the next ten minutes, otherwise ‘we would see what would happen’,” Hazel says. “When we tried to ask what they meant, they didn't respond. They were quite hostile and intimidating — they were very rude to us and acting like we had ulterior motives."

"Since we knew they would escalate, either by calling the police or by taking our ID cards and initiating disciplinary action like suspensions — which they have been doing to people campaigning about Palestine — we decided to move the bake sale down to City Road at the bottom of Eastern Avenue, which is technically off University property."

Last week the University branch of the NTEU sent a staff-wide email criticising security's actions, and also revealed that University management is considering "a draft email policy which would ban communicating ‘political’ issues by bulk email from university accounts”.

“It’s hard to know where to begin in saying what is wrong with this proposal, which belongs in a totalitarian state, not an institution whose core business depends on the free flow of ideas,” said NTEU branch vice-president (academic) Nick Riemer.

“Not only does the NTEU rely on its members’ ability to use school and area-level lists to communicate about important union matters; bulk email lists have been used since they first existed to share information and engage in discussion on matters of interest to staff. Recent examples include the equal marriage bill, the Voice referendum, campaigns against transphobia and other discriminations, antiracist campaigns and events, including, now, the genocide in Palestine. Under the proposed policy, communication on these topics would be outlawed.

"Staff are never obliged to read ‘political’ emails and can simply delete them. It is reprehensible – and symptomatic of a fundamental hostility to the basic function of a university – that university management could even contemplate an infantilising and paternalistic censorship regime of this, or any other, kind.”

All this happened a week before University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott hosted a town hall meeting for University staff, proving that there are still skerricks of justice in the world for those with eyes to see.

Something similar is happening at the University of New South Wales. At a special Students General Meeting on September 25, organised by student pro-Palestinian groups, students at UNSW’s Randwick campus voted 501 to 17 in favour of demanding the university divest from its financial ties to military companies involved in Israel.

The biggest such investment is Defence Trailblazer, a $250 million Department of Education initiative that, in the words of UNSW vice-chancellor and president Attila Brungs, is “aimed at driving greater integration between academia and defence industry”. Defence Trailblazer’s University partners, UNSW and the University of Adelaide, have invested $50 million of students' fees into the initiative, which offers students well-paid internships and PhD opportunities with weapons manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Thales.

The program’s executive director, Dr Sanjay Mazumdar, is a former head of engineering operations at BAE Systems, which supplies parts for the F-35 fighter jet. BAE also manufactures the M109 Self-Propelled Howitzer, a missile launcher used by the IDF to fire white phosphorus munitions into Gaza and Lebanon.

On October 22, Students for Palestine UNSW were informed by Arc, UNSW's student organisation, that their student club status had been suspended until January. The suspension means that the group is severely restricted in its on-campus activities.

“We can’t book rooms or open spaces, we can’t poster or leaflet to advertise our events, and we’re denied access to the budget that registered student clubs get,” says UNSW student and activist Jamie Tyers. “Effectively they’ve made it nearly impossible to build a protest movement.”

Arc cited the group's conducting a banner drop advertising the Students General Meeting on September 24 in the UNSW Quadrangle, writing that "some recent events may not have prioritised the psycho-social safety for participants".

Earlier in the month, a planned campus protest against Israel's bombing of Gaza and Lebanon was banned by the university. On October 3, UNSW sent an email to all students and staff advising that "investigations" were underway in connection to the students who organised the Student General Meeting.

“If you’ve ever been to UNSW, you’ll have seen lots of monuments and statues to past figures of the anti-apartheid movement, independence movements against colonialism and so on. They’re littered around our campus,” Tyers says. “Meanwhile, they have millions of dollars invested in weapons companies that are arming the genocide in Gaza and cracking down on protests against it on campus. An FOI request we filed earlier this year revealed that UNSW has $2.97 million invested in weapons companies. We need to call out the hypocrisy that this uni is filled to the brim with.”

Meanwhile, the crackdown on pro-Palestinian advocacy at Western Sydney University that resulted in the arrest of two students earlier this month has intensified.

Little to none of this has been substantively reported on, least of all in The Saturday Paper. Maybe McKenzie-Murray could find more real-life examples like these on which to base his reporting, and spend less time discovering the sound of one hand typing.

Fundraiser for Noor and Hoor Hammad

If you’ve got anything to spare, please consider giving some money to this fundraiser I’m running for Noor Hammad, a young mum in Gaza, and her baby daughter Hoor. Any money raised will be sent to Noor's brother Abdallah Abdalrahim, who lives in Sweden and can send her money directly.

What I’m looking at

• Al Jazeera — How American media incited genocide

• Mondoweiss — Israeli journalists join the livestreamed genocide

• Drop Site News — "Our job is to flatten Gaza. No one will stop us."