Israel’s treatment of detainees from the Gaza flotilla has been described by its officials as “not in line with Israel’s values and norms.” But even the Australian government had to complain. Palestinian Muslims and Christians have faced far worse atrocities for more than 75 years without protest from Western Governments.

This ethnic cleansing, land expropriation, and legalised discrimination has been described by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israel’s own B’Tselem as apartheid.  Added to this, there are the over two years of genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the worsening atrocities in the West Bank.

More than 9,000 Palestinians remain in Israeli prisons, many held without charge under administrative detention based on secret evidence. Testimonies from former detainees point to a consistent pattern: torture, sexual abuse, starvation, and psychological terror. These are not isolated violations. They are features of a system operating with near-total impunity.

The Sde Teiman case should have made the pattern impossible to dismiss. In July 2024, IDF soldiers sexually assaulted a Palestinian detainee, hospitalising him with fractured ribs, a perforated lung, and severe rectal injuries.

When arrests followed, far-right government ministers stormed the prison in protest, declaring “everything is legitimate.” All charges were eventually dropped. The one person now facing prosecution is the military lawyer who blew the whistle. A UN inquiry concluded Israel had used sexualised torture and rape as “a method of war” to destroy the Palestinian people.

When Western activists are detained, governments mobilise and cameras roll but Palestinians have for decades endure far worse and the Western response is silence. That double standard is not a moral failure. It is politically enforced.

Targeting Muslims and Palestinians together

What is happening in Australia is not an abstraction. Since October 2023, anti-Muslim incidents in Australia have increased by 150 percent in person and 250 percent online.  These are figures from the government’s own special envoy on Islamophobia.

A Monash University report found the three weeks after 7 October 2023 alone saw a 1,300 percent surge in reports to the Islamophobia register. Official discourse has deliberately conflated Islam with Palestinian solidarity, framing a political movement as a religious-security threat.

That conflation is now policy. In Victoria, police can declare “designated areas” for stop-and-search operations. In one documented case, that designation was applied to a Ramadan night market in Dandenong. The message is not subtle: Muslim community spaces are being treated as security risks requiring active management.

Arresting people for words

On 14 December 2025, two gunmen killed 15 people at a Hanukkah gathering in Bondi Beach that was Australia’s worst mass shooting since Port Arthur. It was an act of murderous antisemitism but sadly it was also immediately used as political cover.

Queensland rushed through legislation specifically banning the phrases “From the river to the sea” and “Globalise the intifada.” The police minister claimed these slogans “led to people being murdered at Bondi,”  a claim the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties condemned as having no evidentiary basis, one that offensively displaced moral responsibility from the actual killers.

The arrests followed immediately. On the day the laws took effect, Liam Parry, 33, was arrested for reciting “from the river to the sea” at a protest. He faces two years in prison. Days later, Jim Dowling, a 70-year-old Catholic peace activist, was charged for holding a sign outside Boeing’s Brisbane offices. Dowling appeared in court barefoot and told the magistrate he planned to plead insanity but not on medical grounds, but because he found the charge itself insane.

NSW’s equivalent restrictions were struck down by the Court of Appeal in April 2026 as an unconstitutional burden on political communication but with the increase in laws allowing ministerial and police discretion without avenues for judicial appeal or evidence of procedural fairness appeals may be more difficult.

The machinery being built

The ASIO bill now before the Senate would make the agency’s compulsory questioning powers permanent by removing their sunset clause. And this means that anyone, including non-suspects, including as young as 14, can be detained for 24 hours of interrogation on the Attorney-General’s warrant alone, with no judicial oversight. Telling anyone you were questioned carries a five-year prison sentence.

There is plenty of evidence as to what these powers look like in practice. In 2021, the parents of an autistic 13-year-old approached police for help when their son began viewing extremist content online. Rather than help, the AFP launched a covert operation, cultivated the boy’s interest in violence, waited until he turned 14 to sidestep child protection laws, then charged him with terrorism offences.

A court eventually stayed proceedings permanently, calling the conduct indefensible. Shockingly, when the AFP deputy commissioner was asked about it, he said he would do it again. That is the machinery now being made permanent.

Antisemitism is real, it is rising, and these attacks must be unequivocally condemned. But so is anti-Muslim hate and attacks on Muslims.  However very concerning is the speed with which attacks on Jewish sites and Jewish individuals is then used to foreclose debate about Palestinian rights and to portray criticism of Zionism and Israel as being potentially anti-Semitic.

When a political movement cannot be contained through narrative, the state turns to law. When law is challenged in court, the state moves to close the courts off. When surveillance is questioned, the state mandates silence.

The scandal is not that the world notices when international activists are detained. It is that Palestinians can endure a system of dispossession, imprisonment, torture, ethnic cleansing and violence for generations  and speaking about it becomes the crime.