The Baxter Detention Centre in South Australia was used for the mandatory detention of asylum seekers between 2002-2007. In 2003 detainees protested and set fire to the facilities over the Easter Weekend protests. This happened again with worse results in 2005, but then Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone said that acts of vandalism and self harm […]
By Sam Levnad This article was originally published in Arena Magazine. How can we work towards refugee and asylum-seeker rights while acknowledging Aboriginal sovereignty? The death in September last year of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Kurdish Syrian boy, filled the front pages of international media. Aylan, along with his elder brother, Galip, and his mother, […]
It’s been noted here, there and everywhere, that the Melbourne Jewish community, as a general rule, continues to support the Jewish National Fund and the United Israel Appeal, despite widely available evidence of corruption and embezzlement in those organisations. Here are two items from mainstream Hebrew media, both by Raviv Drucker, detailing the extent of […]
The Refugee Council of Australia has issued the following statement (3/2/17), of which the AJDS is signatory, along with countless other organisations: We, as a coalition of organisations and community groups from around Australia, are writing to express our concern regarding the humanitarian crisis that Australia has created. Successive Australian governments have managed and funded offshore […]
Last year Behrouz Boochani wrote in the Guardian about arriving in Manus Island: “Twenty-eight months ago, with a shattered body which was ravenously hungry and deeply wounded, with bare feet and exhausted soul, I made the trip to the soil of free territory, to Australia. It was four days after the announcing the 19th of […]
It was on International Holocaust Memorial Day this year, after issuing a statement that made no mention of Jewish – nor any other – victims of the Holocaust, that Donald Trump signed an Executive Order banning people from 7 predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. The effects were swift and brutal: people who […]
While the world focuses on the Occupied Territories, the plight of Israel’s Bedouin citizens has gone largely unnoticed. The Bedouin communities of the Negev (Naqab in Arabic) desert have been subject to Israeli policies of forced relocation and home demolitions, which has heightened in recent weeks. These moves have been pushed by the Israeli government […]
Ongoing campaigns by Animals Australia and several Israeli NGOs, about which we’ve recently posted, are proving to have some traction. So far as to prompt Uri Arial, Israel’s Agriculture Minister, to say this: The issue of shipping live animals to Israel from Australia for slaughter is a very painful one and we are working in […]
This year we continue to stand firm in our commitment to acknowledging our privileged presence on this land, traditionally owned by the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin nation. We are equally committed to bringing about change in our own as well as others’ perceptions of their role in ongoing colonisation. Read our Statement […]
Since we are proudly hosting acclaimed Gazan chef, Laila el-Haddad, for her Australian tour in April 2017, it is timely to consider Palestinian food traditions and their plight since the Nakba. This is of course the catastrophe of 1948, brought on primarily by Zionist colonisation of Palestine. With continuing military occupation, ensuing separation and atomisation […]
