Twenty people, including myself, were arrested yesterday for defying Queensland’s draconian new “hate speech” laws. These laws make it an offence—with only narrow exceptions—to publicly utter or display the phrases “From the river to the sea” and “Globalise the Intifada”.
The laws are aimed at silencing support for Palestine and intimidating the Palestine movement.
The arrests took place at a rally organised by Justice for Palestine Magan-djin (Brisbane) as part of a weekend of action against the slogan bans.
Ed Carroll was the first of two Jewish men arrested at the rally under legislation supposedly designed to protect Jews from antisemitic hate speech.
As he spoke, Ed challenged that premise directly, “When Palestinians say ‘From the river to the sea’, it is a call for unity, for liberation, and for peace. When Zionist Jews, Zionist Christians, Christian nationalists and Israeli nationalists use that phrase, it is explicitly a call for genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
As police moved in to arrest him, people instinctively tried to surround and defend him, chanting, “This is not a police state—we have the right to demonstrate.”
After Ed’s arrest, police escalated their response, deploying riot officers—misleadingly branded the “Public Safety Response Team”—to push back the crowd and clear the way for further arrests.
More than 30 heavily equipped officers, armed with tasers and capsicum spray, were mobilised to detain a single peaceful protester. The sheer scale of the operation made it look not just repressive, but absurd.
That absurdity was reinforced by police instructions to organisers before the rally. They had been told that police would enforce a ban only on the exact banned phrases. So “From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever” would be ignored, while “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” would trigger arrest.
Police intimidation—including the use of mounted officers—failed to break the mood of defiance. Again and again, as arrests were made, including the retired journalist, Kate Denny, the crowd chanted the banned slogan in unison.
Frustrated, police began confiscating sound equipment and megaphones. Before my own arrest, I used a megaphone to describe the Intifada slogan as a “call for mass resistance” and argued that the LNP government had introduced these laws to “demonise and criminalise our movement, and to cover for their own complicity in a genocide”.
Not long after I was taken into custody, the protest regrouped and marched to the police watch house. There, another person was arrested simply for wearing a T-shirt—bought in Sydney—bearing the banned slogan. (A warning to interstate visitors: check your luggage before arriving in Queensland.)
All those arrested were released by 9.30pm, charged with either displaying or reciting a prohibited expression, but with bail conditions banning them from attending the rally and march on Parliament the following day.
Despite this, turnout did not falter. If anything, the arrests only strengthened the resolve of those who remained. There were more than enough people ready to take the place of those the police had tried to silence.
By Mark Gillespie
