I got this scarf back in 1989, when I was half the age I am now. A friend of mine was an archaeologist and I went on a dig with him in Jordon. I needed it to protect myself from the sun. It was a working item then, just as it is now.
I’ve been coming here every Sunday since the Melbourne Free Palestine protests began in 2023. To start with we held rallies every week. Now they’re monthly, and in between we hold static protests. As with the static noise you used to get with analogue radios, we’re still there in the background.
I believe we’re experiencing a collapse of the world’s moral order where the Israeli government now dominates and tolerates no competitor. It targets organised society, wanting the complete breakdown of societies around them. That’s what the Israeli military is doing in Lebanon right now, as it did 20 years ago. The government sets one religious group against another to try and collapse the country. It wants chaos. It’s the world’s leading killer of journalists, of health care workers, and it has nuclear weapons. You name it, the Israeli government has no compunction.
I like reading about the Middle East. T E Lawrence is an important western figure. He was a soldier who worked with the Arabs in the First World War. Lawrence became very disillusioned when they were betrayed in the peace treaty at the end of the war, through breaking the promise of Arab independence.
This betrayal has continued in different forms. The few Arab countries that have found oil, have been ripped off by westerners for a long time. The West doesn’t like the fact that some countries have managed to wrest back control. You can see this through Trump’s interest in countries with oil.
The pattern on my scarf is a symbol of Palestine. You know that saying “what did you do in the war daddy?” For me it’s a matter of keeping faith, and standing up for what I believe is right.
