An anti-Zionist audit

Activity for an access and ethics rider

Land Acknowledgement

I’m working on this commission during my travels between Yuin and Wurundjeri lands. These lands were invaded, stolen and remain under colonial occupation. Indigenous resistance is ongoing.

My contribution to the access and ethics rider workshop is based on my personal experience navigating and solidifying the ethical requirements of my own practice as an artist, writer and picture book maker based on Yuin land.

Does Zionism in Australia really matter?

Australia was among the first to ‘recognise’ the ‘legitimacy’ of the illegitimate Zionist colony as it was conjured up by European white supremacists and imposed on stolen and Palestinian land through mass slaughter and displacement. The Anzacs participated in the massacre of Palestinians as early as 1918, and Australian soldiers later helped lay the groundwork for the 1948 Nakba. The Australian state continues to support the Zionist entity militarily, financially, ideologically, institutionally, diplomatically and culturally.

Australia’s fundamental complicity in the ongoing colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine necessitates our opposition to Zionism as a matter of urgency. We must also recognise Palestinian armed resistance as an essential part of Indigenous liberation struggles globally.

It is under the guise of ‘progressive’ cultural production that Zionists launder their genocidal colonialism, weaponising their influence within these spaces to amplify occupation propaganda and steer cultural narratives away from Palestinian liberation.

Before working with an institution, organisation or publisher, anti-imperialists must be satisfied that we are not colluding with Zionism. Positions of power within these organisations are made possible — and are maintained by — the cultural capital that we provide through our creative work, placing a responsibility on us to wield this capital ethically.

We must also be assured that our work will exist in separation from external Zionist groups that may exert influence over an organisation’s existing power structure. These may appear as donors, media partners, or funding or advisory bodies.

Currently, we are watching the continued, daily atrocities of Zionist aggression on Palestine, Lebanon and neighbouring homelands. Palestinians, in cooperation with other members of the resistance axis, are confronting the horrors of colonialism with their very bodies and lives; the least we can do is bear the minor discomforts of refusing institutions complicit in their deaths.

Accountability

An ethics rider assumes that an institution or organisation will accurately and honestly self-report on its own ethical limitations and compromises, and that it seeks to accommodate our ethical requirements.

However, we know that the Australian arts and publishing economies extract their wealth from the maintenance of a contradiction: despite the ubiquity of land acknowledgments, and a near-universal obsession with liberal identity politics, the vast majority of Australian arts organisations and publishers are deeply violent colonial institutions that happily capitalise on the aesthetics and vibes of decolonialism — just so long as the grip of colonialism is never actually, materially challenged.

More specifically, these organisations are often found to be direct accessories to the Zionist project in Palestine, while facilitating Zionist propaganda and the censorship of Palestinians on this continent.

Since the Al-Aqsa Flood resistance operation of 7 October, and during this most recent and horrifying escalation of the Zionist entity’s decades-long project of genocide in Palestine, Lebanon and neighbouring homelands, there has been a growing popular interest in exposing and expunging the deep rot of Zionism from within arts institutions, as well as from newsrooms, publishing houses, healthcare providers and many other industries.

For this reason, the organisations we commonly work with have become increasingly deceptive in their self-reporting. For example, we have seen lists of funding bodies and donors deleted or hidden from websites. We have also seen a proliferation of vague and tentative, both-sidesing acknowledgements of Palestinian victimhood (although very rarely of the Palestinian right to armed resistance and national liberation).

And so, as organisations take steps to downplay their Zionism, the responsibility falls to us — the individual artists, writers and creators — to undertake due diligence.

The audit

Choosing your organisation

Select an institution or organisation to audit. This may be a gallery, theatre, art centre, publisher or media organisation that you are working with, or that has offered you work. It may simply be an organisation you follow on social media, whose platform you have engaged with as a viewer, listener or consumer.

The organisation’s political veneer

How does the organisation position itself publicly? Read the organisation’s ‘about’ page and/or mission statement. Does the organisation lead with a land acknowledgement? From this, what might we suppose about its relationship with settler colonialism?

Search the organisation’s posts and statements and note any gestures or messaging on the low-hanging fruit of liberal politics: e.g ‘Change the date’, ‘Vote yes’, Black Lives Matter black squares, or support for Ukraine.

Silence on Palestine

Has the organisation remained silent during almost a year of observable genocide in Palestine? Does it claim, in this instance alone, to be ‘apolitical’? If so, how does this silence compare to its messaging on other political issues?

Statements on Palestine

If the organisation has made any statement about Palestine, what language is used? What was the organisation’s response to 7 October? Has the organisation aligned itself with US imperialist and Zionist messaging on the occupation of Palestine? Some common red flags include:

  • Explicit or implicit condemnation of Palestinian armed resistance (a legal right specifically endorsed under so-called ‘international law’)

  • The regurgitation of now-debunked atrocity propaganda orchestrated by the Zionist entity (mass rapes, beheaded babies, denial of the Hannibal directive, etc.)

  • Dog-whistles like ‘terrorism’ to describe Indigenous resistance, and other racist tropes

  • Avoidance of the term ‘Palestine’, opting instead for ‘the Palestinian people’, or evasive geographical references like ‘the Middle East’ or ‘Israel and Gaza’

  • Fence-sitting, and limited goals such as ‘ceasefire’ and ‘peace’ for ‘both sides’ rather than an end to colonial occupation and the liberation of Palestine

  • The normalising of the oppressor and/or erasure of the oppressed. Framing the genocide as the ‘Israel-Hamas war’, the ‘Israel-Gaza war’ or ‘Israel defending itself’

  • Attempts to shift our focus onto the red herring of ‘antisemitism’

  • Padding out the statement with meaningless platitudes and hand-wringing, rather than addressing the clear material circumstances of imperialism, colonialism, occupation, land theft and genocide

Statement example #1: Meanjin Quarterly

The following excerpt is from an editorial statement released by Esther Anatolitis on behalf of progressive literary journal Meanjin Quarterly on 22 February 2024, after five months of silence on the current wave of genocidal escalation:

I condemn all forms of racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, and all forms of discrimination—today and always. I denounce all acts of terrorism. I diminish my fear for the future with the courage of those who speak difficult truths. I strive to support that courageous work—today and always.

Statement example #2: ACCA

The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) self-describes as ‘leading the cultural conversation and setting the agenda for contemporary art’. This excerpt is from ACCA’s evasively titled ‘Statement in support of artists’, published in November 2023:

In seeking to encourage cultural participation and debate, we aim to extend a duty of care and respect for the diverse perspectives which reflect our communities, whilst we resolutely stand against all forms of hate speech, bigotry and discrimination, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.

At this distressing time, we express our deepest sympathies to those affected by the devastating events in Gaza and Israel, which are deeply felt in our own communities. We join in calls for an end to violence and the pursuit of peace.

Who holds power?

The language of collectivity — ‘our team is committed to…’, ‘our board believes…’, ‘our editorial policy…’ — provides a level of opacity; obscuring the fact that organisations are composed of individuals, who have names, make decisions and have agency.

What does the organisation’s power hierarchy look like, and who are the individuals? You can usually find this information on an organisation’s website under ‘Meet our staff’, ‘About us’, ‘Our board’, ‘Who we are’ or similar.

What other roles, relationships, affiliations or allegiances do these individuals hold? With what other organisations or boardrooms are they members, thereby establishing financial or ideological links.

Find out as much as you can about these individuals. Search their names alongside ‘Israel’ and other Zionist-colonial nomenclature e.g. ‘Tel Aviv’. Conduct this audit, from the top, on organisations with which these power-holding individuals are affiliated.

Who holds influence?

How might the organisation be compromised by funding, donors, founders, financial or media partnerships, or by advisory bodies? This information may typically be found on dedicated pages on an organisation’s website: ‘donors’, ‘our partners’, ‘media partners’, ‘our supporters’ or similar. Nate that some organisations have recently made efforts to conceal this information, Melbourne’s Rising Festival being a notable example:

Following a number of artist withdrawals, Rising went into a frenzy of damage control: editing and reordering its website multiple times over the course of a fortnight in order to hide, de-emphasise and finally to remove information about the central role of the Besen Family Foundation as both major funder and originator of the blue-and-white-lit festival.

Having deleted receipts, the festival then attempted to dismiss artists’ concerns as ‘speculation about our sources of funding’.

Their eventual ‘Message on the Middle East’ was exactly the kind of cowardly, equivocal nonsense we’ve come to expect from arts organisations throughout the imperialist anglosphere.

For this reason, it is often necessary to seek your organisation’s recent annual reports or other documents detailing its activities, affiliations and financial structure. These can often be found online, separate from the organisation’s website or social media presence, or requested from the organisation.

Find out as much as you can about the external groups and individuals who fund and support your organisation. These groups and individuals may, in turn, employ various levels of opacity to conceal their links to the occupation of Palestine. For example, an art centre or publisher will rarely advertise a direct relationship with unambiguously violent colonial organisations such as the Zionist Federation of Australia, the Jewish National Fund, New Israel Fund or the United Israel Appeal. And yet, these financial and ideological relationships can often be established through a degree or two of separation.

It will soon become clear that a small number of Zionists, Zionist companies and Zionist ‘philanthropic foundations’ have strategically cornered Australian arts and media over decades. These few wealthy propagandists are toxic and ubiquitous, intimately entwined with each other, and deeply connected to the Zionist occupation entity and its leadership.

Some often recurring names include:

Mapping

Create a map of your chosen organisation. You may like to draw a physical diagram with your organisation at the centre and concentric lines of connection spreading outwards, encompassing the levels of hierarchy, power and influence with which your own work will partake.

If undertaking this audit in a group, look for ways that your diagram may intersect or connect with other participants’, contributing to a larger map of your industry.