Australia and Palestine: Settler Colonialism’s Playbook

Different lands. Same tactics. Shared resistance.

Last week was NAIDOC Week here in Australia. A time to celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, while also reckoning with the ongoing struggles for justice and recognition.

I found it quite confronting – scrolling through videos of Palestinians being bombed, starved, displaced, and dehumanised in real time, while reflecting on the history of genocide, colonisation, and displacement in my own country.

The connection between these two struggles has become impossible to ignore.

Two Indigenous peoples.

Two continents.

But the same fight – for land, dignity, and the simple right to exist.

Photo by MARTIN KEEP/AFP via Getty Images

When I attended my first pro-Palestinian protest in 2023, I remember the green, red, black, and white of Palestinian flags snapping in the wind. The keffiyehs. The watermelon shirts. The cardboard signs calling on the government to act.

Before the protest began, a Ballardong Noongar man, Des Blurton, stepped up to give the Welcome to Country. He paused, scanned the crowd, and said:

"Their struggle is our struggle."

And that's when I finally saw it – Aboriginal flags flying alongside Palestinian ones. "Always Was, Always Will Be" signs next to "Free Palestine." The colours bleeding into each other like they’d always belonged that way.

That day on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja was an awakening. A shift from witnessing to truly seeing the parallels between Palestine and Australia. Because they aren’t just symbolic. They’re material. Historical. Ongoing.

I feel some shame that I didn’t notice these connections sooner. But that’s why I’m writing this: to sit with that realisation. To trace the connections between settler colonialism in Australia and Palestine. Not just as shared suffering, but also as shared resistance.

Photo by Jordan Humphreys via Red Flag

Settler colonialism

I grew up believing colonialism was something tragic that happened way back then. A flag planted in the dirt. A ship arriving on shore, hundreds of years ago.

But I understand now: it never ended. Colonialism isn’t a chapter tucked away in an old history book. It isn’t over.

It’s still here, ever-present. As historian Patrick Wolfe once put it: settler colonialism is not an event, it's a structure.¹

It breathes through laws and policies.

It adapts its violence to each generation.

It persists.

In Australia, this started with the lie of Terra Nullius – that this land belonged to no one.² That 60,000 years of culture, ceremony, and connection just... didn't count.

In Israel/Palestine, it’s the same story.

As David Ben-Gurion said in 1915, Jewish settlers would "turn the wasteland and desolation (Palestine) into a flourishing oasis, as did the English settlers in North America."³

Same playbook, different continent.

Both systems built laws and policies not just to steal land, but to erase the people who were already there, from land and memory.

Language

One of the first things colonisers attack is language.

In Australia, Aboriginal languages were systematically banned in missions and schools.⁴ Children were beaten for speaking their mother tongues. Of the 250 languages spoken before invasion, only 120 are still spoken today, with even fewer being passed down to children.⁵

In Israel/Palestine, Hebrew dominates courts, government, business, universities, and media. Arabic was stripped of its official status in 2018.⁶ Street signs in Arabic are often vandalised or removed. Place names, many of which have Arabic roots, have been systematically renamed in Hebrew.

This linguistic hierarchy is a form of cultural domination. It teaches Indigenous people that their language, and by extension, their history and identity, are illegitimate.

Erasure

Colonisers aim to erase Indigenous histories.

In Australia, Aboriginal history was left out of school textbooks for decades.⁷ Cultural ceremonies were banned. Sacred sites and regions were renamed after British figures or English words – Uluru became Ayers Rock, Boorloo became Perth.

In Israel/Palestine, entire villages were depopulated during the Nakba (1948) and renamed with Hebrew names.⁸ The Palestinian flag was banned for decades. Palestinian prisoners aren’t even allowed to study settler colonial histories like Australia’s.

Appropriation

But colonisers don’t just erase, they appropriate.

In Australia, Aboriginal dot paintings are often mass-produced and sold to tourists. Sacred sites like Uluru were climbed for decades and commodified for tourism, despite their spiritual significance.⁹

In Israel/Palestine, Palestinian dishes, like hummus, falafel and tabbouleh, became "Israeli cuisine."¹⁰ The Dabke, a traditional Palestinian dance, is often performed at Israeli festivals as part of “Israeli heritage.”¹¹

What colonisers can’t control, they destroy.

What they can profit from, they steal.

Military and surveillance

Colonisers treat Indigenous peoples not as custodians, but as problems to be managed.

In Israel/Palestine, the Israeli military maintains one of the most powerful and advanced surveillance systems in the world.¹² Cameras and armed watchtowers are dotted around cities. Drones buzz overhead constantly. Armed checkpoints control movement between neighbourhoods. Homes are raided at night.

In Australia, the control is less visible but no less real. During the Stolen Generations, Aboriginal people needed permits to marry, to work, and to leave missions.¹³ In 2007, the Australian government sent troops into Aboriginal communities under the guise of “protection.”¹⁴ Homes are searched at night without warrants.

In both cases, Indigenous people are painted as dangerous. Unable to look after themselves. In need of surveillance. These are convenient lies that justify the violence that follows. All while claiming to "protect" them.

Police and prisons

When control fails, punishment follows.

In Australia, Aboriginal people are among the most incarcerated people on earth, making up 3% of the population but over 30% of the prison population.¹⁵ Children as young as 10 are jailed for minor offences.¹⁶ Deaths in custody remain rampant, with little accountability.

In Israel/Palestine, over 10,000 Palestinians are currently imprisoned – many without trial, held indefinitely under “administrative detention.”¹⁷ Children are frequently jailed for throwing stones, forced to sign confessions in Hebrew. A language they often can’t read.

When simply existing is treated as a crime, prisons become just another tool of colonisation.

Children

Colonisers target children. Because children carry the future.

In Israeli prisons, young and old Palestinian prisoners were once held together. Older prisoners became teachers, passing down history and culture. When authorities realised this, they split them up.¹⁸ Isolate the young, weaken the resistance.

In Australia, during the Stolen Generations, children were forcibly removed from their families. The intentions were clear. As one 1947 official put it: “It is infinitely better to take a child from its mother and put it in an institution than to allow it to be brought up subject to the Aboriginal influence.”¹⁹

The goal is always the same: break the bond between generations. Stop the language, stop the ceremonies, stop the stories.

A shared resistance

And yet, despite all of it, they resist.

In Palestine, when Israeli authorities banned Palestinian flags during the First Intifada, women stitched them into dresses.²⁰ Palestinian farmers constantly replant olive trees after Israeli bulldozers tear them up.

In Australia, Aboriginal communities hold ceremony on mined and fenced land. Even after Aboriginal languages were banned in schools, families continued teaching children at home, embedding words into lullabies and stories.²¹

This is more than survival. It's creative resistance. It’s the insistence that no amount of violence can sever the bond between a people and their place.

As NAIDOC Week ends and Gaza’s genocide continues, we have a responsibility to keep naming these connections. Settler colonialism depends on us not seeing them. On pretending these struggles have nothing to do with each other.

But they are not separate. They are chapters of the same story.

And the more we recognise that, the more powerful our solidarity becomes.

Always was. Always will be.

Free Palestine.

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623520601056240

2. https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/unsettled/recognising-invasions/terra-nullius/

3. https://www.palestine-australia.com/assets/Uploads/Indigenous-Australian-and-Palestinian-Experience-A-Comparison.pdf

4. https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/social_justice/sj_report/sjreport09/pdf/sjr_ch3.pdf

5. https://www.commonground.org.au/article/indigenous-languages-avoiding-a-silent-future

6. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/19/one-more-racist-law-reactions-as-israel-axes-arabic-as-official-language

7. https://www.utas.edu.au/about/news-and-stories/articles/2017/323-history-textbooks-still-imply-that-australians-are-white

8. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/15/the-nakba-five-palestinian-towns-massacred-75-years-ago

9. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160738321000402

10. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/heres-why-palestinians-object-to-the-term-israeli-food-it-erases-us-from-history/2020/02/14/96974a74-4d25-11ea-bf44-f5043eb3918a_story.html

11. https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/jatip/article/1587/&path_info=28_2_2_Systematic_Cultural_Appropriation_and_the_Israeli_Palestinian_Conflict.pdf

12

13. https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/missions-stations-and-reserves

14. https://www.monash.edu/law/research/centres/castancentre/research-areas/indigenous/resources/the-northern-territory-intervention/the-northern-territory-intervention-an-evaluation/what-is-the-northern-territory-intervention

15. https://www.uts.edu.au/news/2024/05/first-nations-imprisonment-record-high#:~:text=In%202023%2C%20First%20Nations%20people,Nations%20people%20to%20be%20imprisoned.

16. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqz8gyp500o

17. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/17/a-nation-behind-bars-why-has-israel-imprisoned-10000-palestinians

18. https://www.palestinecampaign.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/child-prisoners-factsheet-v2-CORRECTED.pdf

19. https://www.carrolup.info/mr-neville-removing-aboriginal-children-from-their-family/

20. https://www.guernicamag.com/elizabeth-a-mcinerny-fabric-of-resistance/

21. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-elimination-of-aboriginal-languages-and-the-legacy-of-colon/10731474?utm_source=chatgpt.com