Opinion
World-renowned psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in his 2014 bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, writes that traumatic experience is not just a historic event; its impression is left on our brain and body. Perhaps that explains my visceral reaction to the images of NSW Police in Sydney aggressively charging and punching those protesting visiting Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
As a South African Jewish Australian in my 70s, I find myself painfully watching my home mirror the authoritarian reflexes of the regime I fled. Many Jews gave their lives for that struggle. That memory heightens my alarm at what is unfolding in our Australian parliaments and streets.
Having worked in Gaza and the West Bank through three Israeli wars in the 2000s, I have seen the most horrible edges of the conflict directly. In the past two years, at least 20 of my former humanitarian worker colleagues have been killed. I know the depth of the grief and the complexity of the history of that blood-soaked place.
On Monday night, as I watched the footage of police behaviour in Sydney, I felt a physiological reaction: a tightening in the chest, lump in the throat and nausea that I hadn’t felt since the 1970s.
Rather more than a well-practised strategy or even a lapse in crowd management, this looked like a state overreaching into intimidation. Any sense of a democratic contract for free assembly and speech was dismembered rather than just strained when police moved with such hostility against citizens congregating and marching peacefully.
Growing up in South Africa during the height of apartheid, I have run in panicked crowds with people wearing the pain of broken limbs from baton charges, the air cracking with gunshot, and eyes streaming from tear gas. I witnessed directly the machinery of a state trading its vestigial moral authority for the support of an ideological base. I left that life for Australia, believing I was moving to a place where the right to disagree was fundamental to the national character.
By moving to criminalise speech and assembly, our leaders are treading a dangerous path. The banning of peaceful expression, whether through the outlawing of political language or the banning of peaceful rallies, is anathema to a free society. A democracy is defined by its tolerance for the space it affords the peaceful dissident.
When a state suppresses speech, it does not dissolve the underlying tension – on the contrary, by compressing it, it makes it more volatile. When kettling (containment) and charges become a standard response to protest, we have become ruled by the threat of force. This is not a civil society.
While Sydney’s streets were witnessing unilateral aggression, I attended a rally in Brisbane. The contrast was profound. Scores of Queensland police were present, as they have been over the past 28 months. As always, they were professional, alert and friendly. The atmosphere was entirely peaceful. Hundreds raised their voices and their placards and order remained intact. It proved that when people are afforded the dignity of freedom of speech, the temperature of a city drops.
Yet even this sanctuary of common sense is under threat. Only days before that peaceful assembly, the Queensland government announced plans to criminalise specific phrases, including “from the river to the sea” and calls for “intifada”. The state that just demonstrated it could manage a peaceful protest with restraint has now pivoted toward the role of the authoritarian.
As a Jew, I will proudly stand to be arrested, ostensibly for antisemitism. I did not spend my 20s active against a regime using violence to subordinate rights and silence its critics only to spend my twilight years watching Australian governments do the same. A free society is loud, it is often controversial and offends some, and is frequently inconvenient for others and those in power. That is precisely why its protection is essential.
We must remind our leaders that they and the police serve the people, not the political optics of the day. If we allow this slope to get any more slippery, we may find that we have lost the right to speak before we even realised it was at risk. Australia should be careful it doesn’t have to learn the lesson of my experience.
Trauma is not a static or historic memory. It lives in the brains and bodies of the Australian Aboriginal community, 800,000 Australian Muslims, yes, and Jews. We don’t just remember past state violence; our bodies physically anticipate its return.
Stephen Heydt is a retired clinical psychologist with 40 years of experience in trauma recovery and disability.
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Stephen Heydt is a Jewish Australian who has lived and worked in Gaza and the West Bank.