By Hebah Ali
Last Monday evening, thousands of people showed up on the steps of Sydney’s Town Hall to protest the arrival of Israeli President Isaac Herzog at the request of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who said the visit would foster “a greater sense of unity” and bring “comfort” to the Jewish community following the devastating Bondi attack in December. Instead, Herzog’s visit has done the opposite.
Pro-Palestine protests have been occurring every weekend since 2023, with the Palestine Action Group and protesters cooperating with police. I’ve been to my fair share of protests, for Palestine and other causes, and I was there last week. Never have I witnessed Police use such wide and excessive force against the civilians they are paid to protect. What many assumed would be a peaceful demonstration on February 9 ended in chaos and violence at the hands of the NSW Police.
When the shoving from the police began, things escalated within seconds. One moment, we were standing peacefully and chanting. Next, we were scrambling with nowhere to go. There were no warnings and no opportunity to opt out. I saw no rioting or even the hint of violence initiated by anti-Herzog protestors at Town Hall, only civil disobedience within the country’s laws and in accordance with citizens’ rights.
Police kettled us in. No one could access the trains. No one could find their friends. We were bottlenecked toward a building as officers closed in. As protesters panicked and tried to escape, police doubled down — deploying pepper spray into a crowd that included children, elderly people and people with disabilities. Parents shielded their children’s faces with keffiyehs, inhaling the spray themselves. Elderly people were knocked down. Skin burned, lungs rasped, eyes swelled and streamed.
After finally escaping onto Bathurst Street, many believed we would be free to leave. Instead, hundreds of police regrouped and charged down the street in intervals, continuing to pepper-spray civilians indiscriminately. NSW Premier Chris Minns claims the NSW Police only wanted to peacefully move protestors on. Yet, social media footage reveals officers punching, pushing, tackling and pinning protesters. Two officers were filmed crushing a handcuffed protester with their knees. Another repeatedly punched an older man. Is that peaceful?
What unfolded that night was not cohesion, but suppression. If the federal and state governments had truly hoped to foster “social cohesion” by inviting an Israeli leader accused of inciting genocide into the country, they achieved exactly the opposite. The Australian Government rolled out the welcome mat for a war criminal, while video footage shows local Muslim men forcibly removed from Town Hall whilst in the middle of their evening prayer, as praying women are pepper-sprayed.
When questioned on live television about the now viral footage of Muslim protesters being accosted mid-prayer, Premier Chris Minns claimed it was “out of context.” Meanwhile, television host Karl Stefanovic suggested those praying were “baiting police” — an abominable framing of blatant police brutality and Islamophobia and a (very thinly veiled) virtue signal to Israeli officials.
Other footage shows Nedal, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy, being dragged, tackled and kicked to the ground by the police. His crime? Attempting to assist the praying protesters who police had assaulted. He later appeared on ABC Radio with his mother, who said she would press charges against the NSW Police. Their seemingly unprovoked assault on a complying minor is abhorrent and requires an external investigation.
Yet Minns has rejected calls for an external investigation* into police conduct and has refused to apologise to the Muslim community for what occurred on February 9. Not only is his defence of the NSW Police hurtful, but it’s a laughable and direct contradiction of the post-Bondi attack leader, who told the media that “everyone has the right to practice their faith safely”. Just not if you’re Muslim was the quiet part of that statement, it seems.
Minns granted NSW Police additional powers ahead of Herzog’s visit after classifying it as a “major event,” enabling expanded deployment to “manage crowd safety” and “reduce the risk of confrontation.” The farcical nature of those claims is now very clear. I saw no visible effort by the NSW Police to de-escalate, and footage from the night seems to confirm this: the police were not reacting to violence; they were instigating it.
Of course, Australia has a long and ongoing history of police brutality, with violence disproportionately affecting First Nations communities. Such treatment is inexcusable, and when normalised in one context, against one group of people, it’s permitted to expand elsewhere.
A 19-year-old woman who was pepper-sprayed described the moment her perception of police shifted:
“The police were demanding that we disperse, but wouldn’t allow any movement to do so. Several officers began shoving an elderly lady, so myself and another turned around to catch her as she was falling. The police then began to unrelentingly shove and mace myself and others,” she told me.
“As I ran alone, I clawed at my eyes and throat whilst crying and screaming for help… I had a sickening realisation that the people supposed to help me were the people I was running from.”
This is not cohesion. It is fear. And it begs the following questions. Were the internationally broadcast images of Muslim protesters being pepper-sprayed during evening prayers meant to appease Herzog and other Israeli nationals for Australia’s acknowledgment of a Palestinian state in September 2025? Was the NSW Police’s clear escalation of force and suppression of protest and religious expression meant to reassure Israeli leadership? If so, the cost was borne by Australian citizens exercising their democratic rights.
If the events of the Anti-Herzog protest are anything to go by, Minns’ draconian protest laws will only endanger more citizens. If in a so-called democracy, we are being pepper-sprayed, punched, kettled, charged and intimidated in the name of “social cohesion”, it is time we inspect the germinating seeds that, nurtured by Minns’ anti-protest laws and unchecked police jurisdiction, have the power to morph democracies into dictatorships.
*The Law Enforcement Conduct Commission has since announced that it will launch an investigation into the police operation at Sydney Town Hall and surrounds on the evening of Monday, 9 February 2026, “following the receipt of a significant number of complaints”.