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Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - SYDNEY — Australian police have defended their violent actions to disperse demonstrators protesting against a visit by the Israeli president on Monday night.
Isaac Herzog arrived in Australia on Monday to a warm welcome by a government determined to show solidarity with its grieving Jewish community amid mass protests by pro-Palestinian activists who consider him a war criminal.
Video emerged of police charging and punching protesters during the rally in Sydney on Monday night, with a state parliament MP among those who said they were injured in the clashes.
Officers showed "remarkable restraint", NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon said Tuesday, adding they "did what they needed to do".
Earlier, rally organizers had failed in their court bid to overturn police powers limiting their right to demonstrate during Isaac Herzog's visit.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese invited Herzog to visit as a gesture of unity with Jewish Australians after 15 people were killed at a Hanukkah festival near Sydney’s Bondi Beach on December 14.
However, Albanese’s decision to invite Herzog, the head of state of a country accused of genocide in Gaza, has angered many Australians and even led to calls for the visitor’s arrest.
After touching down in Sydney on Monday, Herzog laid a wreath at Bondi Pavilion, near the site of the massacre, as across town lawyers for the Palestine Action Group argued in court for their right to protest his visit within an area subject to new government restrictions.
Like many nations across the world, Australia has experienced sharp divisions over Israel’s war in Gaza that have spilled into protests. As many as 30 protests took place nationwide on Monday to protest Herzog’s visit.
The largest was held outside Sydney Town Hall, where police clashed with thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters Monday evening, using pepper spray to disperse the crowd and making a number of arrests. The Palestine Action Group issued a statement condemning the “brutal attack by the NSW (New South Wales) Police against a massive peaceful protest.”
NSW Police assistant commissioner, Peter McKenna, said in a news conference that police arrested 27 people – 10 for assaults against police and 17 for failing to comply with directions to move and related offences.
One video from the protests appears to show police forcibly dispersing a group of Muslims praying in the street. In response, the Australian National Imams Council released a statement calling the police conduct “shocking, deeply disturbing, and entirely unacceptable.”
Major Jewish groups in Australia, including the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Australian Jewish Association, have welcomed Herzog’s visit and condemned the protests.
As Israel’s head of state, Herzog occupies a largely ceremonial role removed from the executive decision-making led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose stated aim of destroying Hamas has resulted in the deaths of more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in 2024 for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Then last September, an independent UN inquiry found Netanyahu and Gallant – as well as Herzog – had “incited the commission of genocide.”
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The inquiry commission pointed to comments Herzog made less than a week after Hamas militants killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israelis on October 7, 2023. Herzog said “an entire nation” had been responsible for the Hamas attack.
His words “may reasonably be interpreted as incitement to the Israeli security forces personnel to target the Palestinians in Gaza as a group as being collectively culpable,” the commission found.
After the report’s release, Herzog angrily dismissed it as suffering from a lack of legitimacy.
One of the authors of the report, UN commissioner Chris Sidoti, a former Australian human rights commissioner, says the country has a legal and moral imperative to detain Herzog on arrival, though he doesn’t think it’ll happen.
“I feel quite confident that he would not even be attempting this trip if he had not received assurances from the Australian government that he would not be arrested,” he said. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has confirmed that Herzog is protected by diplomatic immunity.
An Israeli official told CNN that Israel’s justice ministry had assured Herzog and his delegation there was no threat of arrest, partly because it was a state visit and also because no warrants existed for anyone in their party.
One of Herzog’s entourage, Doron Almog, chairman of the Jewish Agency, is also the subject of a formal complaint filed with the AFP by four legal groups including the Australian Centre for International Justice (ACIJ) and Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq.
Almog, a former general in the Israel Defense Forces, reportedly canceled a planned trip to South Africa for fear he’d be arrested there by a country that took a genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice.
Unlike Herzog, Almog does not have diplomatic immunity, the lawyers said.
In an interview with The Australian newspaper prior to his arrival, Herzog said he wanted to use the trip to confront “lies and false information” about Israel.
Not all Jewish groups in Australia welcomed the visit.
The Jewish Council of Australia, a progressive advocacy group, accused Albanese of using Jewish grief as a “political prop and diplomatic backdrop.”
Hosting Herzog “risks entrenching the dangerous and antisemitic conflation between Jewish identity and the actions of the Israeli state,” Sarah Schwartz, the group’s executive officer, said in a statement. “This does not make Jews safer. It does the opposite.”
A full-page open letter signed by “hundreds of Jews” was published in two major Australian newspapers on Monday that said Herzog does not speak for them and is “not welcome.”
After the Bondi attacks, many in the Jewish community said Albanese had not done enough to stamp out antisemitism that had worsened since Israel sought to avenge Hamas’ murderous attack.
Sidoti, the UN commissioner, said the Australian government had made a “tragic mistake” by inviting Herzog to the country at a time of deep division.
“This mistake should have been corrected weeks ago,” he said. “This is a visit that will have serious consequences for social cohesion in Australia.” — Agencies
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