On December 1, 2023, two months into Israel’s escalating genocide in Palestine, Colombian president Gustavo Petro linked the unwillingness of wealthy global North countries to deal with capital-induced climate change to the management of global South populations deemed disposable because they were forced to migrate as a consequence of that unwillingness. Speaking at the UN climate conference, Petro warned that what is happening in Gaza is a blueprint for fascism globally in dealing with surplus populations:
I invite all of you to imagine a combination of facts — the projection of the climate crisis in five or ten years and the current genocide of the Palestinian people. Are these facts disconnected? Or can we look at Gaza as a mirror of the immediate future? The unleashing of genocide and barbarism on the Palestinian people is what awaits the exodus of the peoples of the South unleashed by the climate crisis.
What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.
That future is already here. Researcher of settler colonial technologies of repression, Alex Avina, perhaps describes the present monstrous state of affairs even more aptly. Avina writes:
We live in an era of global disposability; that is, in an era marked by the power and ability of states to mark entire communities and peoples as disposable surplus populations. We watch in real time as Israel commits genocide in Gaza. We watch weaponised land and seascapes along with border police and border technologies like “smart” fences and drones killing migrants by the thousands. We watch how economic sanctions starve entire countries.
Climate change, imperial wars, and the US fondness for collective punishment in the form of sanctions continue to generate more and more mass refugee displacement. Global north nations have responded by betting on more Apartheid walls, more border police, more surveillance, more genocide. A rather stark, uncomplicated choice thus emerges: do we side with the wall-builders and their Apartheid counterinsurgent technology that kills refugees in places like the Sonoran desert or the Mediterranean sea, or those who yearn to storm and smash walls with their dreams of a more just, free future for all?
We’re gathered here today at Kuyunba, about 500 metres away from the gates to the Pine Gap targeting facility. I say targeting facility and not spy base, because National Security Agency (NSA) documents and the Edward Snowden leaks prove that Pine Gap provides targeting data for US drone and missile strikes in places such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Gaza, Yemen and Somalia, to name just a few. Pine Gap is a place of aggression, a place of counterinsurgency. Pine Gap is a place where people are made disposable in the most literal sense. Pine Gap is integral to the global US war machine. As a former US National Security Agency employee put it, drones are “like the tip of the spear but the rest of the spear is actually the global communications surveillance system” of which Pine Gap is one of the most important parts.
“The repressors”, says Alex Avina, “the torturers, the killers, exchange knowledge, weapons and technology between themselves. They circulate best practices on how to manage, render disposable, and dispose of entire populations. It’s a lucrative business”. Some of these killers work here. It’s not a secret, we can name them – Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, Amentum. They all work out of this facility.
We have committed to gathering here fortnightly to resist the violence of this installation and demand its closure. We resist the colonial violence of its imposition on Central Arrernte country. We resist the militarised and racialised surveillance in the Northern Territory, the incarceration of Indigenous youths across this continent, and the narrative warfare in our mainstream media and political offices against First Nations people that combined reproduce the conditions of colonial dominion that enable US military installations to be sited on this continent. It goes without saying that no permission was sought from traditional custodians, nor was permission granted, for the alienation of this land and the construction of a military base on it.
We gather to resist the imperial violence that this base perpetrates abroad. In the 59 years that Pine Gap has occupied Arrernte country, the US has violently intervened in at least 80 countries. The base has provided targeting information and signals intelligence, facilitating illegal military aggressions from Vietnam and Cambodia to Yemen and Iran. There are no less than seven intelligence-sharing agreements between the US National Security Agency, which operates out of Pine Gap, and the Israeli Signals Directorate. Pine Gap provides intelligence to the Israeli military, which is committing the holocaust of our times in Gaza.
We gather to resist the US and Australian military build-up across northern Australia. For the fiscal year 2024/2025, northern Australia is “the top overseas location for U.S. Air Force and Navy construction spending, with more than $300 million set aside under the U.S. congressional defence authorisations for those years”, Reuters reports. Over the next decade, the Australian government will spend $30 billion on “hardening and upgrading” northern military bases, “partly to meet US requirements and partly paid for by the United States”.
As we are gathered here today to struggle against militarism, colonialism and imperialism, the Talisman Sabre war games – a giant exercise in sabre-rattling – are taking place across northern Australia, Christmas Island, and Papua New Guinea. The games involve over 20,000 US troops and 10,000 Australian troops and have been described as “the most expansive and complex warfighting exercise ever conducted in Australia”. They pose a serious threat to the environmentally sensitive areas where they are taking place. The climate footprint of the exercises is likely to be enormous. There are at least 20 major warships transported to Australia for the war games, and dozens of military cargo aircraft deployed. The US military, the biggest player in these war games, is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases on Earth and one of the world’s biggest industrial polluters.
These war games are a significant health risk to nearby communities, many of which are Indigenous. A 2020 study of military training exercises in Puerto Rico found that “the sudden end of bombing practices is associated with a 56–79% decrease in the incidence of congenital anomalies of nearby populations”.
One area where these war games are taking place is the Bradshaw field, in the Kimberlies, just outside of the majority-Indigenous community of Timber Creek. The Bradshaw Field occupies 871,000ha of rainforest, woodlands and grass plains on the lands of the Ngaliwurru, Jaminjung, and Nungali peoples.
The story of the Bradshaw field shows how colonialism on this continent enables imperialism abroad. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute likes to boast that the “wide open space” of the Bradshaw field, one of the biggest military training areas in the world, is a key means of servicing Australia’s military alliance with the US and other so-called regional allies. The reinscription of northern Australia as a “terra nullius” available for violent and extractive uses is a precondition for these multi-national military exercises.
The field was recently upgraded with “significant US investment” to enable training exercises like the Talisman Sabre war games, making it something of a hybrid training field and potential military base in the event of war fighting.
Just last week we learnt that on at least two occasions this year, F-35 fighter jet parts have been sent from the RAAF base Tindal, just outside of Katherine, to Tel Aviv, Israel, to meet parts shortages there and allow Israeli F-35 jets to continue to carry out their sociopathic bombing campaigns on Gaza, southern Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria, to name just the places the Israeli military is currently bombing.
Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet features heavily in UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s most recent report on corporate actors profiting from the genocide in Palestine.
“Post-October 2023, F-35s have been integral to equipping Israel with the unprecedented aerial power to drop an estimated 85,000 tons of bombs, much of it unguided, to kill and injure more than 179,411 Palestinians and obliterate Gaza”, – she writes. Apartment blocks, hospitals, universities, schools, bread lines, mosques and churches.
The news of the F-35 components transported from Tindal to Tel Aviv ought to put to an end the Australian government’s shameful efforts to mislead us all and deny that it is transporting weapons to Israel. The Australian government should’ve ended its two-way weapons trade with Israel long ago. The Australian government should’ve ended intelligence-sharing from this facility long ago. The Australian government should’ve implemented an energy embargo long ago. The Australian government should’ve sanctioned Israel long ago.
Across the globe, people are rising up against the genocide of Palestinians, against fascist governments and against militarism. As we gather here, anti-genocide and anti-war Palestine solidarity activists are gathered in Canberra for the first of a three-day event marking the opening of the 48th Australian parliament. They are gathered to demand that the Australian government end the two-way arms trade with Israel, end intelligence-sharing from this facility, end coal shipments to Israel, and sanction Israel now. We stand in solidarity, love and rage with them. To borrow the words of Taylor Miller – if Australian governments are so set on investing in war, in genocide, then our foremost task is to upend the reality that makes this horror permissible, and we must lock arms not only while envisioning an end to this genocidal economy—but across this desert, against these walls; towards liberation and return.