By Helen Reynolds
There is something profoundly surreal about watching the Sydney Marathon become entangled in the politics of a war being fought half a world away.
On Sunday, tens of thousands of ordinary Australians will lace up their running shoes and take to the streets of Sydney for what is supposed to be a celebration of endurance, community and human achievement. Among them, however, will reportedly be up to 40 current and former members of the Israel Defence Forces and associates, including personnel linked to the Golani Brigade, a unit that has operated extensively in Gaza.
And the response to their presence has been extraordinary.
Pro-Palestinian campaigners are calling for a last-minute boycott of the marathon, while NSW Police are reportedly preparing to provide personal protection for IDF personnel during the race. In other words, an event advertised as a celebration of sport and international friendship has acquired the security arrangements of a political summit.
That raises an obvious question: why are people with alleged links to military operations in Gaza being welcomed into Australia to participate in a public sporting event, while Australians and foreign nationals who have protested against Israel’s conduct in Gaza have faced extraordinarily close scrutiny over their political activities?
This isn’t simply a question about the Sydney Marathon. It is a question about Australia’s immigration and character-testing standards, and whether they are being applied consistently.
Australia’s Migration Act does not restrict the character test to people who have already been convicted of a crime. The legislation expressly allows the Minister to consider whether there are reasonable grounds to suspect that a person has been involved in genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture or other crimes of serious international concern – even where neither the person nor anyone else has been convicted.
That makes the question rather difficult to avoid.
If there is credible evidence that an individual seeking entry to Australia may have participated in serious international crimes, surely the appropriate response is investigation, not simply an invitation to run 42.195 kilometres through Sydney under police protection.
And there is an uncomfortable irony here.
Australia has demonstrated that political activism can attract serious attention at the border. Yet people who have served in a military accused by international bodies of grave violations in Gaza are apparently able to arrive for a sporting event without the Australian public being told what scrutiny, if any, was applied to their military histories.
To be clear, serving in the IDF does not automatically make somebody a war criminal. Nor should anybody be denied entry merely because they are Israeli, Jewish or politically supportive of Israel. Individual responsibility matters. Evidence matters. Due process matters.
But precisely because those things matter, the Australian Government should be able to answer some very straightforward questions:
- Who are these people?
- What units did they serve in?
- Where did they serve?
- What did they do?
- Were any of them involved in operations in Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon?
- And most importantly: were those backgrounds examined before they were allowed into Australia?
Those are not unreasonable questions. They are the questions a functioning character-screening system is supposed to ask.
The Sydney Marathon should be about running.
But when police have to provide bodyguards for foreign military personnel while protesters are calling for a boycott, perhaps the race has already crossed a finish line nobody expected it to approach.
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I couldn’t agree more and by allowing these people to participate, it divides Australians. Our Police should not have to provide security for them ever as they are not citizens of Australia.
They refused Bassem Youssef.
Why not stop this ugliness, for a “Sydney Marathon” is not about fun, general health, even some memorial; it is just a bent corporate grabbo and lookatme promo, possibly with tourism promotion imagined. Israelis anywhere now are tainted, and some involved here are surely supremacist deluded ingrained superstitious irrational chosenrace blessedfolk. Poo.
This is beyond disturbing.
A marathon invites all runners to participate and often the challenge they set themselves is personal. Certainly not political.
Good luck to everyone participating. I could only dream of such an accomplishment.
No matter which side of politics you are on, Sydney Marathon just became an unsafe event. This could have been easily avoided.
Part of a speech that Richard Flanagan recently gave courtesy of Deepcutnews:
I recently came across a story in Haaretz, the last significant opposition newspaper in Israel, which told of a remarkable Israeli called Lee Mordechai[1]. A mediaeval scholar, Mordechai has over the three years of the Gaza war compiled an online report called “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War“. Referencing thousands of sources, including eyewitness reports, video footage, investigatory materials, articles and photographs, Haaretz described it “as the most methodical and detailed documentation yet of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza”.
“My role as a historian,” Mordechai is quoted as saying, “is to give voice to those who cannot sound their own voices, whether they were eunuchs in the 11th century or children in Gaza.“
The report goes on to describe the unspeakable horrors Mordechai has documented.
Here’s an example: the numerous reports that have come out of Gaza of crying drones: at night IDF drones play the sound of crying babies and screaming women to lure people out of their shelters to help—only to then shoot them.
Here’s another example: the testimony of a distinguished British surgeon who worked in Gaza in 2024 to a British parliamentary committee. Professor Nizam Mamode—and I quote from the BBC report—”broke down as he described children’s accounts of being shot by quadcopters.
“The 62-year-old surgeon told MPs: ‘What I found particularly disturbing was that a bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area and then the drones would come down.’
“His face shook with emotion as he paused for several seconds to compose himself.” He continued: “The drones would come down and pick off civilians – children. We [were] operating on children who would say: ‘I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.’“[2]
According to UNICEF, 21,289 children have been killed in Gaza.[3] The World Health Organisation calculated that in 2023 one child was being killed every ten minutes.[4]
Asked which of the thousands of images of horror had had the greatest impact on him, Mordechai spoke of a photo of the body of a 62-year-old man run over by a tank, his body mangled beyond recognition. His hands were ziptied, indicating he was detained when killed.
“I have never in my life seen anything like that,” Lee Mordechai told Haaretz. “But worse than that was the fact that the image was shared by soldiers in an Israeli Telegram group and got very favourable reactions.” The image was captioned: “You’re going to love this!”
He goes on to finish his speech with a special story.
To end where I began: the Haaretz interview with the mediaeval scholar, Lee Mordechai. After their interview, Mordechai sent the journalist a last link. It was not about Gaza, but a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, called ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Ormelas.’
I found the story and read it.
Ormelas is a beautiful city full of beautiful, happy people. Ormelas’s society is one of harmony and beauty and joy.
“All is perfect,” writes Le Guin, “except for one detail: in a tiny, windowless cellar room there is locked up a naked, starving child, that sits in its own excrement in the darkness. It is feebleminded, perhaps from starvation, perhaps for other reasons, fear, neglect, God knows. All the people of Ormelas know the child exists …
“They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place … in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Ormelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms … The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.
… The[y] [people of Ormelas] know that they, like the child, are not free … It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science.
And so no one does anything to end the child’s suffering.
Le Guin ends her haunting story this way: “very occasionally a young person or occasionally an old person fall silent for days. Then they go out on the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and they walk straight out of the city of Ormelas … they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they are going towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness … But they seem to know where they’re going, the ones who walk away from Ormelas.”
It’s time each of us began to walk towards our most fundamental freedom—to name, to point, to bear witness to the truth. It’s time all of us began to walk away from Ormelas.
Thank you Helen, for raising this issue.
And thank you Thommo for a great comment.
The reference to Ursula le Guin took me back a bit.
I’m reading her exploration of the Tao te Ching at the moment, but many years ago I read her great short story The Day Before the Revolution.
Although written after her novel The Dispossessed, it’s regarded as a Prologue to the novel, and it’s linked to Thommo’s story of Omelas.
It’s available here, free:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-day-before-the-revolution
Le Guin has written a foreword to the short story:
My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn’t get into the action — except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.
Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism. as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.
To embody it in a novel, which had not been done before, was a long and hard job for me, and absorbed me totally for many months. When it was done I felt lost exiled — a displaced person. I was very grateful, therefore, when Odo came out of the shadows and across the gulf of Probability, and wanted a story written, not about the world she made, but about herself.
This short story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas.
And how is Omelas linked to today?
Omelas is the liberal world order.
Young people want change, but Dissent must be silenced.
Invited by the treasonous Zionist Council of NSW, granted visas by the gutless Australian government, and protected by an army of violent cops sent by NSW state Premier Mossad Minns.
https://maximgrosky.substack.com/p/running-with-murderers
@ Thommo: Never under-estimate the cruelty of the US armaments manufacturers. In Iraq kids were blown up, or crippled by losing limbs, or disembowled by armaments deliberately designed to be mistaken for American toys.
So Scummo thought the USUKA sub debacle was a suitable defence alliance with one of the grubbiest ”democracies” in the world. What some people will do for a too well paid political bribe.
I wish I was as nice a person as Helen, but I ain’t.
We are talking about allowing people from a nation committing genocide against the Palestinian people, so that they can continue to steal their land.
As Caitlin Johnstone pointed out, you don’t have to be a Rhode scholar, or Buddist monk to oppose a genocide, you just don’t have to be all fucked up inside.
The last Pew Research Centre survey of Israeli support for the actions of the IDF, that I’ve seen, had support amongst Jewish Israelis at well over 90%.
Israel is dispossessing Palestinians in the West Bank as we speak (or read and write, to be more precise.) Yet, I’ve not read of any protest amongst the population.
In an ABC interview, I believe last Thursday but haven’t been able to confirm, a senior Israeli officer impuned the character of Zomi Frankcom and her colleagues that Israel murdered, by saying that they were ‘not innocents’. What was the Labor government response – crickets.
Australia, imo, should have cut off trade, sent the Israeli embassy packing, and closed our borders to Israelis long before now, as part of actions to prevent a genocide that we could be taking. Instead, Labor has Australia kissing their feet at every opportunity.
While we’re on it, Labor has once again abrogated its responsibility to Australians by deferring to Israel’s own investigation into the murder of Zomi Frankcom. It was Labor’s responsibility to investigate, they sent someone over to Israel, who took something like 8 months to defer to Israel’s investigation. Two years later and an obvious Israeli cover up (was that result ever in doubt) and all Labor did is whinge until the issue blew over.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the results of the AFP investigation into the rape and assaults by Israel of the members of flotilla that tried to bring aid to Palestinians.
(disclaimer: I saw an article referring to the ABC interview, and congratulating the journalist, but in searching for that article haven’t been able to find it yet. I did find reference to an interview with an Israeli colonel, who said he wasn’t sorry he ordered the hit on Zomi Frankcom and her colleagues, but not reference to saying they weren’t innocent.)
The stinking rotting carcass of a party, Labor, has become a stain on Australia’s history.
Haven’t found the original article talking about the ABC interview yet, but I did find the following on dropsitenews, which will do:
”
Drop Site Daily
Israel kills three in first airstrike on West Bank in 10 months; Judge again blocks Trump order on mail ballots; Over 2,500 dead or missing in Nepal
Drop Site Daily: August 28, 2026
Drop Site News
Aug 29, 2026
Israeli soldiers gather outside a home under construction following a drone strike killing of three Palestinians, on the western outskirts of the northern city of Jenin, in the occupied West Bank on August 28, 2026. Photo by Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP via Getty Images.
Friday, August 28, 2026 – Israeli strikes kill eight Palestinians in Gaza on Thursday and Friday. Civil defense teams recover 233 bodies in Gaza. Israel bombs house in Jenin in first strike on occupied West Bank in 10 months. Israeli forces raid Nablus; settlers obstruct Friday prayers. Israel detains about 370 Palestinian children, report says. Israeli commander says he is “not sorry” for ordering strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. “Severe food insecurity” in Gaza, according to latest UN figures. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi: “Putting diplomacy back on track isn’t impossible.” U.S. Central Command gives updates on blockade, Strait of Hormuz. Iranian Security Chief Mohsen Rezaei demands U.S. “fulfill Iran’s conditions” to reopen Hormuz, threatens U.S. economic interests if blockade continues. Iran war has depleted Patriot interceptors to “beyond critical” levels. U.S. President Donald Trump expected to meet with American oil refiners. Saudi-backed Yemeni government says soldier killed in Taiz. Israeli violations continue across southern Lebanon. Israel claims Hezbollah launched two explosive drones at troops. Trump signs order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” amid Canada trade dispute. Judge again blocks Trump’s mail-in voting order days before ballots ship. Fired Stars and Stripes journalists sue Pentagon over dismissals. Gas industry group boasts of shaping NY Gov. Kathy Hochul’s pipeline reversal. U.S. negotiating for stake in Venezuela oil fields. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission finds reasonable cause that Cisco subjected pro-Palestine workers to hostile workplace. UN envoy registers concern with “open-ended Israeli military presence in Syria.” Syria’s president appoints former Kurdish SDF commander as advisor. Kuwait, Pakistan sign joint defense agreement. Nepal-Tibet flood death toll rises to 552. Sudan’s RSF-SPLM-N forces claim capture of two army bases in Blue Nile fighting. Two more U.S. deportees arrive in Eswatini under third-country agreement. Jakarta police detain over 300 after protests. Qatar pledges support for Libyan unity during Benghazi visit. Palestine Action activists charged with “terrorism” offenses over Trump golf course protest.
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Palestine
Israeli strikes kill eight Palestinians in Gaza on Thursday and Friday: At least four Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip on Friday, according to WAFA. In southern Gaza, three Palestinians from the Abdeen family were killed when an Israeli drone targeted Al-Qarara, northeast of Khan Younis. In Gaza City, an Israeli drone strike on a group of Palestinians in the Al-Sabra neighborhood killed one and wounded several others.
Israel killed four Palestinians and wounded several others, including children, in attacks across Gaza on Thursday. An Israeli strike on a tent sheltering displaced Palestinians near Gaza City killed one and wounded others. Another Israeli airstrike hit a bicycle in central Gaza City, killing one Palestinian and injuring several.
Israeli forces shot and wounded a child in Qatar Camp, east of Hamad City.
Civil defense teams recover 233 bodies in Gaza: Gaza’s Civil Defense said its crews recovered 233 bodies and human remains from beneath the rubble of 20 homes destroyed by Israeli forces in the Gaza governorate, out of 407 people believed to have been buried there. Among those recovered were 73 children and 106 women.
Israel bombs house in Jenin in first strike on West Bank in 10 months: An Israeli military drone struck a house under construction in the Horsh Al-Saada on the western outskirts of Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Friday, as large numbers of Israeli forces entered the area. It marked the first Israeli airstrike on the West Bank in around 10 months. Reporting from the area, Drop Site contributor Mujahed al-Saadi said that the house was struck with at least two missiles and that Israeli troops deployed to the area immediately after the attack, preventing ambulances from reaching the targeted house, and detained Palestinian medical workers who arrived on the scene.
Three Palestinians were killed in the strike, according to Reuters.
The Israeli military claimed it had carried out a “precise strike” targeting what it described as “several terrorists.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the strike on X: “I commend our forces for the successful elimination of the terrorists in Jenin. Shabbat shalom!”
Israeli forces raid Nablus; settlers obstruct Friday prayers: Israeli settlers dressed in military uniforms prevented Palestinians from attending Friday prayers at the Al-Wali and Al-Haj Hussein mosques in Beit Furik, east of Nablus, WAFA reported. Separately, Israeli forces raided the village of Tal, southwest of Nablus, searching homes and detaining one Palestinian and seizing his vehicle.
On Thursday, Israeli forces fired sound bombs, tear gassed Palestinians, and sparked fires near homes during a raid on the village of Al-Lubban Asharqiya.
Israel detains about 370 Palestinian children, report says: Approximately 370 Palestinian children are imprisoned in Israeli detention centers as of early August, most at Megiddo and Ofer, according to a report published on Thursday by the Palestinian Center for Prisoners Advocacy.
In the report, children describe Israeli forces raiding their homes at night, taking them away blindfolded and handcuffed, beating and threatening them, and denying them food, water, and bathroom access.
During interrogation, children reported experiencing prolonged questioning, isolation, sleep deprivation, and threats against their families.
Inside Israeli prisons, they face overcrowding, insufficient food and hygiene supplies, restricted family visits, and delayed or denied medical treatment.
Israeli commander says he is “not sorry” for ordering strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers: Nochi Mendel, who ordered three Israeli drone strikes on the World Central Kitchen (WCK) convoy in Gaza in April 2024, defended his decision to Australia’s ABC on Thursday, after he was removed from his post over serious failures and breaches of procedure.
Mendel claimed WCK had “ties to Hamas” and was “not really… innocent,” although he acknowledged he did not know of those alleged links when he ordered the attack.
Israel declined to pursue a criminal investigation against the commander.”
@ Thommo: Agreed.
Then we should also export all ZION@ZIS to any overseas port willing to be infected by their exceptionalist self-serving philosophy & practices. There is no place for individuals in a modern Australia who wish to live in a misogynistic world here, today.
Another example of Albanese and LABOR bending over for the establishment and taking the ”political donations” rather than representing the equitable ideals of modern Australian society.