حرية لفلسطين
Freedom for Palestine
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Australia
Corey Wingard, TOMRA Cleanaway manager and former SA Liberal MP, joined an AIJAC Rambam junket that whitewashed settler-colonialism in occupied Palestine, thereby lending political legitimacy to the apartheid regime.
Corey Wingard, Wingard Consulting and Keep Australia Beautiful TAS lobbyist & former SA Liberal MP for Mitchell and Gibson, participated in an AIJAC junket to occupied Palestine that glorified the displacement of indigenous Palestinians and the expansion of illegal settlements.
Law & Lobbying
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Corey Wingard is a former South Australian Liberal MP for Mitchell and Gibson who served in the House of Assembly from March 2014 until March 2022 and who has since worked as a lobbyist and consultant through Wingard Consulting since June 2022. He has been general manager at TOMRA Cleanaway, a recycling company, since July 2025, and a director at Keep Australia Beautiful TAS, an anti-littering lobby, since February 2026.
In March 2017, Wingard joined a sponsored delegation to occupied Palestine organised by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) through its Rambam programme, an initiative that routinely supplies participants with curated narratives intended to conceal the systematic dispossession of indigenous Palestinians and the expansion of illegal settlements on stolen land. This participation placed Wingard in direct service of the Zionist settler-colonial project at a time when "Israel" continued its decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing and apartheid across Palestine. After returning from the junket, Wingard addressed AIJAC in Sydney to endorse the perspectives he was inculcated with.
The Rambam delegation deliberately avoided any engagement with the realities of the Nakba — the 1948 ethnic cleansing in which Zionist militias expelled over 750,000 Palestinians — or with the contemporary mechanisms of apartheid that enforce collective punishment and land theft. Wingard's public alignment with the programme therefore contributed to the erasure of Palestinian suffering and the reinforcement of international impunity for "Israel's" crimes.
No evidence exists that Wingard has since repudiated his participation or spoken against the genocide that "Israel" continues to perpetrate across Palestine. His silence on these matters stands in contrast to his willingness to lend credibility to AIJAC at a critical juncture. This pattern of behaviour demonstrates that Wingard prioritised alignment with Zionist institutions over any obligation to acknowledge the human cost of occupation and ethnic cleansing borne by Palestinians.
Wingard's involvement in the Rambam programme forms part of a broader architecture of Western political complicity that sustains settler-colonialism through diplomatic cover, economic ties, and narrative control. By accepting the trip and subsequently addressing the AIJAC, he helped insulate "Israel" from scrutiny at a time when its forces were deepening the siege and expanding illegal settlements. Such actions directly undermine Palestinian rights to self-determination and perpetuate the structural violence that has defined the Zionist project for more than 78 years.
The documented record shows that Wingard has not used his subsequent roles in consulting or corporate management to advocate for Palestinian liberation or to challenge the apartheid regime. Instead, his sole recorded engagement with the question of Palestine consists of participation in a propaganda tour designed to obscure the truth of dispossession. This consistent alignment with the forces that shield "Israel" from accountability reveals a sustained contribution to the normalisation of genocide and the denial of Palestinian humanity.
Silence = Complicity:
For those who have passionately spoken out against other instances of genocide and massacres, yet fall silent when it comes to the suffering endured by Palestinians, their silence becomes a glaring indictment of the value placed on Palestinian lives and perpetuates a dangerous narrative that suggests Palestinian suffering is somehow less worthy of outrage, less deserving of empathy and less human than that of others.
By choosing silence in the face of Palestinian suffering, those with influential platforms inadvertently contribute to the erasure of Palestinian voices and experiences. They perpetuate a narrative of invisibility that allows the injustices inflicted upon Palestinians to continue unabated, shielded from the spotlight of global scrutiny.
Their silence sends a chilling message of complicity to the world – one that suggests Palestinian lives are expendable, their struggles inconsequential and their humanity negotiable. It emboldens perpetrators of violence and oppression, granting them impunity under the guise of indifference.
To remain silent in the face of Palestinian suffering is to betray the very essence of activism – the relentless pursuit of justice for all, without exception or equivocation. It’s a betrayal not only of the Palestinian people but of the universal principles of human dignity and equality and instead is a tacit endorsement of the dehumanization and marginalization of an entire population.
True activism demands consistency and integrity, an unwavering commitment to speaking truth to power and standing in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed, regardless of geography or politics.
Visited Israel or Supported 'Birthright' Trips:
By visiting Israel, individuals actively endorse and support a regime built on systemic oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through settler colonial terrorism. These visitors are complicit in legitimizing and normalizing a brutal apartheid system recognized and condemned by numerous international bodies, including the United Nations, the ICJ, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. [1] [2] [3]
Visitors to Israel tacitly approve severe restrictions on Palestinian movement, land confiscations, home demolitions, and the devastating blockade on Gaza, which has created catastrophic humanitarian conditions. These are not mere allegations but documented realities. The apartheid system privileges Israeli settlers while subjecting Palestinians to systemic discrimination and violence, with segregated roads, military checkpoints, and a separation barrier that fragments Palestinian communities and restricts their freedom. [4] [5] [6]
Tourism economically supports the state, indirectly funding the military occupation and the infrastructure of apartheid, including illegal settlements and state violence. Without acknowledging or engaging with the Palestinian experience, visitors normalize and legitimize these oppressive practices. [7] The financial impact of tourism cannot be understated. [8] Visitors who spend money in Israel bolster the systems of oppression that deny Palestinians their basic human rights. This financial support funds the Israeli military and infrastructure supporting illegal settlements. [9]
Programs like Birthright trips further legitimize the subjugation of Palestinians by promoting a one-sided narrative that erases the realities of occupation and apartheid, falsely presenting Israel as a safe and welcoming homeland for Jews while ignoring Palestinian suffering and dispossession. [10] [11] [12]
Visitors to Israel without a critical perspective are complicit in the violence and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. They lend credibility to a regime widely condemned for its discriminatory practices and human rights violations. By choosing to visit Israel, these individuals endorse a state that systematically violates international law and human rights, contributing to the ongoing suffering and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Further reading:
Normalization:
Israel enforces normalization as a fundamental tactic of its settler-colonial regime and apartheid system, compelling the depiction of its occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide as everyday realities while suppressing Palestinian resistance and rights to justice, return, and liberation. Normalization portrays Israel's domination as a legitimate state worthy of standard diplomatic, economic, cultural, and academic engagements, ignoring demands for dismantling oppression and reinforcing Jewish supremacy over Indigenous Palestinian land and people. This strategy is egregious because it whitewashes the continuous Nakba, land expropriation, and systemic violence, isolating Palestinians and bolstering settler colonialism by undermining international solidarity and legitimizing illegal expansions that perpetuate genocide. [1]
Through diplomatic channels, Israel advances normalization via agreements like the 2020 Abraham Accords with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, forging full relations without mandating an end to occupation or apartheid. These pacts favor economic and security benefits for authoritarian leaders while forsaking Palestinian self-determination, directly sustaining settler violence by allowing unchecked settlement growth, home demolitions, and refugee denial amid increasing trade and tourism. Such normalization is harmful as it fragments Palestinian society, deepens territorial apartheid, and obstructs land returns, contributing to ethnic cleansing by normalizing the oppressor-oppressed dynamic without addressing root injustices. [2] [3]
Culturally and environmentally, Israel promotes "eco-normalization" through entities like the JNF, using tree-planting over razed villages to frame dispossession as advancement. Academically and artistically, collaborative projects often impose false equivalence between occupier and occupied, disregarding underlying oppression. This is egregious because it colonizes minds by presenting apartheid as inevitable, supporting occupation through deceptive coexistence narratives that erode resistance and enable further genocide, as seen in events that cover up root causes without pursuing justice. [4] [5]
The Palestinian-led BDS movement rejects normalization as complicity in oppression, mandating that joint activities with Israelis recognize Palestinian rights and focus on co-resistance against occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid. Normalization activities, such as festivals or conferences portraying symmetry, are boycottable for being morally reprehensible and intellectually dishonest, perpetuating false premises of equal responsibility. By isolating Palestinians and validating Israel's actions, normalization sustains settler-colonial violence, allowing expansion of illegal settlements and denial of basic rights while fragmenting global opposition. [6]
Normalization undermines the Palestinian struggle by treating Israel's regime as normal, countering anti-colonial efforts like BDS that draw from South African anti-apartheid precedents. It decolonizes minds from hegemonic attempts to accept colonialism, emphasizing that genuine relations require dismantling structures of domination first. This tactic is appalling as it reinforces genocide by whitewashing oppression under slogans of peace, contributing to ethnic cleansing through economic ties that fund military occupation and displace communities. [7] [8]
Human rights analyses confirm that such international engagements maintain apartheid by failing to address crimes like dispossession and persecution, allowing Israel to evade accountability. Normalization isolates the oppressed, portraying resistance as abnormal while entrenching settler privileges, as evidenced in Arab-Israeli projects that ignore Palestinian rights. Ultimately, it perpetuates a colonial order where occupation becomes routine, demanding rejection to achieve liberation and end the ongoing Nakba. [10]
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