This blog post was originally written by AFSA Focal Point for Farmers, Tammi Jonas. For more, you can subscribe to her Substack here. 

In 1991, I was a 20-year-old kid in the streets of San Diego, marching and chanting against the American-led Gulf War in solidarity with the people of Iraq and Kuwait. I didn’t know their names or their faces, but I knew their struggle was tied to mine — because every bomb that falls on a farm, a family, or a city is an attack on all of us.

Now, more than thirty years later, I watch my grown kids out in the streets, marching in pro-Palestinian rallies, demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza and the escalating colonial violence in the West Bank. The torch of solidarity has passed from one generation to the next. And still the fight is the same: to resist the brutal machinery of empire, capitalism, and colonisation that grinds people down and tries to convince the rest of us to look away.

We will not look away. The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is standing with Palestine, and we stand with Hakoritna Farm, who are under direct threat of destruction by Israel. Hakoritna is more than a farm — it is food sovereignty made flesh, agroecology in action, a refusal to surrender land or life to a system built on dispossession. If Hakoritna falls, it is not just her farmers, their community, and Palestine who lose — it is all of us who dare to imagine a future where communities enjoy safety, security, self-determination and control of our own food systems.

Here on Djaara Country, Jonai Farms is facing a much smaller but telling fight. A handful of lifestylers continue to try to block our micro-abattoir project — infrastructure that dozens of small farmers need to survive in our region. It won’t destroy our homes or take our lives like the threat hanging over Hakoritna and the peoples of Palestine, but the logic is the same: those with money and power using it to crush those who dare to build something different, something just.

Meanwhile, dairy farmers across so-called Australia break their backs for processors who refuse to pay them a fair price. No matter how hard they work, they can’t escape the stranglehold of a consolidated industry that dictates the terms. And livestock farmers? If the closures of abattoirs continue, our livelihoods will vanish. Without abattoirs, we cannot feed you.

So to our non-farming allies who do what you can to ‘vote with your dollar’ — listen carefully: you won’t even get the chance if smallholders are pushed off the land, if the abattoirs are gone, if even more dairy farmers are forced to sell up. If we’re not on the ballot, who is there to vote for?

This is why solidarity is not charity. It is survival – for all of us. It is defiance – for all of us. It is the knowledge that the struggle of a farmer in Palestine is bound to the struggle of a farmer on Djaara Country, that lives taken in Gaza are tied to weekly marches in Naarm, that none of us can be free until all of us are free.

So stand up. Stand with Hakoritna. Stand with dairy farmers. Stand with the fight for abattoir access. Stand with all who resist the crushing weight of a system that would see us gone. Because the choice is clear: solidarity or surrender.

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

By German pastor Martin Niemöller, 1946