Nasser Mashni

Nasser Mashni is president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) and a Melbourne property developer. In November 2023 The Age described him as "Australia's top Palestinian spokesman" and "the most prominent Australian civil society activist for the Palestinian cause"; he had met Foreign Minister Penny Wong, co-hosts the 3CR community radio program Palestine Remembered, and has donated to the Greens.

At a Melbourne rally marking 70 years since the Nakba in May 2018, he told the crowd that "Australia is the same fascist mentality as the Israeli colonial enterprise", that "We have our keys. We're going home", and led "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free". He linked the Palestinian cause to Aboriginal dispossession: "We as Palestinians know only too well the dispossession of an Indigenous people."

On his 3CR program in July 2022 he said: "The power structures that exist in the world all focus upon Zionism. Israel is the domino. Israel falls over, not just the Middle East - South America, the Africans, the world is a far better place once we destroy Western imperialist control of the world... The liberation of Earth starts with the first domino, and that's the overcoming and the decolonisation of Palestine and the ending of Zionism." Deakin University extremism expert Associate Professor Josh Roose said the comments compared to those in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: "It's laden with the same conspiratorial underpinning that posits Jewish people as all-powerful." Mashni defended the remarks, saying Zionism should "indeed fall over" because it "values and privileges Jewish life while destroying Palestinian lives" (The Age, 8 Nov 2023). In 2022 he opposed the Australian Government's listing of all of Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

The day after Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, his statement did not condemn the killings; it said Gazans had "broken through the walls" and that the assault was a "clear result" of Israel's escalating violence (The Age).

At the online Ecosocialism 2024 event he called Leila Khaled, imprisoned for her role in the 1969 and 1970 plane hijackings, "our hero", after the Australian Government refused her a visa. He told attendees "Zionists have failed and they'll never succeed" and "Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea, in our lifetime my friends" (Herald Sun).

At a Melbourne rally in February 2025, days after two Bankstown Hospital nurses were filmed saying they would kill Israeli patients, he told the crowd: "We need to speak up about those nurses who said some stupid shit. We need to be clear it's stupid... We didn't need to enter an Olympics of oppression and condemnation." In the same speech he named critics from the stage - "We're talking about you, Clint. Everybody shout, Clint, Clint, Clint" - called Mark and Jeremy Leibler "a powerful white man with proximity to power" and said "That is violence", called the Daily Telegraph a "scumbag" paper, and ended: "Melbourne is ours... The world is ours" (video posted 17 Feb 2025).

In November 2023 the Herald Sun revealed from court records that in June 1991, when Mashni was 22 and working at a milk bar in Brady Road, North Dandenong, a 15-year-old runaway stole two packets of cigarettes. Mashni chased the boy, beat him with a wooden axe handle, shoved him into the boot of his car and drove him to an abandoned paddock, where he threatened to break his legs. In June 1992 he pleaded guilty to false imprisonment, intentionally or recklessly causing injury, and threatening to inflict serious injury, and received 23 months in prison; the sentence was wholly suspended on appeal in August 1992, so he remains convicted. In a statement to the Herald Sun he said: "I am ashamed of my younger self and of the pain and anguish I caused to this young man and his family", while maintaining that "the charges were way out of scale" and that the boy needed no medical treatment (Herald Sun, Jon Kaila, 11 Nov 2023). The same month Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who had met him, told the Australian Jewish News: "Comments and actions by Mr Mashni have been reprehensible."

He has repeatedly gone to law: a 2022 complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission alleging the Federal Government's statements on Israel breached the Racial Discrimination Act (ABC); a Federal Court action with six others against News Corp, Sky News, The Australian and the Herald Sun alleging racial hatred against Palestinians (AAP); and in August 2026 he was himself sued in the Federal Court under section 18C by Menachem Vorchheimer, over 2025 posts calling Israel, Zionism and Judaism an "Unholy Trinity" (Australian Jewish News).