The Sunday Paper was born during the popular uprisings of May 2021 as an art project and an act of protest. Specifically, it was created to oppose Zionist-owned Schwartz Media, a company that has for years monopolised ‘progressive’ media, weaponising its power and influence to suffocate criticism of the Zionist entity.

The colonial agenda of Schwartz Media and other Australian Zionist organisations, highlighted through The Sunday Paper’s first two issues, has now become more widely exposed and popularly critiqued. 

At the same time, we must now acknowledge a more pervasive and less visible form of silencing. While outwardly supportive of Indigenous rights, and perhaps even self-described as radically anticolonial, many progressive publishers and organisations will quietly erase words like ‘martyr’ or ‘intifada’, and will quickly withdraw their support at the mention of armed liberation struggle. In doing so, they police the terms of resistance and determine the limits of our analysis.

It was through conversations about this shortfall that, in April 2023, The Sunday Paper was brought out of hiatus with a renewed editorial team for Issue 3: Resistance. This editorial shift preceded October 2023, yet the Al-Aqsa Flood and the genocidal escalation that followed have since laid bare what many of us already understood: that the western left, when tested by history, has overwhelmingly revealed itself to be liberal in character rather than revolutionary in practice.

The Sunday Paper’s fourth issue signals a further shift, expanding outwards with a broader commitment to Third World solidarity. We have intentionally sought voices beyond the colony — from a diversity of continents, struggles and revolutionary traditions.

Just as colonisation and occupation are violent, the overthrowing of oppression also entails violence. We know this to be true through observing revolutionary opposition to colonialism and empire throughout history: from the frontier wars of the Australian settler colony to the Mau Mau in Kenya; to Algeria, Turtle Island, Kanaky, Sudan, Kenya, and Palestine.

The Sunday Paper will continue to publish work that is uncompromising, internationalist and unapologetic — work that rejects normalisation, honours the martyrs of every anti-imperialist struggle, refuses liberal containment, and upholds the necessity and legitimacy of resistance.

Until liberation and Land Back, Co-editors of The Sunday Paper