A 2000 Year Old European Hatred Finds Root Amongst Friends
Since its founding in 1948, the State of Israel has embodied the desperate hope of a Jewish people shattered by centuries of European persecution, pogroms, expulsions, and finally the industrialised murder of the Holocaust. What remained of European Jewry, carrying the accumulated trauma of two millennia, disembarked at Haifa or slipped across hostile borders from Syria and Egypt, often in disguise, to reach the last place on earth they could still call a homeland. For them, there was no further frontier; this narrow strip of land had to become home, or there would be none.
In its early, impoverished years Israel offered Australia and Britain little more than goodwill. It gave everything it possessed. Eight decades later, in what may prove its gravest hour amid the war in Gaza, Australia has joined much of the Western world in turning sharply against the Jewish state. In doing so, it has not only condemned a distant ally; it has imperilled the safety and dignity of its own Jewish citizens, a small but integral part of the national fabric.
A Wafer Thin Veneer between Pauline Hanson-the ALP and the Liberal Nationals
Australian Jews, many of whose families helped build the Labor Party, funded its campaigns, and fought for the very principles Australia now prides itself on having pioneered (the dismantling of the White Australia policy, the rejection of Terra Nullius, the advancement of workers’ and migrants’ rights, women’s equality), today find themselves in retreat.
In Sydney, Melbourne, and beyond, families confine themselves to their homes. Security patrols circle Jewish neighbourhoods. School principals quietly ask boys to leave their kippot at home and girls to tuck away their Magen David necklaces. The once-proud symbols of identity have become liabilities.
This fear is not aroused solely, or even primarily, by Palestinian or Arab Australians. It is the broader spectacle of the “Free Palestine” marches, week after week, that evokes the most chilling historical echoes. To many Jews, the sea of keffiyehs, the chants, the placards, and above all the enthusiastic participation of non-Muslim, Australian-born neighbours recall the photographs their grandparents kept hidden: the crowds in Vilnius, Kiev, Warsaw, and Berlin who, almost overnight, transformed from neighbours into accomplices or worse.
The Noble Profession Whispers in Ignoble Tones
A prominent Sydney silk, speaking on condition of anonymity, described watching one such march from the elevated safety of a colleague’s office. His voice faltered as he recounted what his parents and grandparents had told him about Poland in the 1940s: the sudden, incomprehensible betrayal by people they had known all their lives, classmates, patients, customers, friends with whom they had shared meals and songs. When I asked whether there had been any genuine “Jewish exceptionalism” that might have fuelled pre-war resentment, his reply was brief: “We were blamed for everything. The death of Christ, drought, unemployment, missing children, always the Jews. The blood libel never really went away; it simply changed costume.”
In the same conversation he mentioned overhearing, in professional circles that once prided themselves on civility, sneering references to disgraced Jewish figures, Marcus Einfeld held up as proof of collective failing, while the monumental contributions of Sir John Monash, Sir Zelman Cowen, or Chief Justice James Spigelman are dismissed, minimised or forgotten.
A former colleague, elevated to the High Court, had once spoken of Jewish influence in terms familiar from America’s ugliest racial metaphors. The same bar that would fiercely defend Lionel Murphy or Jeff Shaw and the many others like the more recent disgraced Dyson Heydon and his supporters on the High Court Bench against charges of judicial misconduct, now trades in casual antisemitic tropes without rebuke.
The Blind Spot Threatening
Australia’s own history contains chapters of brutality, the dispossession and worse of its Indigenous peoples, yet one does not see comparable weekly mobilisations, funded and amplified with the same ferocity, directed against the descendants of those who enacted frontier massacres. Pauline Hanson is instead celebrated. Her meteoric rise in recent months leveraged by the failures and double standards of the Albanese, Wong, ALP support of the anti Jewish tropes authored by Hamas and their supporters.
Let us be clear: the overwhelming majority of Australian Jews are appalled by aspects of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and by the extremism of its settler movement. They say so openly, often at personal cost. What they cannot accept, what reduces seasoned lawyers to tears in private offices, is the speed with which criticism of Israeli policy has licensed a broader vilification of Jews themselves. When fellow citizens march beneath banners that evoke eliminationist rhetoric, when synagogues require armed guards, when children are taught to hide their identity, the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism reveals itself to be perilously thin.
Those Who Forget The Past
Australia has also forgotten, or chooses not to remember, how often Israel’s intelligence services, quietly, at real risk to their own agents, passed warnings that helped protect this country from terrorist attacks. Some of those operations remain classified; others, such as the re-examination of the 1978 Hilton Hotel and information that led to the Sheraton Hotel raid in Melbourne in the 1980’s bombing, were unwelcome until their accuracy became undeniable. These are but a drop in the ocean of intellgence sharing gifts which Israel gave willingly to Australia without demanding a quid pro quo. Identifying Soviet agents deeep within the labour party and Australia’s intelligence apparartus is another.
This is not a plea for uncritical support of any Israeli government. It is a warning from a community that knows, better than most, how fragile civility can be when neighbours decide that one small group is the author of all their discontents. Australian Jewry will remember which political parties, which institutions, and which voices stood silent, or worse, when the oldest hatred dressed itself in the fashionable clothes of our time.
There are, gratefully, migrant communities in this country, some from places that know and have lived under tyranny intimately, who have refused to join the chorus and have instead offered solidarity. Their courage is noted, and it will not be forgotten either. There is also the insults from the bench directed at lawyers who are identifiably Jewish. Many in the migrant communities have had the same experience and understand rthe intimidation and experience Jews suffer in this regard.
In the end, this is not only about Jews. It is about whether Australia remains a society that judges its citizens as individuals, or whether it will permit ancient prejudices to be laundered through the language of contemporary politics. History is unambiguous about where the second path leads.
Krishnan Pillay
