Jews form a minuscule proportion, around 0.2 per cent, of the world’s population and nowhere are they are safe. Sydney lies almost 10,000 miles from the sites where Nazi death camps in Poland once stood, and the distance from Tel Aviv is only slightly less. Yet the new world is no more impervious to the lethal fanaticism of antisemitic hatred than the old. It never recedes.
Jews celebrating the first day of Hanukkah – the festival of light, and in essence of religious liberty – at Bondi Beach were pitilessly targeted by gunmen. Eleven now lie dead, including a British-born rabbi. Faced with such barbarism, politicians have a natural instinct to appeal to common decency in contrast to what they wish was aberrant behaviour. This message is well-intentioned but misleading.
While the facts of the case have yet to be fully established, it is already clear this was not an arbitrary attack on Australian citizens. It was a lethal assault on Jews for being Jewish. And Jews worldwide will be rendered more vulnerable if the threat continues to be obfuscated.
The atrocity at Bondi Beach is horrific but not exceptional. It is a reprise of the murderous attack on Israelis by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and on Jews more widely since – including those attending the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester on Yom Kippur two months ago. Especially for those of a younger generation whose recollections go back little further than this, the lineage of antisemitism bears stressing, across continents and generations.
Jews have played an integral, though still numerically tiny, part in Australian history since the first white settlers arrived on convict ships in the 1780s. They included Isaac Solomons, the model for Fagin in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. They stayed to build respectable lives in the country to which they had been involuntarily transplanted. Never have Jews formed much more than half a percentage point of Australia’s total population. But numerical insignificance forms no protection against bigotry. It merely underlines the threat.
This is admittedly hard to explain to a generation that thinks of Israel as an oppressive, colonial enterprise. Since long before the Oslo accords more than 30 years ago, I’ve advocated, in Jewish publications and to every Jewish audience I address, that justice requires an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. But the corollary is that a sovereign Palestine must coexist with a secure Israel. And Israel is not safe when literally every Jew worldwide is a potential target for terrorists.
The founding of the state of Israel is a very recent development in international relations. It was regarded even in the 1930s by assimilated European Jews as a quixotic endeavour pursued only by ideologues. There remains a widespread misapprehension, held especially but not only on the left, that if only Israel could make peace with the Palestinians, then the proximate cause of antisemitic hatred could be extirpated. There is no truth in this delusion. And the Australian case shows why.
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Those fanatics who purport to speak for the Palestinian national cause while urging sanctions and boycotts seek not peace with Israel but peace without Israel. Their variant of “peace” is the stasis of the graveyard, where those Jews who have sought to make a life and preserve their heritage in the land of their ancestors are under daily assault. I can give only a partial account of what it seems like, from where I stand.
My own paternal family came from Strelitz (now part of Mecklenburg) in northern Germany 200 years ago. Like many Central European Jews, they arrived off the boat at Liverpool and stayed. Their relations fled Germany in the 1930s and some – who went to Amsterdam – were never heard of again. I cannot stress enough that, however integrated and irreligious the tribe becomes, the sense of danger does not depart. And when populist politicians on the right or left engage in antisemitic tropes, the rational default position is apprehension rather than indulgence.
In an age of pluralism and secularism, which I wholeheartedly support, the task of explanation becomes greater still. For all the flaws, sins and crimes of the modern state of Israel, especially in its retaliation against Gaza for the monstrous deeds of Hamas, an essential truth remains. A Jewish state is a guarantor that, somewhere in a hostile order, there is sanctuary. And it will always be needed, because those who are susceptible to prejudice are always with us. Their victims demand respect; and their potential victims require protection.
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