Published: 15 July 2024
Last updated: 15 July 2024
This article is a response to Deborah Stone’s article Lived experience, paranoia and slippery antisemitism.
Dear Deborah,
Like you I am worried about rising antisemitism, but unlike you I am unwilling to accept that criticism of Israel's status as a defined Jewish state is itself antisemitic.
The idea of defining a state in this way—which applies equally to the Islamic Republic of Iran—marginalises the 25% of Israelis who are not Jews. And the examples given in the IHRA definition include a prohibition on calling Israel a racist state. It is ironic that in a country in which it is very frequent to hear supporters of Indigenous Australians define ours as a racist state, it is somehow improper to state this of Israel.
Comments3
Robert Durkacz11 August at 07:29 pm
May I say that I do not believe Mr Altman in saying that we have anti-semitism in Australia and he is far more moderate in his assessment than other jews who engage with ordinary Australians from time to time (thinking of Deborah Conway and Michael Gawenda) not to mention contributors to on-line forums including in this case ‘Faust’ and Abe James.
We know about anti-semitism from history. I am not Polish but have a Polish surname and enough family connections to know that there were communal tensions in pre-war Poland which were not unconnected with the subsequent genocide under German authority. Simply we do not have that in Australia and we do not have the social conditions for it. Australia is a very successfully multi-racial country. I take it is a slur on Australia to suggest otherwise and the suggestion is made all too often.
Moreover, I doubt that those who say so are sincere. More likely they intend to intimidate us from disapproving what Israel does.
Certainly as Mr Altman says criticising Israel is not anti-semitism. That special term should be reserved for the type of thing known from pre-war Europe.
Australians understand that it is a bad idea to criticise racial or religious types in particular when there are repesentatives of those types living amongst us. On the other hand we may freely criticise foreign countries, whether with more thought and justification or less. The USA is a friendly country to Australia but it is not uncommon to hear anti-American views and there is no serious harm in that. Likewise Israel is a foreign country. Jews may well be particularly sentimental about Israel but they should not expect us to make allowances for that.
Mr Altman believes evidently that we have anti-semitism amongst a small number of neo-nazis but surely these people are too insignificant to deserve recognition.
When Mr Gawenda and Ms Conway allege anti-semitism it is always in connection with Israel. Moreover it is naively claimed that incidents of anti-semitism have increased since the Gaza strip rebellion. This only shows that the so-called anti-semitism is about disapproval of Israel, not some kind of spite towards Australian jews. Likwewise the two contributors before me to this forum are thinking about Israel.
Faust1 August at 01:26 pm
“Fatima Payman and Mehreen Faruqi are not our real enemies; the bands of young men, chanting Nazi-inspired slogans are.”
This is the worst kind of reductive, leftist, Ashkenazi thinking. It can be summed up as “I don’t want to acknowledge how bad antisemitism is from Muslim and progressive Australians, that this Islamo-Gauchisme has now reached Australia; so the threat isn’t sectarian voting or anti-Semitic double-standards pushed by Federal politicians but a vanishingly small percentage of far right incels.”
I know it’s hard to acknowledge that anti-sémitism today comes predominantly from the Left and, ahem, “new” Australians. That the Australian Jewish community who were shielded from anti-semitism for decades and pushed for open borders now finds that those recent arrives are anti-Semitic, but burying your head in the sand doesn’t change things.
Jews are truly in a damned position. Half of the worlds Jews who live in Israel are not allowed to defend themselves otherwise the other half who live around the world would be at threat of attack. What a perverse, no-win situation. It would be nice if Leftist Jews at least acknowledged that instead of acting like a modern day funktionshäftling gaslighting the rest of us.