Hate: on becoming a ‘bad Jew’

One day, when my father was still a young man, barely thirty, his friends in Odessa began crossing the road to avoid him, while our aggressively blonde neighbour Tanya, and Kolya, the neighbourhood plumber, would point fingers at him and yell, ‘Bloody Zionist!’

True, my father was a Zionist, and so am I. Our politics differ, but like most Jews everywhere, we’re both Zionists in the basic sense of this often-misunderstood word – we believe in Israel’s right to exist. Just as the UN did in 1947, voting Israel into existence. The Soviet Union, too, voted yes.

However, by the 1960s, the tide shifted. The then-KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov, ‘elevated Zionism to the rank of USSR’s primary ideological nemesis,’ writes scholar of Russian history Izabella Tabarovsky, partly to fortify Soviet influence across Muslim countries.

‘Zionist’ became a dirty word. During my childhood in the 1980s, it often appeared on the news: ‘Today Zionist terrorists met with American imperialists, to plot against the communist struggle...’ Zionists were the baddest bad guys. They possessed superpowers. The ‘Zionist lobby’ controlled everything, from foreign media to the quality of underwear sold in our Univermag. And they were Jews. The Bad Jews.

Before my father became a bad Jew, he was a good one. A brilliant physicist, he served the state. Yet even then, things weren’t going well. Newspapers and politicians claimed that in the multiethnic Soviet Union, every minority was equally valued. This didn’t apply to my father. There were limited quotas for Jews at universities, so my Odessit father did his PhD at Siberia’s Novosibirsk university, the only place that accepted him. Later, he worked twice as hard as his colleagues while being paid a fraction of their salaries.

Eventually, my parents had had enough and applied for permission to move to Israel. They were refused. Soon after, a large spread in the national newspaper appeared, dedicated to my father, the ‘Zionist traitor’ who wanted ‘to sell scientific state secrets to America and Israel’. (The ‘secret’ he was involved in was calculating the thickness of glass bottles…) The ‘traitor’ was promptly fired from his job and my mother, a teacher, followed his fate and began cleaning parks for a living.

Having lived for six years as refuseniks, in poverty and under KGB surveillance, we were finally permitted to leave. The authorities had had enough of my parents’ ‘conspiratorial Zionist activities’, such as gathering people in our apartment to celebrate Jewish holidays and learn Hebrew. I still remember the exhilaration that flooded through me on the plane carrying us to the Mythical West where we would surely now live as first-rate citizens.

Little did I know that at least about something Karl Marx was right – history does repeat itself...

***

Fast-forward to January 2024 in Australia, where I now live. January is my favourite month. The way it unfolds, I superstitiously believe, will determine the rest of my year; it is my month of plans and hopes. Even now, shortly after the October 7 atrocities, in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war and destruction of Gaza, I attempt optimism. Like many other Zionists I know, I oppose settlements and want a two-state solution. I hope, and call, for hostage release and a sustainable ceasefire. And so I am astonished to discover one January afternoon that my photo is being circulated online alongside the caption ‘genocidal Zionist’. I am ‘doxed’, along with over 600 fellow Australian Jewish artists and academics, members of a WhatsApp group I founded in late October.

It's ironic that it was me who started the group. I don’t have a political bone in my body. I love shadows, Eros, poetry. I’d struggle to climb barricades in my high heels. But the deafening silence, at best, from my usually socially conscious peers about the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and apologism for it at worst, altered me irrevocably. As did the covert and overt antisemitism my Jewish peers and I began experiencing in our professional milieus – arts organisations, festivals, universities. I had to do something, otherwise I feared I’d sink into depression. So, along with Noe Harsel and several other Jewish artists, I organised an open letter urging our peers to call out the escalating antisemitism. This led to the establishment of the WhatsApp group – for mutual support and self-preservation.

It turns out our chat transcript was leaked by a former member, Natasha Frost, a New York Times reporter, to so-called anti-Zionist activists. Some of these were openly antisemitic Hamas-supporters. Lists of Jews, hit lists, were circulated online with the encouragement to harass and cancel us in every way. Primarily, because we are Zionists. Sadly, many in the arts and academy bought into this.

Tabarovsky traces the popularity of anti-Zionist discourse among today’s progressives all the way to the Soviet propaganda that successfully shaped the then-radical left’s views on an international scale. Decades later, in Australian artistic and academic milieus, Zionist is a dirty word. Zionists are the baddest bad guys. They possess superpowers. The ‘Zionist lobby’ controls everything, from Australian media to the quality of underwear sold in Myer. And they are Jews. The Bad Jews.

I am far older than my father was when I become a bad Jew. My literary friends receive alarmed enquiries from our peers: ‘Is it true Lee is working for the MOSSAD?’ (She’d need to be fitter for that, one friend says…) Not friends, never friends, but certain acquaintances do the modern-day version of crossing to the other side of the road, unfollowing or even blocking me online. Several libraries I work with receive letters demanding to cancel me, because, apparently, my ‘WhatsApp cabal’ was bent on silencing and dispossessing pro-Palestinian activists of their jobs… We were also drinking Christian children’s blood, they forget to add.

Unsurprisingly, the doxers have done to us what they accused us of doing. I taught one of my writing workshops with security and several literary organisations, where I taught for years, turned me down for the first time. Some other group members have had it worse. Some received death threats, lost work and public platforming; many more lost friends. All those consequences have been documented in the media. Here I’m exploring the déjà vu I’ve been experiencing this year. The digital onslaught was new in the speed of dissemination and scope of reach. But its tactics, such as the language of othering and vilification based on false information, were disturbingly familiar. My Soviet childhood was knocking on my door.

The Soviets and their international allies portrayed Israel, Tabarovsky writes, as ‘inherently and irreparably evil, while denying Israelis any measure of empathy – a fundamental process of dehumanisation that paved the way for today’s college students to assert that 'Zionists don’t deserve to live’.

Similarly, our doxers dehumanised us by dubbing us ‘Zio600’. One of them posted on X encouraging people to ensure that there would be no culturally safe spaces for Zionists. The sad irony is this already is our reality – there are no culturally safe spaces for us in the arts or other public arenas, and this is precisely why I started our WhatsApp group. The ‘exposure’ and purging of ‘Zionists’, aka any Jews who didn’t denounce Israel to be evilest of them all, in my professional environments began shortly after October 7. Like Jews in Soviet cultural institutions, we now face similar choices – to prove we are ‘good Jews’ or be expelled.

In yet another uncanny parallel (or is it lack of originality?), 40 years after my ‘traitor’ father’s ‘exposure’, I, too, was pronounced to be a secret agent of a foreign country... My father was never given the chance to comment on the lies written about him. You’d think in Australian democracy things would be different, but some ‘progressive’ media outlets abandoned impartiality and accuracy, giving space to doxers’ narratives about our group, while failing to give voice to those doxed. (Some included generic quotes from Jewish peak bodies, but not from the actual group members.)

The Guardian, for example, interviewed a doxer who, to justify her actions, listed our ‘evil deeds’, but had no counter-quote from us, even though, with our lists in circulation, it wasn’t difficult to find us… The only group member quoted in that article was also the only one out of over 600 who had distanced herself from the baddest bad Zionists by apologising on X for being in the group. The Guardian quoted a vague allegation from her statement posted on X that there were ‘instances of bullying and harassment’. The statement also said, but this wasn’t cited in The Guardian, that the member ‘did not see 98 percent of what was written’ in the group and was ‘made aware’ of ‘bullying and harassment’ when they ‘became public’, meaning she was repeating narratives told about us, rather than providing first-hand evidence.

Shortly after the doxing began, The Conversation published two (two!) articles two days apart by academics who argued we engaged in ‘malicious’ activities, and therefore the doxing could be framed as whistleblowing. ‘Members also used the chat to organise politically, with some conversations allegedly centred on ways to target pro-Palestinian activists,’ stated one writer, then proceeded to compare our doxing to the leaking of details of Charlottesville riots’ participants... The evidence to back those claims was – citing the narratives of doxers and several anti-Zionist activists criticised in our group, and other media coverage, including the said Guardian article. When author Ramona Koval, our group member, offered to write a response to those unsubstantiated allegations, The Conversation editor declined, claiming they had published enough on the topic...

There were many more similar instances of media coverage of our group’s doxing. I cannot imagine any other minority group being written about in such a fashion while also being erased. Can you?

So what are we? What did we do to create such an outrage?

Primarily, we’re a threat, I suppose, because our group members are mostly left leaning, social-justice-oriented Jews who also believe in Israel’s right to exist. That Zionism and progressive values can coexist is a problem for anti-Zionist narratives. As one member wrote in the aftermath, doxers must have suspected that our group members could publicly present ‘a logical/moderate/human rights perspective for a two-state solution which is dangerous for propagandists who want to change the narrative to “from the river to the sea”'.

Just as Soviet Jewish intellectuals and artists were often shamed and gagged, so we had to be. From the doxers’ perspectives, we couldn’t grow our conspiratorial tentacles fast enough. Yet despite putting our 900-page chat online, and going through it with a fine-tooth comb, they strained to find ‘incriminating’ content.

In tough times, in a group of over 600 people, it’s unavoidable to have some posts with questionable language. And yet, very few offensive posts were made over the three months. Even those, as the transcript shows, were usually called out by other members. So doxers resorted to recycling the same few problematic posts, but mostly they took out of context other posts, reframing them as malicious. For example, as per good old antisemitic tradition, they presented people’s distressed messages asking what can be done about antisemitism they encountered as sinister plotting. Finding little ammunition, they even took to speculating about the content of posts shown as deleted by admins (deleted for various reasons, including repetition or irrelevance).

To date, whoever bothers to read through the entire chat, if they have no vested agenda, can see that the tales spun about us have little substance. The lion’s share of the chat is wounded people supporting each other. Our assortment of evil Zionist activities included discussing our grief around the war, and the hostilities and exclusion we’ve been increasingly facing. We shared resources, debated Israel’s complicated history, had therapeutic support Zoom sessions and real-life get-togethers.

A smaller percentage was activism – negotiations with institutions to counter discrimination as well as letter writing and petition signing by some members to oppose not ‘pro-Palestinian activists’ but several public figures who have used their large platforms to spread misinformation and antisemitic messages, including targeting Australian Jewish businesses. This was our unforgivable crime – that some of us used acceptable civic channels to oppose racism (which is what antisemitism is, as some conveniently forget).

As 2024 winds its stormy way towards the anniversary of October 7, many Australian Jewish artists and academics are still living the doxing consequences, but new anti-doxing legislation was just introduced for debate in Federal Parliament following what happened to us. So perhaps our adversity will benefit Australian society at large. On a personal level, it’s possible this article will expose me to further doxing, but to remain silent is to be erased, and the cost of erasure seems to me higher than dealing with further abuse. Possibly, I’m coming back to Odessa full circle here.

My parents never stopped their ‘vile Zionist activities’, despite the loss of reputation, the beating my father endured, the poverty. So, too, our WhatsApp city of refuge still goes strong. Because what else do Jews do when faced with hardship? We go on.