The Jewish community needs to show it understands Palestinians’ pain  

To constantly insist that empathy for Palestinians is antisemitic runs the risk of obscuring the deeper issues that need to be addressed.

There is a fundamental distinction between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, even if groups on both Right and Left wish to conflate? the two. Many Jews might be upset by the strength of opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza, but anyone who watches the news must be appalled by the devastation being wrought. To accuse people who express solidarity with the two million Palestinians whose lives are being literally torn apart as antisemitic just blurs the distinction.

I was appalled when the presidents of three of America’s most prestigious universities equivocated about their response to calls for Jewish genocide. I was moved when three Sydney Theatre Company actors took their curtain calls wearing keffiyahs in solidarity with Palestine. It brought back memories of the cast of Hamilton addressing then Vice-Presidential nominee Mike Pence, which led to few complaints of the sort caused by the STC event.

The desire to conflate anything other than total support for Israel with antisemitism is most apparent in the pages of The Australian newspaper, which seems as eager to ferret out antisemitism as it is to attack “trans” people. In last weekend’s issue there were four major opinion pieces devoted to the issue.

All of them were written from a position which assumes support for Israel. In the leading article in the opinion section, Paul Kelly claimed that the current war: “is destroying trust between Israelis and Palestinians…undermining support for the two-state solution.” But to suggest that trust was present before the Hamas attacks, or that there was any real movement on either side towards a two-state solution, is illusionary.

There are conflicting arguments about whether such a solution was close to realisation after the Oslo Agreements, and if so, which side was more responsible for its failure. What is clear is that the various Netanyahu governments have assiduously worked to prevent it, and the scale of settlements in the West Bank has undermined whatever support there may have been.

The most troubling essay on antisemitism came from foreign affairs editor, Greg Sheridan. Over the past few years Sheridan has moved closer to the authoritarian Right, becoming an admirer of Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which he now identifies, along with Poland, as the “safest countries for Jews in Europe”, as if that is the only index that counts.

Hungary is widely regarded as only partly democratic, and as a gay Jew I hardly find Sheridan’s praise reassuring. Poland is notable as having gone further than other countries in Eastern Europe in whitewashing its complicity with the Holocaust.

Sheridan began his column with claims that contemporary antisemitism is fuelled by “Arab and North African antisemitism, now in a crude alliance with the antisemitism of the far Left”. He then develops this argument by pointing to examples of Muslim antisemitism, using this as an argument to limit migration that could come from the playbook of Donald Trump and Marie le Pen.

What is oddest about Sheridan’s column is that there is no reference to right-wing extremism, even though the some of the most egregious examples of antisemitism in Australia have come from neo-Nazi groups. Nowhere does Sheridan question the existence in Australia of the historic antisemitism connected with a series of right-wing organisations and found in groups such as followers of the Croatian Ustasha, as reported in The Age earlier this year. Sheridan explicitly singles out Christian denominations as having “comprehensively repudiated their past antisemitism”, but this does not mean that old prejudices have died.

There certainly are people who claim to be on the Left who exhibit antisemitism, even if they are slightly more subtle in their language. [I can claim some skin in the game here: in the 1980s I called out Bill Hartley, then Secretary of the Victorian Labor Party, for antisemitism on the ABC. He sued for defamation and lost.]

But the Right’s sweeping attacks on the Greens - whom Liberal MP Julian Leeser has called “more racist than One Nation” - are absurd. One wonders whether he has actually listened to Adam Bandt, who has carefully avoided the inflammatory language of some of the pro-Palestinian movement.

The deliberate conflation of antisemitism with support for Israel is a deliberate ploy to prevent any serious analysis of the current situation or acknowledgement of the rights of the Palestinians to statehood. To constantly insist that empathy for Palestinians is antisemitic runs the risk of making those who are appalled by the carnage in Gaza believe that they should blame “the Jews”, rather than the government of Israel.

The Jewish community needs to demonstrate it understands the pain of the Palestinians and cannot support the ongoing slaughter we see every evening on our televisions.

There is undoubtedly a need to increase awareness and understanding of antisemitism in the broader community. There is equally a need for the Jewish community to challenge the current policies of Israel, which seem determined to destroy Gaza and hence create the conditions for further hatred and extremism.

If Israel is to survive as a democratic state, it needs to find ways to accept Palestinians as partners, whether through a two-state solution or some version of a larger confederation. This is what lies behind US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin’s warning that Israel could achieve a tactical victory and a strategic defeat.