Why progressives are failing on contemporary antisemitism

In analysing how Australian progressives have responded to the current antisemitic wave, it is useful to draw a comparison with progressive reactions to the last serious outbreak of populist antisemitism in Australia in early 1960.

That outbreak involved a wave of swastika daubings across the western world. This included Australia where about 100 incidents occurred nationally in all capital cities involving the painting or drawing of swastikas and/or anti-Jewish slogans.

The principal perpetrators may have been members of far-right European émigré groups whose members blamed alleged Jewish Communists for the continuing Soviet occupation of their homelands.

How did the Australian left respond to this outbreak of antisemitism? They displayed unconditional solidarity with the Jewish community against racism.

Leaders from the ALP, trade union movement, peace movement, churches, and academia spoke at a Citizens Protest Meeting organised by the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism. There were also multiple resolutions passed by ALP branches and trade unions condemning antisemitism.

In contrast, most of the leading Australian progressive organisations – trade unions, academics and intellectuals, social movements etc. – have provided limited anti-racist solidarity to Jewish community in the current context. A number have said they don’t approve of antisemitism but have taken no action to demonstrate their disapproval. They have acted as bystanders.

One possible explanation for their passivity may be that they expect racism to emanate from powerful and politically conservative groups in society, that is from above. However, many of those active in the current antisemitic populist movement seem to come from either progressive groups or religious or ethnic minorities, that is to some extent from below.

Progressives appear to be struggling to understand why groups or individuals that may themselves be subject to forms of disadvantage, including prejudice, are openly perpetrating racism.

And a minority on the Left, most notably key segments of the Greens, have implicitly aligned with the antisemites, presumably because they perceive there may be political gain in doing so. Of course, the Greens keep repeating the mantra that they equally oppose antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Israel’s actions in Gaza.

But the Greens refuse to support any action against antisemitism. Senator Faruqi stated that clearly when she opposed the parliamentary proposal to establish a Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities Bill. She did not detail any engagement with the lived experiences of Jews harmed by antisemitism, nor did she recognise the individual and collective trauma caused by antisemitism or propose even one single idea for combatting the current wave of antisemitism.

Instead, she presented a conspiracy theory alleging that anti-racists in the Liberal and Labor Parties were using antisemitism as a political weapon to suppress support for Palestinian national aspirations:

Her speech frankly was a woeful example of what I have called elsewhere ‘Progressive except for Jews’.

The Greens analogy of antisemitism with Islamophobia has no factual or historical basis. There is no centuries-old history of structural-based mass violence and murder against Muslims in Global North countries similar to that which has been perpetrated against Jews. No Western government has passed laws limiting the civil or political rights of Muslims, or restricting Muslim immigration.

Nor have Australian Muslims been subjected as a collective since October 7 to the same populist threats, attacks and attempts at exclusion from public life as Australian Jews. There is no organised movement of influential Australians in the media, academia and social movements seeking to erode their equal rights as Australian citizens.

Yes, there is shameful bigotry directed at Australian Muslims just as there is prejudice directed against African Australians and Chinese Australians. Those forms of xenophobia need to be actively opposed, but they are not underpinned by centuries of persecution and racist stereotypes as is the case with antisemitism.

The Greens direct linkage of antisemitism to Israeli actions in Gaza is highly offensive. It blames the victim by suggesting that Australian Jews are collectively responsible for what Israel does. That is the equivalent of holding all Australian Muslims responsible for the heinous actions of Hamas or the Islamic state, or alternatively implying that Chinese Australians are complicit in the Chinese Government’s long-standing occupation of Tibet.

In my opinion, the Greens have regressed into little more than a ‘Left’ version of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Except that where One Nation racially vilify Chinese Australians and First Nation Australians, the Greens neatly limit their xenophobic attacks to Jews.

Progressives need to understand both the diverse causes of and malevolent impact of antisemitism. I suggest they learn about three distinct events that arguably symbolise its fluid manifestations.

Event one: Far Right antisemitism, the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany

Most Australians will have heard of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that took place in November 1938, and was widely viewed as the precursor to the Nazi Holocaust. The importance of Kristallnacht was that it marked the end of any distinction between public legislative, political and street attacks on German Jews, and the relative security that some Jews had maintained until that night within their own private properties.

Event two: Arab nationalist antisemitism, the June 1941 Farhud massacre in Baghdad

In contrast, few Australians are likely to have heard of the Farhud, the massacre of Jews that took place in Baghdad in 1941 where Jews had lived for 2500 years and formed at that time about 33 per cent of the population. Farhud is an Arabized Kurdish word which means “unrestrained massacre, burning, looting and rape by hooligans”, or simply violent dispossession.

About 180 Jews were murdered, nearly two thousand injured including multiple cases of gang rape, many children orphaned, numerous Jewish properties, businesses and religious institutions damaged and looted, and more than 12,000 people left homeless.

The Farhud was perpetrated by Iraqi soldiers and officers who had returned from an unsuccessful battle with the British army, sections of the police force, and gangs of young people influenced by religious and nationalist fanaticism, and the popular perception of a Jewish alignment with Britain. These groups rejected the presence of national or religious minorities in the Arab world and regarded the Jews as a fifth column sympathetic to the Western powers.

It was the precursor to the mass ethnic cleansing of Iraqi Jewry ten years later as a result of popular and institutional antisemitism. During 1950 and 1951, more than 120,000 Jews (95 per cent of the Jewish population) abruptly left Iraq for Israel via the airlift known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

Event three: Communist antisemitism, the July 1952 Slansky show Trial in Czechoslovakia

The Slansky trial in Stalinist Czechoslovakia in July 1952 involved 14 leading Communists including 11 Jews who were accused of leading an international conspiracy designed to undermine the Communist countries. The interrogations and trial were characterised by their explicit anti-Jewish language, but the public statements released to the western media used the term Zionist rather than Jew in an attempt (mostly successful) to persuade Western progressives into believing the trials were not antisemitic.

This show trial was the culmination of the Soviet assault on Jewish cultural institutions in Russia, and the murder of their key leaders from 1948 onwards. It was followed soon after by the Doctors Plot in early 1953 whereby a group of Jewish doctors in Moscow were accused of plotting to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders.

Those two events were widely understood to be a preparation for a large-scale deportation and slaughter of Soviet Jews which was averted solely by Stalin’s sudden death. But even in the post-Stalin era, the Soviet Union continued to discriminate against Jews, and deny them equal citizenship.

An obligation to act

We know from these historical examples what can happen when decent ordinary people fail to speak out against the stereotyping and demonisation of Jews.

Progressives have two simple obligations:

First, always side with the victims, never the perpetrators of, antisemitism. Never look for sensible explanations or rationales for anti-Jewish racism because they don’t exist.

Second, talk to Jews about their lived experiences of racism and understand their intergenerational fears and trauma of what the current wave of antisemitism might lead to.

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