Have we just woken from a bad dream or is this for real? The Anthony Albanese government’s appointment of a Zionist envoy to combat antisemitism is truly dystopian.
This is from a government that is materially aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Australia has form when it comes to racism.
Before and after World War II, Australia placed strict limits on how many Jews it would allow in. Of 180,000 displaced persons allowed entry, only 8000 were Jews. Concentration camp survivors were specifically excluded, as were those with disabilities or mental illness and southern Europeans, especially those from places with strong anti-fascist resistance movements such as Italy and Spain.
The organised Palestine solidarity campaign has been vigilant about refusing to give any room to antisemitic language and behaviour.
Like other Jewish activists in the Palestinian rights movement, I have been welcomed with open arms. In fact, Jews are less likely to encounter antisemitism at Palestine solidarity events than in most other places.
The claim that the Palestine protests make Jews feel “unsafe” is a wilful lie. But they certainly make supporters of Israel uncomfortable, whether Jewish or not.
Nevertheless, I am not surprised if there has been a rise in antisemitic behaviour. For this, I hold the state of Israel largely responsible. It is Israel, and those who back it, who falsely conflate Jewish identity with unconditional support for Israel.
They dishonestly claim that Israel speaks for all Jews and that we all support Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine.
Insisting that all Jews support a particular political ideology is not new — and is itself antisemitic — but little wonder that some believe it.
The basis on which Albanese and the corporate media claim that the slogans of the Palestinian solidarity movement are antisemitic is transparently false.
The Arabic word intifada simply means “uprising”; we are defending the legal and moral right of Palestinians to resist occupation, ethnic cleansing and oppression.
It’s the same word which, in Arabic, describes the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto.
We want Palestinians to be able to live freely in their traditional homeland. For that to be possible, all people “from the river to the sea” need to enjoy the same rights, regardless of their race, religion or ethnicity.
It continues to shock me that a state that claims that its “right to exist” flows from the evils of the Holocaust can revisit the horrors of death and persecution on another people.
This I will never forgive. (As an aside, states don’t have rights, only people do.)
Will the appointment of Jillian Segal, immediate past-President of the Executive council of Australian Jewry, bring a more nuanced view?
To the contrary: Segal has made statements insisting there be no ceasefire in Gaza until every hostage is released. She means the Israelis taken captive in October, not the thousands of Palestinians who Israel holds without charge.
Segal has lobbied university vice-chancellors to take disciplinary action against student protestors.
She has repeated the discredited claim that children were “beheaded in their beds” on October 7 and insists there is no evidence that Israel is not observing the laws of armed conflict. (How did the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice get it so wrong?)
This appointment is an insult.
As Segal has a track record of insisting that legitimate criticism of Israel is antisemitic, it is more likely that she, will in fact, be an envoy for promoting racism and division.
The Albanese government has dug itself in deeper with the genocidal state of Israel.
Why is Labor not dealing with the simultaneous rise in Islamophobia with the same sense of urgency?
Nelson Mandela told the world in 1997 that South Africa’s freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.
Today, an increasing number of Jews understand that our safety is inextricably linked with the safety of the Palestinian people.
Israel is not the safest place in the world for Jews and its brutal assault on Palestine does not make Jews safer anywhere else in the world either.
As Naomi Klein put it so eloquently: “We don’t want or need the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name.”
Raising our voices in solidarity with Palestine paves the way for our collective liberation.
[Janet Parker is active in Jews for Palestine, Western Australia.]