The Bondi royal commission's most difficult and crucial task |
Here's hoping that the royal commission into the Bondi massacre of last December does not turn into partisan point-scoring, least of all over whether the Albanese government effectively "caused" the tragic massacre by reducing its activity against anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israelis. It's an argument that no one can really win, but which most of those with legitimate things to say before the commission can lose.
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It's partly because some of the players are talking right past each other. Many Jewish Australians have spoken of a sense of siege and of having come to feel unwelcome in Australia over the past few years. There's no mistake about it, from their point of view.
There has been no substantial change in the number of Australian bigots who want to destroy the Jewish religion, or to kill or disadvantage people because they are Jews. That there are too many such bigots is disgraceful, an anomaly of the much-vaunted Western civilisation - and primarily an artefact of Europe and America, rather than Africa, Asia or the Middle East. Frank hostility to Jews and the Jewish religion has existed among a declining number of Europeans over the past 2000 years, and economic decline in the west, including Australia, plus a small segment of alienated youth to chant the words of Nazis, talk Jewish conspiracy theories and associate with campaigns against immigration, and for "white rights".
Horrible as this has been, it has been largely the work of a tiny minority, a rabble much despised by most of the population. Some of these may have acquired a temporary status by adopting anti-immigration causes as attempted entry points into mainstream politics. But, even where their presence has not been legislated against, they are a long way away from levers of power, or any serious threat to the citizenry. They are their own worst enemies.
But what the Jewish community has complained of as an avalanche of anti-Semitism has mostly developed in popular hostility to the actions of the state of Israel. Not in any outbreak of hostile feeling against the Jewish religion, or against individual Jews, particularly in the diaspora. Many, if not all Jews, have a strong emotional attachment to the idea of a homeland for Jews, without having a moment for the ideas or the actions of most Jewish politicians. But they do not see Israeli actions as the united action of religious or ethnic Jews so much as the actions of a Jewish state.
But these can seem to be fine points - almost theological distinctions between an Israel is never wrong faction and groups insistent on criticising Israel. They criticise it for its selfish and brutal actions against Palestinians, its bullying and attacks on its neighbours, or its use of a seemingly unlimited credit to buy guns and missiles with which it makes war on Iran, on Syria, on Lebanon, Jordan, Qatar and other nations it has attacked in recent times. To the diehard or the naive, it may perhaps be able to be sold as pre-emptive self-defence.
Israel is not on trial, but the nature of the criticism of it must be
The struggle has been most unequal, with battle casualty rates almost always entirely in Israel's favour, and a Western media that has, at least until recent times, given Israel the benefit of almost every doubt. Many now see Israel (though not Jewishness) as a serious menace to world peace, one whose international conduct becomes more truculent, more lethal and more threatening every year. Like the US, it scorns international forums and courts and seems to hold most foreign leaders and most world opinion and norms in contempt. With the assistance of the US, it has been able to skate around legal constraints, such as preliminary findings about war crimes. But this is because it hides behind........