Earlier this month, a synagogue in Melbourne was targeted in an arson attack that authorities have characterized as antisemitic. This has been a wake-up call for the Jewish community in Australia, who have already experienced an upsurge in antisemitic protests, violence and political rhetoric since October 7. While Australia has long been a haven of pluralism and religious freedom, recent events have, in many ways, been unprecedented.
To explain the ongoing situation in Australia, the state of antisemitism and the concerns of Australian Jews, Moment spoke with Peter Wertheim AM, the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the preeminent body representing Australian Jewish organizations and the Australian Jewish community. Wertheim served as counsel for the organization in the late 1990s and early 2000s in a series of racial vilification cases in the Federal Court of Australia.
Wertheim discusses, among other things, the history of antisemitism in Australia, antisemitism since October 7, the causes of the recent upsurge in hate and what can be done about it.
What had the history of antisemitism been like in Australia before October 7?
Prior to October 7, judging by the incidents that are reported of antisemitism in Australia, which we record each year and publish in our annual report on antisemitism in Australia, there was a much lower level of reported incidents and the severity of the incidents was much lower. There have been periods over the last 30 years when there have been spikes in the number of reported antisemitic incidents, and there have also been occasions, not many, thankfully, when we’ve seen violent attacks on Jewish institutions, but they occurred quite a long time ago.
So I wouldn’t say what’s happened is unprecedented in terms of the nature of the events that have occurred, but they are certainly unprecedented in the overall number and in the general intensity of the incidents and the level of severity.
What has the environment been like post-October 7?
Well, there have been a lot of protests. There are weekly protests in some cities about the events in Gaza and elsewhere, and those protests generally are small but noisy. The ugly side of those protests is that they are occasionally directed at Jewish institutions locally such as protests outside synagogues, or deliberate attempts to carry out provocative protests in neighborhoods where there are large concentrations of Jewish residents. That is not something we’ve seen in the past.
I’ll give you some concrete examples. There was firstly, the opera house forecourt incident two days after October 7, where you had groups of protesters burning an Israeli flag and being caught on video chanting “F the Jews.” Some people were even heard chanting “gas the Jews.” The police have denied the latter allegation. They said that what they were yelling was “where’s the Jews?” As if that makes a difference. Whether it was “F the Jews” or “gas the Jews,” or “where’s the Jews,” or anything else about quote-unquote “the Jews,” it’s still antisemitic and it is still menacing and intimidatory. And nobody was charged, let alone prosecuted. And what was even worse was that the group of people who were involved in that protest started off with a protest in another part of the city and then marched almost the full length of midtown Sydney to Circular Quay under police escort. And this was at the time when the opera house sails were to be lit up in the colors of the Israeli flag as a gesture of sympathy for the victims of the Hamas massacre. And that’s what the protest was about. “How dare you? How dare you show any kind of sympathy for women, children, the elderly and others who who have just been butchered, mutilated, raped and abducted by armed terrorists. How dare you show sympathy for those victims?” And the fact that it was carried through in that way, and that the protesters, instead of being shut down by the police, were actually facilitated by them, caused enormous disquiet and sent a terrible message, I think, to the rest of the community—that the message was, I wouldn’t say open season on Jews, but it was certainly now more permissible to express these antisemitic sentiments and to target local Jews than would previously have been tolerated.
That was just the first example, and then there were a chain of events after that, in a similar vein, and the response of the authorities would be very patchy. At times it was strong when there was a clear crime committed, but at other times, when it was kind of in that gray area of protest, the authorities seemed to be paralyzed with indecision. There was a combination, I think, of ignorance about what a lot of the chanting meant, ignorance about the details of the actual conflict itself between Israel and its neighbors. And, also a kind of moral confusion about where the appropriate lines lie between freedom of expression and vilification and menacing and violent behavior,
That moral confusion is a continuing theme. Not only the moral confusion but the leadership paralysis that went with it. It was a continuing theme all through the year, and we saw it with the university encampments. We saw it within the arts and culture sector, with the doxxing of Jewish creatives. We saw it replicated many times and it just created a more permissive atmosphere to encourage further behavior of that nature.
However, I think the torching of a synagogue in Melbourne, and then the torching of cars in a suburb in Sydney, which has a large concentration of Jewish residents, has been something of a wake-up call, and there now seems to be a little bit of a change of heart from the authorities. I’ have yet to see how sustained that will be, but certainly, the situation is different in the eyes of a lot of people who were previously undecided about where they stood on these protests, I think in the general Australian community now, there is a very clear sentiment emerging against the importation of the hatreds and the violent emotions of the conflict overseas into Australia.
What do you see as the source of this rise in hate?
I think what we have seen in Australia is not entirely different from what we’ve seen in other Western societies. There has been an underlying change in Western culture away from the taboo against antisemitism that existed in the decades after World War II and toward a growing permissiveness. Some of this has been orchestrated as part of the political opposition to Israel, and some of it is part of a broader anti-Western intellectual trend. This has been developing for decades, and is certainly not confined to Australia. No government alone can be blamed for this development. I think governments everywhere have struggled to find ways to address this trend because domestic politics inevitably get in the way of an effective response. I think the same is true of other sectors of society, especially our universities, which have been caught in a kind of leadership paralysis. But now that inflammatory rhetoric has escalated into ever more serious forms of violence, the imperative to act has grown stronger. We are now beginning to see governments and other sectors in Australian society thinking far more seriously about the kinds of solutions they need to put in place to address this very real problem. Ultimately, people are now starting to realize that when antisemitism takes hold in any society, it’s not just something that undermines the social situation of the Jewish community, it actually is ruinous for the peace and the harmony of society as a whole.
Has there been an upsurge in the use of political antisemitism in Australia?
Oh, yes, and this is both a global phenomenon and, to some extent, it’s deliberate. The anti-Israel movement, for the last 25 years at least, has on some level made a decision to tap into traditional antisemitic tropes that have been largely latent in Western society since World War II, and to try to reactivate those tropes to mobilize them as a polemical tool in in the propaganda war against Israel, which is just another arm of the physical war against Israel. It’s obviously proven to be an effective tactic, because it’s a way of turning public opinion against Israel. It’s just another way of harnessing racism in the service of the Palestinian political cause.
And I would also say that it’s another way of undermining the overwhelming support for Israel in diaspora communities, because Jewish communities everywhere, particularly in Australia, are very supportive of Israel as a country. They are, I would say, Zionist in the sense that they are totally committed to the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination, which is a universal right of all peoples under international law, and to Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law. Australia has always defined itself as a Zionist community in that sense. And surveys have borne that out.
The support has to do with the fact that the Jewish community in Australia has the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors and their descendants of any Jewish community in the world outside of Israel. The Jewish community in Australia, prior to World War II, was quite small. It nearly doubled in size after. Unlike the United States, Australia took in quite a significant number of Holocaust survivors and so that perspective that they brought with them very much infuses the perspectives of our community to this day.
Are Jews in Australia afraid of violence, and if so, what can be done?
Well, every rational person is afraid of violence, but we are not cowering behind our synagogue walls or our community institutions. We are taking sensible precautions with security. Of course, we received funding support from the federal government, very generous support, I might add, to assist with that. But the message that the Jewish communal leadership is conveying to our community is that life goes on. We must not allow what’s been happening to undermine our Jewish way of life, because if we do that, then our opponents win. Jewish life must go on and must be protected. We must stand tall and be proud of our Jewish heritage, our civilization, our faith, and everything that we’ve contributed to humanity. We must continue in the assurance that the vast majority of ordinary Australians are with us.
Is there a future for Jews in Australia?
I strongly believe so. I’m aware of some people who have moved from Australia to Israel recently who were planning to do so anyway, but I don’t see any great movement of people out of Australia from the Jewish community. On the contrary, Australia remains a country where people who are persecuted or live in distressed circumstances from other parts of the world are queuing up to immigrate to, rather than the other way around. And overall, despite the fact that media headlines always emphasize the negative and the sensational, Australia remains a very, very good place for people generally to live and a very good place for the Jewish community especially.
Have the sources of antisemitism changed since October 7? In particular, is there more left-wing and Islamic antisemitism than before?
Well, we’ve always been conscious of the fact that the sources of antisemitism shift with changing events. My organization has been putting together an annual report on antisemitism in Australia since 1990, so we have quite a lot of information to go on. And if you look at the trends that have occurred over a long period of time, you’ll see that the number of incidents recorded has gone up and down depending on what else has been going on in the rest of the world, and the trends in terms of the sources of antisemitism can also be discerned. For example, from 2017 to 2018, the principal source of antisemitism in Australia was undoubtedly from a resurgent neo-Nazi movement, and there’s still a threat, but that sort of receded into the background since October 7. Since then the predominant threat has come from religious extremists and from the far left, and it’s an unholy alliance in many ways. In time, I’m sure there’ll be a falling out, but for the moment, they have a common cause in casting Israel as a kind of icon of Western culture, Western democracy and other things that they both mutually loathe. So it’s a marriage of convenience, but it’s one that is built on a house of cards.
What does the government, the Jewish community and Australian society need to do to combat antisemitism and to maintain Australia’s liberal, pluralistic values?
Well, there’s a combination of things, and we have been beating this drum for a long time. First and foremost is political leadership. There has to be some clarity about what is and what is not antisemitism, and I think also some moral clarity about a zero tolerance attitude toward antisemitism. There also needs to be a move away from the intellectual and moral confusion about the lines between expressions of antisemitism and legitimate freedom of expression. There’s got to be clarity at the leadership level and a zero-tolerance attitude and consistent messaging.
We need to introduce effective education against antisemitism, specifically in our schools and in our public education programs. And by education against antisemitism, I don’t only mean Holocaust education, because we’ve had Holocaust education for a long, long time, and, of course, it has a role to play, but when I speak about education against antisemitism, I think we need to go far beyond Holocaust education to teach non-Jews specifically about the history of antisemitism, about the different forms it takes, about its infinitely adaptable nature. And above all, about the ultimate consequences of antisemitism for any society in which it takes root, the absolutely ruinous consequences, using not only Nazi Germany but many other examples from history as well. Wherever antisemitism has taken root, it has devastated societies, and, of course, has had terrible, tragic consequences for the Jewish people.
Leadership, law enforcement, legislative reform and education are the key areas where governments need to act. And I guess the other area that Jewish communities themselves need to work on is forming alliances with like-minded communities elsewhere in society.
Featured image: the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House. Photo credit: Dietmar Rabich via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA-4.0).