In fear, Australia turns to repression

I signed this petition today from the Jewish Council. Some of you might like to, too.

The Jewish Council has a six point plan to tackle antisemitism—one that looks to bring Australians together, rather than drive them apart. As I write below, powerful political players are looking to stoke division and racism in the aftermath of the massacre at Bondi. We don’t have to let them.

Cameron Spencer, Getty Images

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A week has passed; mourners still sit shiva. The week struck many of us as a time to say little and to listen plenty. Instead the air was rapidly filled with recrimination and blame. The Americans didn’t wait 24 hours before they deployed the atrocity in Bondi for their own ends. Conservatives in Australia, thrown by the emergence of a Muslim hero, took a little longer. But by mid-week they smelled an opportunity for reprisal. A target was chosen, the longstanding thorn in their side—those who had opposed Israel’s killing of Palestinians.

15 people are dead. In our grief we want something done. We have to Do Something. It is clear now: the Government Has Failed. The government allowed Unchecked Migration. Even worse, it allowed The Protests. It allowed protestors to Chant, and to Show Images of The War. They chanted things like Globalise the Intifada, and From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free. Those Chants and those Images are the cause of our climate of antisemitism. And now 15 people are dead.

“When you see people marching and showing violent bloody images,” the NSW Premier Chris Minns told us this week, “images of death and destruction, it’s unleashing something in our community that the organisers of the protest can’t contain”.

Minns has Had Enough and now he will Do Something. It is time for Extraordinary Powers. It is time for Chris Minns to have Extraordinary Powers to ban protesting. He wants protests to be illegal for the next three months, at least.

The Federal Government now agrees: Something must be done. Under pressure, the PM Concedes He Has Not Done Enough. But now, now he is Doing Something, too. The Australian Government adopts the Plan to Combat Antisemitism, we read. He is Fast-Tracking its Recommendations.

What does that mean? It means the Federal Government will adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. Accompanying the working definition are 11 illustrative examples, seven of which relate to criticism of Israel. Remember that in light of the following:

Accepting the Envoy’s recommendations, the government will expand hate speech laws to include “violent or intimidating protest activity”. It will withdraw funding for universities which “fail to effectively address antisemitism”. It will screen visa processes for “antisemitic views or affiliations”.

There will be a national database for antisemitic incidents. A university report card on efforts to combat antisemitism. Charities that promote “antisemitic” speakers will have their status revoked. The media will be monitored to prevent false or distorted narratives. The media will be monitored to prevent false or distorted narratives. The media will be monitored to prevent false or distorted narratives. Criticising Israel will be antisemitic and the media will be monitored to prevent false or distorted narratives.

Why not? We have to Do Something. The government allowed criticism of Israel, and people chanted at protests, and immigration went unchecked, and now 15 people are dead.

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Is that right?

In such a climate of repression, who dares say any differently? Who dares to suggest that it is not chanting that radicalises Muslim men but rather the slaughter of Muslim people?

Who dares suggest that it is not “images of death and destruction” that currently drive antisemitism, but the actual killing of Palestinians; the actual destroying of their homes?¹ Who dares to ask how a bricklayer in Western Sydney was supposed to have been radicalised by students at sandstone universities? Who dares ask how these protests, only two years old, sent him to the arms of ISIS nearly a decade ago?

Who dares point out that to proscribe “Intifada” is to proscribe an everyday Arabic word, a word that is not inherently violent? Who dares to remind us that the First Intifada was a primarily non-violent protest movement, a movement of civil disobedience, one that turned bloody when Israel began shooting down unarmed protestors from afar?² Who dares question whether the state should decide the meaning of words, rather than the person who speaks them? Who dares to ask if we want the Australian government to adopt the strategies of Donald Trump?³

Who dares suggest that the banning of criticism of Israel amounts to a protection racket of a foreign state? Who dares ask what this means for Jews critical of Israel? And who dares to ask whether the erasure of such Jews—an erasure currently pursued by the conservative political class—is not itself profoundly antisemitic?

It is exactly those Jews, after all, who have insisted for years that Israel’s actions put them in danger. The Jewish Council here in Australia, Na’amod in the UK, Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and IfNotNow in the US—these organisations have all insisted that the killing of 70 thousand Palestinians makes them less safe. They have been calling for Something to be done—that is, the ending of the killing of Palestinians—for years. They were ignored; they therefore look at the tragedy at Bondi like Cassandra might. But there is no acknowledgement of this in the Australian press, and their speech is about to be proscribed. They are to be banned from protest.

Instead we have once again “a campaign to infantalise the public”, to borrow the phrase Susan Sontag used in the week after September 11. It is a campaign to eradicate nuance and difference, to overwhelm, with social and legal pressure, the thinking mind. It seeks to make monoliths of diverse communities, and to pit those communities against each other. To understand this phenomenon we have to ask, as always, that most clarifying question. Who benefits?

It is Australia’s anti-immigration right wing, of course, which is why you now see Pauline Hanson and Sussan Ley in front of the cameras every day. And it is anyone who wants to support Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu without reservation; who wants the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to continue apace. Their strategy is to combine the power of the state with the power of social sanction to squash dissenting opinion. What they want, most of all, is a homogeneity of speech. They want the proscription of dissent. They want a country in which no one dares question them, or their story of the world.

Here’s that petition link again.

1. Perhaps the greatest perversity in this sad story is that it is the pro-Palestinian protestors, alongside groups like the Jewish Council, who work hardest to separate crimes of Israel from innocent Jews like those at Bondi. It is the right wing who connects them, as antisemites do, arguing explicitly that criticism of the State of Israel is criticism of all Jewry; that the state and the people are one and the same.

2. “Along with demonstrations, the intifada involved tactics ranging from strikes, boycotts, and withholding taxes to other ingenious forms of civil disobedience. Protests sometimes turned violent, often ignited by soldiers inflicting heavy casualties with live ammunition and rubber bullets used against unarmed demonstrators or youths throwing stones. Nonetheless, the uprising was predominantly nonviolent and unarmed, a crucially important factor that helped mobilize sectors of society in addition to the young people protesting in the streets while showing that the entirety of Palestinian society under occupation opposed the status quo and supported the intifada.” - Rashid Khalidi, The One Hundred Years War on Palestine

3. As Max Kaiser of the Jewish Council put it, the government has just accepted a report that “echoes the authoritarian playbook used by figures like Donald Trump—using funding as a weapon to enforce ideological conformity.”