ALP abrogated responsibility to safeguard Jews from day of Hamas assault

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah bulit a fresh firestorm of debate around the definition of anti-Semitism. Picture: AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg

Within hours of an arson attack on a Melbourne synagogue last week, Benjamin Netanyahu took to X and lit a fresh firestorm of debate around the definition of anti-Semitism. Perhaps it was long overdue.

“Anti-Israel sentiment is anti-Semitic,” Netanyahu wrote, in a tweet that braided a skein between the “extreme anti-Israel” position of the Albanese government and the attack that occurred on the Adass Israel synagogue.

Was he seriously claiming that criticism of Israel and its administration was somehow off limits? A close friend of mine – raised in Israel, living in Melbourne – called me up in dis­belief. “So I’m an anti-Semite now if I criticise Israel?” he said.

The answer was no, of course. Israel is already awash with a sea of inflammatory critics. There are fiery newspaper editorials, raging radio commentators, TikTok gags and obscene shouting matches between balding, overweight TV panellists, all of whom love nothing more than frying up the government of the day.

Netanyahu was in all likelihood referring to something far different: the sinister, well-­organised and extremely insidious anti-Israel movement that manifests weekly in street-marches and sit-ins and encampments that emerged spore-like around the country this year.

Proponents of this anti-Israel movement don’t seek a two-state solution, just one, in which Israel ceases to exist entirely. Their favoured tactics include boycotts against Jewish businesses and policies that seek to isolate the Jewish state.

When the Albanese government decides to switch votes against Israel at the UN, it’s literally carrying water for these cretins.

So, too, is Penny Wong when she dispatches a retired air chief marshal to investigate the death of an Australian on the Gazan battlefield, a decision that signalled her total lack of faith in the Israeli military and its investigative processes.

Galvanised by the synagogue attack, Netanyahu is effectively accusing the government of a hostile, even anti-Semitic posture in respect of Israel. Had our PM bothered to visit Israel over the past year, perhaps a more cautious tweet may have been published. Anthony Albanese has found time for Japan, Spain, the UAE, Ukraine and other locations, but no time for Israel.

Federal Labor abrogated its responsibility to safeguard the Jewish community from the day of the Hamas assault on southern Israel.

We’re certainly not at the point described in the diaries of Victor Klemperer, who chronicled life under Adolf Hitler, a Jewish professor who wrote of how he lost his university position, then the right to drive, then his house, and much, much more, all backlit by the events of Kristallnacht, the race laws, the Night of the Long Knives …

We are not living in those times, but Australian Jews are living in a perverse moment during which morally reprehensible acts have been left unchecked.

Do you remember, in Nov­ember last year, when a jumping castle company wouldn’t hire its services out to a Jewish school?

What about the Officeworks employee who refused service to a Jewish customer? Or when activists occupied Melbourne University and called for Jews to be barred from campus?

Instead of hardening its rhetoric against these abominations, of demanding the release of Israel’s hostages at the top of every press statement about the conflict, Labor’s response has deliberately sought to cool relations with a historically warm ally.

Political expediency is not the only explanation but Albanese is not exactly hauling in votes by the bale. On Sunday, he shrugged off the suggestion his government has downplayed the threat of anti-Semitism, listing a legislative ban on hate symbols, doxxing and appointment of an anti-Semitism envoy as proof of his commitment. As though policy will rethread the tattered strands of our social cohesion.