Community of citizens has been shattered by this ugly tribalism

Police officers stand guard as protesters march in Melbourne. Picture: NewsWire.

The first reports of the attacks on southern Israel a year ago reached Sydney before 3pm local time. The burning, rape, murder and mutilation of unarmed civilians was still in progress five hours later at 8.04pm when the Palestine Action Group began publicising protests. Israel’s targeted assault on Gaza did not start for another 10 days.

The chronology refutes the claim of pro-Palestinian activists that Israel is the aggressor in a war against freedom fighters defending their rightful inheritance. The protests that began in western Sydney on October 8 and continued at the Opera House the next day were crude celebrations of a tribal victory. The killing of 1200 Israelis and kidnapping of 250 others was not an act of terrorism but just retribution against the occupying force.

That hideous distortion of the truth was voiced by Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun at a Hizb ut-Tahrir rally in western Sydney a day after the attacks. “I’m smiling, and I’m happy – I’m elated. It’s a day of courage, it’s a day of resistance, it’s a day of pride, it’s a day of victory,” he told the crowd.

The importation of this tribal animus into Australian civic society is the most disturbing consequence of last year’s attacks. It found fertile ground among progressive intellectuals mired in Western self-loathing and fixated on race, gender and identity.

The plight of civilians caught in the middle of a war in Gaza is merely the post-hoc justification for a visceral sense of historical grievance against the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

Palestinian leaders such as Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni do not distinguish between the two. Mashni told Melbourne radio listeners last November: “Do you think that we hate Jews just because they’re Jews? How you celebrate God is removed from the fact that you denied me my home, killed my father, raped my mother, stole my orchards and business.” Avenging rape and murder with more rape and murder is not a formula for peace. It is a guarantee of permanent unresolved conflict.

Tribalism is the default setting for humanity, an ancient, natural, animal-like state that predates civilisation. The evolution from tribalism to a nation of citizens is relatively recent and flourished exceptionally in the West. The allegiance between fellow citizens is paramount and is built on a shared set of assumptions and values independent of race, sex or any other subgroup identity.

In racially homogenous countries such as Hungary or Japan, concepts of race and culture are inseparable. In multiracial countries such as ours, however, the principles of citizenship must be spelled out. It must be made clear that newcomers are obliged to abandon their existing loyalties and adopt those of their hosts.

The reaction to the October 7 atrocity suggests something has gone terribly wrong in what we foolishly call multicultural Australia. We are undeniably one of the most multiracial, multiethnic and multi-faith countries, but that is quite a different thing from multiculturalism in the literal sense of the word. Without shared values, the game is over.

The noisy, angry, hateful protests on our streets are simply intolerable. They lack respect for our laws and our culture. Above all, however, they are utterly contemptuous of the rights of fellow citizens who treasure Australia as a haven of relative tranquillity and, with it, to remain the only continent except Antarctica that has never hosted a civil war.

The pro-Palestine march in Melbourne on Sunday, in commemoration of the anniversary of the war on Gaza. Picture: Getty Images

The Palestinian movement has worked hard to tailor its narrative in sympathy with Western postmodernist thinking. It portrays Israel as an “imperial-colonialist state” and Jews as “white” or “white-adjacent” settler-colonists. It is a fabrication. Israel voluntarily left Gaza in 2005, removing settlements. Gaza under Hamas was hardly a liberated state: it was an oppressive gangster land of summary justice that persecuted homosexuals and denied rights to women. Yet Australian intellectuals have swallowed Hamas’s line and adopted the Palestinian cause as a new axis of intersectional identity.

The complex history and geopolitics of the Middle East is reduced to a simple binary: Palestinians good, Israel bad. Last week they mourned the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a martyr to the Palestinian cause, seemingly unaware of Hezbollah’s true mission as an Iranian-controlled Lebanese shia Islamist militia that joined the conflict in Syria on the side of a president who went to war with his own people.

Anthony Albanese’s response to October 7 has shown neither courage nor conviction. He seems unable to condemn the alarming rise in anti-Semitism without uttering the fabricated concept of Islamophobia in the same breath.

The Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister have occupied their time as self-righteous armchair critics of Israel’s conduct of the war in an ignominious end to the bipartisan support for Israel since its creation.

This failure of leadership from the top has led to a cascade of pusillanimity on our campuses and streets, where university authorities and police have given ground to tribal forces in the name of tolerance and diversity.

In his 2021 book The Dying Citizen, Victor Davis Hanson wrote about the corrosive effect of globalism and identity politics.

“Once tribalism takes hold, it is almost impossible to thwart this ancient narcotic or to prevent it from destroying the centuries-long and much harder work of estab­lishing multiracial nation­hood and citizenship,” he wrote.

It is a warning only the foolish would ignore.