Escalating anti-Semitism is a danger to the nation

After the last four battalions of Hamas fighters headed south, Israel’s offensive against the terrorists is approaching a critical stage, with a new Israeli assault expected in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city. It will be highly controversial; the city is now a vast refugee camp of 1.5 million people. The complexity of dislodging Hamas, which is vital to any hope of lasting peace, has been underlined by the revelation of the militants’ sophisticated communications and intelligence hub beneath UN Relief and Works Agency buildings in Gaza City. The base operated reportedly with electricity drawn from the UN’s supply. A nearby tunnel runs under a UN school. Until its pro-Hamas sympathies are eradicated, Australia should be slow in resuming funding for UNRWA.

The war unleashed by Hamas’s barbaric attack on civilians in Israel on October 7 is brutal. According to Gaza-based health authorities 28,000 people, mainly women and children, have died in Gaza so far. That is no justification, however, for the dangerous anti-Semitism unleashed across the world, including in Australia, by the October 7 attacks – before Israel could begin to defend itself. In addition to the shameful Opera House demonstration on October 9, bungled by NSW police, one of the worst examples is author/illustrator Matt Chun, who celebrated Hamas’s “freedom fighters’’ just a day after the atrocities and shared details of 600 Jewish people from a creatives’ WhatsApp group, including their occupation and, in some cases, ­social media profiles and pictures. Chun has received tens of thousands of federal taxpayer dollars in funding and support from Writers Victoria, in partnership with the Myer Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Jewish Myer family. He has posted that the Jewish creatives’ group chat “confirms what we already know – Zionists are thoroughly racist, thoroughly anti-Indigenous and thoroughly committed to colonialism”.

As Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin told The Australian, he was “in shock … disbelief” that “people are once again drawing up lists of Jews”. Widespread attacks on Jewish businesses, especially small businesses, are chilling. Bad online reviews, negative social media posts and direct intimidation by anti-Israel activists are rife, John Ferguson wrote on Saturday. Demands for boycotts on companies and organisations led by Jews are being posted. Victoria Police is pursuing a protection order for a Jewish couple who received a photograph of their five-year-old son from an anti-Zionist activist with the threat: “I know where you live.” And Jewish residents of Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs are packing up and moving to the southern suburbs to escape anti-Semitism.

The situation smacks of Europe in the 1930s. As former federal Labor minister Graham Richardson told Sky News, anti-Semitism has been able to “boil away underneath the surface” for a while but is “just coming out everywhere’’. It is being noticed. “Anti-Semitism Down Under is turning Vicious’’, US magazine Newsweek wrote last week.

The federal and state governments have been slow and piecemeal in their approach to the re-emergence of 1930s-style anti-Jewish rhetoric. They need to be stronger and more consistent. Resorting to moral equivalence, condemning anti-Semitism in the same breath as Islamophobia (which is not on the same scale), is not good enough.

The new face of anti-Semitism is young, woke and left, as Brendan O’Neill wrote on Saturday. Anthony Albanese was right to condemn NSW Greens MP Jenny Leong for describing Jewish groups as using “their tentacles” to influence politicians (she later said the word tentacles was inappropriate). But the Prime Minister and his ministers should have been in the parliamentary chamber on Wednesday to vote against the Greens’ push to debate an anti-Israel motion. Until it is faced, exposed and dealt with, the ugly underbelly of anti-Semitism in Australia, stirred on October 7, will grow more menacing.