Old hatreds must be confronted

High Court Justice Jayne Jagot’s remarkable prescience when she delivered the 2023 Sir Zelman Cowen lecture on anti-Semitism two days before Hamas’s barbaric October 7 slaughter of 1400 Jews could not have been timed better. “How is it that, having seen exactly what anti-Semitism can do, it still exists today?” she asked. “Here we are in contemporary Australia, in 2023, with some people still consciously or subconsciously holding to bits and pieces or a whole mishmash of bizarre views about Jewish people. Anti-Semitism seems to just continue bubbling along like poison beneath the surface.”

Tragically, the horrifying events seen across the globe, including Australia, since she spoke have validated and amplified all the apprehension she expressed. Sadly, too, our country has been shown to be no more immune than others to the evil of Jew hatred sweeping the world. As Stephen Rice reported on Tuesday, grotesque acts of violent anti-Semitism have exploded in Australia since Hamas’s murderous, Holocaust-style, October 7 rampage.

In the week before October 7, just one incident of violent anti-Semitism was reported in Australia. In the week after, there were 38; in the second week, another 27. By the end of the third week there were another 32. Julie Nathan, research director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, based in Sydney, says she has “never seen anything like the outpouring of hate (against Jews) over the past three weeks”.

Profoundly troubling incidents have been reported in which “Arab men” have been seeking out confrontation in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, home to many Jews. In one, at a Sydney beach, men were yelling “we will rape your daughters” to a Jewish family.

“Kill Jews” graffiti has appeared on synagogues, while men have been driving around in cars playing loud Arab music and, with their hands, mimicking the pointing of a pistol at innocent Jewish passers-by. It is, of course, not only Australian Jews who are being targeted by the ugly global surge in anti-Semitism. As shown by the rampage through an airport in Dagestan by a Muslim lynch mob in search of Jews arriving on a flight from Israel last Sunday, there appears to be no corner on earth, however remote, that has not witnessed outbreaks of the most grotesque forms of anti-Semitism.

The Anti-Defamation League in the US last week reported a staggering 388 per cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents. Some Jewish schools in London have had to close in the face of threats of violence, and many British Jews reportedly no longer feel safe wearing symbols of their faith.

Alarmingly, as The Wall Street Journal noted on Wednesday, Hamas and “its Western enablers are pursuing or justifying a genocidal war against Jews, not merely a territorial dispute with Israel (in Gaza). And since Western governments too often seem unable to protect the Jewish minorities in their midst, Israel must defend itself as the only safe home for the Jewish people. This most modern of pogroms – global, televised, politicised – demonstrates exactly what is at stake as Israel ramps up its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.”

The Jewish state must indeed do that, and in doing so it must be supported. In Australia, no less than elsewhere, leaders of all faiths and none must heed the words Justice Jagot used to conclude her Sir Zelman Cowen lecture when she said: “Anti-Semitism is irreconcilable with every part” of liberal democracy. It is, and it must be expunged ruthlessly wherever it raises its ugly head.