Greens have been whipping up anti-Semitism ever since October 7

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin and wife Vicki outside their former Sydney home, which was the subject of an anti-Semitic attack early on Friday morning. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers / The Australian

It was the booing and the hissing every time a Jewish name was read out that really struck home.

The oldest and most stubborn form of hatred, anti-Semitism, was playing out in front of me.

In August 2024, a meeting in Sydney’s Inner West Council was taken over by protesters and Greens party activists demanding the council boycott Israeli businesses.

The handful of local Jewish citizens who had attended to speak – and plead – against their local government adopting such an ethnically based procurement policy, were being jeered and intimidated in the chamber by a vitriolic mob.

Never mind that the council has no contracts with Israel or any Israeli business, and is unanimously in support of a ceasefire in Gaza. There was an angry zeal in the eyes of this cadre of activists as they overran the meeting.

The police had to be called, and the Jewish residents and elected councillors were escorted to our cars for our own safety.

Inner West Mayor Darcy Byrne. Picture: Newswire/ Gaye Gerard

Just as it has been horrifying to see the atrocious civilian death toll in Gaza, it was confronting to see anti-Semitism come alive so virulently in our own, proudly progressive, part of Sydney.

Sadly, since October 7, the Greens party has been careless about its responsibility to prevent anti-Semitism, and increasingly deaf to the calls from Jewish community leaders to turn down the temperature.

Just look at the record.

Immediately after the terror attacks, the four Greens members in the Australian House of Representatives voted against a tri-partisan motion condemning Hamas and the appalling slaughter of civilians. They were the only MPs in the 151-member chamber to oppose the motion.

This refusal of Greens representatives to condemn Hamas has continued ever since.

Despite the militant organisation being homophobic, misogynist, Islamic extremists, many Greens politicians have made a point of not repudiating Hamas.

For example, as recently as December, the Greens preselected Omar Sakr to contest the western Sydney federal seat of Blaxland, despite the fact his publicly stated position is that “I cannot and will not condemn Hamas”.

In February 2024, Jenny Leong, the NSW Greens member for Newtown, was caught on camera at a pro-Palestinian event seeming to draw on the infamous Nazi octopus trope. She accused the “Jewish lobby” of spreading its “tentacles” and infiltrating “ethnic community organisations” for nefarious purposes.

reens MP Jenny Leong at a pro-Palestine Protest in Sydney’s Hyde Park. Picture: Adam Yip

Such unacceptable rhetoric has been matched by a dangerously militant campaign of direct action from Greens on the ground.

Greens staffers and candidates have been organising ongoing blockades of the electorate offices of dozens of Labor MPs, alleging, baselessly, that all these MPs deserved to be cut off from engagement with the public because they are supporters of genocide.

In a strange coincidence, the same representatives who have been subject to this harassment during the day have also had their offices smashed up, vandalised and spray-painted with anti-Semitic slogans after dark.

The red triangle, the Hamas symbol identifying someone as a target for assassination, continues to be sprayed on these offices, as well as an increasing number of Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship.

Kerosene was poured and a fire was lit at the office of Josh Burns, the Labor member for the Melbourne seat of Macnamara, who happens to be Jewish.

In response to this attack, one Greens staffer stated “paint across the building and smashed windows of an ‘Israeli’ occupation-supporting MP isn’t violent”.

In November 2023, Senator Mehreen Faruqi posed for a photograph next to an anti-Semitic sign that read, “clean up the world” while depicting an Israeli flag being thrown in the bin.

Things took an even darker turn after the firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne in December.

Faruqi’s chief of staff, Antoun Issa, blasted out to his 15,000 Instagram followers that this terror attack could be a “Zionist false flag” operation.

Many of these deliberately inflammatory statements and acts have a running thread. They draw on some of the oldest and most malicious anti-Semitic tropes and tactics.

So how have the Greens gotten away with such recklessness, even while the incidence of anti-Semitic vilification, vandalism and threats has been going through the roof?

One reason is that Peter Dutton has let them off the hook.

While coming from opposing extremes of the political spectrum, Dutton’s LNP and the Greens party do have two things in common.

Both are determined to blame the Australian government for the crisis in the Middle East, and both have been willing to pour petrol on the flames of division that are now burning here at home.

With anti-Semitism now on the loose in Australia, we simply can’t afford such irresponsibility from our political parties.

It’s time that we all unite to stamp out the scourge of anti-Semitism before it takes a permanent hold in our society.

Darcy Byrne is the Labor Mayor of Sydney’s Inner West Council.