Hamas-Israel war exposes new depth of self-hatred

A rally For A Free Palestine burns the Israeli flag on the forecourt of The Sydney Opera House. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

Let’s pray that Israel swiftly succeeds in subduing Hamas and its militants in the Gaza terrorist statelet, because as long as Hamas lasts it seems its local backers will routinely be flooding our streets and doing their best to intimidate Australian Jews.

I deliberately use the term “Hamas backers” because the tens of thousands of marchers now out every weekend aren’t there in favour of peace.

Here, as well as in Britain and Europe, the demonstrations started immediately after news broke of the original Hamas massacres of more than 1200 innocent people and the abduction of about 240 more on October 7.

On that dreadful evening of Monday, October 9, as the Sydney Opera House was floodlit in solidarity with Israel, many hundreds were chanting “Gas the Jews”, well before any significant counter-strike. And with almost 50,000 reportedly protesting in both Sydney and Melbourne last weekend, on a per capita basis we seem to have just as many as Britain’s voluble supporters of Hamas.

Labor ministers such as Penny Wong might have trouble with the distinction, but there’s a world of moral difference between a carefully planned, premeditated terrorist attack, largely on civilians, with babies butchered in front of their parents and teen­agers forced to watch the mutilation of adults before whole families were slaughtered, and a military campaign against a terrorist army that’s using civilians as human shields.

But there’s no evidence so far that seems capable of shaking the conviction of local friends of Hamas that it’s all Israel’s fault – not even the discovery that terrorist tunnels start inside hospitals, as confirmed by the US on Wednesday AEDT.

From the Prime Minister down, our government seems at least as concerned about an all-but-non-existent Islamophobia as it is about the rampant anti-Semitism on display as convoys of Hamas supporters turn up in front of a synagogue in Melbourne or gun their motorbikes through heavily Jewish suburbs in Sydney.

While police are said to be considering what offences may have been committed by a “death to the Jews” Islamist preacher, none of our myriad anti-racist watchdogs, normally so quick to identify the supposed racist tendencies of journalists and cartoonists, has been able to identify anything untoward in mobs urging the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of the Jews “from the river to the sea” in what would amount to a new Holocaust.

How have we got to such a point of moral derangement, where it’s almost acceptable to deliberately kill 1200-plus innocent people who just happen to be Jews but wholly wrong to risk almost any civilian casualties in punishing the perpetrators, who quite consciously armour themselves with the flesh of their own people?

Members of the Australian Jewish community hold banners and placards in front of the Sydney Opera House.

There are two broad explanations for this palpable double standard: first, the presence within our own country (and others that have accepted numerous newcomers from the Middle East) of people indoctrinated almost from birth that Israel is on stolen land and that the rapacious Jews are the source of all oppression; and, second, the persistence in so many of our institutions of an insidious form of self-loathing that largely blames the West for the world’s ills and sees Israel as its Middle Eastern exemplar.

Not for a second should there be a religious or cultural bar on potential immigrants. Still, what’s the point of having the citizenship test that the Howard government introduced and all subsequent governments have kept if it’s not taken seriously; and why bother asking questions about Australian values that all would-be citizens must get right if there are no adverse consequences for those who don’t accept them once in the community?

Consistent with a non-discriminatory immigration policy, it should be possible to acknowledge that not all newcomers integrate equally.

Yet the only recent government prepared to make such distinctions was Tony Abbott’s which, in its final act, said that our refugee intake from the Syrian crisis should be chosen by our officials rather than by the UNHCR with a preference for persecuted minorities.

The real failing here is less with recent migrants from the Middle East than with an administrative state that has largely adopted the academic left’s anti-Western critique, even though very few societies are more consistently free, fair and prosperous than Australia and Britain.

It’s hard to find a British academic who doesn’t regard imperialism as a racist monstrosity, even though it was the Royal Navy that stamped out trans-Atlantic slavery and no country on earth now has a more multi-ethnic cabinet than Britain, all achieved without reverse discrimination in a society that has become almost completely colourblind.

Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong.

Equally, it’s difficult to find an academic who doesn’t heap blame on Britain’s Balfour Declaration, which pledged support for a Jewish homeland in the lands where the ancestors of Israelis had been expelled. This opprobrium is despite the fact Israel is the Middle East’s only liberal democracy.

So great is the historical amnesia and obliviousness to the obvious that just a fifth of young Britons have a positive view of Winston Churchill, despite his role in saving the world from Nazism.

Indeed, Suella Braverman has just been sacked from the British cabinet, in part for wanting to suppress what she called “the increasingly vicious anti-Semitism and extremism displayed on our streets” in the face of which a defeatist and declinist Tory leadership has mostly dithered.

Here in Australia, every state government and most federal MPs – along with almost every large business and almost all sporting and cultural bodies – supported a constitutional change to give the original inhabitants a special say in government, largely out of guilt over dispossession 200 years ago. That failed, only because voters had more respect for Australia than their leaders.

But where officialdom can act without asking the public, governments of both sides fly the Aboriginal flag coequally with the national one and for years have insisted that all schools teach every subject from an Indigenous, sustainability and Asian perspective – as if Australia’s story is one of racism, environmental vandalism and cultural sterility compared with our neighbours.

It’s hardly surprising that plenty of young Australians brought up with preoccupations about “invasion day”, “white privilege” and colonialism see pluralist Israel as the real villain here, rather than terrorist Hamas, despite the medieval attitudes of most Arab nations towards gays and women. It’s not just Jew-hatred that’s massively on display on our streets but a fair dollop of self-hatred, too.

Forced to choose between a fellow democracy and an Islamist death cult, more self-confident societies would not have a moment’s ambivalence. And yet here we are.

After a trip to Israel in 1971, which he described as a “life-changing event”, Bob Hawke declared that Israel was an inspiration, a small lone democracy in the Middle East.

Labor’s best prime minister warned that “if the bell tolls for Israel, it won’t just toll for Israel, it will toll for all mankind”. His moral clarity is what’s needed now from the current incumbent in the Lodge, who is lacking in both leadership and courage.