Setting a path back to the fair, decent nation we cherish

Special envoy to combat anti-Semitism Jillian Segal on Thursday. Picture: NewsWire / Nikki Short

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Since October 7, the Jewish community has harboured a belief that the government was never really up for the fight against anti-Semitism.

At times, it seemed to treat it as a nuisance rather than a moral imperative. The only real question was whether this anaemic approach was driven by ideology or hard political realities, or both.

Now the two most senior ministers in the federal government, the Prime Minister and the Minister for Home Affairs, have given a powerful, eloquent and sincere affirmation of their revulsion at what is being done to Jewish Australians, and pledged to banish this contemptuous hatred to the dark corners of paranoid delusion and low bigotry, where it belongs. They have shown that they get it. They understand that the extreme anti-Israel activists are not freedom fighters or peaceniks. They are a threat to us all.

After 21 months of boycotts, death chants and blazing streets and synagogues, many in the community and wider society will regard the government’s embrace of the Special Envoy’s Plan to Combat Anti-Semitism, a comprehensive and thoughtful plan engaging government and civil society, as hollow. More still, will borrow the phrase spoken by the “Son of Sam” killer upon his belated arrest by the NYPD: “What took you so long?”

But the Jewish community and all Australians need to draw upon one of our defining characteristics, fairness, and give the government a fair go. It has before it a road map to lead this country back to what it was and what it should always be, a peaceful, self-confident, rational and decent country, the envy of the world.

The implementation of the Special Envoy’s Plan to Combat Anti-Semitism is not a gift or a service to Jewish Australians. We are a hearty and stoic people, and have learned to fend for ourselves. It is needed for Australia. A country where cars are routinely daubed with racist slogans or where schoolkids can be racially abused and ridiculed by parents on the sidelines of sporting fields or in shopping malls; where jackals hopped up on the death chants and poison of vicious street rallies can control the streets and send diners scrambling into the night in terror; where an increasing number of people believe puerile, imbecile conspiracies that the Jews did 9/11, faked October 7, control our banks, media and governments, and can’t tell the difference between a grinding war Israel did not want or choose and a genocide, is not a healthy society. It is not a rational society. And unhealthy and irrational societies cease to produce great minds, great discoveries and innovations, and they do not sustain great standards of living.

Like every plan, the special envoy’s plan will be judged by the success of its implementation. It will require not only the federal government to act, but state governments, universities, schools, cultural institutions, social media platforms, and families and individuals. But this does not get the federal government off the hook or abrogate its central role in guiding our country back to somewhere better than we are now. It has to lead this fightback.

Nor can the media and community cease their work in advocating and shining a light on what has been happening and what we have become. It will be for us, all of us, to hold governments and institutions accountable, and to give fair credit where it is due.

The Jewish community is deliriously patriotic. We adore this country. Partly, this comes from first-hand or family experience of far lesser places, the Soviet Union, Apartheid South Africa, Nazi-occupied Europe. Partly, it comes from having contributed so much to the success, wealth and ingenuity of this country. This is why, amid an outbreak of hatred that few foresaw or imagined, the Jewish community has stayed, and indeed become more Jewish and more Australian.

But this experience has also matured our souls and hardened our minds. We know we are fighting for Australia, and the special envoy has presented a winning battleplan.

Alex Ryvchin is co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.