Anti-Israel mobs the latest iteration of left’s reign of terror

A Melbourne rabbi speaks of a woman pulling her dog away from two little Jewish girls, snapping: ‘Let’s get away from these genocidal killers.’ The extent of the spreading dysfunction in our society is hard to comprehend.

Anti-Israeli protesters outside Miznon restaurant on Hardware Lane in Melbourne this month. Picture: Josh Stanyer / AAP

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Brazen and violent anti-Semitic attacks in Melbourne signal that Australia as a society has lost control of its public space. A type of anarchy has been unleashed, encouraged, indeed almost promoted within a vacuum of political authority, with the government’s reflex response across two years being to look away in awkward embarrassment.

Federal Labor may prefer to see its challenges as economic prosperity and national security, but disintegrating social cohesion now looms as the greater threat to this nation’s future wellbeing.

Multicultural Australia entered new uncharted territory, very ugly territory, as of October 7, 2023. Many local Jews don’t feel safe living here any more and are resigned to becoming targets, yet again, for streams of hatred and resentment, and from across the public sphere. Some are searching for more hospitable countries in which to live.

In Melbourne, anti-Israel marches continue weekly with routes deliberately planned through Jewish suburbs, designed to intimidate the locals. Indeed, one occurred a day after its mob devastated an Israeli restaurant, chanting hate at customers and smashing tables.

To my mind, however, the most telling image of Australia today is that recently described by a rabbi, of two 12-year-old girls outside a local school being shocked by a woman with a tiny dog walking past, pulling it away from them, snapping: “Let’s get away from these genocidal killers.”

This spreading dysfunction has deep roots, ones that demand to be understood. The sleeping ogre of anti-Semitism has been awakened by twin provocations, one from radical left ideology permeating the university-educated, especially young adults in their 20s and 30s, the other from immigrant Arab communities. Let me consider them in turn.

The French Revolution set the scene for what would follow when radical progressive ideology became triumphant, showing the pathological impulses it would draw on. It led not to its own ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity but to the Terror, climaxing in the beheading of the king and queen. The guillotine is the decrowning symbol of 1789.

The progressive psyche has two heads, one moderate and sensible, civically responsible and democratic, with genuine sympathy for the underprivileged. The other is anarchic, malevolent and vicious, driven by hatred of those who are prosperous, successful and powerful, and of societies that work and, in particular, its own society. The former used to predominate in the Australian Labor Party of Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley.

The French Revolution set the scene for what would follow when radical progressive ideology became triumphant, showing the pathological impulses it would draw upon. Picture: Culture Club / Getty Images

Anti-Semitism is new to the progressive cause. Jews had played a major role in the rise of 19th-century European socialism, from Karl Marx onwards. How things have changed. Already in 1967, local political philosopher Frank Knopfelmacher anticipated the anti-Semitism that has run riot in the past 21 months. He prophesied with extraordinary prescience that Jews would switch from victims, championed with condescending pity by the left, to its enemies, for they had committed the unpardonable crime in the six-day Israeli-Arab war: they had won.

Universities today confirm the Knopfelmacher observation. At the University of Sydney, 200 students voted to abolish Israel at a recent meeting, standing up and turning their backs on Jewish fellow students when they spoke. A lecturer at Victoria University, wearing a keffiyeh to class, showed a slide of Israel with bombs falling on it, made it compulsory for his students to attend a Free Palestine demonstration, then failed them if they didn’t.

We can’t begin to understand what is happening to multicultural Australia without coming to terms with the essence of anti-Semitism. I reflected in these pages 18 months ago on its roots. There I suggested part cause was an inferiority complex in Christianity and Islam, with both religions derivative from the third of the monotheisms – their creator, Judaism. The Jews came first and founded Christianity, with their Bible, written in Hebrew, forming the Christian Old Testament, Jesus himself being Jewish, and the early church built by Jews, led by Paul. That Christians blamed Jews for killing Christ was mere rationalisation, covering over a deeper insecurity about their religion being derivative.

But today we live in a largely post-Christian world, so why does such an ancient prejudice persist? One clue is to be found in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

The play has at its tragicomic core a stock caricature of a Jewish moneylender. Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, writes his Shylock portrait with some empathy: Hath not a Jew hands, organs, affections, passions? … If you prick us do we not bleed? But any sympathy evoked in the play for Shylock does not wash away the stigma that he is distastefully alien, and to the degree that humiliating him and treating him with unscrupulous dishonesty is seemingly excused, with his own daughter converting to Christianity and robbing him.

There were no practising Jews in Shakespeare’s England; they had been expelled from the country in 1290, 300 years earlier. In other words, the play is tapping into prejudice latent deep in the national psyche, appealing to an audience that had no experience of actual Jews living in the streets of London or even any ancestral memory of them. This astonishing fact should give us pause.

It seems anti-Semitic prejudice endures long underground, dormant like a sleeping troll. It is swiftly aroused, as we have experienced in Western countries across the past two years, as it captured the Greens and is leaching through the Labor Party, not helped by some of the decisions of our Foreign Minister, Penny Wong.

Historically, by the way, the Hitler period showed that the British were one of the least anti-Semitic Christian peoples in Europe, in terms of their actions. Indeed Knopfelmacher, a Jewish exile from central Europe, from Nazism first, then communism, came to love Britain and Australia for their democratic institutions and tolerance, regarding them as having robust civic strength that was missing in continental Europe.

Back to today, I suspect that the mass of 20 and 30-year-olds who continue demonstrating to free Palestine, chanting slogans they don’t understand, ignorant of the history of the warring parties in the Middle East, are not just dupes of the political hour but also may be responding to deep anti-Semitic prejudice lodged in the cultural genes – hidden for decades in this country, dormant but nevertheless present.

In class terms, this is more visible in the offspring of the upper middle class; after all, support for the now unashamedly anti-Semitic Greens comes from prosperous inner-city suburbs. It is rampant in radical students at our elite universities. It simmers, too, among well-educated sophisticated profes­sionals who blithely question Israel’s legitimacy.

The hope in Australia is that a culture profoundly embedded in the collective conscience of a fair go and welcoming strangers, backed by rock-solidly stable Anglo customs and institutions, will be strong enough to keep xenophobic prejudice in check. Picture: William West / AFP

The left cultural hegemony pervading upper-middle-class Australia is unlikely to dissipate any time soon, whatever anti-woke moves are made from time to time in the political sphere. Almost all the megaphones broadcasting social and political opinion remain in the hands of the left: university humanities and social science departments; university management; school syllabuses and activist teachers; arts institutions from museums to theatre companies; writers festivals; the ABC; federal, state, and local government bureaucracies; and even swathes of corporate management. Nothing better illustrates the potency of the resulting mindset than the degree to which “Israel” has become a dirty word, as a kind of reflex prejudice spat out in fashionable disdain.

Xenophobia is common to almost all people and in all times. Hostility to people who are different is endemic to the human condition, readily springing up in individuals and groups experiencing hard times or dissatisfied with their lives, unhappy in the present, who then project their discontented malice on to others who look distinctively different or behave in different ways.

The Jews have been easy targets, part belonging, part different, some decked in weird robes and head garb, readily singled out. In their case, a powerful and successful alien makes a choice magnet for resentment.

Currently, the more diffuse generalised character of left xenophobia is expressed as hostility to anyone who disagrees with it, making it instinctively opposed to free speech. It has now found a new burst of political energy, infused with the voltage of anti-Semitic rancour.

Linked, arguably the most important factor at work here is power envy. Politics, when stripped down to the bare bones, is about power. Free Palestine demonstrations illustrate, on the surface defending the powerless against an imputed oppressor; under the surface, providing for many shouting in the streets an imagined external enemy on to whom to displace their own personal frustrations.

People rally in Melbourne after the front door of a synagogue was set ablaze on July 4. Picture: William West / AFP

The demonstrators themselves have only one actual power, that of the crowd or mob, and the anarchic vandalism of furtively painting graffiti and damaging property, while now increasing the tempo by openly showing no fear of public authority.

Even in the case of Shylock, he was loathed because he had power, the power of money, which he used to take revenge on those prejudiced against him.

Where there is power insecurity there is commonly paranoia. The anxiety of feeling impotent can arouse sleeping fears that one is being persecuted, that there are evil forces and people working behind the scenes, ones of colossal malevolence out to control the world, trapping poor helpless individuals, exploiting them and keeping them down. It is not just convenient to find someone else to blame for failure but also cathartic, flattering the vanity of the one who feels righteous. Absurd conspiracy theories about Jewish power are not just illustrative, they have been singular and commonplace for more than a century across Europe and the Middle East.

Israel exists as red rag to the bull of contemporary Western power envy. Prosperous, innovative, smart and democratic, it is an oasis of success among nations ruled despotically and incompetently, whose impoverished suffering people are ready candidates for left sympathy – they are genuine contenders for the title of the wretched of the Earth. Israel is imagined as the lead crusading perpetrator of evil Western capitalism, a ruthless and oppressive agent of the US. And Israel keeps using its formidable talents to win David and Goliath struggles, as it is doing once again. Israel is symbol of a powerful and successful nation.

The calls to annihilate Israel, under the spuriously romantic chant of “From the river to the sea”, echo the Nazi pledge to exterminate all Jews. The same mob would be cheering at the foot of the guillotine during the French Terror as bloody heads rolled off into baskets. As recently at the Glastonbury music festival in Britain performers led the crowd in chanting “Death to the IDF”, which equates with death to Israel and death to all the Jews who live there. A cry also heard by the mob that stormed an Israeli restaurant in Melbourne. Here on display is the paranoid contemporary left imagination in its most virulently dark manifestation since its formation in the 1960s.

The sleeping ogre of anti-Semitism has been awakened by twin provocations, one from radical left ideology permeating the university-educated, especially young adults in their 20s and 30s, the other from immigrant Arab communities. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams / Getty Images

Australian Jews have been dragged into the slipstream. No ethnic group since 1945 has made as important a contribution to the host society. In science, medicine, law, the arts and entrepreneurship, their presence is extraordinary.

There also has been philanthropy. Most of the large charitable foundations have been Jewish – Myer, Pratt, Smorgon, Gandel, Besen and Lowy, to name some – overshadowing families on the Anglo side such as Murdoch, Potter and Ramsay.

Perversely, this prodigious giving to hospitals, arts bodies, research centres and a plurality of public welfare organisations may have had an inverse effect.

Virtue can be intimidating, especially to a twisted mind. It is easy to condemn someone for their vices. But when it comes to the hooded demon of rancour, as Shakespeare showed in the case of his satanic mastermind Iago, it is the virtuous and innocent who may inspire the most demented loathing in an envious soul. As it was in the formative case in Western culture, that of Judas, driven self-destructively insane in the presence of someone who was a better person than he was – Jesus.

Let me turn to the second source threatening social cohesion in Australia: immigrant Arab populations. On the multicultural front, a positive occurred late last year. Turkish and Kurdish organisations came out publicly in support of local Jews, offering their sympathy. In earlier pro-Israel demonstrations, Iranian flags had been present in supportive abundance.

Here was evidence that the anti-Israel fervour among immigrants to Australia from the Middle East was not pan-Islamic. It is more circumscribed, to disaffected Muslim Arabs, some of Palestinian background and, in the case of Sydney, some of Lebanese background.

In these instances, the conflict with the host society is intractable, for radical Islam is exclusivist, intolerant and utterly opposed to the slow assimilation of its adherents into the wider community on which successful Australian multiculturalism has depended. Radical Islam is not only culturally alien to the Australia norm of easygoing tolerance but is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Bigotedly monocultural, it also tends to be militant.

Since 1945, the Australian triumph has been in its capacity to assimilate anyone of whatever ethnic, religious or language background, if not by means of shrewd government action; indeed, Knopfelmacher dubbed successful Australian policy as one of benign neglect. Success has followed from the slow realisation among immigrants as they settled in that they like the Australian way of life, finding it vastly preferable to that prevailing where they came from.

The current immigration trend of taking in large numbers from Indian and Chinese backgrounds is surely to the good. That is because of strong families, an ethos of hard work and not too much cultural distance between Hindu or Confucian cultures and the domestic Anglo norm. And, on the other side, there is a case for limiting any further Palestinian immigration to family reunion.

The hope in Australia is that a culture profoundly embedded in the collective conscience of a fair go and welcoming strangers, backed by rock-solidly stable Anglo customs and institutions, will be strong enough to keep xenophobic prejudice in check.

Even when it flows as deeply as the current of anti-Semitism, with its primordial elements now tracing right through the left disposition pervading the upper middle class, and across several generations. The battle will, I fear, be long, for the incorrigibly enduring, bleak presence of anti-Semitism is unlikely to subside quickly, once aroused.

John Carroll is professor emeritus of sociology at La Trobe University.