It is not yet time for the liturgy of remembrance
Two years ago, October 7 shattered friendships and transformed life for Jewish Australians. Michael Gawenda reveals the painful divisions that have torn through our Jewish community as they navigate a new reality.
There is a liturgy of prayers and Torah readings in Judaism for remembering the terrible things that have happened to Jews.
I am not religious and for Jews like me, when it comes to the remembrance of past calamities, there is a secular liturgy to follow when we Jews gather to remember. It consists of singing deeply sorrowful songs and reciting heart-aching poetry and often, regrettably, listening to too long sermons.
There is not yet a liturgy as far as I know for what happened on October 7, 2023, in those kibbutzes and small towns in southern Israel.
Nor is there a secular liturgy of songs and poetry written for October 7 that has become part of collective Jewish remembering.
It is too early for that, partly because liturgies take time to become rituals and partly because what happened on October 7 remains a living – and changing – reality in the lives of Israelis and in the lives of diaspora Jews.
In the days leading up to the anniversary, on the morning of Yom Kippur, on Thursday, outside a synagogue in Manchester where Jews were gathering for the first service of what is a long and solemn day of prayer and fasting, two Jews were murdered and four seriously injured by a man who drove his car into them and then emerged from the car and stabbed as many Jews as he could before police shot him dead.
The British Prime Minister immediately declared it a vile act by a lone individual. This has become the standard response to anti-Semitic attacks by politicians who do not want to offend or upset their Muslim communities. Yet a short time after Keir Starmer made that statement, based essentially on no evidence, the police arrested three people on suspicion that they were involved in the planning of the attack.
Starmer immediately ordered extra security for Jewish institutions and the synagogues in Britain, on Yom Kippur, when the synagogues were full of Jews. They would be guarded by armed anti-terrorist police and Jewish children would have to see this and be told the armed police were there to protect them because there were people who wanted to do bad things to Jews like them.
On this second anniversary of October 7, armed guards at Jewish institutions – synagogues, schools, cultural centres and even Holocaust museums – have become part of Jewish life in Australia, normalised, so that even children no longer ask why the guards are necessary as they walk through the gates of Jewish schools. Hostility to Jews has been normalised.
It is not only for Jews – in Israel and the diaspora – that October 7 remains a living reality. It remains a living reality in the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and in the lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank. And Palestinians everywhere. It is not yet time for remembrance.
So what is it time for as the second anniversary of October 7 is upon us?
Moral reckoning
Is it time for a sort of moral reckoning that consists of counting the dead who were murdered and taken hostage on October 7 and then counting the dead who have been killed in the war against Hamas in Gaza and asking at what point does the war being waged by Israel become, at best, morally dubious?
This is, I believe, a good question if asked sincerely but, in my experience, it is often asked by people on the left, as if it requires no answer, as if not a single Palestinian life can be justified in a war that genocidal Israel is waging against the Palestinian people.
In this context I remember what Bob Carr, the warrior against the Jews who have somehow managed to capture Australian foreign policy and to silence criticism of Israel, said a day after October 7. He said his heart and concern were with the Palestinians who were about to suffer terribly at the hands of the Israelis.
Carr encapsulates what was painful from the start for Australian Jews like me, Jews of the left, about the way the horrors of October 7 were immediately contextualised – minimised – and Palestinian victimhood was elevated to holiness and Australian Jews became, almost immediately, genocide supporters and racists and Zionist scum.
I wrote this on my Substack Gawenda Unleashed three days after October 7. Gawenda Unleashed has been a sort of diary of what has happened to Jews, Australian Jews in particular, these past two years.
This post was a response to the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the Sydney Opera House and in the CBD in Melbourne that heroised the October 7 murders of 1200 people and the kidnapping by Hamas of 251 hostages:
When some people at the pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist rallies chanted death to the Jews I did wonder how it was possible for Jews to be at these rallies, to speak at these rallies when fellow Jews, 1000 of them, had been murdered and there were Jews still hidden away and full of fear as Hamas murderers continued their holy work in those southern Israeli towns and villages.
I cannot think of anything to say about the root causes of the Hamas slaughter of Jews. I am rendered speechless by this question … Really, the pro-Palestinian marchers and flare lighters and chanters, especially the Jews among them, can’t they see the obscenity of the question about root causes, the question they ask when they can’t bring themselves to mourn, in silence preferably, for an hour or two, maybe a day even, what the Hamas murderers have perpetrated?
People are dying in Gaza, men and women and children, and it is right for Penny Wong now to call on Israel to do everything it can to protect civilians in Gaza and it is right to work for a corridor for humanitarian aid and for escape routes for Gazans – possibly through the border controlled by Egypt. Only the morally corrupted would remain untouched by the plight of the people of Gaza.
Wong did say that October 7 was terrible and that Israel had a right to defend itself, but from the start it was a cold, almost proforma response to the mass slaughter of Jews, best illustrated by the fact that Wong, months after October 7, went to Israel but – unlike other foreign ministers and even prime ministers and presidents – she refused to visit the sites where the killings and rapes and tortures had been perpetrated.
Friendships end with a whimper
For me, friendships that were decades long ended within days of October 7. And friendships ended with people I had worked with for years.
They ended not with a bang but with a whimper of silence.
Looking back, I was in part responsible for these endings because October 7 had rendered me unreasonable, confronted as I felt, with a new, unimagined reality in which a fierce hostility towards Jews had suddenly been normalised, almost mainstreamed, certainly on the left.
Last year, on the first anniversary of October 7, in this newspaper, which has been a welcoming place where I have been allowed to record a sort of diary of my post October 7 life, I wrote this:
There is deep sorrow still on this anniversary of October 7 among Jews of the left like me, sorrow and pain. And there is this sense of betrayal, most acutely felt in the days after October 7 but still there a year later. Friendships have ended …
I do not much care about the Greens, in the sense that they were never a part of the left in which I grew up. They are part of the ideologically zealous left that too often, has ended up supporting murderous fascist-like regimes.
But the Labor Party has been the home of many Australian Jews. Bob Hawke, perhaps Labor’s greatest prime minister, was a lover of the Jews, a powerful supporter of Israel even if, towards the end of his life, he was increasingly concerned about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
It was a dark time for Australian Jews who felt unsafe and unloved and abandoned by the Albanese government. Anti-Semitism had become normalised. Things that were unimaginable a few years ago – the bombing of Jewish institutions, the anti-Semitic graffiti campaigns, the physical threats against Jews – had become a feature of Jewish life in Australia. In many ways it felt like what happened on October 7, the murders and rapes and kidnappings, had at best been erased from the collective memory especially by the left – for some on the left there was a denial that it had even happened – and at worst, on the left, it had become a symbol of all that was wrong with Zionism and its illegitimate, genocidal state.
‘I think I failed’
In that context, making room in Jewish hearts for the suffering of the people of Gaza was hard and many failed to make such room. I think I failed.
This is not an excuse but amid so much hostility to Jews after October 7, so much cancelling of Jewish artists and writers because they were Zionists and such failures by institutions such as our universities and human rights bodies to even begin to combat Jew hatred, Jewish hearts like mine failed to find a space for the suffering – the scale of it, the causes of it – of the people of Gaza.
What has changed? On this second anniversary of October 7, hostility to Jews has become a normalised part of Australian life, as if such hostility is understandable even if it is unacceptable. Zionism is now a firmly established term of abuse across much of the left and even beyond.
The cancellation of Jewish artists through social media campaigns of intimidation no longer causes anything approaching outrage – not even from Tony Burke, who is the Arts Minister and whose job it surely is to challenge the cancellation, to express his displeasure at this targeting of Jewish Australians.
What has changed? When Albanese spoke at the UN about the government’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state, he did talk about the rise in anti-Semitism and how unacceptable it was and as he spoke – I think this move by the government to recognise a non-existent state is a mistake – I thought about how acceptable, in fact, hostility to Jews had become.
I thought about how the report into anti-Semitism and how to combat it by the government-appointed anti-Semitism envoy, Jillian Segal, had sunk without a trace, despite the fact it had been launched with great solemnity by Albanese and Wong and Burke – a landmark report, they had agreed.
It sank without a trace after a couple of weeks of outrage in the media, especially in the Nine papers and the ABC, and a collective agreement among their commentators and journalists that this work of Segal’s was proof of the power and influence of the Israel/Jewish lobby.
The report should be ignored. And so ignored it was. And the whole idea of having an envoy to combat anti-Semitism was discredited and the government resorted to silence to distance itself from its appointed envoy and her widely vilified suggestions for how anti-Semitism might be ameliorated.
A few weeks ago, Aftab Malik, the federal government-appointed envoy to combat Islamophobia, delivered his report at a press conference with Albanese.
It is fair to say the press conference seemed to me a far more modest affair than the one for Segal’s anti-Semitism report. There were fewer journalists and forgettable speeches, and this was reflected in media coverage of the report, which was at best modest and quickly became a non-story. And it is possible that this was a reasonable journalistic judgment.
These government-created envoys, designed ostensibly to deal with the clear threats to multicultural harmony, were in reality performative politics, designed to show that the government was doing something to safeguard our precious cultural diversity. Now the best the government can hope for is that Malik’s and Segal’s reports can be quietly buried, and that the political cost of all this will not be significant.
Still, even though for Jews in Australia and Jews in Britain and Europe and the
US anti-Semitism has not abated, attacks on Jewish institutions have not
subsided and Jewish insecurity and fear remain the reality of Jewish life, some things have changed two years after October 7. There is increasingly space in Jewish hearts for pain and sorrow at the suffering of the Gazans. Once that space exists, that suffering of the Gazans made real, there is increasingly space for a questioning of what is happening in Gaza, what has happened in Gaza.
There is increasingly space for asking what the consequences have been of having fascists and Jewish supremacists in an Israeli government, and what are the consequences of Netanyahu’s profound political cynicism, his profound failures.
There is even space for Australia’s major Jewish organisations to say, publicly, that Netanyahu’s interventions in Australian politics had made things worse for Australian Jews. A year ago, such public statements would have been unthinkable. Things have changed, even as Australian Jews, in the main, feel no more loved than they did a year ago, no safer, no more certain that sometime soon the hostility to Jews might subside.
Something has changed, even as, for many Jews, what happened on October 7 remains painfully vivid and outside time, as if it happened yesterday and even as, for many Jews, the living and dead hostages still held captive in Gaza are an unbearable reality.
And the Trump plan for ending the war, has it changed anything? Might something come of it? Will the hostages be freed some time soon? Is it possible that Hamas might agree to what is in reality its surrender? Will the dying in Gaza end? Will Netanyahu, who like a naughty schoolboy was forced by Trump to call the Prime Minister of Qatar and apologise for the failed attempt to kill the Hamas leadership in Doha, be forced to do Trump’s bidding and defy the extremists in his government who will never accept this plan?
The easy answer is that nothing will come of this plan, just like nothing came of all the other plans to end the war.
The hard answer is that no one knows and that hope should not be easily and cynically dismissed and ridiculed.
On Tuesday, two years after October 7, 2023, many Jews will spend time with family – some of whom will be in Israel – reflecting on where we are, we Jews, how we are feeling, what is happening in Israel and in Gaza and in Australia.
It is not yet time for remembrance – in songs and poems and in sermons, about what befell the innocents in those kibbutzes and small towns in southern Israel and at the Nova music festival in the desert not far away.
And what has happened in the two years since that time of horror.
It is not yet time.
Michael Gawenda is a former editor of The Age. He is the author of the book My Life as a Jew.
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