After the Israel attack, Jewish people can no longer feel safe — even in Australia

The brazen normalisation of today’s anti-Semitism has left Jews with only one option: Israel.

For many, like me, who have fled this war, we wait anxiously for when the external threat makes it safe enough to return.

Living in Israel has always been fraught with risk. Large-scale wars and violent intifadas aside, the era of bombs on buses has evolved into more indiscriminate and brazen terrorism: stabbings, car rammings and shootings in broad daylight. October 7 was the most audacious, as thousands of barbarians tore through a border fence and committed a massacre that was proudly recorded for posterity. The footage is a horror show of beheadings, torture, babies cooked in ovens, violent gang rape and the kidnapping of civilians, spirited to the gates of hell and Hamas’s spiderweb of tunnels made with aid siphoned off its own people. All of it caught on camera. It’s evidence served up on a silver platter yet in this deranged new reality we’re living in, the world, it seems, has moved on.

The loss of innocent civilian lives on both sides of this conflict is tragic – it’s the devastating cost of a war Israel didn’t want to have. Yet instead of condemning Hamas (classified as a terrorist organisation by Australia, the US, the EU and Britain) – which uses civilians as human shields – it is ­Israel, which yearns for the day when innocent Gazans can be free from Hamas, that is vilified.

And by extension, because anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism (despite what some on the ­progressive left may argue), Jews in the diaspora are in the eye of the storm.

Anti-Jewish sentiment has moved far beyond bias and backyard whispers, past done-in-the-dark swastikas and behind-the-scenes boardrooms or masked keyboard warriors. Day after day, abhorrent vitriol rages across placards, loudspeakers, posters and graffiti calling for Jews to be gassed. Circulated across social media, it’s an endless stream of content with no reprieve. Faces aren’t disguised, names aren’t blurred out – it’s shameless, free-for-all bigotry without reproach.

An Instagram account that “names and shames” those ripping down hostage posters bears no weight any more. The woke TikTok generation parrots from the pulpits of their safe homes and local cafes to “ceasefire now!” and to “free Palestine from the river to the sea” – a death chant that calls for annihilation of the world’s only Jewish state. Call it what you will, but we see you – and you may as well be wearing white hoods and cloaks.

The pro-Palestinian movement is not protest in context (Hamas has struck Israel’s Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon three times since the start of the war yet nobody seems to care), nor is it advocating for Palestinian people in good faith (that would require condemnation of Hamas). Rather, it is about a fundamental, deep-rooted hatred of the Jewish people – and this “cause” is as good an excuse as any. Anti-Semitism has always bubbled away at the surface, Hamas has just given it licence to explode. The result is untenable vulnerability and isolation. And because the reality is that there is power in numbers, Jews are being bullied into submission: hiding at home for fear of gangs like the one in Melbourne asking passing motorists if they knew “where to find the Jews”; taking off traditional Magen David jewellery in public to avoid anything that may be a “dead giveaway”; encouraging our children not to wear school uniforms on public transport.

We gather in quieter, smaller numbers, praying in utter despair for an end to the suffering on all sides and the safe return of our hostages and young soldiers. Increasingly, I find myself wondering whether this is how my grandfather may have felt before escaping Germany in 1939. Except back then he found refuge in Australia. Now, we find refuge nowhere. ­Except, that is, for Israel.

So while Israel may contend with missiles and rockets, hemmed in on all sides by enemies, the greatest irony of this conflict is that it’s the only place where Jews will ever feel safe to walk the streets without intimidation or harassment. It is the reason that hundreds of patriotic young army reservists voluntarily flew back home to fight, resolute in Israel’s right to defend itself.

For many, like me, who have fled this war, we wait anxiously for when the external threat makes it safe enough to return.

As Jews in the diaspora are made increasingly unwelcome, defending Israel has never been more important. We will continue to fight because despite the brutal evidence, despite our palpable sorrow and despair, and because we cannot change what the world thinks of us, Israel is all we have.

Carli Philips is an Australian-born Jewish writer who has been living in Tel Aviv for two years. Philips has been in London since the start of the war.