Making a national icon a symbol of anti-Semitism is a bridge way too far
The Palestine Action Group’s successful bid to march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge underscores the theme of the week: history, and the attempt to walk all over it.
The symbolism of the pro-Palestinian march across Sydney’s majestic Harbour Bridge on Sunday will be weighty, which is the aim. Capitalising on public horror about reports – this time, apparently credible reports – about a civilian hunger crisis in Gaza, the anti-Israel protest movement will seek to colonise one of Australia’s most iconic structures, laying claim to “a powerful symbol”, as Lord Mayor Clover Moore describes it.
“Death to the IDF” and “From the River to the Sea” will enjoy purity by association with some of the defining Harbour Bridge marches in recent history, including the walk for reconciliation with Indigenous Australia in 2000.
What next, the inaugural Yahya Sinwar October 7 memorial march on the Kokoda Trail?
The bridge march underscores the theme of the week: history, and the attempt to walk all over it.
This is a week of historical significance on the ground in Gaza where the humanitarian suffering marks a grim new chapter in the war and one for which Israel cannot negate its share of moral responsibility. It’s a historic week, too, in the diplomatic corridors of power where Israel’s campaign against Hamas has lost international legitimacy, with Western governments poised to recognise Palestine. Keir Starmer says the UK will recognise a Palestinian state in September unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza; a stance obnoxious to both sides, with a neo-colonial arrogance about it.
And the world’s once-great mastheads produced their first draft of history duped by pro-Hamas propaganda. The New York Times, as well as the ABC and Nine papers, published a harrowing photo of a skeletal toddler, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, wearing a plastic bag for a nappy while cradled in his mother’s arms to illustrate starvation in Gaza. It was later revealed the child suffered from a serious pre-existing condition; the paper excluded a photo of the child’s brother who appeared nourished.
The Times’ lame “clarification”, published in a social media post from an account with a modest following, could not stem the fresh wave of anti-Semitism the front page image unleashed. (On social media, someone offered the fascinating observation the image was deliberately framed as a pieta; Mary cradling the dead Christ, perhaps to tap into latent anti-Semitism in the Christian psyche.)
Remember that journalists at the Nine papers, the journalists’ union at the ABC and at progressive media outlets overseas have signed a petition urging “as much” professional scepticism be applied to information from Israeli government sources as is applied to Hamas. If only the media lived up to this ambition. Instead, as I see it, the left-leaning media applies not scepticism as much as scorn to official Israeli sources and utter credulity to sources from within Gaza where independent journalism is even more scarce than food.
Anthony Albanese, refuting Israeli denials of starvation in the strip as “beyond comprehension”, remarked that “while there is a caveat on any health information which is provided by Hamas, it is Israel that has prevented journalists from getting in”. True – although if the world’s media are wedded to a meta-narrative about Israel as an illegitimate and irredeemable state in the business of genocide then “independent” reporting from Gaza may appear little different than the Hamas-twice-removed version we’re consuming now.
The notion of Israeli “genocide” long ago crossed the red line separating truth from libel, as the adults leave the room, one by one – including Bob Carr, a former Labor luminary who has since shapeshifted into something much reduced. Australia’s former foreign minister, former NSW premier, former lover of democracy and one must now say former historian kicked off the week with a dose of post-history.
It is a sign of my residual admiration for the man that even knowing his transmogrification from staunch supporter of Israel to one-eyed evangelist for Palestine I was still disappointed that he couldn’t offer a suitably exaggerated and unjust historical analogy for the chaos and tragedy in Gaza. That he couldn’t pluck a brutal war of vengeance involving the mass suffering of civilians from his vast mental library.
Because we know Carr loved history from the time he was in high school. Back then, he reminisced in a speech in 1995 when he was still NSW premier, he was thrilled to be taught a history that was “explaining the contemporary world to him”, and “was not boiled down to be instantly digestible”. At that time he was disturbed the discipline was being marginalised in schools, so in the interests of civic health he introduced a mandatory history curriculum of such rigour that in 2002 teachers were reporting that year 10 students were worn down and turning away from modern history “in droves”.
Maybe he’d learnt his lesson because these days Carr’s history tutorials are perfectly crafted to the post-truth TikTok generation. This week he flipped history into something he might have once described as “easily digestible” – and very bad for civic health. He likened Israel’s actions in Gaza to “the worst of the last hundred years of Stalin’s Ukraine, of the Warsaw Ghetto, of Mao’s Great Leap Forward”.
Why these comparisons in particular? I have some theories. Stalin and Ukraine evokes Russia and Ukraine, the latter being a popular cause, even though Israel, like Ukraine, had been forced into a defensive war. Mao’s Great Leap Forward: that’s designed to throw off counteraccusations that he’s doing the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party while slamming the pro-Israel lobby for exerting disproportionate influence on behalf of the Netanyahu government – the bog-standard trope about Jewish power pulling the world’s strings. But, really, these two examples are just cover for the third: the Warsaw Ghetto.
Carr has joined the thriving market of Holocaust distortion, profitable for grifters and agitators on both far right and far left. In this schema, the Israelis blend with the Nazis, the Palestinians take the place of the interned Jews, and Hamas, still holding 50 hostages in the dungeons of Gaza, is disappeared altogether.
The comparison would be spot on if the Warsaw Ghetto had been controlled by a Jewish death cult sworn to the destruction of the Aryan state, which used the ghetto as a launching pad for bloody attacks, rigged the place with a vast tunnel network so the Nazis could not retaliate without killing Jewish civilians, received backing as a proxy of a heavily armed state, hijacked aid shipments – there being aid shipments – for enrichment and to control the broader Jewish population and – oh lord, how did we get here?
Must Carr deploy the doomsday weapon in the anti-Semite’s arsenal, a staple in parts of the Muslim world, which casts Jews as Nazis and therefore reverses the moral justification for the state of Israel as a refuge for the victims of the Holocaust, history’s ultimate crime against humanity?
Because if it turns out that the Jews are actually themselves Nazis then clearly the United Nations made a mistake establishing Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust. So now we can all cheerfully get on with the task of de-legitimising Israel and working towards the glorious day when it will be dismantled and the Jews can return to their natural and deserved state of defencelessness. Meanwhile, the new state of Palestine supplants the state of Israel as a state born in the ashes of genocide.
Apart from being obscene, Carr’s Warsaw Ghetto comparison doesn’t even have originality going for it. In December 2023, Masha Gessen drew comparisons in The New Yorker between Gaza and the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, to the apparent satisfaction of the magazine’s famously rigorous fact checkers. Even then Patrick Wolfe, an Australian anthropologist, had made the same comparison as early as 2006. Do you get that? Israel was being called genocidal 20 years before the current war. It had been designated a “settler-colonial” state built on a genocide of Palestinians, a crime, according to the logic of this academic discipline, which can never be undone and shapes all that Israel does thereafter.
Without delving into the obscenity that characterises as “genocidal” a state built in the Jews’ ancestral homeland by refugees from European, and later Arab, persecution, the theory is a window to the way the academic and media classes had been groomed to see Israel as genocidal before the IDF fired the first shot in Gaza after October 7, 2023. Hence, the denunciations, such as a petition in the prestigious Overland, of Israel’s “ongoing genocide” against Palestinians within a fortnight of the biggest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Hence, a telling remark from NSW Greens MP Jenny Leong in support of the Harbour Bridge march. She said Premier Chris Minns’ decision to light the sails of the Opera House “in the colours of a genocidal regime” after the October 7 massacre was a wrong that needed to be rectified by allowing pro-Palestine activists to occupy another symbol of the city. Once again, the reversal of cause-and-effect that wipes the genocidal violence of October 7 from the historical record and with it, the Holocaust, as Jew hatred spikes.
The authorities resisted permission for the march on “safety” grounds – traffic, the bridge’s weight-bearing capacity – rather than spell out that the lack of safety here is one of intimidation.
The protest is dubbed “The March for Humanity to save Gaza”. I wish that were true. It’s not, even if many good people will join the rally, shouting vile slogans without interrogating their origins and meaning. (Mark Latham – another former Labor leader since gone way off the reservation – says he’ll be joining this march to the right side of history. Choke on that one, perhaps?) I wish we could see a reconciliation march re-dux through a Middle East lens.
In a sign of how the world has turned inside-out, I wish the protesters could follow this week’s historic move by the Arab League and call for Hamas to disarm and end its rule in Gaza – end the Palestinians’ hell. I’d even take an ill-timed march towards the mirage of a “two-state solution”. But the marchers in Sydney will almost certainly not call for a two-state solution and the end of Hamas, the jihadi enemy of civilisation, only for the end of Israel, an outcome they describe as “peace and humanity”. Where once upon a time I could dismiss them as fringe dwellers, this week has reminded me just how much that’s no longer the case.
Julie Szego is a Melbourne-based freelance journalist.
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