Macabre as this may sound, I wasn’t shocked at the nurses from Sydney’s Bankstown Hospital, cheerfully boasting, during a quiet moment on night shift, that they would not treat Israeli patients but would kill them.
Horrified – certainly. My late father was an Auschwitz survivor who had been forced to present himself before the “angel of death”, Dr Josef Mengele. He knew of fellow Holocaust survivors so traumatised that even decades later in Australia they did not trust gentile doctors – fortunately, there were plenty of the other sort around.
The spectre of Jews being murdered in hospital wards by assassins disguised in the scrubs of a healing profession evokes dark associations.
But shocked – no way. Frankly, I’m shocked others are so shocked. NSW Health Minister Ryan Park, whose decisive action in this crisis cannot be faulted, called the pair, Sarah Abu Lebdeh and Ahmad “Rashad” Nadir, “deranged”. Nonsense. They strike me as perfectly sane.
Indeed, Nadir’s bio suggests a man of intelligence and resilience. He fled Afghanistan as a child and arrived in Australia speaking limited English. According to a 2021 social media post from not-for-profit group The Helmsman Project, he’d been working part time as a nurse while studying for a master’s. His was a migrant success story.
The nurses were disinhibited about wanting to kill Israelis, with Nadir even bragging, please god falsely, that he’d already dispatched several “to the afterlife”, because – to state the obvious – they had no inkling they were breaching a taboo.
And in a broad sense they weren’t. The idea that Israel, and by logical extension Israelis, should be sent “to hell”, as Nadir put it, has become almost mainstream in the wake of October 7.
It’s just a question of time and place. One must keep the exuberance in check, that’s all.
The nurses were merely a tad too earthy, too literal in their support for an ideology that has become a weekend catchcry on the streets and the mark of respectability in institutions throughout the West.
And for those seeking to “globalise the intifada”, no part of society should be allowed to remain neutral on the subject of Israel’s existence, which means that every profession must relax their protocols to allow for a carve-out to rid their ranks of Zionist evil, meaning Jews.
Hence, we saw keffiyeh-clad actors – whom I’d describe as useful idiots for the pro-Iranian axis – imposing their views on audiences. Clusters of teachers pushing pro-Palestine activism in the classroom.
Journalists at the ABC and elsewhere lobbying editors to suspend the usual rules of journalism and report the Israel-Palestine conflict as a morality tale wherein all the strife can be traced back to a Jewish state deemed guilty from birth. And so on.
Similarly at Bankstown, the real story lurks just off-camera. A nurse at NSW Health has since come forward with claims that in the aftermath of October 7 she’d publicly raised the alarm about her colleagues wearing their uniforms while chanting “From the river to the sea” – effectively a call to eliminate Israel – only to find herself under investigation by the health regulator.
And soon after the video surfaced, Bankstown Hospital scrubbed from its Instagram account a photo of a woman wearing a “Free Palestine” T-shirt depicting a raised fist in the colours of the Palestinian flag.
Before this week’s controversy, Bankstown Hospital, its website full of the usual social justice blather about supporting “culturally and linguistically diverse communities”, saw nothing wrong with disseminating a photo with what a spokesperson now calls “political messaging”. It had no concerns such an image might undermine people’s faith that Bankstown provided excellent healthcare to all, regardless of ethnicity or political views. If “Free Palestine” is the hospital vibe, why be shocked at nurses broadcasting to the world a delightful, lighthearted riff on snuffing out Israeli patients?
In a similar vein, why be shocked at Macquarie University academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, the recipient of $870,000 in commonwealth research grants belatedly coming under review, posting with scholarly nuance on X: “May 2025 be the end of Israel.” She previously has insisted “Zionists” aren’t entitled to “cultural safety”.
This might mean, and I’m improvising here, that I have no moral right to demand public hospitals be free of “Free Palestine” sloganeering or of nurses prepared to share their homicidal thoughts on Israelis to the world at large while working their shift.
Adjusting for differences in socio-economic background and cultural capital, the nurses’ sentiments are barely distinguishable from what passes as correct-think in academic and human rights circles.
For instance, when in November 2023 Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi claimed not to have noticed a placard beside her that urged Israel be thrown in the bin, I believed her. Why would she have noticed?
The sentiment is hardly noteworthy on the Israel-hating hard left. The members of the intelligentsia who want to cleanse the world of Israelis perceive themselves to be on the side of the angels. They believe they’re righteous warriors against a state framed in their discourse as a genocidal, settler-colonial, white supremacist, apartheid entity; the fact it’s also the world’s only Jewish state, and home to roughly half the Jews on the planet, is simply coincidence.
Hence, one of the most inhospitable places for Jews today is the anti-racism movement, as we saw at Queensland University of Technology’s recent closed-door, Israel-hating and ironically named National Symposium on Unifying Anti-Racist Research and Action. Among a laundry list of outrages, the one dissident in the audience, a Jewish academic, was shamed and threatened with being punched in the throat.
I’m certainly not interested in “safety” if it means safe rooms for Jewish students on otherwise hostile university campuses. Or Jewish suburbs where firebombed synagogues are rebuilt as fortresses. Or Jews avoiding certain hospitals in certain parts of town because – well, better be safe than sorry.
Park has said Bankstown Hospital will examine whether improvements can be made to the state Health Department from a “cultural perspective”. What’s needed at Bankstown and everywhere in Australia is nothing less than cultural revolution.
Everyone from the federal government down must stop pairing their condemnation of anti-Semitism with that of “Islamophobia” because this conceals and obfuscates the reality that much of the Jew-hatred we’re seeing today emanates from a section of the Islamic community. And our leaders must say without equivocation that calling for the destruction of Israel is vile and racist, whether that call comes in the vernacular of western Sydney or the turgid jargon of the highly educated.
Julie Szego is a Melbourne-based freelance journalist.
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