“Gas the Jews!” “Gas the Jews!” “Gas the Jews!” If the chanting crowd at the Sydney Opera House on Monday night sounded like they were echoing the Holocaust, that’s because they were.
No doubt the mindless slaughter of Israeli women, children and grandparents in their homes and young people at a music festival in southern Israel last Saturday was meant by the Hamas terror organisation to strike fear into the hearts of Israelis, many of whom have direct links to the Holocaust.
Yet in some of the Australian media’s attempts to strike a moral equivalence between this kind of medieval barbarism and Israel’s military response to it, some journalists have failed to understand long links between Hamas and its parent, the Muslim Brotherhood, to German Nazism and to the Jew hatred that predated the Third Reich. Politicians and media who talk about Zionist colonialism misunderstand the history.
The Jews are direct descendants of the Canaanite original inhabitants. The word Judaism traces back to the province of Judea. Jews have been there for more than 3300 years.
Neither did most Jews come to the old British-mandated Palestine after World War II. In fact, many stayed on after the Romans expelled Jews in AD19. There were about 600,000 in the area before independence in 1948.
While many had made their way to Europe, many also went to major Middle Eastern cities and came back to Israel after 1948. Islam is only 1400 years old and many people who consider themselves Palestinian actually came from the wider Middle East.
Nor are most Jews in Israel European. Most are of Middle Eastern extraction and 20 per cent of Israel proper is Arab, with full voting rights and members in the Knesset. Other ethnic groups such as Druze and Bedouin have full voting rights and many choose to serve in the army.
Nor have many journalists understood Gaza, often described as a hellhole of 2.2 million people crammed into an area not much bigger than a few capital city suburbs in Australia. Gaza actually sits on a beautiful strip of Mediterranean coastline. With the right economic strategies and leaders who cared more for the wellbeing of Palestinians it could be a successful city.
Journalists claim Gaza is locked down but the Israeli army left Gaza in a unilateral withdrawal in 2005 under prime minister Ariel Sharon. Before the latest murders, about 18,000 Gazans a day have had permits to leave the city to work in Israel.
This column has visited Israel several times and has a daughter living and working in the tech sector in Tel Aviv.
The first visit was a trip sponsored by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies for editors in late 1992. We were lucky enough to visit Gaza and escaped unscathed after a brick-throwing attack on our vehicle. Some of us later also managed to get away from our minders to an Israeli press function where, uninvited, we met prime minister and war hero Yitzhak Rabin, who was happy to have beers with a couple of Aussie journos.
Later we spent part of a night at the home of Palestine Liberation Organisation deputy Faisal Husseini. This was before Rabin and PLO chief Yasser Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for signing the Oslo Accords in late 1993 that set out a political land-for-peace formula meant to culminate in the elusive two-state solution. Husseini was a close relative of the World War II-era grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who met Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1941.
This week online magazine Quillette published a piece by US historian Jeffrey Herf on the links between Hamas and anti-Semitism. Praise to Claire Lehmann, Friday columnist here, who founded Quillette. Herf quotes Amin al-Husseini assuring German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1941 that Arabs were “natural friends of Germany because both are engaged in the struggle against their three common enemies: the English, the Jews and Bolshevism”. Al-Husseini believed World War II had “been unleashed by world Jewry”, which controlled the US and the Soviet Union.
It’s a common racist trope that owes much to tsarist Russia’s discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In the context of an underprivileged Muslim world such thinking fails to hold despotic regimes to account for their fabulous oil wealth while keeping their own people in relative poverty. Nor does it account for the demographic disparity: 16 million Jews worldwide to two billion Muslims.
Back to Rabin and Faisal Husseini. Both believed a political solution was essential for peace and both feared an ideological struggle along religious and cultural lines.
At that stage Rabin’s Labour voters on the Golan Heights were prepared to vote to give up the land Israel had won from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War to secure peace. Both men were suspicious of Hamas. Many at that time feared Israel risked more than it could gain by dealing with Hamas in Gaza. Fast forward to today and it is clear Israel wrongly assumed Hamas would leave it alone while Israel focused most of its military attentions on the West Bank.
If Hamas’s brutality last Saturday has a valid comparison beyond the Holocaust it is with Islamic State, another Sunni group with ideological antecedents in the Muslim Brotherhood.
The violence wreaked on civilians in southern Israel is eerily similar to the treatment ISIS meted out to the Yazidis in 2014, especially the sexual violence and murder of Yazidi women.
Yet in some of the left media commentary here the old “root causes” crowd that tried to blame the US for al-Qa’ida’s 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon has been saying Israel brought the attacks on itself by running a virtual apartheid regime.
It is instructive how many feminist journalists have had little or nothing to say about the rape and murder of women and girls at Hamas’s hands last Saturday.
These “root causes” arguments infantilise Muslim societies, remembering Hamas’s sponsors in Iran run the second biggest oil-exporting business on earth but repress their own people. Yet beyond the neo-Marxist political analysis given by many of our local Greens politicians here this week there are psychological differences between Islam and Judaism.
Judaism is not a missionary religion but an ethno-religious grouping. Islam, like Christianity before it, seeks to evangelise to nonbelievers. Jews have faced hundreds of years of anti-Semitism, even pogroms, because they have kept together, maintained their faith and language, and seldom intermarry. They are quintessentially “the other”, and have been for centuries.
Yet for 2000 years, through a rigorous commitment to education, the Jewish diaspora in the Middle East, Europe, Africa and India managed to keep its faith and language intact. This has caused resentment among non-Jews, especially in the Middle East.
Suspicion of Jews feeds into the powerful effects on Israel of the Holocaust and earlier pogroms. Israel will do almost anything to save every Jew – from the Entebbe rescue in 1976 to the handover of 1027 Hamas and Palestinian prisoners for the return of a single captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2011.
It is this focus on life, rather than any desire for religious or ethnic apartheid, that sits behind the building of the wall on the West Bank and the closure of Gaza.
While Palestinians obviously love their children, Jewish society cannot reconcile with a culture that sends its young children on to school buses wearing suicide vests. Like ISIS, it’s a culture of death foreign to Judaism. And it has only backfired on Palestinians as Israel has moved to set up barriers to protect itself.
Yet for travellers who know Israel, Palestinians in places such as Tel Aviv, inside the old 1948 Green Line, live peacefully side-by-side with Jews every day.
The left’s useful fools defending hideous behaviours from a clearly totalitarian fascist organisation need to be reminded Gaza’s residents are being bombed only because of Hamas’s deliberate actions. Hamas and Iran chose this course.
Protesting in favour of beheading babies and burning old women alive presents dangers to Australia, just as 9/11 did. Countries such as ours need to ask if they really should tolerate the sort of intolerance shown by the anti-Israeli marchers in Sydney on Monday. Dan Andrews banned the Nazi salute after a Melbourne rally last year, but racist attacks against victims of mass murder are apparently OK?
This is the most dangerous time for Israel in 50 years. It will struggle with the idea of not bowing to the blackmail of hostage-taking. It faces danger from Iranian-backed Hezbollah in the north. History suggests it will forget its attempted peace deal with Saudi Arabia – probably the trigger for the latest Hamas attacks – and will strike military targets inside Iran. It hit Syrian targets on Thursday.
Israel, a lonely island of 10 million, is the only democracy in a region with 200 million Arabs, most committed to its destruction. The loss of 1300 lives is an astonishing toll on such a tiny population – much worse than 9/11 in the US.
Israel needs to be feared to survive. When Hamas says Palestine has been occupied for 75 years it is talking about the UN-sanctioned establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Do the maths.
This organisation does not want peace. It wants the total destruction of Israel.
Chris Mitchell was editor-in-chief of The Australian, 2002-15.
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