Anti-Semitism: At last, a belated recognition of a scourge which was allowed to fester

Anti-Semitic graffiti in Woollahra in Sydney’s east. Picture: Rohan Kelly

Anthony Albanese, it seems, finally gets it. His emotional and powerful press conference at Sydney’s Jewish Museum on Wednesday could, and should, have been given many, many months ago, long before the ugly spectre of anti-Semitism took root and spread its poison across this country.

It took a car set alight in Sydney in an anti-Semitic attack for the second time in weeks and terrorist firebombing of a beloved synagogue in Melbourne’s Jewish heartland to shake an emotional Prime Minister into giving the sort of response that the country’s Jewish community and many non-Jewish Australian had been pleading for since Jews were targeted at the Opera House on October 9 last year.

By any measure, we are living through an ugly moment. We are seeing a scourge of anti-Semitism in this country on a scale that is unprecedented and is now creating global headlines.

So what has gone wrong until now? At one level, the answer is simple. Before the Prime Minister’s strong but belated response on Wednesday, the truth was that the fish had rotted from the head. This includes, but is not limited to, Albanese and Penny Wong who, through a mixture of naivety, weakness and expediency in failing to recognise and act on the problem early on, helped to set the permissive tone for what has followed. And now, it seems, the horse has bolted.

This was not their intention, but it is a reality and it amounts to a failure of political leadership.

When Wong’s increasingly hostile policies towards Israel see her criticising it on a near-daily basis, including by equating it this week with the dictatorships of Russia and China, it emboldens those misfits tempted by hate crimes.

No one is pretending that Albanese and Wong are not horrified by anti-Semitism, as all decent Australians are, and they are entirely within their rights politically to criticise Israel over its conduct in the war Gaza. But there are real-life consequences in Australia to the government’s policy backflip over Israel that should have been grappled with much earlier, before synagogues were burning. Language matters, actions matter, and until Wednesday, these have been too equivocal for too long.

Anthony Albanese with Rabbi Shlomo Kohn at the torched Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne.

As former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who has observed anti-Semitism all her life, told me this week, societies that lacked strong political leadership to stamp out anti-Semitism early are doomed to have it rear its ugly head later.

Yet those with partisan political axes to grind who choose only to blame the federal government are ignoring the broader failures of leadership that have also led Australia to this moment.

In Victoria, where almost half of the 905 national instances of anti-Semitism took place in the past year, the Victorian state Labor government of Jacinta Allan has been all but missing in action. Allan did nothing as school kids skipped school to call for the eradication of Israel and has done nothing to act on anti-Semitic chants or the carrying of anti-Semitic signs at the weekly protests through the middle of Melbourne. It has largely taken a “nothing to see here” ­approach to the problem.

On campuses, vice-chancellors could not muster the courage to call out and take action against the racist elements of the anti-Israel encampments until the damage had been done and Jewish students all but chased from campus.

Police chiefs have also given the appearance of being paralysed by the conflict, instructing their officers to watch rather than swoop to stamp on anti-Semitism whenever it appears at rallies and in protests that have even been allowed to take place outside synagogues.

Local councils around the country have been little short of disgraceful, spending endless hours debating meaningless resolutions on Israel, many of which have been anti-Semitic rather than political, rather than concentrating on collecting the bins.

There have been some honourable exceptions to these failures of leadership. Ever since the disgraceful protest outside the Opera House on October 9 last year, NSW Premier Chris Minns has been far more proactive than either the federal government or his Victorian counterpart in condemning and taking action against anti-Semitism.

Albanese is now moving to take the issue as seriously as it should have been taken many months ago, by setting up an Australian Federal Police special operation for anti-Semitism.

But anti-­Semitism in Australia has been festering and growing since Oct­ober 7 last year. It should never have taken so long for this taskforce to emerge. And now the anti-Semitism genie is fully out of the bottle, with copycat crimes being committed.

We’ve seen the danger of copycat hate crimes in Australia before. The deadly spate of Islamic State-inspired attacks here from 2014 to 2018 were carried out mostly by youths who bore hate in their hearts. Thankfully no one has yet been killed by acts of anti-­Semitism, and the government is finally, belatedly, taking strong steps to tackle it. But it should never have got to this.

This fish should never have rotted at all, much less from the head.