Gray Connolly | Australia threatened by an anti-Jewish hate

We as decent Australians have an obvious choice: to live cravenly beneath a malevolent cloud of revived and revolting anti-Semitism, or to continue standing tall and proud with our Jewish fellow citizens.

I grew up, mostly, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Then as now, it was an affluent locality but also a very Jewish one.

An older person paying for groceries or reaching for a shelf might reveal a forearm with fading numbers tattooed in what was once dark ink.

You knew, as a gentile, never to say anything. It was impossible to comprehend what suffering these Holocaust survivors endured.

At the same time, Jewish schools and institutions looked like Christian ones, and Jewish parents picking up their children did not have to convoy, as they do now, to fortified schools and synagogues that resemble forward operating bases in Iraq.

This recent hostility to Jews is abhorrent but also baffling. After all, Jews make up only 0.4 per cent of the population, small enough to be accommodated by the MCG precinct.

Moreover, whenever and wherever you grew up, it was and is impossible to ignore the historically enormous contribution of Jews to Australia and to the nation we have become.

General Sir John Monash, our greatest soldier, was Jewish. Sir Isaac Isaacs, a founding father of our federation and first Australian-born governor-general, was Jewish.

Anti-Jewish hate is a dark cloud looming over Australia. Picture: ChatGPT

Sidney Myer, founder of the Myer retailing empire, who in the Depression cut his own salary rather than sack any employee, was Jewish. Sir Zelman Cowen, a Rhodes scholar and naval intelligence officer in World War II, and later governor-general, was Jewish.

Down to today, if there has been one group of “lifters” in Australia, who have given so much – so disproportionately – to our country, it’s our Jewish fellow citizens.

We have made mistakes as a country, particularly in our treatment of our Indigenous people.

However, if there was something we as Australians got right, it was a refusal to allow religious prejudices to be mainstreamed.

Yes, we had sectarian tensions. But we also had prohibitions on religious tests for public office, and we had a politics that valued and defended the different faith traditions of our pluralistic Australia.

I emphasise the word “had” as I fear, increasingly, that this Australia is now under grave threat.

A pro-Palestine rally in Adelaide. Picture: Matt Loxton

It is the sad case in 2024 that all too many in our country, who must know better, have acquiesced for months in the pollution of our discourse, our streets, and even our universities, by what we Australians had mercifully avoided: the cancer of anti-Semitism.

If ever a myth was exploded by recent events, it is that education is a shield against prejudice. Strong leadership and good moral example are not just shields but swords against such monsters but education in itself, absent a moral core, is but a sterile form of indoctrination.

Hence the appalling state of our campuses, where the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students and staff is now rife.

With too few exceptions, the leaders of our major universities are missing in action, or quibbling, or equivocating – trembling vice-chancellors hiding under desks, “waiting on advice”.

Worse, our police, whose sworn duty is to enforce the law without fear or favour, are now terrified of “escalating” situations where Jews are already being menaced or their schools and synagogues terrorised.

The pro-Palestine rally outside the Sydney Opera House on October 9, last year. Picture: AAP/Dean Lewins

If you are from Sydney, you know the police never cowered, especially when ranks were filled by war veterans and rugby league players.

It is unimaginable that an earlier generation of NSW police would ever have allowed anti-Semitic mobs to gather at the Sydney Opera House on October 9 last year – all before a single Israeli soldier had entered Gaza – to incite hate at “the Jews”.

Yet, even as we may wish to assign blame elsewhere, it is we as citizens who are ultimately to blame.

It is we who decide, each day, by our acts and omissions, what sort of country we want to live in.

It is we who demand too little leadership from our alleged “leaders”.

For too long, too many of us have accepted mediocrity, indolence and sclerosis – and now rank and abject cowardice – from Canberra, from Macquarie St, from university chancelleries, and, worst of all, from chiefs of law enforcement.

The result of our society shamefully accepting such lamentable circumstances is the cancerous anti-Semitism we now see.

Rather than watch our world disappear, we all can help it – and we each must help it.

Never Again means Never Again.

We owe our Jewish sisters and brothers a solidarity of nothing less.

Gray Connolly is a Sydney barrister and writer.

Originally published as Gray Connolly | Australia threatened by an anti-Jewish hate