
On 6 December last year, a fire was lit in the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne. Considerable damage was done and one person was injured. A few days later, on 11 December there was a similar fire at a synagogue in Sydney. Anti-Israel graffiti was sprayed on walls and a car set alight (which the two assailants had apparently stolen for the job). In the absence of anyone claiming responsibility, we can assume that both these incidents of vandalism (sorry, ‘terrorism’) were misguided attempts to protest against the Israeli genocide against Palestine.
Meanwhile, in Palestine itself, on 6 December 34 Palestinians (including four women and at least six children) were killed in an Israeli attack on a refugee camp at Deir al Balah in southern Gaza. On 11 December, Israeli attacks in Gaza killed at least 26 Palestinians in the town of Beit Lahiya. Among the dead was an entire family, including four children, their parents and two grandparents.
The difference between the two sets of events is clear. In the latter case, we have the deliberate actions of a tooled-up merciless military state, determined to remove and/or eliminate a population that gets in its way. In the former, the acts of misguided individuals, no doubt convinced that they were helping the Palestinian cause in some way.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The attack on synagogues simply reinforces the idea that there exists an identity between Jews (and those of Jewish origin) and the Israeli state. By attacking the former, goes the argument, you are attacking the latter. But there is no such identity – despite Israel fervently wishing it were so. Many thousands of Jews do not support the murderous state in Israel, do not support its occupation of Palestine and do not support its wars in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria. Their participation in the mass Palestine solidarity demonstrations both around the world and in Israel itself
stands as proof.
Naturally enough, for the mainstream media and the political class the difference in magnitude between what is happening in Palestine on a daily basis and the synagogue attacks was entirely lost. The killings in Gaza on these two days were simply folded into the 45,000-plus dead for which Israel is already responsible. Our guess is that death in Gaza was entirely absent from media reports in the wake of the synagogue fires, edged out by a rising campaign against antisemitism. An avalanche of moral outrage followed. So great was the stridency of media comment that you might have thought that brown-shirted stormtroopers were even then at the gates of Melbourne and Sydney’s leafier suburbs.
Of course, this was not the case. Undoubtedly, there have been instances of bad, even aggressive, behaviour towards those of Jewish origins, occasioned or (for some) sanctioned by the Gaza genocide. But ‘a scourge’ (Albanese)? Or ‘vile antisemitism [that] that has been allowed to fester’ (Dutton)? No.
According to the Mapping Social Cohesion report (by the Scanlon Institute) in July 2024, a mere 13% of respondents expressed negative attitudes towards Jewish people; in 2023 it had been 9%. This compares with 27% (2023) and 33% (2024) negativity against Muslims. The statistic on Jewish people, the report remarks, ‘is in line with the share of people with a negative attitude towards Hindus and Sikhs’.
Readers may remember that in July last year, wilting under claims that it wasn’t doing enough to combat ‘the scourge’, the Government appointed Jillian Segal as its ‘Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism in Australia’. Or they may not, given the complete lack of any useful activity in that area since the appointment – except for an expenses-paid junket to Buenos Aires so that Jillian could chat with other special envoys. It is worth noting that Envoy Segal is a former President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the chair of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce. Draw your own conclusions.
Naturally, she popped up again in the wake of the synagogue vandalism. In an interview with SBS she managed to conflate antisemitic violence with the (entirely peaceful) Palestine solidarity demonstrations held in most cities on most weekends. She said: ‘these demonstrations and marches are anti-Israel – and anti-Israel is really anti-Jewish because they want Israel to disappear and then be only one state which means the killing of all the Jews’.
Solidarity with Palestine entails no such beliefs. Fundamentally it is aimed at stopping a horrific genocide and working out a democratic (rather than apartheid-based) solution in the area. What is Jillian’s solution to this non-existent problem? Move the demonstrations elsewhere, where people of Jewish origin can’t see them! ‘The cities should not be utilised’, she says.
Which brings us back to individual acts of vandalism – terrorism, if you like. They enable people like Segal, Dutton and governments of all stripes to promote the repression of civil liberties and the rights to protest. Today it’s ‘terrorists’ – tomorrow demonstrations.
For our part, we condemn utterly and in the first place the 45,000 plus deaths meted out by Israel in Palestine. And we condemn acts of vandalism as a stupid and ineffective way to protest against them.
First published January 2025 by Active Left, a group of socialists in the South Australian Labor Party.