There was much to read in the papers last Monday, the 7th of July. Three stories caught my attention.

Hannah Thomas, who ran as a Greens candidate in Grayndler against Anthony Albanese in the recent federal election, was told that she would possibly lose the sight in her right eye as a result of forthcoming surgery. It had been injured when she was thrown to the ground by police during a protest outside a factory in Belmore which manufactures components for F-35 jets used by the Israel Defence Force. Such a tragic outcome for a young woman had not apparently elicited any expression of concern or empathy from local politicians. Albanese was nowhere to be seen or heard. All the NSW Premier Chris Minns could manage was to say was that businesses were “entitled to run their companies”. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if it had occurred during a pro-Israeli rally.

The second story was about the report of the Northern Territory coroner Elizabeth Armitage into the shooting death of Kumanjayi Walker at Yuendumu in 2022. She concluded that the policeman who fired the fatal shot was a racist who “worked in and was the beneficiary of an organisation with hallmarks of institutional racism”. Nothing has changed since then. In 2023 and 2024, there were 104 deaths – 76 in prisons and 27 in police custody. The Human Rights Commission reported that there had been 12 such deaths in the first half of 2025.

There was little comment from federal politicians on either of these stories despite their obvious gravity. The seemingly endless saga of deaths in custody and increasing rates of incarceration confirmed yet again the passage in the Uluru Statement about the consequences of powerlessness. Hannah Thomas’s serious life-changing injury, while engaging in a peaceful protest, should have concerned the whole community. But it was the third story which took flight and illustrated who had both power and influence in contemporary society.

It concerned a brawl in a Jewish restaurant in Melbourne and the torching of the doors of a synagogue in east Melbourne. It is not clear what motivated the arsonist or if he knew there were people inside. There is no doubt the great majority of Australians would radically disapprove of attacks on places of worship. Many would also empathise with the Jewish community at this particularly difficult time. But there is no evidence, that I’m aware of, that the leading Jewish organisations have ever expressed any concern at all about the total destruction of all the mosques and Christian churches in Gaza where there is nowhere left to pray.

The response to the singed synagogue door was immediate and overwhelming. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke dashed down to Melbourne on the Sunday morning to meet Jewish leaders at the site. The arson attack, he declared, was “an attack on Australia and Australian values”. Having lived in a community where Molotov cocktail attacks on First Nations’ fringe camps was a regular occurrence it seemed his hyperbole hovered close to hysteria. Burke also made contact with the Israeli ambassador and within a short time Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar had all demanded that the Australian Government take immediate action to uproot severe hate crimes. Their comments were clear examples of high-end Israeli hypocrisy coming from leaders who have been systematically uprooting Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank along with everything that made their lives possible.

And that brings us to the heart of the problem. There can be no understanding of our present situation which has been called a crisis without an open discussion of the actions of the Israeli state and its daily and ubiquitous use of antisemitism as a weapon to deflect every criticism of its behaviour. As far as Israel is concerned, the world courts are antiSemitic, the great majority of the nations in the UN General Assembly have caught the same virus. There is no need then to heed the great weight of legal opinion that has determined that Netanyahu is an indicted war criminal, that in Gaza the IDF is engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide, that the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal and that Palestinians there suffer under a recognisable form of apartheid. And perhaps the critical point is that now the whole world can see, each day, the never-ending atrocities, the utterly boundless suffering of the Palestinians and the systematic cruelty of the IDF.

Can we really expect Australians not to be deeply moved by the horrifying spectacle of the second Nakba or catastrophe? Can there be any surprise that many of our countrymen and women now hold very strong feelings about — not Jewish people, their religion, culture and ways — but the actions of the Israeli state and its present government? The current campaign to define their deep concern and empathy for Israel’s victims as manifestations of antisemitism is insulting and an assertion of assumeers moral superiority at the very time that Israel has become an international pariah.

The great division we see has opened up over this fundamental question about Israel’s culpability. Is it guilty as charged by both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court or not? The concomitant and inescapable question is what do the mainstream Australian Jewish organisations think about it all? What does Jillian Segal, the government’s antisemitism envoy think? Has she ever been interrogated on this question? Does the thought of 16,000 dead Palestinian children keep her awake at night? Does she accept the condign judgments of the International Court of Justice? The local Jewish leader Mark Leibler declared recently that he was a “proud Zionist” and this was the case with 90% of his community. The corollary is clear. Many members of the local Jewish community are Israeli nationalists who support the Netanyahu Government and do not accept the judgment of the world. They will never come to terms with the assessment of men like the great Israeli humanist Gideon Levy who wrote in Haaretz last week that:

• Gaza is the face of the IDF and the state of Israel. What happens in Gaza will not remain in Gaza, even though most Israeli media outlets wish it so. What happens in Gaza defines Israel in the world, and what happens in Gaza will define Israeli society for many years to come.

What has happened in Gaza divides and defines Australians as does the question of genocide. Supporters of Israel, and, by implication, the IDF, are unable to understand the passion of the supporters of the beleaguered Palestinians. They conclude that hostility to Israel stems from an upsurge of ancestral antisemitism, what Jillian Segal called “a wave of hate”. Julian Leeser, the Jewish shadow attorney-general, declared in today’s Sydney Morning Herald that what we are dealing with “is a pathology in our society”. It was “about much darker things than what is happening in the Middle East”. Darker than the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza? Really? What an extraordinary thing to say! It is we Australians who are responsible for what he sees as antisemitism. On reflection he cried “how deep the poison runs”.

There is then a deep and likely unbridgeable division in Australian society about the nature of Israel’s onslaught on the Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. Questions about genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and apartheid will continue to divide us. How could it be otherwise? It is clearly a totally inappropriate time to introduce a series of measures to exercise control over our universities, schools and cultural institutions, all carried out under the banner of a deeply contentious definition of antisemitism which for many people would be the means of rewarding the supporters and enablers of genocide and shielding Israel from criticism. It would further undermine the autonomy of our universities bringing in the sort of measures which Trump is using in America.

So while the First Nations wrestle with their powerlessness, the leaders of the Jewish community flaunt their power and authority. Segal advances confidentially behind the antisemitism banner, representing a community that makes up a little less than one half of one percent of the population. On Thursday, she presented a report to the prime minister containing detailed plans to exercise a range of extensive controls over our universities, schools and cultural institutions which have been created to serve the whole Australian community — all 99% percent of us.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.