Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field.

Let me meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass,

The world is too full to talk about. (Rumi)

(Part Two of a two-part reflection.)

Antisemitism must be effectively challenged wherever it occurs. It must also be understood. So must its misuse as a shield to protect profound harm to Palestinians, the final destruction and theft of their lands, widely rehearsed contempt for their culture and indigeneity, and the religious beliefs of Palestinians who are Muslim. It must also be understood as a dire human ugliness we will rise above – or fail and fall together.

Ultra-nationalist Israeli Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir calls Palestinians “human animals”. He, and those like him, openly support the settlers’ accelerating ambitions for “Greater Israel” – explained below. In May 2024, Ben-Gvir’s colleague, Belazel Smotrich, had already called for “No half measures” in the “…total annihilation of Gaza”.

In that same month, according to Jewish genocide scholar Omer Bartov writing on 15 July 2025 in the New York Times, “… the Israel Defence Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August [2024].”

The proves most obviously that our own collective suffering will save us from causing harm to others only when we give up destructive tribalism to recognise one another as a single human family. And behave accordingly.

Dr Bartov continues: “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognise one when I see one.”

Worldwide outrage against Israel’s actions has accelerated. Yet Western governments, including our own, strenuously avoid meaningful action, even as Zionist lobbyists’ demands grow to ensure that any criticism of the State of Israel is called out as antisemitism and muted or silenced.

No accountability of Israel’s conduct as a “Jewish state” is demanded by any prominent Zionist group or individual in Australia, abjectly disrespecting, in my view, what it means to be not politically Zionist but culturally or religiously Jewish. Meanwhile, the unprecedented authority to control the Israel/Palestine narrative proposed by Jillian Segal, the government-appointed envoy against antisemitism, makes clear how emphatically she believes the “Jewish lobby” speaks uncritically for Zionism, ultra-nationalism, and the most extreme government in Israel’s history.

The existence of Jewish peace and human rights groups, however, including the Jewish Council of Australia demonstrates that Zionist lobbyists do not speak for “all Jews” and not at all for many Jews.

The inhumane, appalling ambitions and actions of Hamas must not go unmentioned.

For years “ propped up” by Netanyahu, they have grossly betrayed the people of Gaza and Palestinians more broadly. Netanyahu’s cruel and “useful idiots”, their continued presence long justified Netanyahu’s pretence he “would not deal with terrorists”. Providing him also with his desired excuse never to face the issue of Palestinian statehood.

Race, culture, religion, old hatreds and new: all coalesce here as I also pointed to in Part One. What, then, of Jesus, the most famous Jew of all? How does he figure in this contemporary tragedy of human harm where “God-given” rights to land supersede centuries of national identity?

Whether you “believe” Jesus was God, the Messiah, or a historical figure of unprecedented influence, what he inarguably did was to reframe human ethical concern, enlarging a vision of “neighbour” beyond previous familial or tribal boundaries. He urged and practised an active response to all in need through a “love” [agape] that’s not an emotion, but a framework built on concern for others. Jesus was, moreover, reckless enough to declare that this message of care is not for “special people” only. Christianity, in its most dogmatic forms, did that.

To combat fundamentalist dogmatism and its alignment with ultra-nationalism, context and meaning cannot be reduced to crude binaries. This has happened throughout history. The age we live in presents new urgencies. The prompts below suggest a genuine understanding of antisemitism; also, hints at least of life-saving agape. Or Rumi’s “field” where hope through understanding lies.

1. An unbroken history of targeted harm towards Jews since medieval times largely arose from heretical views within institutional Christianity, blaming Jews for killing Jesus. Prejudice drove pogroms throughout Eastern Europe, in the 20th century making Jews the sacrificial scapegoats targeted by fascist governments across Europe, culminating in the horror of the Holocaust, and Hitler’s aim to “cleanse” Germany and Europe more generally of their Jewish populations.

2. This horrendous principle of “cleansing” any population is not exclusive to political or religious authoritarianism only. It drives the thinking behind colonisation. This includes Australia, where colonists declared a terra nullius, a “land belonging to no one” which depended on the entitlement of imperialists to determine whose lives mattered. And whose did not.

3. Colonial “entitlement” lives today and is stark in Israel. Noam Chomsky, himself a Jew, has said, “Settler colonialism is not only about the act of settling and colonising but what happens afterwards.” This includes driving out the indigenous population and, while trashing their rights, using propaganda to whitewash this.

4. Driving out, subduing, dispossessing or murdering an indigenous population depends on two factors: 1) an intensification of the ideology of racial/cultural superiority; 2) dehumanising so intense and consistent that all empathy, interest and care for the “other” is lost.

5. The state of Israel is unique in a number of ways. It exists as a “Jewish” state at least in part, in response to the Christian persecution of Jewish people and to the reluctance of Western nations, including the US, to take in persecuted Jews before, during and after World War II. Suffering Jews were not wanted. Palestine was itself colonised by the British. As early as 1917, Britain issued the Balfour declaration, deciding for the Palestinians that Palestine could become a home for the Jewish people. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes: “It was not just Christian Zionism alone [which flourishes today] that won the day for Zionism long before the Holocaust. [It] was motivated also by British, and Western, Islamophobia [which also flourishes today].”

6. Palestine was itself declared by Zionists to be terra nullius: “A land without people for a people without a land”.

7. The success of Zionist lobbyists together with vast Western defence interests means it’s near impossible to criticise Israel’s Government without this being collapsed into a criticism of the Jewish state, and of Jewishness itself. On 12 July 2025, Louise Adler, a prominent anti-Zionist Jewish critic wrote in the Guardian: “…no institution, organisation or department is exempt from the [Jewish lobby’s] latest push to weaponise antisemitism and insist on the exceptionalism of Australian Jewry…”.

8. Zionism is a supremacist political ideology that arose in response to centuries of persecution of Jewish people. That does not excuse its harm. Conflating Zionism, Judaism, Israel, and “Jews” is a grave injustice. Robbing Palestinians of their national identity, suggesting that any “Arab” nation will do as their national homeland, amplifies a dehumanisation that further insults our common humanity.

9. The part that religion still plays in this tragedy is poorly understood. Neither Judaism, Christianity nor Islam is free from bigotry, tribalism, and factionalism. Among some Christians and Jews, Messianic myths have gained new strength. Along with nationalist expansionism, they drive the story of “Greater Israel” and the push to claim — through vastly superior military power — the lands of “Judea and Samaria” to extend way beyond the currently occupied Palestinian territories. “Messianic Zionism” — embraced and financially supported by “Christian Zionists” — emphasises a Biblical entitlement to the land they claim is God-given. This intensifies the ultra-nationalist colonial project, justifying the settler movement seizing Palestinian territory illegally and by force. Messianic Zionism rests on a belief that when God is satisfied by a change in geographical borders, it will be time to send the Messiah. Or to re-send the Messiah, if you are a Jesus follower. These beliefs too are protected by shouts of “antisemitism” when challenged.

10. Education and understanding around antisemitism must be freed from any claims of exceptionalism that excuse or obliterate harm to others. Israeli Governments’ long history of military dominance and explicit racism is itself are factors in increasing antisemitism globally. Zionist organisations and individuals refusing to acknowledge this arguably do “Jewishness” — with its immense history of humanitarian achievement — a grave disservice. The price that’s paid is not equal.

None of this — nor Zionism itself — should be seen as a “Jewish problem” to be mitigated by humanitarian non-Zionist Jews. It is an ancient, terrible human problem from which no “people” are exempt. Only as we face into the broader history of what our entire human family is capable of, both worst and best, will we effectively protest the scourge of racial or religious “superiority” wherever it occurs.

Whatever our identity, we are surely capable of learning to see every person’s life as worthy of dignity. And every child’s life as worth saving.

Read Part 1 of this two part series.

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