Don't Mention The War

After Bondi

Following news of the Bondi massacre of fifteen Jews, my wife Anne and I barely slept. The depth of the tragedy for all the families is unbearable; the optimistic face of the young girl, named Matilda for the promise offered by Australia, is haunting; the implications for our politics, for Australian Jewry and all Australians are unpredictable and immense. Before the monstrous Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israeli civilians and the pitiless Israeli two years of war in Gaza in response, Australia was possibly the country least affected by the scourge of antisemitism, even in comparison with the United States, where antisemitism was a powerful current in politics until 1945. That happy Australian chapter is now over. The Bondi massacre was incomparably the worst incident of antisemitism in Australia’s history.

The unspeakable murders at Bondi are the second-most lethal political massacre carried out by an Australian. The most lethal was the slaughter, also by gunfire, of fifty-one Muslim worshippers at Christchurch, New Zealand. If the explosive devices had exploded in the Bondi park where Chabad Jews and others were celebrating Hannukah, the death toll might have exceeded Christchurch’s. I hope that we follow New Zealand’s lead by avoiding, so far as possible, any mention of the surviving terrorist’s name. He is a mass murderer not a Muslim martyr.

We know that the massacre was perpetrated by a father and son who were supporters of ISIS, a movement founded in the Sunni-Shi’a civil war following the needless US-UK- Australian invasion of Iraq. To build the Caliphate that will redeem the world, ISIS commands its followers across the globe to murder not only all Jews and Christians, that it calls Zionists and Crusaders, and all Shi’a Muslims, and the Druze and Yazidi peoples, but all human collectives except for the innocent Sunni masses. We do not yet know when the Bondi murderers began to follow ISIS. Nor do we know why there was no red flag when the Bondi murderers, the younger of whom had been of interest to ASIO some years earlier, the elder of whom held a licence to carry guns, decided to holiday in Mindanao, the territory in the Philippines with an ISIS history. In intelligence matters, especially, it is of course easy to be wise after the event.

The response to the Bondi massacre has been seriously strange. It is almost a law of Australian politics that following a loss of lives—in a bushfire, a mine collapse, a shooting spree—the political weaponisation of the tragedy is forbidden, at least for a decent interval. In the case of Bondi, weaponisation occurred almost immediately, with the creation of a de facto alliance of the Coalition, the Murdoch media, and the most powerful parts of the Israel/Jewish lobby, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation and so on. Almost as one, this alliance claimed that the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, bore considerable responsibility for the massacre. He had the power, they claimed, to combat the growth of antisemitism in Australia after October 7. And yet he had done almost nothing.

The response of the Albanese government to the Bondi massacre and the formation of the anti-Albanese alliance has been both clumsy and rather pathetic.

For reasons we cannot yet understand, the government has refused so far to convene a Commonwealth Government Royal Commission. This suggests to almost everyone with an interest in politics that there are some things it wants to hide. The government has argued that Royal Commissions take far too long before delivering their findings. There is of course no reason why a Royal Commission into Antisemitism could not publish an early interim report, like the similarly urgent Royal Commission into Espionage that followed the defection of the Soviet intelligence agents, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov.

Rather than convene a Royal Commission into Antisemitism, the Albanese government has sought to appease (it is the only word) the Bondi alliance, in two most fundamental ways.

Following Bondi, the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed absurdly that there was a causative connection between the massacre and the decision of the Albanese government to recognise that the only possible end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians was the so-called “two state solution”. Such recognition, according to Netanyahu, rewarded Hamas for the murders on October 7. Albanese replied that his government was only doing what the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, several European countries had already done. To prove his support for Israel, he agreed to invite the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, to visit Australia. President Herzog is a head of state but also an active Israeli politician. A defender of what the Government of Israel has done in Gaza since October 7, he famously blamed the entire Gazan population for the October 7 murders, a statement that will feature in the prosecution case in all forthcoming genocide trials of Israel. I wonder how the Albanese Government plans to control the massive demonstrations that can be anticipated if Herzog visits Sydney or Melbourne. Will Albanese follow the lead of the Premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns, and ban protests while President Herzog is visiting Australia?

For six months the Albanese government had been sitting on the radical report into antisemitism written by “the envoy” it had appointed, Jillian Segal, the former President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. Following Bondi, Albanese announced that it would accept and, presumably, implement all the Segal suggestions. One of her suggestions is for unprecedented interventions into the performance of Commonwealth-funded institutions, like the ABC and Australia’s universities. Segal claims that certain common arguments about Israel and Zionism are antisemitic and must not be permitted; and that certain kinds of public protests against Israel’s war in Gaza are also antisemitic and must be forbidden. If these institutions failed to meet her standards, presumably according to some still undetermined government-appointed board, they would lose part of their funding. Such actions will most likely add to the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel mood of Australia’s academic and literary communities.

We already know what kinds of discussions the Israel/Jewish lobbies want to forbid. Since October 7 one part of the lobby successfully removed the Lebanese-Australian, Antoinette Lattouf, from ABC local radio in Sydney because of an accurate re-tweet about Israel’s weaponisation of starvation in Gaza. Another part of the lobby caused the author of Disciplined, an outstanding novel concerning Muslim political intellectuals in Australia, the Palestinian-Australian, Randa Abdel-Fattah, a fierce critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, to leave the Bendigo Writers’ Festival. The festival then collapsed with the walkout of some fifty performers in sympathy. Yet another group was responsible for the decision of the administration at the Fiona Stanley Hospital in Fremantle to cancel a forum where the wonderful ex-Gaza doctor, Mohammed Mustafa, “Dr Mo”, was to speak while seeking funds for a children’s hospital in Gaza. Professor Stanley, who has no role in the running of the hospital, was infuriated. There are many additional examples of this kind, the strangest of which, perhaps, was the several weeks’ suspension from St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney of the eminent heart surgeon, Professor Peter MacDonald, merely because of a cynical question about Mossad he asked at a pro-Palestinian forum.

Such interventions are a part of the strange atmosphere of strictly enforced unreality that has accompanied the growth of antisemitic sentiment in Australia since October 7. The sharp rise in antisemitic acts —insults, tweets, graffiti, arson, but no physical violence so far as I am aware before Bondi—did not occur for no reason. They are self-evidently connected, in ways we must try to understand in open, non-censorious discussion, to the character of Israel’s war in Gaza following the murder of 1200 and the kidnapping of 250 of its innocent citizens at the hands of Hamas.

For some two years Israel has been responsible for the deaths of an estimated 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, some 80% of whom are civilians. The Gazan Ministry of Health has the names of 70,000 of the dead but according to several expert studies the death toll is much higher. The dead include at least 20,000 children. Israel has killed more than 200 journalists whose only crime was to report honestly on what was happening in Gaza. Its forces have destroyed hospitals, universities and schools and, in whole or in part, an estimated 80% of the buildings in Gaza. Body parts lie strewn under the millions of tons of rubble. These Palestinians have faced daily fear of death by bombing while scrambling without dignity for food or sheltering in scraps of tents without protection from heat or cold or rain. During these two years the Israeli public and diaspora Jewry were rightly exercised by the situation of the hostages taken by Hamas and Islamic Jihad that many believed had been abandoned by Netanyahu. They were largely indifferent, to judge by the protests in Israel and the opinion of dozens of observers, to the suffering of the people of Gaza.

And yet none of this can even be mentioned when discussing the reasons for the growth of an ugly and dangerous antisemitic current on the fringes of the massive pro-Palestinian movement in Australia, as seen in the 200,000 Sydney Harbour Bridge marchers. It especially cannot be mentioned when attention turns to the now very real threat of Islamist terrorism in Australia and the existence here of followers of ISIS, the most murderous movement in contemporary Islam. Australians were profoundly shocked by the murder of fifteen people at Bondi. There was not even one day before the recent ceasefire when as few as fifteen innocent people were killed in Gaza by Israeli force of arms. As a civilisation we have lost our way when we no longer consider every single human being as equally precious.

The troubles between the Jewish people of Israel and the Gazan Palestinians did not begin on October 7 2023 with the Hamas atrocity. They did not begin in 2005 when Israel withdrew from its settlements in Gaza but left it in the condition of what has famously been described as “an open-air prison” and when, shortly after, Hamas, a party committed to the destruction of Israel, won a Palestinian election. They did not begin in 1967 when Israel began its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and briefly Sinai, following its victory in the “Six Day War”. They did not begin in 1948, when the world was becoming aware of the Holocaust, when the United Nations accepted the creation of Israel, when the surrounding Arab states declared war on the new state, and when this new state caused the flight or death of 700,000 Palestinians that the survivors call “the Nakba”, the Catastrophe. They did not even begin in the First World War when the British Empire, “Perfidious Albion”, promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine and, simultaneously, the Arabs freedom from their Ottoman overlords. They began in the late nineteenth century when Jews, some the followers of the new ideology of Jewish national self-determination, Zionism, fled in significant numbers from the pogroms in Czarist Russia to their ancestral “Promised Land” in Ottoman-controlled Palestine. The rights and wrongs of this history are unresolvable and neverendingly debatable. Nonetheless two things now seem clear to me. After the atrocity of October 7, Israel had no alternative but to go to war against Hamas. However, it had no right to turn this war into the annihilation of a people, their cities, towns and market gardens, and their culture.

I do not write any of this with calmness. For the past two years I have spent one or two hours each morning, as a kind of duty, reading the Gaza coverage of the courageous and, in the true sense, the patriotic Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz. I was born to Jewish refugee parents three years after the conclusion of the Holocaust, the attempt to remove the Jewish people from the face of the Earth. My writing and teaching have been dominated by study of those anti-human ideological movements that scar the history of the past one hundred years—Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, Pol Pot-ism, Jihadist Islamism. My life has been devoted to the call to action of my generation: “Never Again”. As we have watched Israel’s pitiless destruction of Gaza, we have all learned that for both a large part of Israeli society and the Jewish diaspora the call to action is the morally and perhaps politically catastrophic: “Never Again, To Us.” (January 1, 2025)

(For new subscribers) Robert Manne AO, FASSA, is an Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University and the author in 2016 of The Mind of the Islamic State (Black Inc. and Prometheus Books). His most recent book is A Political Memoir: Intellectual Combat in the Cold War and the Culture Wars (La Trobe University Press).