In recognizing an undefined Palestinian state on Aug. 10, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that “the situation in Gaza has gone beyond the world’s worst fears. The Israeli government continues to defy international law and deny sufficient aid, food and water, to desperate children.”
Ignoring the flow of reports carefully disputing charges of “starvation,” Albanese couldn’t resist joining the French, British and others in a reckless rush to punish Israel for a war it didn’t start and for its military campaign to defeat a genocidal, asymmetrical enemy.
Albanese’s Australia has ideologically run its relationship with Israel and the Jewish people off the road. The Australia that was an international leader in the fight for free emigration of Soviet Jews and that has been known for its staunch support for Israel inside a U.N. system that feeds on incessant opprobrium of Israel has now become a leading voice in a camp of ostensible democracies seeking to isolate the Jewish state at every turn.
Words do have consequences.
The list of violent attacks on Jews globally is lengthening. The mass shooting on Bondi Beach joins a litany over the years that includes shootings at the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul; the Jewish Federation of Seattle; the Jewish community center in Kansas City; the Tree of Life*Or Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh; the synagogue in Halle, Germany; the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen; Chabad of Poway, Calif.; a synagogue in Monsey, N.Y., involving a knife attack; a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia; a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas; a kosher supermarket in Jersey City; a “free the hostages in Gaza” march in Boulder, Colo.; and at the Jewish museum in Washington, D.C.
The actual list is longer, but these are the ones that made the news for more than a single day.
Especially since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, the steady drumbeat of venom spewed against Israel and its supporters hasn’t abated. The callous, reckless, blood libelous charges of war crimes, genocide and starvation that emerged from the war in Gaza—brought by diplomats, mainstream media reporters, news anchors and pundits, and, of course, the social-media influencers who rush to see who can be the first to flay Israel—are taking their toll. The stain of these big lies will seemingly not wash out.
The brutality of Hamas’s horrific attacks is fading from public discourse. Even now, the terror organization brazenly says it will not disarm, nor will it stay out of future governance in the Gaza Strip, despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan that calls clearly for that to happen to bring about a more stable and secure region. The verdict that has produced the conventional wisdom is clear: The victim on Oct. 7 has, in two years, become the victimizer.
The term that comes to mind for all of this is “open season.”
There was no pushback from academic administrators when pro-Hamas demonstrators bullied and intimidated Jewish students by declaring “Zionist-free zones” on university campuses, and presidents and prime ministers from Chile, Colombia, Ireland, Spain, Norway, the United Nations and others threw around the genocide charge like sweets at a pro-Hamas demonstration in Gaza.
Special longer-length articles on “starvation” in Gaza were blared on the front pages of newspapers—most notably, The New York Times photo duplicity ostensibly depicting a mother and her starving child, but in reality showing a child with a severe pre-existing medical condition. The social-media industry, powered by influencers whose résumés would suggest no knowledge whatsoever of the Middle East, was eagerly racing to outdo each other in trumpeting Israel’s “war crimes.”
In what has become an unbridled obsession, Israel has been cast as a demonic outlier and its supporters as equally complicit in its nefarious deeds. One is tempted to make analogies to Europe in the 1930s, when Jews were first made to feel unwelcome and then officially barred from the societal mainstream. Take more modern-day examples: An Israeli orchestra conductor and a prominent cantor who happens to do service in the IDF are canceled from performing in Flanders and Amsterdam, respectively. Applicants for academic posts are asked questions about ties to Israel. The European music scene spent weeks grappling over whether or not Israel should be allowed to participate in next year’s Eurovision song contest.
Is it any wonder, then, that those with automatic weapons or explosives are motivated to attack Jews where they live, work or celebrate? If you suggest, as Albanese has, that Israel is intentionally starving children, or, in the case of incoming New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, will not discourage chants like “globalizing the intifada,” you have the essential elements necessary for people to act on their own. Hate and disdain are in the air, and it is becoming ever more poisonous.
With very few exceptions, there are now no checks on the floodgates of loathing that have brought us to this stage. We have good friends in most of these places, but to a large extent, their voices are being drowned out by a mob of pro-Hamas operatives, useful idiots, all-politics-is-local political figures, diplomats who run in packs where the prevailing winds are to push Israel into a corner and “don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts” media types.
It is past time that responsible political leaders, members of parliament, clear-eyed journalists and community leaders do a deep dive into who is funding much of this madness and what is out there that drives it. Rather than whipping the haters into a murderous frenzy, like a deranged father and son who took it upon themselves to murder 15 people on Bondi Beach and wound three times that number, there needs to be a reckoning by public officials and others in the public eye about the violent acts to which their words contribute.
Within the memory of those who still might evoke Germany in the 1930s, that this kind of piling on Israel and its supporters—and Jews everywhere—should resurface is an outrage. In contemporary times, we experienced this once. We cannot ever accept that it is happening again.
