Israel

What’s new in In That Howling Infinite?

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

The past beats inside me like a second heart
John Banville, The Sea

Why is this blog called In That Howling Infinite?  It refers to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a magnificent study in mania and obsession:

“But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!”  Moby–Dick, Chapter 23

In a figurative sense, it speaks of the themes and schemes that are addressed in the thoughts, ideas, songs, poems and stories that feature in this blog. We are, as Bob Dylan sang, “condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting”. And we like to hope that, as the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho said, “someone will remember us, I say, even in another time”

Here are the most recent articles in In That Howling Infinite.

A historian talks about Palestine’s deep history. An interview with British historian William Dalrymple

Becoming Arab … the myth of fingerprints. A discussion regard Yossef Rapoport’s illuminating Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East

Lucifer ascending … the Dark Lord and the evil within. A free-flowing contemplation on the archetypical “big bad” of story and scripture. The sequel to Lucifer Descending … encounters with the morning star 

The Geography of Faith: America and the Gospel of Power. What happens when a nation with immense material power begins to clothe that power in sacred language?

Smyrna 1922 and the Ottoman endgame. The expulsion of the millennia long Greek presence in Anatolia was one of the last chapters in the extraordinarily violent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

Beside Strange Waters. The dark side of former Pink Floyd front man and currently, controversial political activist

Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints. Old maps are not title deeds and cannot be manifestos – the limits of cartography.

Alexander Dugin versus Sydney Sweeney. When a Russian philosopher and ideologue called “Putin’s brain” takes on a pulchritudinous film star.

Echo of the Steppes … history’s long shadow. History as we like it: the historian as storyteller, where landscapes become characters and the past refuses to remain buried.

Rasputin and the downfall of the Romanovs. To admirers he was a man of God; to his enemies, a charlatan, sexual predator, political manipulator and symbol of everything rotten within Russia’s last royal dynasty.

The featured picture at the head of this page is the interior of St George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Madaba, Jordan, home of the sixth century Madaba map, discussed in Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints 

Sydney Sweeney has good jeans

Ten  favourites:

A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the West. In one of the first essays published in In That Howling Infinite, we walked down what Welsh poet RS Thomas called ‘the long road of history”, beginning with the usual suspects: power and pride, greed, and aggrandisement, and as accessories after the fact, dolour, devastation, and death.

Blood and Brick … a world of walls. Hadrian’s Wall, the Theodosian Wall, the Berlin Wall, Northerm Ireland’s Peace Wall, Israel’s Separation Wall, George RR Martin’s Ice Wall, the wall you can see from space, and walls that most people have never heard of. If walls could talk, what take they woukd tell. While walls are destined to fall one day, people like them. They project a language of security – but they stem from a sense of insecurity, a fear of losing what you have.

One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance. The history of Israel and Palestine does not yield to forensic neatness. This land holds layered attachment; Jewish longing and Palestinian dispossession; British imperial design and Arab nationalist pride; secular aspiration and religious revival; survival strategy and ideological fervour. None alone explains the whole. Together they form the sediment of a century.

The Twilight of the Equine Gods. An illuminating canter through the story of the “Centaurian Pact” between humans and horses. it is at once a ride and revelation. The horse, as German academic and cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff’s tells us, “has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances – against which every other covenant into which we have entered has been fragile and ephemeral – not even our relationship with our gods has shown a comparable degree of stability”.

The Sport of Kings. CE Morgan’s “great American novel” is not a history book – nor is it an historical novel. But it is most certainly about history. And about identity. As Morgan puts it: “You would never escape the category of your birth”. It is also about memory and myth: “Repeated long enough, stories become memory and memory becomes fact”.

Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment. “Nostalgia”, literally the pain associated with the thought of home, or homesickness, is derived from the Greek “nostos” – a theme used in Ancient Greek literature most notably in the recently reimagined Odyssey, involving an epic hero returning home after a long time away. Nostalgia reveals the deep longing for a home that our younger selves took for granted, and bittersweet return to people and places that have changed forever. But it isn’t all it’s cracked out to be, and, indeed, can bring out the worst in us, becoming a millstone of bitterness and regret strung about the necks of discontented souls who drift off into a maze of memories, meanings and emotions.

A cowboy key – how the west was sung. My riding days are over, but I have been into westerns all my life, and the songs inspired by them – in films, musicals and popular song, from ghostly herds to outlaw chic, Frankie Laing to Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift. And, as a onetime musician myself, I have, back in days gone by, penned songs in a cowboy key.

McGoohan’s Blues – sunbathing in the rain. How an eighteen minute digression from the concept if not the plot of an iconic if indecipherable ‘sixties’ television series made an indelible impression on an impressionable twenty year old who remains mightily impressed with this song by Britain’s high priest of angst.

The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir. “Fast forwaranother century, and I was “on the Holy Ground once more” attending the wedding of an old pal held in an old pub in the heart of Ireland. Getting there, we’d done a whistle-stop tour of the south, including Inis Córthaid (my mother’s hometown), Wexford and Ross, the heartland of the ‘98 rebellion … I was best man at that wedding, and in a speech largely devoted to the groom and our mutual, lifelong appreciation of Bob Dylan, I was able to relate to guests young and old tales of my Irish childhood, taking us all “down the foggy ruins of time”, and sang extracts from songs I actually did learn at my mothers knee, the song-lines of my Celtic twilight.

About the creator of this blog

Paul Hemphill is a British-born Australian songwriter, poet, and blogger.

Once upon a time, he was an accountant by profession, a manager, mentor and mediator. A long-time resident of Sydney, he is now living in the middle of the forest on the mid north coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he spends much of his time in the great outdoors.

His interests include music, poetry, politics and history. He has had a lifelong passion for the history, politics and people of the Middle East. Over the years, through study and travel, he has acquired a working knowledge of standard and colloquial Arabic.

Listen to some of Paul’s songs on SoundCloud and YouTube. Search under Paul Hemphill or HuldreFolk (but ignore the Flemish death metal band of the same name). He has assembled seven volumes of poetry and verse, and these can be read on this blog.

Check out In That Howling Infinite on FaceBook.

A historian talks about Palestine’s deep history

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

History is rarely as tidy as the stories we tell about it. Places acquire names long before they acquire nations; peoples inherit memories they did not themselves create; languages, religions and identities change without ever quite erasing what came before. Palestine may be one of the world’s most conspicuous examples of this historical palimpsest, a place where ancient geography, successive civilisations and modern national identities have become so entangled that disentangling them can itself seem political.

That is partly why I have always valued William Dalrymple. He is a historian who understands that the past is inhabited by people, not merely populated by dates and events. His recent conversation about Palestine prompted me to revisit not only what he said, but what he left unsaid: the complicated process by which a population became a people, a geographical name acquired a modern national meaning, and history became memory – and memory, in turn, became identity.

It also led me back to a broader fascination of mine: the relationship between history, travel and place, and to writers who understand that landscapes are not backdrops to history but repositories of it.

The featured image at the head of this post? When last In Ramallah, de facto administrative “capital” of that part of the West Bank governed  by the  Palestinian Authority – Area A of the Oslo dispensation – we visited the cultural centre of Dar Zahran, a beautifully restored Ottoman house just south of the city. By fortunate serendipity, Dar Zahran was hosting a small exhibition of paintings by the late Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout. This large painting pictures the skyline of Jerusalem – Al Quds with its mosques and churches and the infinite variety of the Palestinian people, was front and centre. [In In That Howling Infinite, see Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout]

Talking about Palestine and Palestinians

There are some historians whose books I buy almost automatically. British historian William Dalrymple is one of them. I have read many of his works over the years, from his debut, In Xanadu, through From the Holy Mountain, The Last Mughal, Return of a King and The Anarchy (see, in In That Howling Infinite, Bad company – how Britain conquered India, the story of the rise and fall of the notoriously rapacious British East India Company).

Dalrymple is well-educated, well-read, and well-travelled, having had his boots on the ground and its dust on those boots. He is what we call a “popular” historian and not an academic in the narrow sense, writing with enthusiasm, empathy, and the authority of someone who has visited the places he describes. And, to borrow from Bob Dylan, he knows his song well before he starts singing. His aim, refreshingly, is to educate, not to inculcate.

What has always appealed to me is not simply the depth of his scholarship but his refusal to become anyone’s court historian. His admirers come from different directions, and his critics do too. The old Empire loyalists dislike him because he writes unflinchingly about the violence and arrogance of imperialism. Progressives often embrace him for precisely that reason, yet they, too, sometimes seem disappointed when he refuses to enlist in their causes. Dalrymple has always struck me as someone who hoes his own row. He follows the evidence where it leads rather than where his audience might wish it to go.

That quality was on full display in his recent interview with Palestinian journalist and British resident Ahmed Alnaouq on the chat show Palestine Deep Dive, discussing his forthcoming, and as yet unfinished, book on the Palestinians. I encourage reader to take the time to watch the video below before reading the detailed appraisal that follows; but the time poor may nevertheless find it of interest.

To anyone familiar with the history of the region, little of the story itself is unfamiliar. Nor, contrary to some popular assumptions, has this history been ignored by Israeli historians. Ilan Pappé’s A History of Modern Palestine remains one of the best examples of a history that restores Palestinians to the centre of their own story, particularly those who rarely appear in conventional political histories: the villagers who cultivated the land, often on estates owned by absentee urban families or tribal elites who harvested much of the wealth.

That, perhaps, is the real significance of Dalrymple’s project. It belongs not simply to Middle Eastern history but to the much broader revolution that historians call social history. For centuries history was largely the story of rulers, wars, dynasties and diplomacy. Ordinary people appeared only fleetingly. Their lives belonged, if anywhere, to anthropology or sociology. Only relatively recently have historians begun asking what history looked like from the fields rather than the palaces.

Yet there is another trap which Dalrymple carefully avoids.

It has become fashionable to speak of the inhabitants of Palestine as though they constituted an unchanged people stretching seamlessly from biblical times until today. That is no more convincing than similar claims made by almost any nation.

Palestine has always been one of the great crossroads of civilisation. Long before the Philistines and the Hebrews there were other peoples. Afterwards came Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and countless others, accompanied not merely by armies but by settlers, merchants, pilgrims, labourers and refugees. Even in the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, economic opportunity attracted migrants from throughout the Levant. The Suez Canal, the expansion of Haifa, the Hauran railway, and later British infrastructure projects all drew workers from neighbouring lands. Family names such as al-Misri, al-Shami, Homsi and Halabi quietly preserve those journeys.

And yet Dalrymple is equally correct when he points to the growing body of genetic evidence demonstrating profound continuities across the centuries. Human populations do not simply replace one another like changing tenants. They absorb, intermingle and endure. DNA reveals not racial purity but remarkable persistence.

One aspect of the interview that particularly caught my attention was Dalrymple’s discussion of religion – not as an immutable badge of identity but as another thread in the long weaving of Palestinian society. Conversion, he observed, was rarely a single dramatic event. More often it was gradual, pragmatic and deeply human. Families embraced Christianity under Byzantine rule, Islam under the Caliphates and the Ottomans, sometimes from conviction, sometimes because new rulers brought new opportunities, and often because children simply inherited the world into which they were born. Nor was the movement one way. Jews became Christians; Christians became Muslims; communities adapted over centuries rather than changing overnight.

Language followed much the same path. Arabic became not merely the language of religion but of administration, commerce, literature and everyday life. It gradually supplanted earlier tongues without erasing the peoples who spoke them. Identity, like language itself, accumulated layer upon layer.

His brief reference to Yossef Rapoport’s Becoming Arab particularly caught my attention because I suspect it offers an important clue to the intellectual architecture of the book he is writing Rapoport’s central thesis is that peoples are not born fully formed; they become. It exercised a profound influence on my own essay One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance. See also, Becoming Arab … the myth of fingerprints

There is a quiet subversiveness in Becoming Arab because it quietly removes the ladder that every competing nationalism insists upon climbing. By demonstrating that Arab identity in medieval Palestine emerged through a long process of linguistic, cultural and social transformation rather than existing unchanged since antiquity, Rapoport undermines the comforting assumption that any modern national identity is primordial and immutable. The implication extends well beyond Palestinians. Jews, too, have continually reinvented themselves through exile, diaspora, return and statehood. Israelis and Palestinians alike remain peoples in the making.

Belonging, then, rests less upon ancient blood than upon lived continuity, accumulated memory and attachment to place. Rapoport gently redirects us away from the sterile question, “Who was here first?”, towards the infinitely richer question, “How do people come to belong?” It is an insight I have found equally illuminating when thinking about the British, the Americans, and even the tangled histories of Russians and Ukrainians. It also underpins what I have elsewhere called the “myth of fingerprints”: the mistaken belief that nations possess fixed and immutable identities when, in truth, every people is a palimpsest, written and rewritten over centuries without ever completely erasing what came before.

Dalrymple also highlighted the remarkable role of churches and monasteries across successive eras – Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman and British. They were far more than places of worship. They were centres of learning, repositories of manuscripts, guardians of memory and, eventually, pioneers of modern education. During the Mandate years, Christian schools became among the first institutions to embrace European models of education. It is therefore hardly surprising that Christian Arabs were disproportionately represented among the intellectual architects of both Arab nationalism and the emerging Palestinian national movement. This, too, complicates the modern tendency to reduce the story to a simple contest between Jews and Muslims. The reality, as always, is richer and more textured.

Dalrymple’s passing reference to George Antonius was equally telling. Antonius remains one of the most poignant figures of the Mandate years. Urbane, multilingual and deeply cultivated, he believed there remained a path towards accommodation between Arab and Jewish aspirations. Alongside moderates such as Musa Alami, he searched for political middle ground as extremism steadily crowded out compromise. Increasingly isolated, distrusted by radicals on both sides and ultimately ignored by the great powers, he watched the possibility of reconciliation slip away. He died in Jerusalem in 1942, disappointed and politically alone. There is something profoundly melancholy about his story. Men such as Antonius devoted their lives to preventing the catastrophe that would later be remembered as the Nakba. History tends to remember the militants, the revolutionaries and the generals; it is far less generous to the moderates who failed. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it is often those failed moderates who seem to have understood the coming tragedy most clearly. [See The first Intifada … Palestine 1936]

There is, however, a significant historical link missing from Dalrymple’s account.

To speak of Palestinians as a people with a distinctive heritage, history and culture is entirely legitimate, but it also raises the prior question of when and how that collective identity emerged. The people we now call Palestinians did not arrive in Palestine as a discrete nation from elsewhere; they emerged over centuries from the settled populations of the region, predominantly Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians alongside smaller Jewish and other communities, whose identities under Ottoman rule were more likely to be local, familial, religious, Ottoman or broadly Arab than specifically Palestinian. A modern Palestinian national consciousness crystallised only in the late nineteenth and, more decisively, the first half of the twentieth century, amid the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Arab nationalism, British rule, Zionist immigration and the intensifying struggle over the land.

Nor should “Palestine” itself be confused with a Palestinian nation: the name is far older, deriving ultimately from Greek and Roman Palaestina and subsequently used in various forms by Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and European writers; under the Ottomans, the territory was not a sovereign province or nation-state called Palestine but was divided among administrative districts. None of this makes Palestinian identity artificial. Like most modern national identities, it is both modern and genuine, rooted in an older population and a deeply layered attachment to place.

Perhaps Dalrymple simply takes this history as read. More likely, it is unmentioned because the interviewer did not ask about it. He does write about it in a piece published in The Guardian in August 2025 (republished below). But his readers and particularly an audience hearing a relatively compressed interview – may not. When the process by which a people acquired a modern national identity is left unstated, audiences tend to fill the gap with their own assumptions: some hearing an ancient, continuous Palestinian nation, others an identity recently invented from nothing. Both are historical distortions. The point is not to diminish Palestinian peoplehood but to locate it accurately: between the much older history of the land and the modern political history that transformed its inhabitants into distinct national communities.

As with Israeli identity, Palestinian identity belongs to the modern age while drawing upon memories, attachments, communities and histories that are considerably older. That distinction is essential if the Palestinian story is to be understood rather than simply enlisted in one of the competing narratives of the conflict.

It was telling that, despite repeated invitations from his interviewer, Dalrymple steadfastly refused to enter the contemporary ideological battlefield. He would not be drawn into pronouncements about settler colonialism, the legitimacy of Israel or competing national claims. He remained a historian.

Dalrymple displayed the same intellectual discipline when discussion turned towards the future. His interviewer clearly hoped he would venture predictions. He declined. Historians, he observed, can tell us what happened; they are far less qualified to say what will happen. The future delights in making fools of prophets.

Anthony Eden supposedly reduced politics to three words: “Events, dear boy, events.” Orwell supplied the darker warning through the Ministry of Truth: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” That remains one of the great cautions against allowing history to become merely another instrument of political mobilisation. Less bleakly, Robert Fisk – another writer I greatly admired – offered the wisest answer of all: “My crystal ball is broken.” Those who confidently predict the future almost invariably discover that history has other ideas. [See The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue ]

One curiosity remained with me after the interview. Dalrymple remarked upon young Israeli soldiers carrying rifles almost everywhere, yet the obvious question went unexplored: why? I have wondered about this myself ever since my first visit to Israel. I can still picture my late friend Avi’s rifle standing against the hallway wall in his parents’ home in Ramat Gan after he returned from reserve duty during the 1973 war. On my most recent visit I asked Israelis directly. Unless a weapon can be securely stored, soldiers are required to keep it with them. Our friend Shmuel’s son, serving as an army medic, once absent-mindedly left his rifle on a military bus after an exhausting exercise. His reward was several weeks in military prison. What appears to outsiders as a symbol of militarisation is, to many Israelis, simply one more expression of a society shaped by permanent insecurity.

Dalrymple also refers to the annual Jerusalem Day march, an event that commemorates the IDF’s capture of the Old City in June 1967 and the “unification” of the city. We happened to witness similar scenes ourselves near the Western Wall only days beforehand. They were ugly, confronting and impossible to dismiss as merely social media caricature.

I look forward to reading the finished book. Not because I expect it to settle the argument—history almost never does—but because the best historians enlarge rather than narrow our understanding. They remind us that identities are not fossils buried in the earth waiting to be excavated, but living things, fashioned over centuries by conquest and coexistence, faith and language, migration and memory. They leave us with fewer slogans and more questions; fewer certainties and greater humility. In an age increasingly addicted to binaries, that may be the most subversive act of all.

Travelers’  tales

There is a thread that runs through much of my writing, though I did not always recognise it at the time. It is a thread woven from history, travel, memory and place, and it connects figures as seemingly disparate as Jan Morris, Robert Fisk and William Dalrymple. They are very different writers, with different perspectives and different temperaments, but they share a quality that I have always valued: they do not simply describe places; they allow places to speak.

During my early encounters with the history and culture of the Middle East at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies – the “Madrasat al-Jawāsīs”, the “School of Spies”, as Arab friends would jokingly call it – I became fascinated by a trio of British writers whose books transported me into the worlds they described.described. Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark and Jan Morris each approached the region differently, yet all possessed that rare ability to convey not merely information but atmosphere: the smells of markets, the rhythms of streets, the weight of history embedded in landscapes.

Jan Morris was perhaps the greatest exponent of this art. Her genius was not merely as a chronicler of empire, nor simply as a travel writer, but as someone who understood that places possess personalities. She once wrote, “All my life I have felt in places, in landscapes as in cities, an allure that seems to me actually sexual, purer but no less exciting than the sexuality of the body.” It is a remarkable observation because it captures something that many travellers experience but few can articulate: that certain landscapes exert a pull beyond geography, that cities and countries can possess a kind of emotional and even sensual presence.

Bell, the archaeologist, traveller and administrator sometimes called the “Queen of the Desert”, was present at the creation of the modern Middle East after the First World War. Stark travelled through the region in the middle decades of the twentieth century, recording a world already beginning to disappear. James Morris, later Jan Morris, chronicled the rise and decline of British imperial confidence and the uncertain transition into a post-imperial age.

What makes Jan Morris such a fascinating figure is that her personal transformation occurred alongside the transformation of Britain itself. The end of Empire and the discovery of a new identity unfolded in parallel. The writer who chronicled the fading grandeur of British power was also undergoing a profound reimagining of self. Her Pax Britannica trilogy remains an extraordinary work, though it is also deeply complicated. Morris’s relationship with empire was neither a simple condemnation nor an uncomplicated celebration. She recognised its violence and arrogance, yet she was also fascinated by its energy, ambition and sense of adventure. Empire, in her telling, was a vast human drama: magnificent, destructive, creative and cruel.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 represented the moment when that imperial illusion finally collapsed. Morris described it as a kind of tombstone for British power and a crisis of British masculinity. The old confidence had disappeared. The imperial actor who had once imagined himself striding across the world stage was suddenly confronted with his own limitations. “Old forces were dying and new energies emerging,” she wrote. “Patterns that had seemed permanent were falling into chaos.” That insight resonates far beyond Britain. History repeatedly teaches us that identities and institutions which appear permanent are often temporary arrangements. Empires, nations and cultures are not fixed monuments but living things, constantly being reshaped by events.

This is why William Dalrymple’s work has always appealed to me. Like Morris, he understands that history is not simply about dates, battles and rulers. It is about people in places. His great strength is that he belongs to no faction. He follows the evidence, and he makes his own judgments. He resists the temptation to reduce history to contemporary political arguments. Instead, he explored the deeper processes by which societies and identities emerge.

As we have noted above, his observations intersect with Yossef Rapoport’s Becoming Arab, a work that has greatly influenced my own thinking. Rapoport challenges the assumption that national identities are ancient, fixed and immutable. Arab identity in Palestine, he argues, emerged through centuries of linguistic, cultural and social development. This does not diminish Palestinian identity; rather, it explains how all identities are formed.

The same applies elsewhere. Jewish identity has also evolved through exile, diaspora, return and statehood. British identity, American identity, Russian identity and Ukrainian identity are all products of history rather than timeless inheritances. Peoples are not fingerprints stamped permanently into existence. They are palimpsests, written and rewritten across generations, retaining traces of what came before while continually becoming something new.

This is also why Dalrymple’s observations about religion are significant. Faith, like language, is not simply inherited unchanged through the centuries. Communities converted, adapted and transformed. Jews became Christians, Christians became Muslims, and Arabic gradually became the dominant language of administration, commerce and culture. Churches and monasteries served not only as places of worship but as centres of learning and memory. During the British Mandate, as we have noted above, Christian schools were among the pioneers of modern education, and Christian Arabs played a disproportionately important role in the development of Arab nationalism and Palestinian political consciousness.

Again, the lesson is one of complexity. The history of Palestine cannot be reduced to simple categories. It is a story of migration and continuity, faith and adaptation, conflict and coexistence.

A personal coda

I make no comparison between my own experiences and those of writers such as Morris or Dalrymple, who devoted years of their lives to the places they studied. My own travels have been measured in days and weeks rather than prolonged residence, and I possess neither their linguistic gifts nor their local knowledge. Yet they have taught me some of the same lessons.

Over the years I have wandered through mosques and basilicas, monasteries and synagogues, castles and catacombs, museums and markets. I have traced the layers of history in weathered stones, walked streets that have changed little for centuries, and watched successive civilisations leave their marks upon the same landscape. Everywhere, the faces, languages and faiths have reminded me that history is one of mixture rather than purity, continuity rather than replacement. it is this extraordinary diversity that makes these lands so compelling.

Israel and Palestine affected me more deeply than almost anywhere else. I have read widely, but books can only take one so far. I have stood at checkpoints, seen the separation barrier close up and, witnessed the daily inconveniences, restrictions and humiliations that accompany life under occupation. Equally, I have spoken with Israelis and Palestinians whose lives have been shaped by generations of fear and insecurity, and come to understand, even if not always to agree with, the fears that underpin so many aspects of everyday life. By design, good fortune or simple caution, I have never witnessed the violence itself. But I have seen enough to understand that both peoples live with histories that cannot simply be dismissed.

Travel has not made me an idealist, nor has it turned me into a partisan. If anything, it has left me increasingly suspicious of certainties. The longer one spends amidst places where history is layered one civilisation upon another, the harder it becomes to accept simple stories about pure origins, immutable identities, uniquely righteous causes, and uncomplicated heroes and villains. Reality is almost always more complicated – and more human – than that.

Perhaps that is the enduring lesson of writers like Jan Morris, Robert Fisk and William Dalrymple. They remind us that landscapes have longer memories than nations, that stones often preserve truths that politics attempts to conceal, and that history is rarely a straight line. It is a conversation across centuries, written by countless hands.

In the forward to East – an Arab anthology, republished below, I wrote: “these are the lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude”. Their histories are “carved in stone, mysteries locked in stone”. And perhaps that is why they continue to draw us back: because beneath every empire, every ideology and every argument lie the enduring traces of ordinary human beings who lived, loved, fought, worshipped and dreamed in the same places we walk today.

Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, August 2026

For more on the Middle East in In That Howling Infinite see: A Middle East Miscellany and East – an Arab anthology; and, most recently: Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints.

Eastward, aye, he wandered

Forward to East – an Arab anthology  of poems by Paul Hemphill
In these troubled times, I look back on a part of the world that has captivated much of my intellectual life. I was drawn to the Middle East in another age, when it was the land of myth and magic, of dreamers and adventurers, of quixotic tilters at windmills, of pioneers who would make the deserts bloom, of dissemblers and deceivers bearing false promises. The ancient lands of the Bible, the fabled realm of A Thousand and One Nights, the restless quests of Richard Burton, Charles Doughty, and TE Lawrence; the pulp-fiction fantasies of Frank Herbert, James Michener, and Leon Uris; the celluloid myths of Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, and Paul Newman.
These are the lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude, of warriors and holy men. The spiritual and the temporal have melded here since time immemorial. We still see the remnants of ancient empires and the echoes of their faiths. We can chart their decline and fall in monuments and mausoleums, in the “tumbled towers and fallen stones, broken statues, empty tombs,” where “ghosts of commoners and kings walk the walls and catacombs of the castles and the shrines.” Histories carved in stone, mysteries locked in stone, as “canyons and castles pass ageless and ageing and captive in time.”
I first travelled through these lands when the gaze of our Western world was directed elsewhere. The big stories then were the Vietnam quagmire and the Cold War, words made flesh when Brezhnev’s Red Army euthanised the Prague Spring – much as Nikita Kruschev crushed Hungary’s short lived revolution a decade earlier. Then plucky little Israel – that’s how the world viewed the Jewish state back in the day – made its pre-emptive blitzkrieg against the braggadocio of Egypt, and the dubious martial prowess of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, and put the Middle East back in the news again.
And there it has stayed, with hijackings, hostages, terrorism, the Oil Crisis and OPEC, civil war and invasion in Lebanon, Gulf Wars One, Two, and Three, the Twin Towers, the Wars of American Vengeance. And so to the present day, the brief Arab Spring giving way to a long and bloody Arab Winter, and the demolition of the Sykes-Picot dispensation with Daish’s redrawing of the map of the Middle East, the Abraham Accords with their promise of Arab-Israeli “normalisation” – an opaque and controversial word in this box canyon of false hopes – the fall of the Assad regime and the prospect of a revived Syria, and, in the endgame of many Israeli incursions into Hamas’ Gaza autocracy, the pogrom of October 7 and Israel’s biblical vengeance.
There is a place for dissertations on the state of the world and the tectonic movements that continue to reverberate and ricochet through these most antique of lands. And this is not one. But they have been the inspiration for much of my writing, and this volume is an anthology of those pieces. And unavoidably, they reflect and comment upon ideas and incidents, actions and accidents, memories and monuments.
I wear the weave of history like a second skin, as though each stone, each ruin, each sun-baked wadi, each vibrant soul has pressed itself into my being. As the Irish novelist John Banville wrote, “the past beats inside me like a second heart,” and in these lands, it beats with a particular resonance – ancient and immediate, mythic and human. The Middle East is not merely a subject of study or a theatre for politics; it is a history and geography I have walked through, a landscape I have viewed, a culture I have carried with me in the dust of its deserts, in the sounds and scents of its streets, in the quiet of its mosques, churches and synagogues, and its ruins.
My poems and songs have mirrored what I have carried in memory, and carry still. The cadence of markets and mosques, the call to prayer, the silence of the canyons. the desert wind, remind me that these lands live not only in history books but in lived, sung, remembered experience of all who have passed through They recall centuries of triumph and loss. The past is not distant; it rises in waves, song lines across stone and sand, linking the footsteps of pilgrims, soldiers, merchants, and wanderers with my own.
I know the Old Cities of Jerusalem and Damascus like my own neighbourhood. I’ve promenaded down the Street Called Straight and the Suq Al Hammadiyeh many times; shopped in the ancient Aleppo Souk – before it was destroyed; walked though the deserted Dead Cities of the North – which became later refuge for the homeless; climbed the Masada massif twice, once in the full heat of high summer, and again one time in predawn darkness to watch the sunrise over the Dead Sea and Moab; traveled overland through the Judean Desert to the old monastery of Mar Saba Stood; stood atop the battlements of Krak de Chevaliers; slept a ledge overlooking Petra, the Rose City and walked the Siq both ways three times; rode in a jeep through the canyons of Wadi Rum; traveled on the famous Nairn Express from Damascus to Baghdad, and an old bus through the Khyber Pass; stood by the Euphrates at Babylon, the Nile at Karnak, and the Ganges at burning ghat of Varenesi; visited Palmyra and watched the sunset atop Qala’at Fakhe al Din al Ma’ani.
All of these, now memories, carry the stories of centuries: the echo of prophets, conquerors, poets, and common folk whose lives have risen and fallen in patterns invisible yet inscribed in every wall, every minaret, every crumbling mosaic. The present weighs upon them as heavily as the past: geopolitics, ideology, oil, invasion, and resistance all leave their marks, mingling with the dust of empires long gone. Yet amid it all, the pulse of life persists—bright, stubborn, and singin – reminding me that beauty and despair coexist in ways the mind alone can scarcely contain.
These lands, as I first knew them, were the lands of story, legend, and lore; of pilgrims and explorers; of warriors and sages. And now, reading, writing and singing their echoes through books, prose and verse, I understand that memory, imagination, and presence are inseparable. One cannot approach the Middle East without the awareness that history is embodied, tactile, insistent: in the sun upon skin, the dust on boots, the voices of markets, mosques, and alleys, and in the pull of ruins that hold the ghosts of kings and commoners alike.
Writing about the Middle East, I am reminded that story, song, and memory intertwine. The poems and songs I carry are part of this landscape, as much as the stones and winds themselves, shaping how I see, feel, and reflect. Their cadence is my compass, their imagery my guide, the echoes, the pulse of lands that refuse abstraction. Here, history and the present are inseparable; the past is alive in the dust, the stone, the sun, and the song.
I wear its dust, I carry its past, I feel its presence. In prose and in song, in memory and in presence, I am tethered to these lands. And in this tethering, I find the resonance that drives the writing in this anthology: an awareness of the Middle East not as a distant object but as a living, breathing interlocutor, shaping thought, reflection, and imagination with the weight, warmth, and insistence of centuries.
Decades later, I wrote about my early travels in Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life.It encapsulates very much how I travelled in those gone days:

“I’d like to think that perhaps it is something intrinsically part of my software – an ability to adapt, accept, empathize, and, as far as it is indeed possible for a stranger, to become one with the scenery and slip into the machinery, and, to put it bluntly, take it all at face value. As a “stranger in a strange land”, I accepted what I saw, observed, heard and learned, moved on – to quote American beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti – like “a mirror walking down a strange street’. For this is how I traveled in those roving years, leaving very little by way of words and pictures of my travelling. All I saw, heard, observed, felt and learned was mostly stashed away on my own, internal hard-drive to be accessed in latter years – waiting, perhaps, for the advent of social media, blogs and highly portable electronic devices”.

For more about these journeys, see Song of the Road (2) – The Accidental Traveller

One of the oldest urban centres: Gaza’s rich history in ruins

The Guardian,17 Oct 2025

In October 2025, William Dalrymple wrote this  fine piece on the long, entangled history of Gaza in The Guardian, publicizing a forthcoming multi-episode series on his excellent Empire podcast. He wrote of how the territory’s ancient heritage has too often been ignored. As we mourn incalculable human losses, learning about its past can help us better understand the present

As a ceasefire brings a measure of peace to the Dresden-like hellscape that Gaza has become, it is time to take stock of all that has been lost. The human cost of what the UN commission of inquiry recognises as a genocide is of course incalculable, but fewer are aware of how much rich history and archaeology has also been destroyed in these horrific months. This is bolstered by the widespread assumption that Gaza was little more than a huge refugee camp built on a recently settled portion of desert. That is quite wrong. In reality Gaza it is one of the oldest urban centres on the planet.

Golda Meir famously declared that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, but the reality is very different. Palestine is actually one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself. Palestine was an established name for the coast between Egypt and Phoenicia since at least the second millennium BCE: the ancient Egyptian texts refer to “Peleset” from about 1450BCE, Assyrians inscriptions to the “Palashtu” c800BCE, and Herodotus c480BCE to “Παλαιστίνη” (Palaistinē). This was all brought home to me as I worked, with my co-presenter Anita Anand, on a 12-part series on Gaza’s history for the Empire podcast.

Gaza was first referenced as a strategic prize in an Egyptian inscription of Thutmose III in the 15th century BCE, where it is referred to as Ghazzati. It is also one of the most fought-over and contested spaces: for more than 4,000 years this area has been an ethnically mixed crossroads, linking Africa with Asia, and the desert with the Mediterranean. It has also been a crucial strategic and economic hub: an often incredibly rich and prosperous port from which the spices, incense, perfumes and wines of western Asia were exported to Greece and Rome, the end of the caravan route from Arabia via Petra. As well as a fortress guarding the strategically crucial route leading from the eastern Mediterranean coastline to Egypt.

Travellers who visited Gaza over the centuries have often remarked on the fecundity of its vegetation and the diversity of its agriculture, both of which are the products of its underground waters and the Mediterranean climate. It is this that enabled Gaza to grow the excellent grapes that for many centuries were made into a much celebrated sweet wine, the Château d’Yquem of the classical world. An exhibition of the salvaged antiquities of Gaza currently showing at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris opens with a fabulous display of the distinctive “torpedo jars” in which the Gazans exported their wine. As late as the sixth century AD, these amphorae were reaching both Merovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England.

Each successive power in the Middle East has always wanted to own Gaza, and to conquer it, and over the centuries we hear of a succession of empires – first the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, and later the Umayyads, Mamluks, Turks and the British – coming through and fighting to seize it. More difficult to see in the chronicles of conquests and sieges are the locals who have always lived hereabouts, century after century, whose faith has slowly evolved from paganism to all three of the Abrahamic faiths, and whose dominant language has moved from Aramaic to Greek then from Greek to Arabic.

Archaeology shows that the DNA of the different peoples who lived here has remained fairly consistent throughout the centuries: the modern inhabitants of this land, both Jewish and Palestinian, share much the same mix of DNA groups as the peoples who lived here in the bronze age, and whose skeletons have been tested in contemporary labs. The small Samaritan and Palestinian Christian minorities, the latter descendants of the first Christians, exhibit genetic patterns that are especially close to those extracted from ancient skeletons.

Although the town remained a robust centre of paganism long after many other cities in the region, its beachfront was also the home to the earliest monasteries of Palestine, as followers of St Antony of Egypt migrated there bringing the monastic movement to the Levant; soon “the desert became a city” as monasteries sprang up across the region. In 406 the Empress Eudoxia provided the funds for a cathedral for Gaza, and by the end of the sixth century, the celebrated church of St Sergius was built.

The Arab conquest used to be considered a major turning point in the region’s history, but according to many historians and archaeologists who specialise in this period, the conquest is almost invisible archaeologically. Surviving documents from the period indicate that for many years after, Gaza continued as an administrative centre of the region, and Greek-speaking Christians continued to run the bureaucracy. The son and grandson of two of the early chancellors of the Ummayad Caliphs, St John of Damascus, ended his life in the monastery of Mar Saba not very far from Gaza in the Judean desert. In time, the inhabitants of Palestine accepted the language, government and religion of their new masters; but it was a gradual process of transition, over many centuries, not a sudden catastrophic end of civilisation. The Arab conquerors were a small military elite; the local people remained much the same.

The site of Saint Hilarion monastery, Deir al-Balah, June 8, 2022. Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty 

Gaza continued to flourish through the Crusader period, when it was given over to the Knights Templar to guard the frontier with Egypt; and even more so after the Mamluks expelled the Crusaders and filled Gaza with fine mosques and caravanserais. During the Ottoman period, Jaffa and Acre took over from Gaza as the most prosperous ports of the region, out of which Galilee cotton and Jaffa oranges were exported; but Gaza remained an important regional centre.

Though Gaza now dominates news bulletins for the worst reasons, it is a place about which we have traditionally learned remarkably little; we are not taught its story in movies or TV documentaries, let alone as part of formal education. Yet it is something we obviously badly need to know in order to grasp current events.

This month sees the publication of several new books addressing that absence. As well as the catalogue of the brilliant Paris exhibition, Trésors sauvés de Gaza: 5,000 ans d’histoire (Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5,000 Years of History) historian Anne Irfan has just produced an excellent primer, A Short History of the Gaza Strip, while Jean-Pierre Filiu has published a supplement to his wonderful Gaza: A History, called A Historian in Gaza. In it, he writes: “The Gaza I knew, and whose length and breadth I’ve travelled, has ceased to exist.” All three count as essential reading for those hungry to know more about this ancient territory so as to better understand the current, desperate chapter in its history.

A Short History of the Gaza Strip by Anne Irfan (Simon & Schuster, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

A Historian in Gaza by Jean-Pierre Filiu (C Hurst & Co Publishers, £16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

 

Beside Strange Waters

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

I have admired Pink Floyd since the sixties. I still thrill to the memory of sitting in the darkness on Parliament Hill in the fall of 1968 as the  lights of the city sparkled below us and as jet planes roared overhead on their descent to Heathrow airport to the accompaniment of Interstellar Overdrive and Careful With That Axe, Eugene. The Dark Side of the Moon remains, in my view, one of the greatest albums ever recorded: musically adventurous, philosophically rich, endlessly rewarding. Like much of Floyd’s best work, it explores madness, alienation, mortality and power with extraordinary subtlety.

That subtlety is precisely what seems missing from co-founder Roger Waters’ contemporary activism. Flying inflatable pigs adorned with Stars of David or swastika imagery; describing Israel as uniquely evil; dismissing inconvenient evidence about the atrocities of October 7, 2026; and denouncing former colleagues as idiots. All this may generate headlines, but they lack the complexity of the art that made him and Pink Floyd famous.

Perhaps that is the enduring irony. David Gilmour rarely pretended to be a political philosopher. Waters plainly believes he is one. Yet the songs they created together endure precisely because they resisted simplistic moral binaries. The Dark Side of the Moon recognises that human beings are contradictory creatures, capable of love and cruelty, sanity and madness, empathy and tribalism. Waters’ current politics increasingly divide humanity into those who possess truth and those who have been brainwashed.

The Haaretz article republished below unintentionally illustrates another uncomfortable truth. In 2006 Waters was still embraced by most Israelis despite his criticisms. Today he is regarded by many not merely as a critic of Israel but as someone who has crossed into demonisation. Whether one agrees with that judgement or not, the shift is real. His critics see not an artist speaking truth to power but a man whose empathy has become radically selective.

The music, however, remains untouched. It is still magnificent. One can treasure the album while concluding that its principal lyricist has become, to borrow one of his own titles, rather more comfortably certain than comfortably numb. The  younger Roger Waters asked us to question authority. The contemporary Roger Waters often seems to demand that we accept his own. That is a curious destination for one of rock’s greatest sceptics.

The dark side of Roger Waters

This is a fascinating article, not because it settles anything – it manifestly does not – but because it captures Roger Waters almost in the raw.  Israeli music journalist Ben Shalev deserves credit for largely getting out of the way and letting his subject speak. The result is both revealing and, at times, deeply unsettling.

The article begins as a piece of rock-and-roll history. In 2006, Waters agreed to perform in Israel but, under pressure from the fledgling Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, cancelled the planned Tel Aviv concert and instead performed in Neve Shalom (Wahat al-Salam), the Jewish-Arab “Oasis of Peace” village near Latrun. The move required an extraordinary logistical effort: a chickpea field became a wheat field, then an amphitheatre for some 60,000 people. Traffic collapsed, helicopters ferried the wealthy, and the concert itself – a performance of The Dark Side of the Moon – became one of the largest and most memorable rock events Israel has ever hosted.

Around this entertaining backstage story swirl competing memories. Did Waters himself suggest Neve Shalom? Was it promoter Shuki Weiss? Did Waters witness armed Israeli soldiers at the separation barrier or not? Did security concerns prevent him attending a peace gathering, or did he simply go shopping? Almost every anecdote has two or three incompatible versions. Shalev wisely resists deciding who is right. Memory, ideology and self-mythologising have become inseparable.

The more interesting story is Waters’ own political evolution. He describes 2006 as the beginning of his radicalisation, crediting Qatari-Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti and the nascent BDS movement with opening his eyes to what he now regards as Zionism’s original sin. He claims his deceased father’s letters from British Mandatory Palestine anticipated these concerns decades earlier. Since then, he says, he has concluded not merely that Israeli governments have committed grave wrongs, but that Israel itself – and Zionism as such – is “a failed experiment.”

At that point the interview changes register entirely. It ceases to be about a concert and becomes a prolonged political jeremiad. Waters insists Israelis have been comprehensively brainwashed, dismisses Israeli society as morally corrupted, embraces armed struggle as historically necessary, rejects Nick Cave’s argument for cultural engagement, and repeats claims about October 7 that have been extensively challenged by independent investigations. His denial that Hamas committed rapes, despite substantial evidence collected by UN investigators, journalists and Israeli forensic teams, inevitably overwhelms everything else he says. Whether one is sympathetic to Palestinian suffering or highly critical of Israeli policy, this is where many readers simply stop listening.

That is perhaps the tragedy of Roger Waters. He undoubtedly possesses genuine moral passion. The anti-authoritarian themes running through Animals, The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon were always political, even when listeners preferred to hear only the music. But somewhere along the way, righteous anger seems to have hardened into absolute certainty. There is almost no room left for ambiguity, self-doubt or tragedy. Israelis become collectively brainwashed; Palestinians collectively embody resistance; every contradictory fact is assimilated into a single explanatory framework.

It is an oddly totalising worldview from a man who once warned us against “thought control.”

Postscript

On 4th September 2026, The Times of Israel Israel reported that Roger Waters, “a far-left conspiracist who has long been accused of antisemitism”, was scheduled to headline a New York City conference run by a group that raises conspiracies about the September 11, 2001 terror attack. “Waters and the group organizing the conference, the International Center for 9/11 Justice, have raised false allegations that Israel was involved in the al-Qaeda terror attacks”.

According to The Times, “The group identifies with the “truth movement” that raises alternative explanations for the attacks and calls the attacks an “inside job” orchestrated by the US government with assistance from Israel and other countries”. “9/11 was the first step in the plan for US-Israel hegemony in the Middle East,” the group said earlier this year.

The Times notes that Waters has endorsed conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2001, attacks, telling Tucker Carlson in July that the towers fell due to “controlled demolitions. “It fell down because it was demolished, and the question is, ‘Who placed the explosives in it? Who pressed the button?’” he said. He alleged Israelis had foreknowledge of the attacks, saying, “They were dancing around, sort of congratulating themselves”. He has also raised conspiracies or denied atrocities related to Hamas’s October 2023 invasion of Israel and has a history of anti-Jewish rhetoric.

Paul Hemphill, August 2026

For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany.

Roger Waters: ‘My Songs That Israelis Love Are About Truth and Love. Israel Is the Complete Opposite’

Twenty years after his performance in the Jewish-Arab village of Neve Shalom, Roger Waters recounts his version of what really happened there – and what has changed for him since. ‘They went from, ‘Waaaah! Roger, Pink Floyd, we love you’ – to ‘What the fuck is he talking about?”

June 18, 2026

Roger Waters: "Israel is a failed experiment."
Shortly after 10 P.M. on June 22, 2006, as Roger Waters’ concert in the Jewish-Arab Israeli village of Neve Shalom was in full swing, a member of the production team mistakenly believed that police were preparing to arrest the Pink Floyd legend.

The employee, a member of Israeli producer Shuki Weiss’ team, thought he had heard over the radio that Waters would be arrested on suspicion of damaging IDF property the moment he stepped offstage. He alerted Amir Feingold, who was in charge of security for the production.

Already under immense pressure as the concert drew to a close and 60,000 attendees prepared to leave, Feingold took the report seriously. “We called the Jerusalem District commander, who was at the site, and asked him to look into it,” he recalls.

“Listen, we know how easily the police arrest people. Look at what’s happening today with protest activists.”

That was in 2006. The minister responsible for the police was not Ben-Gvir.

“If there was the slightest chance something would go wrong, we wanted to make sure it didn’t happen. The district commander reassured us. He said, ‘I’m with you.’ At the same time, Shuki and I went to Waters’ manager and told him, ‘Listen, here’s the situation. There could be problems.’ As soon as Waters got off stage, we put him in a car, even before giving the order to turn on the lights in the facility. Shuki said a few words to the audience while the man was already on his way to Ben-Gurion International Airport, escorted by special police patrol unit vans.”

רוג'ר ווטרס גרפיטי
Rogers Waters spraying graffiti on the separation wall, 2006.  Credit: AP

The story about the complaint against Waters is an insignificant anecdote, but it illustrates how much Israeli reality has changed in the 20 years since that performance.

In 2006, Ben-Gvir was a serial offender who belonged to the lunatic, ostracized fringes of the far-right, far outside the bounds of public legitimacy. Today, he is the national security minister. Waters is the one who has moved far beyond the bounds of Israeli legitimacy in the past two decades. In 2006, he was still a huge cultural hero, unconditionally loved and admired. His arrival in the country was seen as a historic event.

Israelis’ attitude toward Waters has, as is well known, totally changed since then. First, he has been a vocal and tireless advocate for the cultural boycott against Israel, as part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Then, he denied the scale of the Hamas massacre on October 7.

Pink Floyd’s music is still very much loved in the country, but Waters himself is probably among the most hated people in Israel. The possibility of him setting foot in the country today is beyond imagination. This makes the memories of his performance here, exactly 20 years ago, particularly charged and interesting.

What does Waters himself remember from that visit to Israel and the performance in Neve Shalom? What is the most significant thing that stuck with him?

“Very, very comfortable, shabby chic white sofas arranged backstage. Not the most meaningful memory, but you said, how do you remember it? But the main memory, obviously, is the memory of when I made the little speech at the end where I said, you are the generation of young Israelis who must make peace with your neighbors and blah blah blah,” Waters says in a Zoom interview from his New York home.

He then mimics a screaming, fawning audience: “They went from, ‘Waaaah! Roger, Pink Floyd, we love you’ – to ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’ Wow. It was something of a surprise. I went back the next year and I learned a lot more about Israeli psychology. But that first year, it was still a bit of a surprise.”

Waters is not precise with the timing: He returned three years later, in 2009.

Was the change in audience reaction really that extreme?

“It went from ecstasy to silent horror in a split second. And I thought, whoa, that was by far the most important bit. The rest was just a gig, with an adoring audience.”

Israel is waiting for Roger

One need not accept Waters’ recollection. I asked several people who were there how they remembered that moment. Some didn’t recall Waters’ statement at all. Others said the audience reacted supportively. No one remembered a reserved response, certainly not “silent horror.”

A significant discrepancy between different accounts of the same events characterizes the entire story of Waters’ performance and his 2006 visit to Israel. Whose idea was it to move the concert from its original venue in Yarkon Park to Neve Shalom’s chickpea field? What did Waters see during his visit to the separation barrier? Why didn’t he attend the meeting organized for him with intellectuals and peace activists?

The answer to all these questions is: It depends on whom you ask. So we asked. To mark 20 years since the most complex and charged performance in the history of international rock concerts in Israel, we will try to tell its story in the most reliable and interesting way.

This story has two protagonists: Waters and producer Shuki Weiss. In the 1970s, before Weiss became one of the country’s biggest concert producers, he managed record stores in Tel Aviv and was one of those responsible for introducing Pink Floyd’s music to Israelis. Later, when he owned the Dan Cinema Club in Tel Aviv, he used to hold record listening evenings there. One time he played “The Wall.”

“People would come to listen,” he recalls. “Many people.”

In the early 1980s, Weiss and Miron Rechtman, the owner of the Betty Bam event equipment company, bought the sound system that Pink Floyd used on its “The Wall” tour. In the mid-1980s, Weiss tried in vain to bring David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s guitarist, to Israel as a solo artist. Toward the end of the 1980s, after Waters had left the band, he negotiated to bring Pink Floyd to perform in the country in its trio lineup (Gilmour, keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason. But that attempt also failed.

The crowd waiting for Waters to perform. The concert caused a traffic nightmare.

The crowd waiting for Waters to perform. Credit: Oren Levin

“I stalked them, so to speak,” he says.

In early 2006, Weiss learned that Waters was planning a world tour based on the album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

“I went to London, met his agent, and offered a huge sum, much more than he received anywhere else,” Weiss recalls. After the contract was signed and the planned performance in Yarkon Park was announced, he traveled to Paris for a brief meeting with Waters. “I told him that Israel was excited for him,” he says. “He was perfectly fine.” Weiss says ticket sales were excellent, with 35,000 sold three months before the show.

A couple of weeks later, Weiss was vacationing with his family in the Netherlands, when Waters’ manager, Mark Fenwick, called him. He told Weiss that pro-Palestinian activists were exerting heavy pressure on Waters. A few hours later, Fenwick called again to say that Waters had decided to cancel the performance.

“I got lots of emails from my brothers and sisters after the announcement of Hayarkon Park. But the important one was from Omar Barghouti,” Waters recalls about changing his mind, referring to one of the founders of the BDS movement. “We had a conversation, and then I eventually cancelled Hayarkon Park. Organizing this concert instead was a compromise with Omar and with the rest of the people who had just started the BDS movement, because obviously even doing Neve Shalom broke the boundaries of the cultural boycott.”

Waters describes that exchange as “a huge moment” in his political thinking.

“You know, in this song that Mona Miari and I have just released, a re-imagination of my song ‘Comfortably Numb,’ I sing, ‘We never knew about the Nakba. I was only 5 years old in ’48.’ And we didn’t,” he says. “And the lie that is Zionism had been spread all over the world since the Second World War. So I wasn’t alone. Very, very few people quite got it.”

Waters says that one of the few people who “got it” before the war was his father.

Shuki Weiss giving an interview ahead of the Rogers Water concert in 2006.
Shuki Weiss giving an interview ahead of the concert. Credit: Oren Levin

“My father taught at St. George’s School in Jerusalem from 1934 to 1936,” he says. “And he wrote letters home to my grandmother, which I have, saying how worried he was about the influx of American money, mainly, to buy up land, and about the establishment of the settlements that he saw going on, and how desperately worried and concerned he was,” he recounts, referring to the pre-state Jewish communities. “Of course, he was killed in the war, so I never got to talk to him about these things. but it’s a fascinating fact.”

Following the deepening of his awareness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict due to the appeal of the BDS movement, Waters made his second visit in 2009. “My travels around the occupied territories … were deeply, deeply moving and very informative,” he says. “I’ve tried never to shut my mouth from that moment. And things have only got worse, obviously, except that it’s becoming clearer and clearer to the vast majority of people all over the world now that this is a failed experiment, and it should be stopped.”

What is the failed experiment?

“Israel is the failed experiment. Zionism is the failed experiment. and this is becoming increasingly a position taken up by a huge majority of human beings all over the world, because we witness and are appalled by the horrific policies of the state of Israel in its massacre of the indigenous people whose land it stole in order to create itself. And so it’s a terrible, terrible, terrible tragedy, and it remains to be seen: Will I see the end of the story in my lifetime? Probably not. I’m 82 years old.”

פותחת
Waters performing in Neve Shalom in 2006.  Credit: Assaf Evron

Field of wheat

In response to Waters’ decision to cancel the Yarkon Park concert, the most monumental improvisation in the history of performances in Israel occurred. Thanks to the move to Neve Shalom, Weiss says he was called “The King of the Chickpea Field” for years by people in the global music industry.

“When Waters’ manager informed me of the cancellation, I told him: ‘What if I move the show to a place for Jews and Arabs?’ I don’t know where that came from,” Weiss says. ‘I knew Neve Shalom. David Broza’s grandfather was one of the first residents there. I had done performances there many years before this show, events for peace. But nothing of this magnitude. Performances for a few thousand people. I had no idea if a huge concert could be held there. I left my family in the Netherlands and returned to Israel. That night, Waters’ manager called me back and said: ‘We checked what Neve Shalom is. If you can do it there, and if you invite Arabs to the show and arrange meetings with peace activists, we’re in.’ I told him: ‘Yes, yes, yes.”

Rayek Rizek, a Neve Shalom resident, offers a different version of the events that led to the Neve Shalom performance. “Sometime in late March 2006, I heard two employees in the community’s secretariat talking about Roger Waters,” recalls Rizek who was the community’s secretary general in 2006. “I’ve loved Pink Floyd since high school. I still listen to them today. When I was studying at university in the United States, around when “Animals” (the band’s 1977 album) came out, I missed a performance of theirs in Houston. By the time I managed to look for a ticket, everything was sold out. I was very sorry,” Rizek says as an aside.

“So when I heard the employees in the office talking about Waters, I asked what was going on. They said his manager had sent us an email. Waters was interested in Neve Shalom and was asking for information about the village,” he says. “As soon as I saw I had a direct connection with the manager, I sat down and wrote him a long email telling him about Neve Shalom and inviting him to hold the concert with us. I didn’t know about the pressure being exerted on him. Two days later, Shuki Weiss came to the village and told me, ‘This morning, Waters’ manager called me and asked about the possibility of moving the concert to Neve Shalom.’ I imagine the manager received my letter and understood that such a possibility existed.”

Rizek’s version doesn’t necessarily contradict Weiss’s entirely. Perhaps Weiss suggested the idea to Waters’ manager, and then the manager sent an email to Neve Shalom. But it’s also possible that the initial email to Neve Shalom was sent to explore the option of holding some separate activity in the community. In this scenario, when the Yarkon gig was canceled amid Rizek’s offer to hold a concert in Neve Shalom, Waters and his manager adopted the proposal. Rizek recounts that during one of the preliminary meetings with police officers at the event site, one of the commanders got annoyed over some details and asked, “‘Why are we even holding the concert here? Why didn’t it stay in Tel Aviv?'”

Rizek recalls: “Shuki looked at me and told the commander: ‘Blame him.’ As for me, all I did was send a letter.”

Waters himself doesn’t remember the history of the concert’s move to Neve Shalom. “Shuki Weiss, bless him, he’s just another promoter,” he says with a smile. “I don’t know him at all. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I can spit.”

On the other hand, he stresses, “I loved the idea of Neve Shalom, of this agricultural community.” He says fondly: “It’s like this is the dream that we have of how Palestine could go, could go back to being, where everybody lives together, and there’s no supremacists, there’s no racism. Whatever it may be that has caused this great catastrophe, there was none of that in Neve Shalom. I hope it’s still doing well.”

Flyers for the Roger Waters concert in Israel

Flyers for the Roger Waters concert in Israel Credit: Oren Levin

Weiss picked the new concert site’s location with Giora Porter, who designed the producer’s concert venues for many years. “There was only one area that came into consideration, with a certain slope, a kind of natural amphitheater,” Porter recalls. “It was a chickpea field owned by two brothers from one of the local moshavim. I located the field owners and said: ‘I want to buy your chickpeas.’ They said: ‘Okay, we’ll harvest in May.’ I said: ‘No, now.’ They understood they could make a killing off me. I bought the chickpea field, the crop they wouldn’t harvest, for $100,000. They were nice guys, but they knew how to bargain.”

“But there was a problem with the crappy soil in the Latrun area,” Porter says. “Exposed soil in June is all dust. It’s terrible. I suggested sowing grass, but the moshav resident said: ‘No, that will ruin my land.’ I said: ‘I can’t do a show on dirt.’ I think he was the one who suggested sowing wheat. He said: ‘It’ll sprout and be green like grass.’ So we went to see wheat sprouting elsewhere. I told him: ‘It’s terribly sparse.’ He said: ‘We’ll double sow it, increase the density.’ And that’s what he did. Shuki paid for it. And that entire huge area turned green within days. It was a miracle.”

Weiss and Porter recount that various state authorities created numerous difficulties for the show. The Israel Antiquities Authority remembered that salvage excavations needed to be carried out on the site and delayed the work. The Israel Land Authority charged several hundred thousand shekels to rezone the land for commercial use, even if only for one night. Meanwhile, the Health Ministry prohibited watering the compound with reclaimed water and forced Weiss to bring tankers. “It didn’t matter that we used reclaimed water at night, but I showed them we had tankers,” Weiss says.

“Quite cunning bodies,” Porter says of the authorities that created difficulties and collected payments. Weiss adds, laughing: “They know their job. That’s governance!”

Weiss and Amir Feingold, who was his security officer, have mostly praise for the police’s conduct. Some officers, Weiss says, were Pink Floyd fans. The event morphed into a kind of national project that the police wished to see succeed. There was, however, a dispute over the number of paid police officers the production was required to fund. The Jerusalem District commander demanded 1,000, including several dozen detectives to hunt for pot smokers among the crowd.

“We argued with them about it,” Feingold recalls. “I told the district commander: ‘In the end, it’s rock and roll. Are you bringing 80 detectives to arrest the pot smokers? Let them enjoy themselves.” The police, he says, complied and eased the demands.

Waters landed in Israel two days before the concert. The morning after his arrival, he visited the separation barrier near Bethlehem, where he protested against its construction with spray paint and words. Weiss says Waters gave interviews after his visit in which he said he was shocked to see “soldiers with drawn weapons” near the wall.

“A lie. There wasn’t a single soldier there, certainly not with drawn weapons,” Weiss says. Feingold, who accompanied Waters’ entourage on the trip to the wall, confirms no soldiers were present.

קהל אנשים צופים רוג'ר ווטרז ווטרס

Fans at the concert in 2006. Most did not arrive by helicopter: Assaf Evron

No-show in Neve Shalom

Waters laughs when he hears this claim. “So which story rings truer, Shuki Weiss’ story, no weapons, no soldiers, just a nice wall, or my story? I’ll tell you which one is true: my story,” he insists. “Shuki Weiss is a lying schmuck, obviously. I’m sure he’s very smiley, and he likes to make a lot of money. Good luck to him, but he’s just making stuff up.”

Another claim by Weiss concerns Waters’ non-attendance at an event organized in his honor in Neve Shalom. It was to be a meeting with intellectuals, peace activists, and village residents. Singer David Broza “helped me bring artists, writers, very serious people,” Weiss recalls. “They brought an olive tree for him to plant. There was a children’s orchestra. Tons of excitement. Everyone was already there, but he wasn’t. No Roger. They called him. He didn’t answer. His manager didn’t know where he was. In the end, David planted the tree in his place. Later it turned out he went to Kikar Hamedina to buy jewelry for his partner.”

Not only an olive tree was prepared for Waters, but also a sculpture of the famous prism from the cover of “The Dark Side of the Moon,” Rayek Rizek recounts. “I went to an artist in the Rehovot area, he told me 20,000 shekels ($4,500 in 2006). In the end, we made it from marble-coated concrete. It cost 4,000 shekels. Shuki paid,” Rizek says. “We waited and waited. In the end, someone on Waters’ behalf came and said he couldn’t come. There were too many people.”

Weiss says Waters was a no-show in Neve Shalom the day before the concert, but the event took place the afternoon of the show. “He was supposed to go to the community from the backstage area,” Feingold says. “His security guard came and looked around. I told him: ‘Tell me what you need. We’ll sort it out.’ He didn’t say a word and left. Later, he announced, ‘We’re not coming.’ I don’t know if he or Waters decided. He just said, ‘Security problems.’ What security problems? First-graders and 30 other people from the left. Where was the threat?”

Rogers says “of course” he didn’t come. “You don’t do anything on a gig day, except the gig,” he says. “I’m glad I’ve had this career and that I’ve been able to do multiple shows all over the world to fabulous audiences, but it’s very rare to do other things on show days.”

“And I’m absolutely, totally against the Nick Cave school of thought that, oh, we should all go and talk to people in meetings and that’ll do it,” he stresses, parodying hippie naivete. “No, it fucking won’t, you prick. No people has ever freed themselves without armed struggle, ever. It just doesn’t happen. It reminds me of the best interview that any of us have ever seen. (Palestinian writer) Ghassan Kanafani gave that fabulous interview where he talks about the conversation between the hatchet and the neck. What a wonderful writer.” He adds, referring to one of Kanafani’s books, “I can still remember almost every word in ‘Returning to Haifa.'”

A few weeks after the Neve Shalom concert, Waters wrote Rizek. “Dear Rayek, I’m deeply saddened that I was unable to plant the olive tree, but our efforts to reach the site were thwarted by the sheer numbers of people surrounding the vehicle in which I was travelling,” he wrote. “I know how upset you are that this did not take place and I hope that will not blight the memory of our visit to your land.” It sounds like something Waters would write, not his agent or manager.

“You see, Ben? I’m not just evil,” Waters comments.

The wheat field that replaced the chickpea field near Neve Shalom, 2006.
The wheat field that replaced the chickpea field near Neve Shalom, Oren Levin

When I sent him an email a few weeks ago asking if he would agree to be interviewed for this article, I didn’t expect a positive answer. But it was positive and even cordial. When I told him during the Zoom call that I was pleasantly surprised, and that the conventional wisdom here is that he has no desire for dialogue with Israelis, certainly not after October 7, he responded: “Yes, I am. I’m just having one with you now.”

However, some things he said were difficult to hear and didn’t seem very open-minded.

“You, as a country, Israeli people have been brainwashed, and consequently you are now subjects, nationals of the most evil thing that has happened in the world since the Nazis and the Second World War. And you can’t seem to grasp it, and that is so sad,” he said.

“You used the two magic words: Gideon and Levy,” he continued, referring to my email mentioning Gideon Levy as my Haaretz colleague. “It’s only these words that got you the ability to get to me, and even Gideon got the whole October 7th thing wrong. We almost fell out over it, because he was so brainwashed. He believed all that crap about burning babies and raping women and stuff, and it’s all complete nonsense, and everybody knows it’s complete and utter nonsense. There was no rape by Hamas on October the 7th. However, there have been documented multiple rapes by the IDF, of men and women and children.”

After pushing back that I did believe these things happened, I asked Waters to change the subject. It was unbearable to hear him say these things. I knew that any attempt to continue responding to him would blow up the interview. But he continued.

“Your position is indefensible, and no amount of talking intelligently to any of you is going to change any of this. You’ve been Ben-Gvir’d until you can’t accept any reason,” he retorted. “Your state, Israel, is psychotic, psychopathic, criminally insane, and the only way out of it is for you to re-establish connection with the rest of the human race. Stop thinking that you are superior in some way and should rule the world, and join in with the community of the part of the world you’re living in. Until you do that, you are doomed, but you may well drag the rest of the world down with you. You know, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if suddenly some lunatic was to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran or something, and that’s the end of the world. You, Israel, and the United States, the U.K., France and Germany, and all the people in that cabal are dragging the whole globe towards its extinction, extinction of all life on the planet. And that’s what I complain about. It’s not weird to complain about that.”

Aviv Geffen arrives by chopper

Back to the concert, enormous traffic jams formed on the way to Neve Shalom in the afternoon and evening, and on the way from it that night. “The biggest traffic jam of 2006, perhaps of the entire decade,” Feingold asserts.

“A massive transportation failure. To this day, people are still stuck there trying to get out,” Porter laughs. Still, he acknowledges the huge traffic jams were unavoidable. “That’s the geography. We invested a lot in finding access roads, dirt roads,” he says. “We rented entire fields from nearby kibbutzim and leveled them for parking. And still, in the end, everything converged on one turn off the main road. Like everyone coming to Tel Aviv in the morning. It’s an unmanageable rush hour.”

דיויד גילמור

David Gilmour. “He’s dumb as shit.” Credit: Gregorio Borgia/AP

So, did you bear responsibility for the failure, or did you say “it couldn’t be prevented”?

“Both,” Porter says.

Those who didn’t suffer from the traffic jams were the affluent who could afford 3,000 shekels for helicopter transport to the concert venue. A special helicopter line operated from Sde Dov airport in Tel Aviv. “Rani Rahav rented two helicopters for himself and the group that came with him,” Weiss says, referring to the PR consultant. “Aviv Geffen also arrived by helicopter. They told me afterward: ‘You don’t understand what a sight unfolded before us from above. It was worth every shekel.”

As for the concert, the quadraphonic sound was excellent. The superb backing band, which included acclaimed guitarists Snowy White and Dave Kilminster, was flawless. Waters occasionally used playback or excellent backing vocalists. It wasn’t a spontaneous or surprising performance, but it was clearly going to be that way. For the fortunate few who had the luck to see Pink Floyd perform, it was necessarily a diluted version. (Weiss is one of them, saying, “It was a poor man’s Pink Floyd. It wasn’t the real thing.”). But a straw poll I took last week among people who were there suggests that the enjoyment was complete, overwhelming and enthusiastic.

Musician Oded Tamsoot came to the concert from Ma’ale Gamla in the Golan Heights. “The entire event, the performance itself, was an amazing experience, beyond imagination,” he says. A year later, he formed the Pink Floyd tribute band Ummagumma.

Yael Ori, a former teacher and kindergarten teacher from Jerusalem, says Pink Floyd’s messages, which deeply influenced her as a teenager, inspired her to choose the teaching profession. “My high school was a nightmare,” she says. “I decided I wanted to be a teacher so my children wouldn’t suffer what I suffered.” Singing “We don’t need no education” with Waters and the masses was a wonderful experience, she says.

Dvir Zhorno from Jerusalem was 16. “The concert’s timing was perfect for me. It was shortly after I discovered Pink Floyd and started delving into their music,” says Zhorno, now a finance professional. “After the show, I heard critiques that he performed the songs exactly as they were on the albums, but that style suited me. That’s what I wanted to hear. ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ live, exactly like on the album – it was awesome.”

David Broza at the tree planting ceremony at Neve Shalom. He was the default replacement for Waters.
David Broza at the tree planting ceremony at Neve Shalom. Credit: Oren Levin

Truth and love, lies and hate

Toward the end of the interview, I asked Waters what he thought about the enormous, unbridgeable gap between the deep love hundreds of thousands of Israelis feel for Pink Floyd’s music and the extreme hatred most Israelis feel toward him, his views and his statements.

“This is their problem,” he sighs. “All my work, all that work that they love, all those songs I wrote for Pink Floyd – “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” “Comfortably Numb,” “Wish You Were Here,” – are all about truth and love. And all of my work that I do now is about truth and love. The State of Israel and what the children of Israel are taught to believe from the minute they’re grown up is the exact opposite. You’ve been brought up to believe the lies about October 7th. That’s not true. That’s just pure evil lies. And you’ve been taught to hate Arabs and Palestinians. That’s the opposite of love. So you live in a world that’s built on lies and hatred. … My music is built on love and truth, and that’s why there’s a dichotomy – oh, we love his music, but we hate him.

“I’m so sorry that even talking to you, I can see that you have been brainwashed, my brother Ben, completely. And I know you’re laughing at me now, but it’s really not funny. It’s sad. Israel is the saddest thing on earth, with the possible exception of the Trump White House. It’s sad because human beings are better than this. There is a capacity within every human soul for an attachment to love and truth. So for us to be persuaded that lies and hatred are a better alternative is why I go on working and expressing myself in my great songs.

“You think that ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘The Wall’ and ‘Animals’ weren’t political? Are you fucking stupid? Yes, they are stupid. If they don’t get that, they’re very, very stupid. You can’t really blame them. There were people in the band who don’t get it. David Gilmour doesn’t get it. He’s dumb as shit. He never understood a single bit of any of it. … That’s why he was miserable. And he was miserable with the band, because he never understood what I was doing.”

Waters started to say another sentence but then stopped and said: “Well, no, I’m not gonna [there]. Good luck with getting them to print any of this.”

Thank you very much.

“You’re welcome. Thank you for still having a smile on your face at the end of this conversation.”

Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

The world according to Ptolemy (2nd century), an Italian manuscript of ca. 1460. (National Library of Naples, image Library of Congress)The World According to Ptolemy (2nd century), an Italian manuscript, 1460. (National Library of Naples, Library of Congress)

Palestine Mapped. From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought
Thomas Suárez

Tom Suarez is one of the most meticulous and careful researchers on Palestine and Zionism although he is relatively unknown. His first book, which the Zionists did their best to prevent being publicized, disrupting his speaking tours, The State of Terror was a majestic tour de force of the Zionist terrorism that created the Israeli state and their strategies for the future ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Suarez’s second book, ‘Palestine Hijacked – How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from the River to the Sea’ was another tour de force. As Ilan Pappe wrote, Suarez showed how “The use of terror was deliberate and sustained, carried out or supported by the same leaders who then established and led the Israeli state. We are still living this history: The book proves that Israel’s regime of Apartheid against the Palestinians and the continued expropriation of their country are not the result of complex historical circumstances, but the intended, singular goal of Zionism since its beginning.

It is not surprising that Suarez’s latest book is in the tradition of his previous books even if it concentrates mainly on the visual rather than the verbal.

Palestine Mapped guides the reader through the Greek and Roman concepts of Palestine, the various medieval Mediterranean civilizations and the European Christian “Holy Land” mapping that has dominated since the Reformation and continues to inform modern political thought. This isn’t simply a book about cartography or map making but how notions of the ‘Holy Land’ and Palestine informed the maps and visual representations that were produced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A beautifully illustrated book on the mapping of the river to the sea might seem a luxury disconnect given that Palestinians are being massacred daily. Suárez is very much aware of this. He explains in his Introduction why the ongoing genocide in fact makes the topic all the more relevant. Perhaps key to this is the subtitle’s final word, geographic thought.

Much of the West’s fanatical support for Israel is rooted in Evangelical messianism, the psychosis (to use the author’s word) that the Israeli state is the place in the Biblical Genesis, “placing it apart from the realm of all other earthly nations and securing wide Christian devotion.”

Suarez argues that this collective elite and religious mindset is powered by our own geographic wiring, and that the book is intended in part as an antidote to what he calls the “mapping of the Holy Land” narrative.

al-Idrīsī, map of the Levant, mid-12th century, this copy c1250. (National Library of France; image Library of Congress)

Al-Idrīsī, map of the Levant, mid-12th century  (National Library of France; Image Library of Congress)

Since the book is organized roughly chronologically, its real-world relevancy is borne out mostly in the final chapter — though the Israeli state’s manipulation of ancient maps is already demonstrated with the sixth century ‘Madaba’ map.

The book begins with the earliest extant mapping of the Levant, that of the Greeks and Romans, then devotes two chapters to the medieval period. The first addresses mapping by Europeans in which Palestine is a focus: those from the distance of the Church, and that of on-the-scene pilgrims.

The interior of the Church of St. George, Madaba, Jordan. Part of the floor is the remains of a mid-6th century mosaic map of the Levant.

The interior of the Church of St. George, Madaba, Jordan, and the remains of a mid-6th century mosaic map of the Levant.

The second addresses mapping in which Palestine was not the focus, but through which the mapping — and Western perception — of Palestine nonetheless evolved: sea charts, advanced world maps, Ptolemy’s Geography, and what the author calls ‘Arabic’ mapping, a term used in place of the usual ‘Islamic’ mapping of academia, which he considers to be flawed terminology.

The book then arrives at what is described as the pivotal year of 1500. Three revolutions of the period are said to influence Palestine’s future: Europeans’ dramatically widened world view, the advent of printing, and above all, Lutheranism.

World map in the Fasciculus temporum of the Carthusian monk, Werner Rolewink, 1484. Woodcut.

World map in the Fasciculus Temporum of the Carthusian monk, Werner Rolewink, 1484. Woodcut.

The future stage is set during that century, and Suárez gives short shrift to the years 1600-1800, other than to establish the rise of proto-Zionist ideology.

European mapping of Palestine during that period is said to be stuck in a time warp, Biblically oriented no matter the variety of renderings, in stark contrast to Europe’s mapping of the rest of the world, which was a quest for the latest, the most accurate. It is, however, here that today’s manipulation of geographic thought is first addressed, because a 1714 work of one Adriaan Reland is cited today to erase Palestinians (for which Reland is said to be blameless).

The final, long chapter begins at the year 1800, at which simmering Christian Zionist ideology takes active form with the confluence of Christian millennialism, Western imperialism, and advanced mapping techniques.

The end of the century brings of course Theodor Herzl and the advent of Political Zionism. Suárez cites both Herzl’s 1896 Der Judenstaat and a map from his 1897 newsletter, Die Welt, to argue that Herzl failed to understand the opportunity Christian Evangelicalism offered his project. I’m not so sure that this is true. One of his main supporters was William Hechler, the Chaplain at Britain’s Vienna Embassy, where Herzl was living.

Star of David with a map of the eastern Mediterranean, on the heading of the weekly Die Welt, June 4, 1897.
Star of David with a map of the Eastern Mediterranean, on the heading of the weekly Die Welt, June 4, 1897.

Hechler believed firmly that the Jews must be enabled to resettle in Palestine in order to hasten the second coming of Christ. He was constantly looking forward to a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy along these lines. He presented a memorandum to Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister, urging him to take up the cause of the Jewish return to Palestine even before he had met Herzl or read the “Jewish State”.

Hechler had been a tutor to the Grand Duke of Baden, and he introduced Herzl to him and also to the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II. He also accompanied Herzl to Palestine where he met Kaiser Wilhelm II in Jerusalem.

Herzl had an instructive meeting with the Grand Duke April 23 1896 in Karlsruhe and he noted in his diaries that Grand Duke

‘took my project for building a state with the utmost earnestness. His chief misgiving was that if he supported the cause, people might accuse him of anti-Semitism’.

As Francis Nicosia, the Raul Hilberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University observed:

‘whereas today non-Jewish criticism of Zionism or the State of Israel is often dismissed as motivated by a deeper anti-Semitism, in Herzl’s day an opposite non-Jewish reaction, one of support for the Zionist idea, might have resulted in a similar reaction.’

With Herzl’s death, Zionism continued to receive the enthusiastic endorsement of Christian Zionism and its millenarian supporters. Prominent supporters included Arthur James Balfour who combined antisemitism and Zionism effortlessly.

The 1947 UN Partition map receives its due attention: the author deconstructs it as a scam intended to produce the opposite result.

Suarez analyses the manipulation of geographic thought employed by Israel’s propagandists and argues that the ‘pro-Palestine’ community defeats itself by engaging with this propaganda on its own terms.

Put in its crudest form, when Zionists say ‘there was never such a place as Palestine’, we respond with an old map in which the entire land is called ‘Palestine’, or other such ‘evidence’.

Suárez argues that this is a mistake, a trap, the result of cultural conditioning:

we are geographically hard-wired to accept [that] the ancient origins of a place-name has the power to grant or deny personhood today, to justify the expulsion of anyone to whom that geographic name is or is not attached.

This is a heavily cross-disciplinary work, and it is hard to imagine anyone with Suárez’s background in the Palestinian issue who is so experienced in the history of cartography. It strikes me that this might be a book that can bring the Palestinian issue to a wider audience: Everyone, it seems, loves old maps, and perhaps this book is the perfect Trojan Horse gift for acquaintances who believe they are fair-minded but can’t quite make the break from Israel.

The reader is disarmed by the earlier ‘apolitical’ part of the book, gradually drawn into cultural conditioning addressed in the middle part, and already long engrossed when encountering the final chapter. But it is also a cautionary work for those long active in the issue of Palestinian liberation, who, as with all aspects of the issue, often disempower themselves by responding to Israel’s propaganda on its own terms.

Tony Greenstein
Tony Greenstein is a longstanding Jewish anti-Zionist and an anti-fascist activist from Brighton. In 1982 he was a co-founder of Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Tony was suspended from the Labour Party in 2016 and expelled in 2018 as a result of the antisemitism witch-hunt–the first Jewish person to be expelled. Tony is the author of The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast. He has written extensively on Palestine and Zionism for, amongst others, the Guardian’s Comment is Free, the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, Tribune and the Weekly Worker. Tony was the child of an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and when young a member of the religious Zionist Bnei Akiva, now part of the Greater Israel movement.

Historical Atlases

My collection of Collins and Harper Collins historical falls into five broad groups:

General World History

  1. Collins Atlas of World History – Geoffrey Barraclough, Collins
  2. HarperCollins Atlas of World History – Geoffrey Barraclough, HarperCollins
  3. History of the World in Maps: The Ultimate Cartographic Exploration of Our Past – Philip Parker, Collins
  4. The Times Complete History of the World – The Times / Collins

Military, Political and European History

  1. The Times Atlas of the Second World War
  2. Atlas of the Crusades – edited by Jonathan Riley-Smith
  3. Atlas of European History

Archaeology and Exploration

  1. Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of Archaeology – also published as the HarperCollins Atlas of Archaeology
  2. The Times Atlas of World Exploration

Biblical History and Geography

  1. HarperCollins Atlas of Bible History – James B. Pritchard
  2. HarperCollins Atlas of the Bible
  3. HarperCollins Concise Atlas of the Bible

5. Biblical Geography  – Evangelical Reference

  1. NIV Atlas of the Bible –  Zondervan / HarperCollins

There are 13 titles, although a couple represent different editions or titles of essentially the same work: The Collins Atlas of World History and the HarperCollins Atlas of World History are essentially the Barraclough atlas in different editions/imprints [Henry Barraclough was a renowned  British historian, historiographer, and medievalist. I read his The Meaning of History back when I was in Sixth Form at Moseley Grammar School] Past Worlds and the HarperCollins Atlas of Archaeology anre  alternative titles/editions of the archaeological atlas. The HarperCollins Atlas of the Bible and Concise Atlas of the Bible are related but distinct editions. The  HarperCollins Atlas of Bible History is a separate, more specialised biblical-history work.

In chronological and subject breadth the collection isn’t simply a collection of history books with maps. It is almost a cartographic library of human history:

Prehistory → Archaeology → Ancient Near East → Biblical world → Greece and Rome → Christianity → Crusades → European kingdoms and empires → exploration → global history → the Second World War → the modern world.

And that perhaps explains why the physical atlases mattered to me in the first place. Their great virtue was not merely the information contained in them but the ability to see history spatially: peoples moving, empires expanding and contracting, frontiers shifting, trade and exploration routes opening, armies advancing and retreating, and religious and political worlds overlapping.

They are heavy both literally and figuratively, providing a way of understanding history that a conventional chronological narrative often cannot: history as movement across landscape and time.

An Australian Jew’s submission to the Royal Commission

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

The Royal Commission into Antisemitism was convened in the shadow of the Bondi Beach massacre of December 2025, when fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah gathering in what has been described as the deadliest antisemitic attack in Australian history. It was, on any reading, a rupture –  not only because of its scale, but because it forced into the open a question that had been building, uneasily, for more than two years: how a country that prides itself on pluralism and civic ease had arrived at a moment where Jews could be targeted so explicitly, and so lethally, in public space.

That question does not begin at Bondi. Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza, Australia has seen a sustained wave of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist protest – much of it framed in the language of human rights, some of it more strident, even incendiary. Alongside this mobilisation has come a marked rise in antisemitic incidents: abusive chants at early demonstrations, harassment of visibly Jewish individuals, vandalism of synagogues and community institutions, graffiti, threats, social and professional exclusion, and a steady current of online vilification. Some of these episodes have been highly visible; many more have been ambient, cumulative, and privately absorbed. For the Jewish community, the sense has not been of isolated but of a gathering atmosphere – a shift in what can be said, and done, about Jews in public without consequence.

It is into this unsettled landscape that the Commission steps. Its task is not only to examine the failures that allowed Bondi to occur, but to consider whether that attack can be understood in isolation at all – or whether it belongs to a broader pattern of escalating hostility, contested language, and fraying social norms. In that sense, it is as much an inquiry into civic culture as it is into security.

Andrew Wirth’s submission is written with precisely that broader frame in mind. He contributes not as a representative of any organisation, but as a Jewish Australian – the child of Holocaust survivors, a member of a contemporary community that now finds itself, again, thinking seriously about questions of safety and belonging. His purpose is not to collapse legitimate criticism of Israel into antisemitism, nor to deny the moral force of Palestinian advocacy. Rather, it is to interrogate the relationship between the forms that advocacy has taken in Australia since October 2023 and the lived experience of many Jews during that same period.

He is, in effect, asking the Commission to look not only at events but at environment. To consider whether the prevailing ways of understanding harm – episodic, attributable, legally discrete — are adequate to a phenomenon that may instead be cumulative, ambiguous, and socially mediated. And to ask, quietly but insistently, whether Bondi was an isolated act of hatred, or the most violent expression of a climate that had already, for some time, been forming in plain sight.

The complete submission is republished in full below. As it is very lengthy, In That Howling Infinite has used AI to provide a comprehensive summary.

Much of the testimony before the Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion dealt not with abstract politics, but with the way the Israel-Palestine conflict has spilled into everyday Australian life: schools, workplaces, music venues, synagogues and online spaces. Among the most striking evidence was that of singer and author Deborah Conway, who described cancelled performances, organised protest campaigns, doxing, online abuse and threats directed at her for publicly identifying as both Jewish and Zionist. Whatever one’s views on Israel or Gaza, her testimony underscored the increasingly blurred line between political activism, social intimidation and hostility directed at Jews as Jews – a tension that sat at the heart of the inquiry’s hearings. Conroy’ testimony and that of others is also republished below.

In That Howling Infinite, April 2026

Long story short …

Wirth’s submission is, at heart, an attempt to change the lens through which the Commission looks – away from the forensic habit of isolating moments (a chant, a placard, a lone actor, a single atrocity) and toward something more diffuse and disquieting: the social atmosphere in which those moments become possible. He writes as a Jewish Australian, and as the son of survivors, but resists the pull of memoir. The authority he claims is not moral witness so much as analytic patience – an effort to describe how a climate forms, thickens, and, eventually, breaks.

His central contention is that the harms experienced by Jewish Australians since October 2023 are systemic and cumulative. Bondi – horrific, unprecedented – is not treated as an aberration but as a point of condensation, where a long-gathering set of pressures became visible in a single, devastating act. To understand that act, he argues, one must look not for a clean causal chain (this slogan → this shooter → this event), but for patterns of probability: the way repeated exposure to certain forms of rhetoric, symbolism, and social signalling can lower inhibitions, sharpen antagonisms, and render violence imaginable to those already inclined toward it. The analogy he reaches for is telling: not criminal law, but climate science. You cannot attribute a single storm to climate change with precision; you can, however, describe the conditions that make storms more frequent, more intense, more likely.

From this premise, the essay unfolds in widening circles.

He first dismantles the idea of a singular “pro-Palestinian movement.” What exists instead, he suggests, is an ecosystem: formal advocacy bodies fluent in the language of human rights; looser activist formations oriented toward protest and disruption; and a penumbra of fellow travellers – ideological extremists, vandals, conspiracists — who share space, slogans, and emotional energy if not formal affiliation. These elements are not centrally controlled, nor are they uniformly motivated. That, in a sense, is the point. The diversity allows for elasticity: respectable actors can maintain a principled public face while disclaiming the excesses of the wider milieu (“a few bad actors,” “not representative”), even as those excesses contribute to the overall tone and impact of the movement. Plausible deniability is not a bug but a feature.

Language is the next terrain. Wirth is careful not to claim that particular phrases are intrinsically violent in a narrow, lexical sense. Instead, he insists that meaning is contextual, historical, and relational. Words arrive carrying baggage. “Intifada,” whatever its literal translation, is heard by many Jews through the memory of suicide bombings and mass-casualty attacks; “from the river to the sea,” however it is intended, resonates with anxieties about elimination; “Zionists are…” constructions collapse a vast and internally diverse population into a single moral category, often freighted with the most toxic imagery available. The key point is not that every speaker intends harm, but that in a crowded, emotionally charged public sphere, ambiguity is not neutral. It creates room for multiple readings, including the most hostile ones, and allows those who wish to intimidate to do so under cover of contestability. The same words can be defended as benign and experienced as threatening – and both facts can be true at once.

Central to this slippage is the term “Zionist.” In activist discourse it operates as a floating signifier: sometimes a political descriptor, sometimes a moral indictment, sometimes a proxy for a people. Wirth’s claim – backed by survey data — is that the overwhelming majority of Australian Jews feel some connection to Israel and many are comfortable with the label “Zionist” in a broad, cultural or existential sense. To target “Zionists,” then, is in practice to target Jews as they understand themselves, even if the formal claim is otherwise. The distinction between Jew and Zionist, while logically defensible, does little work sociologically. Indeed, he suggests, the insistence on that distinction can become a way of telling Jews what they are allowed to be – a curious inversion in a discourse otherwise attentive to self-identification.

The essay then turns to causation – or rather, to the limits of conventional thinking about it. The familiar retort to concerns about protest rhetoric is that no direct link can be proven between speech and a specific act of violence. Wirth concedes the point and then sidesteps it. In complex systems, he argues, causation is rarely linear or attributable. The relevant question is not “did this slogan cause this attack?” but “does a given communicative environment increase or decrease the likelihood of such attacks occurring?” Here he draws on the literature around “stochastic violence”: the idea that repeated, dehumanising or inflammatory messaging can, over time, prime a small subset of individuals to act, even in the absence of explicit incitement. Responsibility is diffuse; effects are real. It is an uncomfortable model for legal systems built on individual intent, but a familiar one in other domains of risk.

If this is the mechanism, the effects are not confined to headline events. A large portion of the submission is devoted to what might be called the low-grade, high-frequency harms: insults, exclusion, intimidation, the steady drip of being cast as suspect or illegitimate. Synagogues require guards; schools adjust routines; people speak more cautiously, or not at all. There is a contraction of presence — a subtle withdrawal from the public square. Wirth is at pains to stress that for every reported incident there are many more that never reach formal channels but accumulate in private memory, at dinner tables, in the small recalibrations of daily life. This is where his argument edges closest to the experiential without relinquishing its analytic frame: harm as something lived continuously rather than episodically.

Against this backdrop, he is sharply critical of two patterns in the public response. The first is the tendency, among some pro-Palestinian advocates, to dismiss Jewish concerns as bad faith – “weaponisation,” an attempt to silence criticism of Israel, a manoeuvre in a political contest. This, he suggests, substitutes motive-hunting for engagement with the substance of the claims. The second is the reliance on generalised anti-racism frameworks as a sufficient policy response. Such frameworks, he argues, are necessary but not sufficient, because antisemitism does not map neatly onto the paradigms those frameworks were designed to address. Jews are often perceived simultaneously as powerful and vulnerable, insiders and outsiders – a dual coding that allows hostility to evade categories built primarily around visible disadvantage. Subsumed into the general, antisemitism risks disappearing.

He extends this scepticism to legal doctrine. Courts, tasked with balancing free expression against harm, tend to look for discrete, demonstrable injuries traceable to particular acts. But if the harm is cumulative, ambient, and probabilistic, that evidentiary demand becomes almost impossible to meet. The result is a persistent gap between lived experience and legal recognition – a sense, on the part of those affected, that the system cannot quite “see” what is happening. This is not, in his telling, an argument against free speech so much as a claim that the existing conceptual toolkit is ill-suited to a new class of problem.

The question of representation threads through the latter part of the submission. Wirth does not contest the right of anti-Zionist Jewish groups to participate in the debate, but he cautions against treating them as broadly representative. Their prominence, he suggests, owes less to their numbers than to their utility: they provide a form of internal validation for those who wish to deny any connection between anti-Zionist activism and antisemitic harm. The risk, for the Commission, is that such voices — legitimate but minority – might be weighted in a way that obscures the concerns of the larger community.

All of this leads to a set of recommendations that are, in tone, more calibrative than punitive. He does not call for the suppression of protest or the prohibition of criticism of Israel. Instead, he argues for clearer moral boundaries around language and conduct; for accountability within advocacy movements for what they tolerate as well as what they endorse; for policy approaches that acknowledge systemic harm; and, crucially, for investment in education – a rebuilding of the shared understandings that make any legal framework meaningful. Law, in his formulation, can draw lines; it cannot, by itself, restore the sensibility that gives those lines legitimacy.

Running beneath the analysis is a quieter, more disquieting claim: that the deepest failure of the past two years has been one of recognition. Not simply a failure to prevent specific acts, but a failure of institutions — governmental, cultural, civic – to articulate, early and clearly, that Jews are a vulnerable minority entitled to the same reflex of solidarity extended to others. Silence, in this reading, is not neutral. It is read, by all parties, as permission.

The essay closes, as it began, with Bondi –  not as origin but as revelation. A society that prides itself on its egalitarian reflexes is asked to consider whether, in this instance, those reflexes faltered; whether a movement framed in the language of rights allowed, in some of its forms, the targeting of a minority at home; and whether the balance between free expression and communal belonging has been misjudged. The question Wirth leaves hanging is not whether protest should be free – it must be – but whether it can remain so without eroding the conditions that make a plural civic life possible.

Author’s Note…

This opinion piece is one of several on the attitudes of progressives towards the Israel, Palestine and the Gaza war.

The first is Moral capture, conditional empathy and the failure of shock, a discussion on why erstwhile liberal, humanistic, progressive people from all walks of life have been caught up in what can be without subtly described as that anti-Israel machinery. Shaping facts to feelings – debating intellectual dishonesty– regarding the Gaza war, intellectual dishonesty is everywhere, on both sides of the divide, magnified by mainstream and social media’s hunger for moral simplicity and viral outrage. Standing on the high moral ground is hard work! discusses the issues of free speech and “cancellation”, and boycotts with regard to the recent self-implosion of the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, one of the country’s oldest and most revered.

As governments federal and state weigh the prohibition of potentially inflammatory phrases, we also consider syntax and semantics. Lawyers parse syllables and activists insist that what is heard is not what is meant, and what is meant is not what is said. The words hover, untethered from consequence, yet curiously heavy with it. If words can be made infinitely flexible, then meaning itself becomes negotiable; and if meaning is negotiable, then so too are responsibility and harm. See: Same old stone, different rock. What’s in a word? and What’s in a word? A world of meaning and of pain 

There are moments when public argument stops being a search for truth and becomes a test of belonging. Facts are no longer weighed so much as auditioned; empathy is rationed; moral language hardens into a badge system, issued and revoked according to rules everyone seems to know but few are willing to articulate. One learns quickly where the trip-wires are, which sympathies are permitted, which questions are suspect, and how easily tone can outweigh substance.

What interests me here is not the quarrel itself – names, borders, histories—but the habits of mind it exposes. The ease with which conviction can slide into choreography. The way intellectual honesty is praised in the abstract and punished in practice. The curious transformation of empathy from a human reflex into a conditional licence, granted only after the correct declarations have been made.

Across these pieces I circle the same uneasy terrain: the shaping of facts to fit feelings; the capture of moral language by ideological gravity; the performance of righteousness as both shield and weapon. Cultural spaces that once prided themselves on curiosity begin to resemble courts, where innocence and guilt are presumed in advance and the labour lies not in thinking, but in signalling.

This is not an argument against passion, nor a plea for bloodless neutrality. It is, rather, a meditation on how quickly moral seriousness curdles into moral certainty – and how much intellectual work is required to stand on what we like to call the high ground without mistaking altitude for clarity.

The position of In That Howling Infinite with regard to Palestine, Israel and the Gaza war is neither declarative nor devotional; it is diagnostic. Inclined – by background, sensibility, and experience – to hold multiple truths in tension, to see, as the song has it, the whole of the moon. It is less interested in arriving at purity than in resisting moral monoculture and the consolations of certainty. That disposition does not claim wisdom; it claims only a refusal to outsource judgment or to accept unanimity as a proxy for truth.

On Zionism, it treats it not as a slogan but as a historical fact with moral weight: the assertion – hard-won, contingent, imperfect – that Jews are entitled to collective political existence on the same terms as other peoples. According to this definition, this blog is Zionist. It is not interested in laundering Israeli policy, still less in romanticising state power, but rejects the sleight of hand by which Israel’s existence is transformed from a political reality into a metaphysical crime. Zionism is not sacred, but its delegitimisation is revealing – because it demands from Jews what is demanded of no other nation: justification for being.

On anti-Zionism, it has been unsparing. It sees it not as “criticism of Israel” (which you regard as both legitimate and necessary) but as a categorical refusal to accept Jewish collective self-determination. What troubles it most is not its anger but its certainty: its moral absolutism, its indifference to history, its willingness to borrow the language of justice to license erasure. It is attentive to how anti-Zionism recycles older antisemitic patterns – collectivisation of guilt, inversion of victimhood, and the portrayal of Jews as uniquely malignant actors – while insisting, with studied innocence, that none of this concerns Jews at all. If not outright antisemitism, the line separating it from anti-Zionism is wafer—thin, and too often crosses over.

Running through all of this is a consistent stance: a resistance to moral theatre, an impatience with historical amnesia, and a belief that intellectual honesty requires limits – on language, on fantasy, and on the indulgent belief that one’s own righteousness exempts one from consequence. And a lifelong hatred of antisemitism. The new antisemitism looks a lot like the old hatred!

We are not asking culture to choose sides; we are asking it to recover judgment

See in In That Howling Infinite, A Political World – Thoughts and Themes, and A Middle East Miscellany. and also: This Is What It Looks Like, “You want it darker?” … Gaza and the devil that never went away … , How the jihadi tail wags the leftist dog, The Shoah and America’s Shame – Ken Burns’ sorrowful masterpiece, and Little Sir Hugh – Old England’s Jewish Question

A Royal Commission into Antisemitism: One Australian’s Submission

Andrew Wirth, Times of Israel Blogs, 2 May 2026

Aftermath of Bondi Beach massacre, Sydney 2025 (Image available under the Creative Commons)

Australia is in the midst of a major enquiry into antisemitism- a Royal Commission- following the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach. The community has been invited to make submissions. Below, I share mine. It is analytical rather than personal and represents my attempt to understand the links between anti-Zionist protest and harms to the Jewish community.

Who I am

I write as an Australian Jew.

I am writing entirely in my personal capacity and do not represent any Jewish communal, political or Zionist organisation. I am an engaged member of the Jewish community and regularly attend a local “egalitarian orthodox” synagogue.

I am a child of holocaust survivors. My father survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps and death marches; my mother was hidden in a convent for the latter part of the second World War. All four of my grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.

I strongly support the right of Australians to advocate for the welfare, human rights and self-determination of both Jewish and Palestinian communities. I have been involved in inter-communal dialogue both in Melbourne and in Israel-Palestine and am commited to a just outcome in Israel and Palestine.

I am a medical specialist in the public hospital system and an associate professor at at Melbourne University.

Aims of this submission

I am writing primarily to reflect on, and critically evaluate, common claims made in reference to the relationship between pro-Palestinian advocacy and harms affecting the Australian Jewish community.

My primary contentions are that:

  1. The adverse impacts of the protest movement need to be understood as a systemic and cumulative phenomenon- this includes chronic low level psychological harm, social exclusion and the generation of an atmosphere associated with a heightened risk of sporadic violence
  2. The heterogeneity of participants and their motivations, the ill-defined targets (Israel, Zionists or Jews), and the ambiguity of protest language and symbols, together make attribution of harm and intent difficult. This ambiguity and heterogeneity allow a protest environment that tacitly fosters exclusionary, vilifying and even violent behaviour while allowing protest spokespeople plausible deniability.
  3. Consequently, the courts and relevant legislation, which assess the protest movement on a “slogan by slogan” or “event by event” basis -that is, through the lens of individual cases – cannot adequately “see” the broad environment as experienced by the Jewish community. It is a case of forest and trees.

Background

The attack on December 14, 2025, was the worst act of antisemitic violence ever committed on Australian soil. Fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach.

Some have drawn a straight line between the Bondi massacre and anti-Zionist incitement, particularly focusing on the slogan “Globalise the Intifada”. Anti-Zionist advocates, in contrast, attribute blame to the shooters’ ISIS connection and the influence of radical Sydney clerics, insisting that the Bondi shootings have nothing to do with peaceful anti-Zionist activism.

Yet this murder was, in the perpetrators own words, intended to condemn “the acts of ‘Zionists”. It seems implausible that this targeting of Zionists was entirely unrelated to two years of inflammatory anti-Zionist rhetoric or that hate speech played no role in pushing perpetrators, primed by fundamentalist influencers, to cross some threshold to action.

Most Jewish Australians view Bondi against a backdrop of over two years of escalating incitement and a hardening anti-Jewish atmosphere. The Opera House protest in October 2023 marked a turning point. Reported chants, including “Where are the Jews?” and “F*** the Jews”, suggested a real shift in what could be said about Jews in public, seemingly without consequence.

Since then, high-profile incidents, such as arson attacks on synagogues, have attracted significant media attention.  Less visible are cumulative, psychologically harmful effects of effects of chronic “low level” stigmatisation.

Many find it hard to avoid the conclusion that this environment may have lowered the threshold for violence. A long-standing vulnerability has been brought into sharper focus, prompting calls for a precautionary response, including greater restraint in protest language.

The Bondi tragedy has produced grief, fear and anger within the Jewish community, alongside shock and sympathy across the wider Australian society. The subsequent critical national conversation has led to the present Royal Commission. Could we, as a nation, have done more to counter antisemitism and ensure Jewish safety? Why did our security services fail?  Was anti-Zionist activism a contributing factor for Bondi?

If so, do we need constraints on forms of protest? Should constraints be established through legislation or, at a deeper level, through education and cultural change?

Debate over public discourse and anti-Jewish incidents

Palestinian advocacy organisations have condemned the violence at Bondi and expressed sympathy for the victims. However, Jewish expressions of fear or calls for reassurance and safety have typically been dismissed as “weaponising antisemitism”, silencing debate or even “defending genocide”.

Anti-Israel groups like US Jewish Voice for Peace and the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network insist their activism is guided by justice and human rights and rejects racism or violence. Those claims are in their mission statements. Jewish anti-Zionist commentators and groups have denied any possible relationship between the language of protest and the attack.  “Zero evidence”, according to one commentator.

Consequently, they have criticised Jewish calls for safety and protections, and government proposals to restrict aspects of protest, as overreach or an attack on free speech rather than an attempt to provide community safety.

This insistence that no restrictions be placed on the language and forms of protests is accompanied by several claims that warrant critical evaluation:

  1. That the pro-Palestinian movement is peaceful and simply protesting injustice (including alleged genocide)
  2. That the language of protest, including terms such as “Globalise the intifada” is inherently non-violent;
  3. That public protest is directed against Israel and Zionists and not against Jews;
  4. That consequently activist speech cannot be linked with violence, or harms more broadly, affecting Jews
  5. That the imputation of violent connotations is simply an attempt to stifle free speech.

How might we reconcile this Jewish experience of harm with claims by Palestinian advocacy groups that the movement is non-violent and explicitly rejects antisemitism?

Below, I address a number of key questions and issues in turn.

1.The pro-Palestinian movement is a complex ecosystem and not accurately characterised as entirely peaceful

Palestinian advocacy groups stress that their activism is grounded in human rights. They claim that violence against Jews cannot be attributed to a movement that explicitly rejects antisemitism or the use of violence. This is a superficially reassuring but incomplete framing. It fails to acknowledge the range of actors (and agendas) within the pro-Palestinian advocacy community and beyond it, not all of whom necessarily share these peaceful ideals.

This heterogeneity is even reflected in the several labels used to describe the movement: pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist. While they may be used interchangeably, they represent very different agendas and targets: supporting the rights of a people, opposing the policies of a state and opposing, and often vilifying, those who can be linked with that state- that is, Jews.

A 2014 study of over 20 Palestinian civil society groups by the General Delegation Of Palestine in Australia captures the heterogeneity of the groups – likely a fraction of the number of groups active in 2026.

The study notes that Palestinian organizations “often have multiple desired outcomes and target audiences and undertake different kinds of activities.” The study explicitly distinguishes “advocacy groups” and “activist groups”. The former are the public facing, suit and tie wearing (my words) groups, that speak the language of human rights and engage in, to quote the study, “persuasion, lobbying and negotiation”.

“Activist groups”, in contrast, are described as “denunciative” engaging in “protest, street demonstrations, strike actions, public meetings” and whose desired outcomes are “diffuse and not necessarily … within defined policy and political parameters”. They “articulate messages in different forums, to different audiences” with different “tone, tenor, and language of the message”… “in language that resonates with their niche constituencies.” Of course we are now also increasingly aware of Islamist (and) influences in Australia which we now know to have been connected to the Bondi massacre.

Beyond explicitly Palestinian groups lies a wider ecosystem. It includes direct-action networks, unaffiliated vandals, right-wing extremists, Islamic fundamentalist groups and “old school antisemites”. They often mobilise around the same events, language and grievances or share physical and online spaces with non-violent advocacy groups. Their presence may shape how protests are experienced by those on the receiving end.

Speaking at the Lowy Institute lecture ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess observed that activist groups are often not “centrally controlled” or “uniformly motivated,” and may include “individuals who are increasingly willing to embrace or threaten violence to achieve their goals.”

This heterogeneity within the activist community allows for plausible deniability when violent or threatening behaviour is observed For example, after chants of “F-ck the Jews” and “where’s the jews” were reported at the Opera house protest, Fahad Ali of the Palestinian Action Groups dismissed this as reflecting a “small group of troublemakers” The same disavowal was made regarding a pro-Palestinian bikie group. This allows spokespeople to claim entirely benign aims while wider affiliates of movement take a more aggressive approach to members of the Jewish community.

To put it simply: claims that the Palestinian advocacy community is entirely peaceful is a very incomplete description of reality.

2.The language and forms of protest are not unambiguously peaceful, but rather contain phrases and symbols with the potential to be interpreted as violent by elements in the protest movement and broader society

The language and symbolism of protest span a wide range. Some slogans are political and entirely unobjectionable: “Stop the war,” “Free Palestine”.

Then there are the explicitly or implicitly violent slogans and symbols that often accompany protest. They include phrases such as “where’s the Jews”, “f*** the jews” “death to IDF” and  “by any means necessary” as well as symbols (terrorist flags, pictures of the Ayatollah, the Jewish Star of David in rubbish bins)  Symbols of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran can be understood as implying support for their violent and eliminationist goals (described here, here, here, here, here). This celebration of violence was evident immediately after the Hamas massacre at the Opera House protest and the Lakemba celebration (and indeed there was further language of celebration and an anniversary event at Lakemba a year later.)

Slogans such as “Zionists are baby killers” and “all Zionists are terrorists” are clearly intended to, or can reasonably be expected to, incite hatred towards those who support Israel’s existence or are affiliated with Israel, regardless of their views on the conduct of the war.

In between are phrases whose meaning is contested, such as “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada.” Many have expressed concern that such phrases are coded calls for violence or for the elimination of the Jewish state. Palestinian advocates have emphasised the innocent meaning of “river to the sea” and “Intifada” (here, here, here) and some go so far as to argue that attributing violent intent to such slogans is Islamophobic.

It is frequently explained, for example, that “intifada” simply means “shaking off” political oppression and is not inherently violent. But language does not operate through dictionary definitions alone. For many Jews, the word “intifada” evokes, and is inseparable from the Second Intifada — a sustained campaign of terrorism that killed more than 1,000 Israelis. That history inevitably shapes how the term is heard. As Susan Benesch of the Dangerous Speech Project explains, the experience of speech as “inflammatory” depends on the speaker, the audience, the medium and the context.

“Globalise the intifada” may carry one meaning in an academic lecture and quite another in a mass street march. Its impact can shift with the size, tone and location of a protest; with accompanying slogans (“death to the IDF,” “by any means necessary”); and with symbols associated with Hamas or Hezbollah. Such language may land very differently in demonstrations held immediately after the Hamas attacks of 2023 or in the wake of the Bondi terror attack. It will be experienced differently in the public square and outside a synagogue.

The activist community is not an army of philologists. Whatever the linguistic origins of “intifada”, its meaning is contested and may be interpreted differently by different groups. As the Palestinian led report mentioned above states, in some circumstances “…human rights and international law arguments can lose their meaning in inflammatory and, at times, ideological criticisms.”

It is that very ambiguity that allows those who do seek to intimidate (or even provoke violence) to use it with plausible deniability. As Susan Benesch states “One cannot make a list of words that are dangerous, since the way in which any message will be understood – like its effect on an audience – depends not only on its content but on how it is communicated…. The very same words can be highly inflammatory, or benign.”

3.The use of the term Zionist as the target of protest implicates most Jews despite claims by protesters that they are not antisemitic and do not target Jews

Activists claim to target Zionists and not Jews.

The problem is that the vast majority of Australian Jews are Zionists- if you target Zionists you are generally targeting Jews.

A 2023 Australian survey reported 80-90% of respondents indicated personal connectedness with and concern for Israel and 77% identified as Zionist. Most Australian Jews have cultural, religious or historical connections to Israel and support for the security and safety of its citizens, including for many Jews, close family. Some use the label Zionist to describe this connection. It is often an element of cultural identity and for Australia’s substantial post-Holocaust community, it carries connotations of “refuge”. For many Jews, this sense of connection does not imply endorsement of specific Israeli policies or leadership.

Anti-Zionists are well aware of this deep connection between Jews, Israel and Zionism, yet work hard to maintain the fiction that their activism does not target Jews.

They do it by presuming to tell Jews about their identity. (Something that would be considered offensive if directed at other groups. Jews are told that they are a disembodied “faith group” with no sense of peoplehood or organic connection to Israel. Palestinian advocates showcase the tiny minority of antizionist Jews who agree with them. Anti-Zionists insist that Zionism and Judaism are distinct noting that  “Not all Jews are Zionist” or “being Jewish is not identical to being Zionist”. This distinction is technically correct but doesn’t negate the connection of the vast majority of Jews with Israel.

Indeed, the identification of Zionists and Jews in the mental landscape of some activists is evoked by the use of classic antisemitic tropes in antizionist discourse. They speak of  “…the Jewish Lobby and the Zionist Lobby infiltrating” with their “Tentacles”, of powerful elites(including Jewish Law firms) and conspiracist notions  “We already know that Zionists are parasitic upon progressive spaces. It is under the guise of progressivism that Zionists launder their genocidal colonialism, while weaponising their influence to amplify occupation propaganda and steer cultural narratives away from Palestinian liberation.”

Thus, though the protest movement insists its focus is Israel and its policies, the use of the term Zionist does much unrecognised work in redirecting hostility from Israel to Jews. This reflects the multiple and conflicting resonances of the term Zionist in protest culture. In protest messaging, the term “Zionist” is a placeholder for a catalogue of evils: colonialism, racism, apartheid and genocide. It can be loaded with the most inflammatory rhetoric: Zionists as “child killers,” “Nazis” or “genociders.” It functions loosely as a political descriptor, a moral accusation and a marker of identity.

These dual resonances – Zionist as object of hate and Zionist as Jew – ripple through disparate communities, tacitly “criminalising” even the most benign connection with Israel and indirectly reinforcing antipathy towards Jews, without ever explicitly naming them. When “Zionist” functions simultaneously as a term of vilification and as a label many Jews apply to themselves, political critique almost inevitably slides into group-based hostility. The effect is to generate antipathy toward Jews without ever explicitly naming them.

It is not surprising that in some community sectors, a simple public expression of concern for the safety of Jews in Israel may be enough to evoke all the hostility now reflexly associated with the term Zionist. This leaves many Jews uncertain how to speak publicly at all.

Many Australians who support Palestinian rights in good faith may not recognise how protest language may facilitate this “slippage” of anger from Israel to Zionists, to Jews.  This slippage blurs the boundary between political critique and hostility toward the Jewish community.

A distressing incident in 2025 illustrates how boundaries between antisemitism and the language of anti-Zionist protest can blur. Year-5 Jewish students on an excursion were reportedly subjected to a barrage of insults from older students from another school including: “dirty Jews”, “baby killers”, and “Free Hezbollah”.

It is tragic that the Bondi attackers, allegedly motivated by opposition to “Zionists”, murdered Jews.

4.The reflex denial of any possible links between protest and violence is based on simplistic and outmoded understandings of causality in complex social systems

In response to Jewish community concerns about protest language and community safety, it is common to hear the reply that the relationship between speech and a specific terrorist act cannot be “proven”. This is technically true, but misleading. In complex systems, causation is a statistical concept.

It is widely accepted in the broader community that certain harms operate probabilistically: for example the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events is well recognised even though one cannot prove causation for an individual bush-fire or storm event. The same applies to the relationship between smoking and individual cases of lung cancer.

Similarly, there is a substantial literature supporting the view that the risk of harm from hate-speech is also probabilistic and operates at a population level.  This is true, even though we cannot attribute a given event (such as Bondi) to a specific persons, actions, slogan or protest event.

This phenomenon has been described as “stochastic terrorism” or “stochastic violence”. This has been defined as “…the use of mass communications to stir up … lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are … individually unpredictable”. This literature recognises that violent acts are likely related to the emotional and cognitive effects of activism in the media and on the street. Psychological and linguistic studies and a recent major metanalysis of 55 studies on the impact of media messaging all describe similar mechanisms. This literature describes how rhetoric circulates within communities and can lower the threshold for violence in primed individuals. In these systems no one need explicitly call for violence, and no one is individually responsible. Risk arises through cumulative effects rather than direct incitement.

Susan Benesch of the Dangerous Speech Project describes dangerous speech as “Any form of expression (e.g. speech, text, or images) that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence against members of another group.” She further notes that “Hate speech … uses derogatory group slurs, metaphoric language, exaggeration, images, and symbols. … Its public expression ….allows like-minded individuals to find an echo chamber for their shared beliefs. And it has real and painful consequences for victims.”

Mike Burgess, speaking a month prior to the Bondi massacre, said that “Since October 2023, we’ve seen more provocative protests and a notable uptick in intentionally disruptive and damaging tactics by anti-Israel activists, including multiple acts of arson, vandalism and violent protest…” and “The conflict in the Middle East …. prompted protest, exacerbated tension, undermined social cohesion and elevated intolerance (making)  acts of politically motivated violence more likely. …. Inflammatory rhetoric and provocative, disruptive actions had been normalised, and the normalisation of violence and hatred against one community had created a permissive environment for similar behaviours in other communities.”

This is not an argument about direct causation or “collective blame”, but the debate over language and anti-Jewish violence requires the recognition of this well described sociological phenomenon and  constructive engage with its policy implications.

The inadequacy of frameworks premised on direct causation is not merely  theoretical but regularly surfaces in permissive court findings regarding the right to protest near synagogues, or to display language vilifying “Zionists”.

5.The harms to the Jewish community are not limited to dramatic violent acts but include chronic psychological and social harm

Bondi was a tragic event that finally shocked our community into recognising and responding to a problem that had been evident to most of the Jewish community for two years.

Pro-Palestinian/ anti-Zionist activism had invaded “intimate” Jewish spaces, with mobs outside synagogues or at recreational spaces in Jewish neighbourhoods. There has been vandalism of Jewish homes, schools, synagogues, community centres and of the offices of a university academic. Jews in the arts and other sectors of our community have been marginalised and doxxed and private businesses intimidated and shut down. There have been death threats to Jews and Jewish organisations.

A steady drum beat of vilification: “baby killers”, “genocidaires” and “Nazis” has created a charged and heated atmosphere in which many Jews have come to feel unwelcome or unsafe. For every act that hits the media there are countless stories, often related over the Sabbath dinner table, of personal slights, off-hand comments and slurs. There has been endless on-line hate. This incitement has been marked by episodes of violence, acts of arson and now murder.

The dramatic rise in incidents negatively impacting Australian Jews since October 2023 has been well documented in Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) incident reports, as have Jewish experiences of antisemitism (2024 survey ) and antisemitic attitudes held by non-Jewish Australians (2021, 2025, ASECA survey).

Hate speech itself can be profoundly harmful psychologically. This is true for Jews in Australia (and)  the US Jewish community just as it was for the indigenous community during the voice debate. For some antizionists, the intimidation and marginalisation of Jews is not a by-product of activism but rather a specific goal. ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess, commenting on anti-Israel activists observed: “Directly or indirectly, their actions can marginalise, stigmatise and frighten sections of the community.”

A 2024 survey conducted in the weeks after the start of the Gaza war (including approximately 8% of the adult Jewish population) reported that 64% felt that antisemitism was a big problem, far higher than in a 2017 survey. One in five had personally experienced an insult or harassment because they are Jewish and a similar number was less open in showing their identity in public. Similar findings have been reported in the UK, Europe and the US.

This is particularly sensitive in Australia’s post Holocaust community. As Jeremy Waldronwrote of hate speech: “It does this not only by intimating discrimination and violence, but by reawakening living nightmares of what this society was like—or what other societies have been like—in the past. In doing so, it creates something like …a sort of slow-acting poison, accumulating here and there, word by word…”

6.Jewish community calls for support and safety reflect genuine grass roots concerns and are not simply political attempts to stifle legitimate debate as often claimed by anti-Zionist groups

Against the overwhelming evidence of adverse Jewish experiences, non-Jewish and Jewish pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist groups regularly attempt to downplay the issue by:

  • disputing definitions of antisemitism, survey methodology and measurement.
  • dismissing communal concerns as “weaponising” antisemitism
  • claiming Jews are simply conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel.
  • claiming that antizionist slogans and activism have nothing to do with Jews because “not all Jews are Zionists” or “Zionism and Jewishness are not identical”. Such claims, while true, are facile and in no way negate the experiences and views of the vast majority of the Jewish community who have strong connections with and concerns for Israel and are targets for antizionist activism
  • focusing on antisemitism from the political right, distracting from the complex and cumulative effects of anti-Zionist speech and activism from the progressive left, religious fundamentalist and anti-Israel groups.

The pattern is one of disputing and distracting rather than engaging with patterns of fear, withdrawal and marginalisation.

This approach stands in opposition to recommendations in the AHRC Framework which stresses that the  approach to racism should be “community-centric” and recognise that racism as a “complex and shifting phenomenon”.

7.Claims that antisemitism can adequately be addressed through existing “universal” mechanisms are not supported by evidence

Anti-Zionists resist specific policies to respond to antisemitism, casting their lot with generalised anti-racism frameworks. They reject the Special Envoy’s report on antisemitism, in part for reasons of free speech. The claim that the AHRC Framework is sufficient as the primary mechanism to deal with antisemitism is flawed.

While society-wide approaches to racism are essential, Indigenous Australians, migrants, women, LGBTQ+ communities, Muslims and Jews all have different histories of oppression and face different challenges.

The need for targeted measures for antisemitism is not about moral priority but relates to its specific dynamic. Jews are often not recognised as a minority let alone a vulnerable one, because they are coded “white” and linked with power, money, conspiracy and influence. There is growing ignorance of antisemitism’s history, its genocidal expression within living memory. A UN report highlighting the lack of awareness of antisemitism’s modern manifestations.

It must also be noted that the AHRC document was framed and developed primarily to deal with indigenous disadvantage. Its preamble it states that: “racism operates by racialising various groups of people negatively to maintain the dominance of groups racialised as white….”. This strong conceptual frame around issues of colour raises questions about its suitability as the sole vehicle for addressing antisemitism.

The assertion made by Jewish anti-Zionists, that “general anti-racism” measures, including the AHRC Framework, will be effective for antisemitism does not reflect what is known about antisemitism nor about the AHRC Framework.

As human rights law academic Kenneth Marcus has observed, when  antisemitism is subsumed under generalised frameworks of disadvantage, it often disappears from view.

The Special Envoy’s plan, while open to criticism, is consonant with Global Guidelineswhich have been endorsed by over 40 states and regional groups, and consistent with UN recommendations that addressing antisemitism requires specific strategies in addition to general anti-racism measures.

In public statements the JCA has argued that calls to curb the most hostile forms of anti-Zionist speech risk making Jews less safe, by exposing them to blame for increased state repression. It is worth asking whether reframing such calls as political manoeuvres rather than expressions of communal fear does not itself heighten that risk — by casting concern for safety as bad faith.

8.Minority Jewish voices substantially misrepresent the concerns of the wider Australian Jewish community

The Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) has expressed the intention to engage with the Commission, as is their right. However, public positions taken so far by the JCA and other anti-Zionist Jewish groups raise concerns about the nature and impact of their likely submissions.

The JCA presents itself as an expert voice that provides a counterbalance to allegedly unrepresentative communal leadership bodies such as the ECAJ.

While Jewish peak bodies are not directly elected by the whole of community (what community peak bodies are?), they include a wide range of community organisations across the country and are closely aligned the community’s concerns regarding safety and connection with Israel. Concerns regarding community safety are widespread and a deep connection to Israel and concern for Israel’s welfare are shared by around 90% of Australian Jews. Around three quarters self-identify as Zionist.(2017, 2023 and 2024).

The JCA and other anti-Zionist groups have a small number of high-profile spokespeople, however their views are unlikely to reflect more than a small minority of a Jewish community of over 110,000. The JCA claims over 1,300 supporters. However, many claimed supporters are anonymous and signing on to their website entails endorsing values such as human rights, freedom and equality. not necessarily the anti-Zionist nature of the group. It is far from clear that their those who have signed endorse the JCA’s view that antisemitism is unrelated to progressive and antizionist activism.

This doesn’t delegitimise their participation or views but should have bearing on the weight given these views at the Royal Commission.

Anti-Zionist Jewish positions are often cited by the broader anti-Zionist advocacy community and by segments of the media and civil society. This is not because the JCA is representative of the community, but rather because their views suit the agenda of those who seek to vilify the Jewish community without restriction.

This “spoiler effect” is not without precedent.

The recent referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, though set in a different political context, is illustrative. Tanya Muscat and Katharina Wolf from Curtin University described how “No” proponents “… were selectively framed by media to present a picture of broad Indigenous opposition, thereby neutralising support for the Yes campaign…(this)  illustrates the need for communication strategies that are not only inclusive, but genuinely representative and responsive to the diversity within Indigenous communities.”

The Commission should be alert to the risk that anti-Zionist Jewish voices, amplified beyond their representative weight, may obscure the genuine concerns and aspirations of the wider Jewish community.

9.Jewish vulnerability is not adequately recognised in legal and progressive cultural frameworks

Over the last two years or more, hostile speech targeting Jews has circulated, escalated and become normalised in a manner that seems unimaginable were this another minority.

Cautious responses across government, media, legal and other civic institutions have contributed to a permissive environment in which hostile language and behaviour have gone unchallenged.

In part this has happened because concerns expressed by Jews regarding antisemitism are often understood primarily through the lens of the Israel–Palestine conflict, where they are interpreted as attempts to “silence protest”. They are also contested through disputes over definition or methodology.

At a deeper level, Jews are not widely recognised as a vulnerable minority, despite being one of Australia’s smallest communities and carrying profound collective trauma within living memory. Jews are targeted by “the right” as “non-white” and conspiratorial (with replacement theories proliferating, particularly in the US) as well as by progressives who characterise them as white, European, powerful and conspiratorial. This antipathy from both sides of the political spectrum is not experienced by other minorities, and other vulnerable groups typically do not offer solidarity to the Jewish community.

Existing legal and anti-discrimination mechanisms are designed to deal with harms attributable to individual people and events. As discussed above, much of the harm associated with the protest movement can be understood as cumulative in nature, with risks being statistical. This framing is more akin to climate change than to individual criminal behaviour and so grappling with the cumulative effects and diffuse responsibility of mass movements needs alternative conceptual approaches and  mechanisms of mitigation and redress.

The NSW Court of Appeal’s April 2026 decision striking down the Public Assembly Restriction Declaration scheme found that it imposed an impermissible burden on the implied constitutional freedom of political communication. The courts framework assumes that harms from political expression are discrete and traceable, and that a more precisely targeted instrument is always available and always superior.

The stochastic violence framework challenges both assumptions. Where harm operates through cumulative population-level exposure and threshold effects, demanding tight causal specificity as a condition of constitutional validity is demanding something the nature of the harm structurally cannot provide. Where the relevant risk is ambient and systemic rather than incident-specific, a broader precautionary mechanism may be more — not less — consistent with the underlying harm theory than a narrowly targeted one would be.

Legal mechanisms designed to adjudicate individual acts, individual intent and individual causation are poorly suited to harms that are diffuse, cumulative and probabilistically distributed across a population.

The Commission should draw two conclusions from this. First, that the safety concerns motivating the legislation were genuine and documented. Second, that the gap between what existing legal frameworks can address and what the harm actually requires cannot be closed by litigation. It requires policy development grounded in the empirical literature on dangerous speech and probabilistic violence — to develop regulatory responses that are both constitutionally defensible and adequate to the harm being addressed. That is precisely the kind of deeper recommendation this Commission is positioned to make.

10. This is not just another free speech/protest issue- the current protests are the first large-scale human rights protest movement in Australia that explicitly or implicitly targets an Australian minority community

The claim that anti-Zionist protest stands in the tradition of great Australian civic activism deserves scrutiny. Australia has a proud history of protest in the cause of human rights.

Opposition to the Vietnam War targeted government military policy. The anti-apartheid movement targeted a foreign regime. Activism for LGBTQ+ and Indigenous rights targeted discriminatory laws and the Australian state. In each case the object of protest was governmental policy or the policies of a foreign state.

No Australian minority community was targeted, vilified or made to feel unsafe in its own country as a direct consequence of the protest itself.

The anti-Zionist protest movement is different.  Its stated target is the Israeli government but, as argued above, the language and conduct of significant elements of the movement extend — through slippage and cumulative normalisation — from Israel, to Zionists, to Jews. The people bearing the cost are not governments or institutions. They are Jewish schoolchildren, Jewish academics, and Jewish families whose synagogues have been vandalised and whose neighbourhoods have been subject to intimidatory protest.

A human rights movement that targets a vulnerable minority undermines its own foundational premise. This not simply the case of speaking truth to power but rather a large movement directing its forces at a vulnerable minority.

Powerful and effective advocacy for Palestinian rights is entirely legitimate and possible without dehumanising language, without intimidation in Jewish communal spaces, and without slogans carrying violent resonances for a community that has known genocide within living memory.

Some notes from personal experience

My parents came to Australia to escape European antisemitism. It was largely a successful migration, and this country has been good to our family and to the Jewish community more broadly.

Antisemitism has nonetheless been a sporadic presence throughout my life. As a child I heard comments about Jews and money. Walking to synagogue in a kippah I have had “bloody Jews” shouted from passing car windows on several occasions. A close friend was beaten in a football ground car park while wearing a kippah . A few years ago a tradesman stormed out of my home after apparently noticing a Jewish artefact, shouting in the street as he left: “the Nazis should have finished you off.”

This was unpleasant but had never risen to the sense of a systematic anti-Jewish campaign.

Since October 2023 something has changed.

Partly it is what has been said and done — the graffiti, the vandalism of Jewish centres, the tearing down of hostage photographs from public walls. Partly it is what has not been said. I have watched colleagues receive institutional solidarity after attacks on their communities over time After October 7th 2023 I received communications from institutional leaders that mentioned Gaza, mentioned the conflict, but did not mention Jews, did not mention what had happened to Israeli civilians and did not acknowledge what the Australian Jewish community was living through. That silence communicated something profound.

I have watched security guards at synagogues and Jewish schools become so normalised that we have largely stopped remarking on it. Soon after October 7th 2023 a Jewish nursing home in Melbourne started to employ guards at the entrance. My uncle, a Holocaust survivor, needs guards to protect him from antisemitic attack in Melbourne in 2026.

The sense that there has been a tectonic shift in attitudes towards Jews is widely shared in my community, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

Conclusions and recommendations

The concerns currently being expressed by Australian Jews do not turn on Bondi.

Rather, Bondi has served to crystallise awareness of the sustained and normalised hostility toward a minority community. This has operated through language, symbolism, social pressure and physical intimidation in a civic environment that has consistently failed to recognise, constrain or respond to it with the seriousness applied to harms affecting other minorities.

There is a moral accounting that has not yet been done. For two years, government and civic institutions sent a series of signals — largely through acts of omission— that shaped the environment in which hostility toward Jews escalated and became normalised. Just two early examples were the silence after the Opera House protest in October ’23 and our Foreign Minister’s refusal to visit the Nova memorial while in Israel. The has been a continuing absence of clear public statements about what forms of protest and language are acceptable — not legally, but morally.

This continuing silence and apathy were read, by the Jewish community and by the protest movement, as tacit acceptance of unconstrained forms of protest. The failure of government to reinforce moral and civic norms has had consequences that no subsequent legislative response can fully undo.

A Royal Commission that focuses narrowly on security failures at Bondi, without grappling with this broader institutional failure of leadership, will fail.

The protest movement should address its own accountability. Palestinian advocacy organisations that present themselves as defenders of human rights carry a particular responsibility. Tolerating, excusing or deflecting attention from dehumanising language directed at Jews is a contradiction the Commission should name directly. “We reject antisemitism” in a mission statement is not accountability. Genuine commitment to human rights principles requires actively calling out vilifying language when it appears, refusing to share platforms with those who use it, and accepting that the credibility of a movement is shaped by what it tolerates as much as by what it explicitly endorses. The question the Commission should put to these organisations is not whether they intend harm, but rather whether they effectively provide cover for unacceptable conduct incompatible with the protection of human rights.

The Commission will hear from minority Jewish voices who are seeking to limit scrutiny of anti-Zionist activism and minimise the widely held concerns of the community they claim to represent. Anti-Zionist Jewish voices are amplified not because they reflect Australian Jewish experience but because they are useful to those who wish to deflect that scrutiny. It would be a serious failure if the genuine and widely held fears of over 100,000 Australian Jews were obscured by a small, unrepresentative minority whose positions are largely indistinguishable from those opposing any restraint on anti-Zionist activism.

The Commission should weigh the asymmetry of what is at stake. On one side of the balance sits some degree of restraint in the most inflammatory language and protest forms — forms that reasonable people can recognise as serving no legitimate advocacy purpose. On the other sits a community that has spent two years reporting fear, concealing identity in public, withdrawing from civic life, and watching its institutions firebombed while being told that its concerns are weaponisation, overreach, or simply the price of free speech. Freedom of speech is a central value. So is the right of a minority community to exist in civic space without being treated as a legitimate target. These are not equivalent considerations, and recommendations that treat them as symmetrical will not address the harm.

This is not a call for censorship, silencing debate or banning protest. It does not equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Nor is it a concern about mere Jewish discomfort relating to robust debate. The case for Palestinian rights is legitimate and can be made powerfully without language that dehumanises, without slogans that carry violent resonances, and without forms of protest that target Jewish communal spaces. The question is not whether advocacy is permissible. It is whether the most harmful modes of that advocacy are necessary to it.

What is at stake is not comfort but belonging: whether Australian civic spaces remain places where minorities can live, speak and participate without being treated as objects of collective hostility.

No regulatory or legislative response will be adequate without investment in the civic and educational foundations that make such responses meaningful. The past two years have exposed not only a failure of law and policy but a failure of shared understanding — across institutions, media and the general public — about what antisemitism is, how it operates.

Regulation addresses behaviour but education is needed to address the conditions that make certain behaviours seem acceptable. Any set of recommendations that omits this foundation is treating symptoms. The Commission should recommend that addressing antisemitism be incorporated into school curricula. The media and public institutions require structured guidance on recognising hate speech that operates through political framing.

The Commission is accordingly asked to consider the following recommendations:

  1. Recognise the systemic nature of the harm. The cumulative, probabilistic character of harm from hate speech and inflammatory protest language should be acknowledged explicitly. A framework built solely around adjudicating discrete incidents and provable individual causation will continue to fail the Jewish community as it has failed it for the past two years.
  2. Develop regulatory responses adequate to systemic harm. The NSW Court of Appeal’s invalidation of the post-Bondi protest restrictions indicates the limitations of current judicial processes to address the nature of harms experienced by the Jewish community. The Commission should recommend policy grounded in the empirical literature on speech and harm —that are both constitutionally defensible yet adequate to the nature of harms experienced by the Jewish community.
  3. Require accountability within the protest movement. Advocacy organisations that claim to reject antisemitism and violence bear a corresponding responsibility to actively call out vilifying language and intimidatory conduct within the broader protest ecosystem they share. Passive disavowal after the fact is not accountability. The Commission should consider whether organisations and individuals that claim human rights credentials while tolerating dehumanising language directed at Jews should continue to receive public legitimacy, funding or institutional support.
  4. Reject the adequacy of generalised anti-racism frameworks as the sole response.The AHRC Framework was developed primarily around racialised disadvantage and the experience of communities of colour. Antisemitism has a distinct dynamic — Jews are simultaneously coded as white and powerful by progressives, and as foreign and conspiratorial by the right — and is rendered invisible by generalised frameworks. Specific strategies, consistent with Global Guidelines endorsed by over 40 states and with UN recommendations, are warranted and should be implemented alongside, not instead of, broader anti-racism measures.
  5. Weigh community voices accurately. The Commission will hear from Jewish anti-Zionist groups whose positions diverge sharply from those of mainstream communal organisations and most community members. Their right to participate is not questioned. However the weight accorded their submissions should be proportionate to genuine representativeness, and the Commission should be alert to the amplification of minority Jewish voices to serve interests other than accurate representation of the Jewish community.
  6. Invest in education and civic foundations. The Commission should recommend that antisemitism — its history, its specific character and its modern manifestations — be reflected in institutional training.
  7. Demand moral leadership, not only legal mechanism. The most important failure of the past two years has not been legislative. It has been the failure of government, universities, media and civil society to say clearly and repeatedly that Jews are a vulnerable minority community entitled to the same recognition, solidarity and protection extended to other minorities; that their fears are legitimate; and that certain forms of language and protest are not made acceptable by being coded. No other minority is expected to bear resentments originating in distant conflict or in the acts of isolated individuals.

The “I’ll ride with you” movement, which supported Muslims who were feeling vulnerable to backlash following the  Lindt Café siege, exemplifies our community’s capacity to recognise and respond to minority vulnerability with solidarity. No equivalent solidarity was extended to the Jewish community in the wake of October 7th, or in the two years of escalating hostility that followed.

Randa Abdel-Fattah’s claim that “Zionists (i.e. most Jews) have no right to cultural safety” exemplifies the cloud that has hung unanswered over the Jewish community for far too long. This slogan, and the tragic downstream effects when such views become normalised (and even celebrated in some sectors), represent the deep challenge before the Royal Commission and the Australian community more broadly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew is a medical specialist working in Australia. He is a regular visitor to Israel and a member of an egalitarian shul in Melbourne. He is married and has three sons. He occasionally suffers from thought bubbles that transmogrify into written form.

Jewish singer Deborah Conway accuses Aussie actor of running anti-Semitic boycott campaign against her

Jewish singer Deborah Conway has accused an Australian actor of running an anti-Semitic boycott campaign against her that led to venues cancelling her shows.

Clareese Packer and Samina Rakhshan, NewsWire, May 11, 2026

Jewish singer-songwriter Deborah Conway has accused an Australian actor of running an anti-Semitic boycott campaign against her while speaking outside a hate inquiry.

Fifty-six witnesses were called in the Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion last week, sharing how “Nazi style slurs” are being hurled at children in schools that now look more like prisons due to increased security concerns in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Conway, a Jewish Australian, told the commission several of her shows have been pulled over the last few years, claiming an Australian actor, who she did not name inside the hearing, had sent letters to venues stating “Deborah Conway is a self-confessed Zionist and a supporter of genocide”.

The letters also allegedly included words to the effect that if they were to platform her “you are complicit in genocide”.

“I think some of the venues found that incredibly disturbing and they pulled back,” Conway said.

Conway revealed the name of the actor she has accused of running the campaign while speaking outside the hearing, however NewsWire has chosen not to name the woman.

“She signed her name very boldly and openly and she was proud of the letter she had written,” Conway claimed outside the hearing on Monday.

Singer Deborah Conway has suffered a flurry of online abuse in the wake of October 7, 2023. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Deborah Conway Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Conway also detailed how in another instance, 70 people wearing balaclavas rocked up to a venue hitting pots and pans together, and said if they went ahead with one of Conway’s shows “we will make sure that we turn up with 300 people, and we will make sure that business is very hard for you”.

“So they pulled it, which I don’t blame them — I would too,” Conway said.

The musician also copped a flurry of online abuse after she and a group of about 600 Jewish creatives were doxxed in February 2024.

“I hope your entire family dies in an air strike and you have limbs amputated without aesthetics — I assume he means anaesthetics,” Conway read to the commission on Monday.

“I hope that after this happens you have no access to clean bandages, antibiotics or food.”

Conway called anti-Zionism a ‘genocidal impulse’. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Anti-Zionism a ‘genocidal impulse’

Conway described anti-Zionism as a “genocidal impulse”, telling the hearing that “when people chant from the river to the sea … that is a call to end the entity of Israel”.

“I want there to be peace, I want there to be a two-state solution, I want everyone to just relax. Let everyone eat their hummus and get on with it,” Conway said.

“But unfortunately … we’re not living in the land of unicorns and rainbows.”

She said she can’t bear the idea of young artists who are being targeted and vilified for believing Israel should be allowed to exist.

“That’s their crime, and that’s a crime that I think is completely beyond the pale,” she said.

“When they say Zionism equals Nazism … genocide … and then they end up with a sign that goes in the bin.

“They’re throwing us all in the bin. It’s not going to end well.”

Conway is an Australian singer and songwriter. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Conway is an Australian singer and songwriter. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

‘Larger than life’: Tribute to slain Rabbi

The father of a 14-year-old who survived the Bondi attack with bullet wounds paid tribute to Rabbi Eli Schlanger who died in the Bondi attack on December 14 last year.

The speaker was present at the Chanukah by the Sea event where two gunmen allegedly opened fire, killing fifteen people.

“He was so happy, it was an amazing event ‘til the minute before,” the man said.

He described Mr Schlanger as “larger than life” and “an amazing human being” who was always ready to help.

His 14-year-old daughter was shot while shielding children during the attack, with the man saying his daughter had asked him afterwards “(Dad) why they hate us so much, why they want to kill us?”

The speaker also told the royal commission a Jewish community member brought their Mezuzah — a religious scroll placed at the door of Jewish Homes — to see if it was intact and correct.

Once he opened it he found a “Free Palestine” scroll in it instead of the religious verse.

‘No friends left’: Jewish 15yo targeted online

A 15-year-old Jewish boy, known only as ABB, detailed how he had been bullied since the end of 2024 and was targeted in a Minecraft chat group comprised of children from his school.

A Jewish teenager says he was targeted with anti-Semitic abuse while playing the popular online game Minecraft with kids from his school. Picture: Supplied by Telltale Games

A Jewish teenager says he was targeted with anti-Semitic abuse while playing the popular online game Minecraft with kids from his school. Picture: Supplied by Telltale Games

Someone had written “I hate the Jews” in the chat group at one stage, but his stomach turned “upside down” after someone commented “rabid filthy rotten gut-wrenching grotesque rabbi yamaka wearing bank owning iron doming Hashem following Jew” on another occasion.

“It made my stomach turn upside down, I really just had to step away from my computer for a little bit and then, when I came back, I think I just closed and logged off for the day,” the teen said.

The children continued with the abuse after the 15-year-old confronted them at school and “told them to stop because it was destroying my mental health”.

He didn’t tell his parents right away because he thought he could handle it, “but it just got out of hand”.

“I walked into their room and said I have no friends left,” the teen told the hearing.

His mother, ABD, said her son had “tears in his eyes” as he told them how his friends had locked him in a part of the game and left him alone to die.

“Appalled”, ABD said her stomach drops knowing how her son had “normalised” and had to “make his peace” with the ordeal.

“(He) accepted it as part of his school life,” she said.

His parents said the school handled the situation really well and held an investigation, with three of the children also apologising to ABB.

However if ABB is near the group too long at school they tell him to leave, the boy said.

“Every time I go up to them, because some of my other friends sit with them … if I stay there for a little too long, they’ll be like ‘get out of here’ or something like that,” ABB said.

ABB also told the hearing of how a group of Year 12s recently shouted something along the lines of “Hitler was right to kill them all”.

“I turned around expecting to see somebody staring at me or pointing at me but I found it was just a group of Year 12 boys who were just talking amongst themselves using it for general conversation,” he said.

The October 9, 2023 rally at the Opera House has been described as a critical turning point in the rise of Jewish hate during the inquiry. Picture: NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

The October 9, 2023 rally at the Opera House has been described as a critical turning point in the rise of Jewish hate during the inquiry. Picture: NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

The boy’s father, ABE, said he no longer recognises this country, telling the hearing people used to be “a lot more tolerant”.

“All of those Australian idioms that we have for people having a fair go, that seems to have been lost,” he said.

“I would like to see something come out of this commission where we can chart the course back towards that Australia, or that attitude that we had in Australia.”

Propaganda fuelling ‘disunity’ and ‘discord’

Rabbi Daniel Rabin, who is part of a synagogue in Caulfield in Melbourne, said “we wouldn’t be sitting here if this was just about criticism of Israel”, telling the hearing Australians are being fed propaganda which is fuelling the disunity the country is experiencing.

Mr Rabin acknowledged that criticism of Israel is OK, but “huge lies” are circulating, telling the commission the word “genocide” is being “thrown into everything”.

“It’s the seeping through of this propaganda that’s found it’s way everywhere,” he said.

Rabbi Daniel Rabin detailed a campaign of abusive calls his synagogue has received. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Rabbi Daniel Rabin Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

“I think there are those who naturally have this hateful mission, but I think it’s affecting many regular Australians who are being fed this narrative, which I think is causing so much of the disunity and this discord that we are finding ourselves in at the moment.”

He recounted a campaign of abusive calls his synagogue had received, with the phrase “baby killers” seeming to be the favourite.

“When you say somebody is a baby killer … I can’t think of anything more grotesque to say about a person,” he said.

“It’s actually mind boggling that people are accusing us of that and then calling our synagogues … it’s hurtful, it’s disgusting.”

Mr Rabin spoke of having eggs and anti-Semitic slurs thrown at him before October 7, 2023, but the abuse has increased in the wake of Hamas’ attack.

Just days after the attack a car passing by he and his 10-year-old son shouted out “horrific things” he didn’t feel comfortable repeating at the inquiry.

“Having my 10-year-old son with me, of course he looked at me and he said ‘Why do these people hate us?’” he said.

“And that was very confronting … very difficult to explain to him.”

Fifteen people were killed in the Bondi attack in December 2025. Picture: NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone

Fifteen people were killed in the Bondi attack in December 2025. NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone

Jewish musician’s career and business destroyed after doxxing

Jewish musician Joshua Moshe told the hearing how his life started to fall apart after he was doxxed, with he and his wife both receiving hate messages and threats.

The couple’s homeware shop in north Melbourne was vandalised with boycott stickers and graffiti in the wake of the doxxing, while photos of them both taken from their social media accounts and plastered with “Zionists” and “Boycotting”.

At one point he received a photo of his son along with a voicemail that said “You racist motherf***er better keep watching your motherf***ing back”.

The abuse forced the couple to close up their shop and move to a different spot in the city. “This was devastating to experience … ongoing torrent of messages.. I was feeling extremely anxious, devastated, feeling like my life was starting to unravel,” Mr Moshe said.

Musician Joshua Moshe told the hearing how his life started to fall apart after he was doxxed. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Musician Joshua Moshe  Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Musician Joshua Moshe and his partner Maggie May Moshe spoke with the media outside the hearing on Monday. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Musician Joshua Moshe and his partner Maggie May Moshe spoke with the media outside the hearing on Monday. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

A saxophonist and composer, Mr Moshe was part of an award-winning band for seven years up until the doxxing incident, when he found out via social media that he’d been kicked out of the band.

The band had posted an online post — which they recently issued an apology for — which said the group was “disgusted, deeply shocked and betrayed”, claiming Mr Moshe had made comments in a Zionist WhatsApp group.

“We explicitly condemn any form of Zionism, racism, bullying anti-Semitism and prejudice of any kind,” the post said.

Mr Moshe said the Zionism that he believed in was that Jewish people deserved a home in some part of their ancestral homeland.

ECAJ researcher targeted with ‘horrifying’ anti-Semitic caricature

Executive council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) research director Julie Nathan described the “horrifying” moment a sexualised caricature of her was shared on the internet.

The caricature was accompanied with the words “Julie simply desires to be filled with Aryan seed”.

“It’s very much a sexualisation, so you have this Jewish caricature, this is the feminine version of it, with the long, curly hair, and the long fingernails … It was horrifying to see” Ms Nathan told the royal commission.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry research director Julie Nathan says trying to keep track of anti-Semitic incidents online is ‘like trying to count the stars’. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Executive Council of Australian Jewry research director Julie Nathan says trying to keep track of anti-Semitic incidents online is ‘like trying to count the stars’. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Ms Nathan, who authors the Jewish group’s annual report on anti-Semitism in Australia, said a new form of anti-Semitism has emerged since October 7, 2023 telling the hearing there was a 316 per cent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Australia according to their 2024-2025 annual report.

“We’re getting much more brazen and much more confident coming out and not ashamed or worried about it being anti-Semitic and inciting violence against Jews,” she said.

Online posts or publications are not included in the report “because there are so many it’s uncountable”, Ms Nathan said.

“It’s like trying to count the stars,” she said.

Pro-Palestine material is also not counted as anti-Jewish, with Ms Nathan explaining a “free Palestine” sticker would only be considered anti-Semitic if it was stuck on a synagogue or a Jewish school, for instance.

“Israel is a state like any other state, and just as we in Australia are free to criticise our government, our country … we accept that, and even though people may lie about things or may use offensive language,” Ms Nathan said.

“We accept that as being, you know, political discourse or political language. It’s only when it crosses the line into anti-Semitism, that’s when we will count it as anti Semitic.”

The incidents, which are all personally reviewed by Ms Nathan, are recorded under six different categories including: physical assault, vandalism, verbal abuse, hate messages, graffiti and material such as banners and stickers.

She spoke of some people on social media screenshotting the annual report and making fun of it, saying: “We’re doing well boys, let’s keep the momentum going”.

Chief executive officer of The Dor Foundation Tahli Blicblau said scenes at a Western Sydney protest on October 8, 2023, ‘set the tone’ for the normalisation of Jewish hate. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Chief executive officer of The Dor Foundation Tahli Blicblau sPicture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Ms Blicblau said online spaces have helped move anti-Semitism away from ‘shameful radical fringes’. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Fireworks in the street is Israel was ‘counting its dead

Fireworks in the streets as Israel was “still counting its dead” in the wake of Hamas’ 2023 attack “set the tone” for the normalisation of Jewish hate in Australia, the leader of a Jewish organisation has told a hate inquiry.

Many pointed to the Sydney Opera House protest on October 9, 2023, as a critical turning point in the rise of Jewish hate; however, Dor Foundation Tahli Blicblau chief executive instead submitted that scenes at a Western Sydney protest the day prior were pivotal.

“The events of October 7 were described as a day of pride and courage,” Ms Blicblau told the royal commission on Monday.

“Cars were driving through Western Sydney setting off fireworks … that glorification of violence that night at a time when Israel was still counting its dead really set the tone for a permissive environment in which glorifying violence was accepted and permissible.”

Nine witnesses will give evidence on Monday. Picture: Gaye Gerard /NewsWire

 Picture: Gaye Gerard /NewsWire

Research from the Jewish body, which was established in 2024 to combat anti-Semitism, has revealed that most Australians can’t recognise anti-Semitic tropes.

Radical ideologies had converged in such a way that anti-Semitism was slipping into public discourse easier, Ms Blicblau said.

“They’re shrouded just enough in language, often of human rights, to be acceptable,” she said.

“Most Australians can’t recognise anti-Semitic tropes when they see them, so they’re presented with these hateful tropes and because they don’t recognise it as being anti-Semitic, it’s more likely to become normalised and accepted.”

Ms Blicblau also spoke to the role of online spaces in helping move anti-Semitism away from “shameful radical fringes”.

“The role of the internet and social media allows these hateful comments to reach millions of people within milliseconds, so in order to combat the new form (of anti-Semitism) … we need to operate there,” Ms Blicblau said.

The hearing continues

Dire straits. The bottleneck that behaves like a universe

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Oil tankers, container ships and bulk carriers shimmer all over the horizon to the left of the windswept beach here at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. They have been bottled up in the Persian Gulf ever since the US and Israel launched the war on Iran more than a month ago.  To the right, with the Iranian coast only 65km away, the dark-blue sea is completely empty. Only a handful of vessels a day manage to cross the Strait of Hormuz, down from well over a hundred ­before the war. They take a circuitous route through Iranian territorial waters, often paying the Iranian regime a hefty toll.

Tehran’s ability to control this international waterway, through which one-fifth of the worldwide oil supply used to pass, has become Iran’s biggest leverage against the US, its Gulf neighbours and the global economy. Whether the war ends in a success or defeat for Iran depends first and foremost on whether Tehran emerges from this conflict still holding the strait – and, with it, the keys to the worldwide energy markets.

Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, 3 Aptil 2026

What follows is a piece for history tragics – and for all who, metaphorically or intellectually, nostalgically or romantically, still yearn to “go down to the sea in ships and do business in deep waters”. For those who hear, beneath the churn of headlines and hot takes, the older music: the creak of hulls, the logic of tides, the long memory of trade and war written across the surface of the world.

Because when the Strait tightens, when Hormuz flickers from map detail to global anxiety, there is a reflex, almost tidal in itself, to reach backwards. To steady the present with the ballast of the past. The antique mariners Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, the classical strategists Alfred Mahan and Halford Mackinder, the catechisms of geopolitics and sea power half-remembered, half-invoked. The old grammar returns: command the sea, command the world.

And yet, while the past is summoned, it does not settle easily over the present. It frays at the edges. It argues back.

Some voices insist on restoring the full weight of history – reminding us that the Persian Gulf was not merely sailed but administered: the Royal Navy’s long vigil, the latticework of protectorates, Aden and Suez as imperial hinges. Sea power, in this telling, was never abstract; it was local, granular, enforced in specific places against specific resistances. Empire did not “command” the sea so much as continuously work it.

Others, just as insistent, suggest the sea’s primacy has already ebbed. Pipelines, railways, overland corridors – the new Silk Roads – quietly subvert the tyranny of chokepoints. Hormuz matters, yes, but not as it once did. The map has thickened; the old determinisms loosen.

And threading through it all – more unsettling than either nostalgia or revision – is a harder recognition: that the balance has tilted. That it is now easier to disrupt the sea than to command it. That a few well-placed risks – mines, missiles, drones, or even the rumour of these can achieve what fleets once guaranteed.

Which is precisely why this moment—and this place—invites a longer gaze. For Hormuz is not merely a crisis point. It is a lens. A narrow passage through which history, strategy, and imagination are forced to pass in close quarters, revealing not just what we think we know about the sea – but how much of that knowledge still holds when the waters grow tight.

And so we follow the thread.

A choke point and a global hinge

The essay, republished below, by English historian and author Peter Francopan turns on an old, almost Elizabethan intuition – Walter Raleigh’s dictum that “whoever commands the sea commands the trade… and so the world” – and asks whether it still holds in the age of drones, pipelines, and petro-politics. The Strait of Hormuz, that narrow, anxious funnel through which a fifth of the world’s oil must pass, becomes his stage: not merely a geographic chokepoint, but a historical echo chamber where empires, from the Portuguese to the British to the Americans, have tested the proposition that control of the sea is control of destiny.

The core argument is deceptively simple. However much globalisation has diversified supply chains, the world remains perilously dependent on a handful of maritime arteries. Hormuz is the most critical of them. Iran, by geography alone, sits with its hand on the tap.

What follows is a kind of strategic paradox. The United States possesses overwhelming naval superiority, yet cannot easily guarantee safe passage. Iran, comparatively weak in conventional terms, can still disrupt—through mines, missiles, drones, and plausible threat alone—the flow of global energy. Control, in other words, has become asymmetrical: it is easier to deny the sea than to command it.

Frankopan folds this into a wider historical arc. Sea power has long structured global order – from the Iberian empires to Pax Britannica to the American century—but it has never been absolute. It is contingent, fragile, and dependent on political will as much as on fleets. The current crisis exposes that fragility. The cost of keeping Hormuz open – economically, militarily, psychologically – may exceed what even a superpower is willing to bear indefinitely.

Layered atop this is his reading of Trump’s confrontation with Iran: a clash driven as much by misapprehension and political impulse as by coherent strategy. The implication (never quite stated, but hovering like heat haze) is that great powers still stumble into old traps—overestimating control, underestimating local resolve.

Obstacle Course. Credit: New York Times

Command of the sea, or command of risk?

If Frankopan writes like the historian he is, the comments read like a dockside argument, a fractured chorus of rum, empire, drones, and Trump all sloshing together.

Several bridle at Francopan’s selectivity. Where, they ask, is the Royal Navy in the Gulf? The British protectorates? Aden? The Portuguese seizure of Hormuz in 1515? There is something almost touching here: a yearning to reinsert imperial continuity into a narrative that feels too compressed, too presentist. History, they insist, is longer – and perhaps more reassuring – than Frankopan allows.

Yet beneath the pedantry lies a point: chokepoints are never just geography; they are administered spaces, historically managed through bases, treaties, and coercion. Hormuz did not simply “matter”—it was made to matter, policed into significance.

A sharper critique comes from those who accuse Frankopan of naval determinism, of succumbing to Mackinder in sea going form. Where, they ask, are the pipelines, the highways of the modern Silk Road? If oil can flow overland, if energy can be rerouted, then the tyranny of chokepoints diminishes. The vulnerability of Hormuz is not just a military problem but a failure of diversification. If the Strait can be “closed,” it is because the world has allowed it to remain indispensable. Overland infrastructure does exist, but not at sufficient scale, nor with sufficient redundancy, to replace maritime flow quickly. The sea remains cheaper, denser, stubbornly dominant. Mackinder haunts the room after all.

Then there is the Trump versus Iran morality play. And here, the thread fractures into familiar ideological lines. One camp sees Trump as reckless, blundering into war without strategy; another as a hard realist confronting an implacable regime. But more interesting than the partisan positions is the shared assumption beneath them: that the conflict must be read through the personality of a single leader. Structural forces – energy dependency, regional rivalries, the logic of deterrence – fade into the background. The theatre of personality displaces the machinery of geopolitics.

Meanwhile, a darker undercurrent runs through several comments: casual talk of forcing the Strait, toppling regimes, even nuclear options. The language slips, almost unconsciously, from analysis into annihilation. One is reminded how easily strategic abstraction can become moral amnesia.

What the article and its commentariat together reveal is not a consensus but a tension – between old frameworks and new realities.

Francopan is right, broadly, that chokepoints still matter. Geography has not been abolished. Hormuz remains a lever capable of moving the world.

But his critics are right, too, that the nature of control has shifted. The age of decisive naval supremacy – Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway – has given way to something murkier. Control is now probabilistic. It lies in deterrence, in risk calculation, in the shadow of what might be done rather than what is done.

Iran does not need to “command” the Strait in Raleigh’s sense. It need only make others doubt that it is safe.

And here the deeper irony emerges. The more globalised the world becomes, the more sensitive it is to disruption at key nodes. Interdependence, that liberal promise, doubles as systemic fragility. A few missiles, a handful of drones, a rumour of mines—and the bloodstream of the global economy clots.

The comments circle this insight without quite naming it. They argue about navies versus pipelines, Trump versus Tehran, Britain versus decline- but beneath it all is a shared unease: that no one, not even the United States, can fully guarantee the openness of the system on which everyone depends.

Raleigh revisited

Raleigh’s maxim survives, but in altered form. To command the sea once meant mastery – fleets, flags, unquestioned passage. Now it means something closer to managing uncertainty, policing risk, absorbing disruption. Or, to invert it (and perhaps this is the real lesson of Hormuz): whoever can unsettle the sea can unsettle the world.

The Strait, narrow and ancient, becomes a kind of TARDIS of geopolitics – small on the map, vast in consequence, containing within it centuries of empire, trade, ambition, and miscalculation. You can sail through it in hours. You can be trapped by it for decades. Hormuz is one of those places where scale misbehaves.

On the chart it is almost an afterthought: a narrow blue incision between Iran and Oman, barely 21 nautical miles at its tightest navigable squeeze. A cartographer’s margin note. You could blink and miss it, the way you might skim over a comma in a long sentence. And yet – inside that comma, the world pauses.

Tankers queue like thoughts that cannot quite be completed. Insurance markets twitch. Futures spike. Admirals rediscover their relevance. Presidents improvise resolve. Somewhere in Delhi or Shanghai, a planner recalculates the cost of keeping the lights on. The Strait is not large, but it contains largeness: economics, empire, anxiety, history – all folded into a channel so narrow that a missile battery on one shore can imagine the other.

That is the TARDIS trick: disproportion. Interior vastness concealed within exterior modesty. A space where time thickens. Because Hormuz is not just a place. – it is an accumulation. Portuguese forts, British gunboats, American carrier groups, Iranian fast boats – all still present in the mind, layered like ghost traffic moving in opposite directions through the same confined lane.
And like the TARDIS, it distorts power. The strong discover their strength is conditional; the weak discover they possess a lever. To command the sea here is less about domination than about enduring the possibility of interruption.

It is gigantically small, metaphorically huge, a bottleneck that behaves like a universe.

In a wide ocean, power projects as a roar – carrier groups, satellite grids, the choreography of dominance. In a narrow strait, the same power ricochets. It echoes, distorts, sometimes even dampens. The voice is still large; the space refuses to carry it cleanly.

Hormuz does this to everyone. It compresses asymmetry into something almost theatrical. A superpower arrives with an orchestra; a regional actor needs only a well-timed cymbal crash – mines, missiles, the rumour of both – and suddenly the symphony falters. Not silenced, but unsettled. Hesitant. Listening to itself.

It tells us less about the decline of hegemony than about the environments in which hegemony operates. Power at sea is expansive; power in a choke point is negotiated, contingent, on the edge

The old imperial instinct – force the passage- still murmurs in the background (you can hear it in the comments: convoy the ships, clear the mines, damn the cost). But the modern world hesitates, because the cost is no longer just ships sunk – it is markets convulsed, alliances strained, escalation spiralling in ways that do not end neatly at the waterline.

Which leaves us with a paradox worthy of the place: the hegemon can still roar – but here, in this narrow theatre, it must decide whether the echo is worth the noise.

In That Howling Infinite, March 2026

Hormuz: Iran’s dire Strait

Command the seas and you command the world

Peter Francopan, Unherd, March 12 2026

Historians these days doubt that Sir Walter Raleigh ever laid down his cloak to stop Queen Elizabeth I from stepping in a puddle. They do agree, though, that he understood the nature and benefit of maritime power. “Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade,” he wrote in A Discourse of the Invention of Ships in the early 17th century. “Whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself”.Raleigh lived in a different era, of course — one that most of us imagine as a time of swashbuckling sailors and risk-taking pirates, when control of the High Seas was a competition between the European states building empires in both the New and Old Worlds.

This was also an age when geography mattered every bit as much as resources. Many of the first European footholds overseas were chosen less for what lay in the ground than for where they sat along the great sea routes that were beginning to bind the world together. The Portuguese seizure of Malacca in 1511 was not about spices growing nearby but about controlling the narrow maritime gateway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea through which much of Asia’s trade passed.

The same strategic logic shaped the expansion of the British empire. Outposts were established above all because of their position along the world’s shipping arteries. The British occupation of Gibraltar in 1704 secured control over the entrance to the Mediterranean and the vital route between the Atlantic and Europe’s inland sea. In the Caribbean, islands such as Jamaica — seized from the Spanish in 1655 — were major naval and commercial hubs sitting astride the shipping lanes linking the Americas and Europe. Likewise, further south, control of Cape of Good Hope allowed Britain to dominate the maritime passage between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.The empire that Raleigh’s generation started building was not only created through conquest and extraction: it was built through the control of the sea lanes and strategic points that allowed commerce, information and manpower to move across the oceans. The same ports that handled cargo could shelter naval squadrons, repair ships and project force across vast distances. Britain’s empire was fuelled by sugar, silver, slaves and more; but it was built on being able to move these at will across the oceans, and on the islands, harbours and strongpoints that underpinned maritime, economic and imperial power.

These days, we have become used to future-gazers insisting that the future belongs to those who control data and algorithms, or satellites and space rockets, or rare earths and critical minerals. Ships, shipping, and transport networks do not sound quite so exciting, so fresh or so unknown. To a historian, though, in a world that is hyper-connected, logistics are king.

In its heyday, Britain’s reach rested heavily getting the basics right. At Gibraltar, ships entering or leaving the Mediterranean could refuel and undergo repairs, while Malta secured British control of Mediterranean shipping routes. Further east, Aden functioned as a crucial coaling station at the mouth of the Red Sea once steam navigation transformed long-distance travel; or there was Singapore, which, from the early 19th century, grew into a key naval base guarding the approaches between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

Each of these places mattered less for what they produced than for the services they provided: coal, water, repairs, provisions, intelligence and protection. Ships could not roam the oceans indefinitely; they required an interconnected chain of harbours capable of maintaining hulls, repairing sails or (later) overhauling, to provision with fresh food and water. Maritime power was not just about ships, captains and crews — but about a dense mesh of locations that were spread out around the world and reinforced each other.

Over time, however, it became easy to forget just how central these routes and nodes were. In the decades after the end of the Cold War, the world entered a period of globalisation underpinned by overwhelming American economic, political and military power — and by the mantra of free trade being the engine of prosperity and the bedrock of the international world order. Attention shifted elsewhere, and strategists and commentators forgot about shipping lanes. Yet as geopolitical competition intensifies and the world moves into a more multipolar era, the importance of the arteries of global commerce has once again become startlingly clear.Maritime transport moves over 80% of goods traded worldwide. Around 11 billion tons of goods are transported by sea each year — roughly one and a half tons per person. Ships carry around two thirds of global oil production, as well as around a fifth of natural gas, moving energy to places where they are most needed. Without global shipping networks, computers can’t be switched on, assembly lines can’t work, and houses can’t be heated.While the crisis in Iran and the Gulf have focused attention on oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and petroleum products, global shipping is fundamental in almost every aspect of daily life. Seaborne trade moves almost two billion tonnes of iron ore per year, with major exporters in countries like Australia, Brazil and South Africa being matched with demand in China, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere. Hundreds of millions of tonnes of bauxite and alumina are sent by sea from mines and processing plants in Guinea, Indonesia and Australia, as are tens of millions of tonnes of copper ores from Chile, Peru and south East Asia.

Global shipping is not just the backbone of international trade; it is crucial in keeping the world fed. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, a UN body, international trade plays a crucial role in supporting global food security by linking food surplus with deficit areas and enabling access to basic food products. 80% of agricultural commodities are transported by sea, with shipping again playing a crucial role in matching “breadbasket regions” with those that suffer from food production deficits.As Sir Walter Raleigh would have recognised, globalisation makes control of the seas more, not less important; as peoples, regions, goods and resources get moved from one part of the planet to another, dependencies rise — and so, therefore, do vulnerabilities. Things that we take for granted are always ones that we should pay special attention to, not least since it never seems to cross people’s mind that small shocks can have major implications.

In the summer of 2011, Thailand experienced catastrophic flooding as a result of unusually high levels of rainfall, which had an enormous impact on global car production. At the time, Thailand was one of the world’s leading producers of hard-disk drives and wiring harnesses for cars, as well as electronics modules. As factories closed because of flooding, the effects spilled over into the global economy. Hard drive prices doubled in a matter of weeks; shortages of parts crippled automotive production not only in Thailand, but across Asia, North America and even Europe. The associated costs ran to tens of billions of dollars.

If that gives one example of the risks that come from the assumption that supply chains are dependable, then another comes from Covid-19. Lockdowns and collapsing industrial demand caused an immediate decline in maritime activity. Global maritime trade volumes fell sharply, with estimates suggesting a reduction of as much as 10% in the first eight months of 2020, representing cargo worth at least $225 billion in trade value — if not considerably more, precipitating an unprecedented logistics crunch.

In the past few days we have seen another classic case of the risks posed by pressure on supply chains. Energy markets have been spooked by the implications of attacks on infrastructure in the Gulf following US and Israeli strikes on Iran, with oil prices almost doubling in a matter of days. But it is shipping prices that have truly gone through the roof. Spot charter rates for LNG carriers are six times larger than they were before 28 February — a rise some industry experts refer to as “unthinkable”. Some charterers are paying as much as 10 times the rate they paid before the attacks on Iran began to secure prompt tonnage because of the scale of the shock.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s key chokepoints, a narrow stretch that connects the Gulf with the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, a crossroads where geology and geography dovetail to create perfect opportunities for disruption.

Bordered by Iran to the north and Oman and the United Arab Emirates to the south, the Strait is one of the world’s most strategically significant waterways. At its narrowest navigable point, the shipping lanes are only a few kilometres wide in each direction, meaning that at a time of conflict — such as today — the ability to restrict shipping is considerable. Considerable volumes of goods pass through the Strait — something that is clear from the fact that Jebel Ali in Dubai is the ninth-busiest port in the world. But Hormuz is more crucial to global energy markets, with around 15 million barrels of oil passing through each day, equivalent to about one-fifth of global petroleum consumption. Other chokepoints are significant; but Hormuz is the most important oil chokepoint in the world.At the moment, almost no shipping is transiting the Strait, with an estimated 1000 vessels waiting for the conflict with Iran to pass. A small handful of ships have sailed through, with several others reported to be trying their luck by either claiming to be Chinese or by turning off transponders that reveal both their location and their true identities. More than a dozen ships have been damaged so far, with Iran saying that British ships are “legitimate targets”.Political leaders have tried to project confidence. Donald Trump said that merchant crews and shipowners simply needed to show “some guts” if they wanted trade to keep moving through the Strait. Yet the reality suggests that courage alone is rarely enough to keep maritime commerce flowing during wartime. Guts are one thing; a US Navy ship being damaged by Iranian mines, missiles or attacks from land is another. For now, then, such are the risks to crews, cargo and hulls that shipping in the Gulf is at a standstill.Just how high the strategic stakes have become is clear from the military deployments now underway. That message has not been lost on Greece, Italy or France — all of which have dispatched warships towards the Gulf to secure maritime traffic and monitor the Strait, although it remains unclear whether or how they will solve the problem of getting traffic moving again. In Britain, there has been fierce criticism of the Royal Navy’s absence from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf, but the absence is not imminently solvable. It is the result of the British government’s catastrophic lack of foresight, decades of not investing in the sort of naval forces one needs in this century.Trump has insisted that the shutdown in the Gulf is temporary and that oil, gas and more besides will soon start to flow again. It is typical fighting talk from a president who chose to start a confrontation with Iran because he was not able to understand why the regime in Tehran had refused to “capitulate” to American demands regarding nuclear enrichment, ballistic missile programmes and more.Trump came to office promising never to drag the US into “forever wars”, sneering at the “so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits” from who had inflicted disaster on the Middle East. Now, while Trump and his team work out how to stop Iran from inflicting damage on its neighbours, others must pay the price. India imports the overwhelming majority of its oil and gas by sea, partly because it has access to a limited network of pipelines. So the collapse of shipments from the Gulf is producing an existential crisis: although the US has granted a “temporary waiver” to allow Delhi to buy Russian oil, the facts that the rupee has weakened sharply, and that authorities are reportedly speeding up customs procedures to allow faster unloading, are signs that compression of logistics at sea is already having ripple effects. Moscow emerges as an unexpected beneficiary of the crisis, as the spike in oil and gas prices will provide much-needed relief to a beleaguered economy. Russia’s geopolitical role could be additionally bolstered by the country’s purported long-standing “security concept for the Persian Gulf” as an off-ramp for the US intervention in Iran.The consequences of the current crisis, however, extend well beyond the coming days or even the coming weeks. What we are witnessing is not simply a temporary disruption in the Gulf, but a reminder of a deeper truth about how power works in the modern world. Maritime routes remain the arteries through which prosperity, security and resilience flow. Data, algorithms, satellites and artificial intelligence may dominate the language of the 21st-century economy, but they still depend on the movement of physical goods across oceans. Microchips require minerals, energy and specialised manufacturing equipment that must be transported. Data centres require copper, aluminium, rare earths and vast amounts of energy infrastructure. Without ships and secure sea lanes, even the most advanced digital economy quickly runs into very practical limits. Power is and always has been about logistics.For Britain in particular, this requires a series of profound shifts. The protection of shipping routes is already a central strategic task. The Gulf is one theatre where the risks are currently obvious, but it is far from the only one. The North Atlantic and the High North are rapidly emerging as arenas of growing geopolitical competition as melting Arctic ice opens new routes and as submarine cables, energy infrastructure and shipping lanes become ever more exposed to interference and disruption.These are not challenges that can be addressed through strategy documents or policy papers; they require investment in ships, in platforms, in training and in the infrastructure that allows maritime forces to operate effectively across long distances. They also require the rebuilding of the kind of interconnected networks of ports, facilities and partnerships that once underpinned Britain’s global reach. In an increasingly multipolar world — one in which predation, risk-taking and opportunism are often rewarded — maritime resilience will become a defining measure of national strength.In that sense, the current crisis offers a glimpse of the future. Control and protection of shipping routes is key to stability, to reduction of risk and to long-term national resilience. The resources on which new economies depend may have changed, technologies may have evolved and ships may look different. But the underlying reality remains exactly the same as when Raleigh wrote four hundred years ago: whoever commands the sea commands far more than the sea itself.

Peter Frankopan is the author of The Silk Roads (2015), The New Silk Roads (2018), and The Earth Transformed (2023). He is also a Professor of Global History at Worcester College, Oxford

A curated selection of comments from Unherd readers

This includes everything that carries an argument, stripped of noise but not over-pruned. There was a lot buried in that thread once one scraped away the rhetorical noise. Francopan’s essay and the comments rehearse empire, contest strategy, litigate politics, invoke technology, argue personality. They reach for certainty and find, instead, contingency.
Here they are:

Historical framing matters. Analyses of maritime power that ignore Britain’s long role in the Persian Gulf, its protectorates, and control of trade routes through Aden and Suez are incomplete. Control of sea lanes has always been exercised locally, even when its effects are global.

There is a fundamental tension between classical naval theory and modern infrastructure realities. Traditional doctrines of sea power emphasise chokepoints, yet pipelines, rail corridors, and overland routes increasingly challenge that dominance. Disruption of maritime trade today may reflect failures of diplomacy and diversification as much as limits of military power.
The strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz is clear, but control is asymmetric. It is easier to threaten shipping than to secure it. A weaker power can impose risk without achieving dominance, using missiles, drones, and dispersed systems that are difficult to eliminate.

Modern warfare reinforces this asymmetry. Low-cost technologies can disrupt high-value assets, raising questions about the long-term viability of traditional force projection. At the same time, countermeasures are evolving, suggesting an ongoing cycle of adaptation.The scale of resources required to secure global shipping is immense. Sustained convoy operations would demand naval capacity that is not readily available. Even if assembled, such efforts would be costly and unlikely to restore previous economic conditions quickly.Alternative strategies exist but are slow to implement. Expanding pipelines, rerouting supply chains, and hardening vessels can reduce vulnerability, but require long-term investment and coordination.

Many states failed to prepare despite the predictability of such a crisis.There is deep disagreement over the nature of the current conflict. Some view it as a necessary confrontation with a regime that threatens regional and global stability. Others see a lack of clear objectives, inconsistent strategy, and the risk of open-ended escalation.The question of escalation remains unresolved. One side retains capacity to intensify, while the other relies on disruption. Proposals for decisive action raise further uncertainties about feasibility, consequences, and post-conflict stability.

Regime survival is interpreted differently. Some argue that mere survival constitutes success under pressure; others contend that survival after severe degradation would represent strategic defeat.Geopolitical decision-making often operates without clear or fixed end states. Objectives may shift in response to opportunity, reflecting the contingent nature of strategy rather than coherent long-term planning.

Historical analogies are widely used but often misleading. Claims of past maritime dominance are contested, with evidence that control has always been partial and constrained by other factors such as air power and competing theatres of war.

Debate over Western power reveals competing narratives. Some emphasise decline, overstretch, and lack of strategic coherence. Others point to enduring capabilities and the need for renewed investment, particularly in naval forces.

The scale of global security challenges exceeds the capacity of individual states. Effective responses likely require collective action, yet coordination remains difficult and politically constrained.

New vulnerabilities complicate traditional strategy. Subsea infrastructure, including data cables, represents a vast and exposed network that is difficult to defend, illustrating the expanding scope of strategic risk.

Legal frameworks exist but are contested in practice. International law mandates freedom of navigation, yet interpretations of neutrality and belligerency vary, particularly in complex conflicts.

Economic interdependence amplifies the consequences of disruption. Even limited interference with key trade routes can trigger wider global effects, including energy shocks and recessionary pressures.

At root, the issue is no longer simply control of the sea. The emerging reality is a system where disruption, deterrence, and alternative routing shape outcomes as much as traditional dominance.

What’s in a word? A world of meaning and of pain

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

And the words that are used for to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken
Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes in

When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, with the serene arrogance of the ideologue, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

State governments weigh the prohibition of potentially inflammatory phrases; lawyers parse syllables; activists insist that what is heard is not what is meant, and what is meant is not what is said. The words hover, untethered from consequence, yet curiously heavy with it. And this is where Lewis Carroll, with his disarming Edwardian whimsy, begins to feel less like a children’s author and more like a diagnostician. Alice, still tethered to an older moral physics, asks the only sensible question: whether words can, in fact, be made to mean so many different things. The answer – never quite resolved in Wonderland is being tested here and now on our streets, in own legislatures, and on our social media  feeds. For if words can be made infinitely flexible, then meaning itself becomes negotiable; and if meaning is negotiable, then so too are responsibility and harm.

More than words can say …

We like to imagine that words live quietly in dictionaries, disciplined by etymology and tamed by definition. But they do not live there. They live in history. And history leaves fingerprints.

So, what’s in a word? A root, yes. A history. A memory. A strategy. Sometimes a slur. Sometimes a lament. Often, a rhetorical shortcut. Occasionally a doorway into understanding. We pretend words are neutral. They are not. They are histories. They are wounds. They are strategies. They are prayers. They are threats. They are pleas.

What’s in a word? Enough to start a war. Enough to end a conversation. Enough, if handled carefully, to begin one. The question is not simply what a word means. It is what it does. Does it illuminate complexity, or obscure it? Does it invite argument, or pre-empt it? Does it name suffering without erasing another’s?

Words are fall differentially upon the tongue and the ears; words which some see only as incitement and which the others see only resistance. And yet, these words did not come out of nothing. They arose from lived experience. Palestinians do experience dispossession. Israelis do experience existential threat. Jews carry a historical memory of annihilation that makes the word genocide resonate differently in their ears. Palestinians carry a memory of erasure that makes Nakba less metaphor than inheritance. Each community carries memory as identity. To police to and sanction vocabulary without acknowledging origin and memory is to misunderstand both.

To study a language is to develop a kind of double hearing. You recognise when metaphor shades into innuendo—and when it darkens further into menace.

To study a language is to learn when freedom names a horizon – and when it licenses the powerful to act without restraint. To notice when peace is an aspiration – and when it is a performance designed to defer justice. To recognise when security protects life – and when it expands to govern it; when it names legitimate protection – and when it justifies suffocating control. To feel when homeland gathers memory and when it redraws the map to exclude others. To understand when return is a longing—and when it becomes an argument that displaces those already there.

To study a language is to hear when muqamawwa – resistance – signals dignity – and when it becomes a script that traps a people inside permanent defiance. To know that sumud – steadfastness—can describe dignified endurance and also calcify into the romanticisation of endless struggle. To detect when tadhāmon solidarity – binds people together—and when it flattens complexity into slogan. To recognise when itishhad – martyrdom – honours loss – and when it recruits the living into the service of the dead. To hear when terror names violence—and when it is stretched to delegitimise any form of opposition.

To study a language is to hear when history explains—and when it is curated to absolve.

For years I have studied Arabic – and its roots and patterns: how three consonants generate a constellation of meanings. And I have studied Middle Eastern history with more than academic curiosity – not as spectator sport but with what I would called metaphorical “skin in the game.” Words like jihad, intifada, nakba, aliyah, ‘awda, sumud, words that now ricochet across social media feeds and protest placards, are not abstractions or exotic imports to me. They are layered. Sedimented. They carry centuries in their syntax and sentiment. They are lived terms, argued over, felt in the mouth. And so when someone asks “What’s in a word?” I cannot pretend the answer is neutral.

Intifada. From nafada – to shake off, to shake free. Dust from a cloak. Subjugation from a people. The metaphor is physical, almost domestic. Yet in common Arabic usage, it implies resistance and uprising, and neither are peaceful or passive. In Israeli memory the word is fused to sirens, shrapnel, blown-out windows. It is impossible to hear it without recalling the Second Intifada’s exploding buses and cafés, bloody streets and scattered body parts. So when someone chants “globalise the intifada,” they may imagine solidarity with resistance; others hear a call that premises funerals. The dictionary definition is technically correct. It is also profoundly incomplete. It does not arrive alone; it brings its dead with it.

Or al Nakba. In ordinary Arabic, a misfortune. A bad year. But in Palestinian consciousness it has fossilised into 1948 – villages depopulated, olive groves left untended, families scattered, deeds and keys preserved like heirlooms. It is no longer a generic calamity; it is The Catastrophe. Say it in Ramallah and you evoke dispossession. Say it in western Jerusalem and you may hear, in reply, the memory of a war launched to strangle a newborn state. 1967 is referred to as al Naksa, the setback.

And then there is jihad — perhaps the most mistranslated word in modern political discourse. Its root, jahada, means to strive, to exert oneself. Classical Islamic thought distinguishes between inner moral striving and outward struggle that can be intellectual, and yes, armed defence under defined conditions. Yet modern movements – from anti-colonial insurgencies to nihilistic terror groups – have narrowed and weaponised it. The word has travelled. It has acquired passengers it did not originally carry. To deny that is to be naïve. To reduce it solely to “holy war” is equally ignorant.

Al ‘Awda – the return – carries a weight for Palestinians comparable to the resonance of intifada or nakba. It is not a mere political slogan; it is a moral, legal, and emotional claim bound up with exile, memory, and inheritance and the enduring hope, however fraught, of returning to one’s ancestral land. For Israelis, the concept often triggers apprehension, a fear that the abstract ideal of return could translate into demographic and existential challenge, potentially threatening the state itself. Like intifada or nakba, the word carries histories and futures simultaneously: one side sees longing and justice, the other sees danger.

Hebrew political vocabulary is no less charged. Aliyah – ascent – frames immigration as spiritual elevation. Ge’ulah -redemption – maps theology onto statehood. Am Yisrael Chai – Let Israel Live – evokes covenant, not population. Political vocabulary hums with biblical resonance. It is impossible to excise theology from nationalism in a land where scripture is mapped onto soil.

The power of these words lies not in dictionary meaning, but in the lived and imagined consequences each community projects onto them. So when commentators insist that “intifada just means struggle,” or that “Zionism just means Jewish self-determination,” they are not wrong linguistically. They are incomplete historically. Words do not live in morphology alone. They live in memory.

Let’s cast our etymological web wider and delve deeper in our dictionary and examine words that ricochet across the howling internet in these troubled times. Genocide. Ethnic cleaning. Apartheid. Settler-colonialist. Terrorist. Resistance. Each carries not only denotation but detonation and accusation. Each holds an argument inside a noun. Each is more than description; but also a moral verdict disguised as vocabulary. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck called such terms Kampfbegriffe – battle-words. Words of iron forged in particular historical furnaces, hardened by trauma, and redeployed not merely to describe reality but to shape it.

The same dynamic now saturates discussion of Israel–Palestine. Let’s not pretend that careful language will resolve a conflict this old, this layered, this saturated with grief. But careless language can only make things worse.

Call Israel a “settler-colonial state or an apartheid state” and you situate it in the moral lineage of Algeria, Rhodesia and Pretoria. Call Hamas’ October 7 assault “resistance” and you shift the frame from massacre – to revolt, or to shift the timeframe, to pogrom, the Russian word for destruction, now interpreted as referring to the organised massacres of a particular ethnic group – which, ironically, precipitated the first settlement of European Jews in what was to become Palestine. Call Gaza “genocide” and you summon Auschwitz – whether you intend to or not. Call protesters “terror sympathisers” and you evacuate the possibility of grief motivating them at all. Each move does moral work before the evidence is even considered.

It is here, amid the discourse of colonialism and statehood, that the word genocide warrants careful attention. Unlike settler-colonial or apartheid, which describe systems of domination and segregation, genocide describes intent – the deliberate aim to destroy a people as such. It is not simply a scale of death; it is a moral calculus applied to the machinery of annihilation. To deploy it is to summon not only bodies but histories, to conjure not only numbers but the moral shadow cast by deliberate erasure. In debates over land, displacement, and occupation, it is tempting to apply the term as an ethical accelerant, to compress outrage into a noun. Yet to do so responsibly requires rigor: assessment of intent, systematic targeting, and legal definition. Without that, the word risks inflation, becoming a rhetorical hammer rather than a precise lens. Each word narrows the moral aperture.

And yet, Genocide” now circulates online as hashtag and chant. It trends. It compresses argument into a single, morally incandescent noun. For many who use it in the Gaza context, it is less a legal claim than an expression of horror at the scale of devastation. It is a cry. But cries, once repeated often enough, harden into verdicts.

In Australia, we are hardly innocent of this. We live in a country still wrestling with its own founding vocabulary: terra nullius, invasion, genocide, reconciliation, Voice. These are still contested. We know – or should know – that words can both clarify and inflame. To call Australia “founded on genocide” may be defensible within certain scholarly frameworks; it is also rhetorically maximalist. It shocks the moral nerve. That shock may awaken conscience – or entrench defensiveness. Language is never inert. Words do not merely describe history; they frame it. They allocate blame. They assign virtue. They shape identity.

In That Howling Infinite has spent months untangling these labels. Is Israel a settler-colonial state? Does apartheid apply, and if so, where? Does genocide cross the threshold from metaphor into actionable accusation? Each term compresses arguments into a noun. It performs moral work before the debate even begins.

That compression is seductive. We prefer our tragedies simple: one culprit, one origin story, one clean fingerprint. Words that arrive pre-loaded with moral clarity spare us the labour of nuance. They allow passion and empathy to outrun reason and understanding – which, in an age of instant reaction, they reliably do.

Historical illiteracy compounds the problem. The conflict is older than most of its loudest commentators. Its history is layered with Ottoman legacies, British mandates, partition plans, UN resolutions, wars declared and undeclared, refugees, intifadas, failed peace processes, withdrawals, rockets, settlement blocs, religious revivals, and fractured leaderships on both sides. Yet online discourse flattens this into memes, and to pretend this can be reduced to a meme is historical illiteracy A map. A slogan. A 30-second clip untethered from context. Algorithms reward the sharpest edges. The most incendiary noun travels furthest. Nuance, by contrast, is penalised. It does not trend. It does not fit neatly into a caption. I worry about the generational shift in how these debates unfold. Previous eras had gatekeepers – flawed, certainly – but also editors who demanded sourcing, historians who insisted on chronology. Now discourse is democratised and accelerated. A meme outruns a monograph. A slogan outruns a syllabus.

The language used evolves accordingly. Rhetorical shortcuts proliferate. “From the river to the sea.” “Open-air prison.” “Terror state.” “Colonial entity.” “Death cult.” These phrases are not random; they are engineered for virality. Each word comes preloaded, historical analogies that compress decades into chantable cadences. But chants and slogans compress complexity. They must; that is their function. And that compression distorts: two national movements, two historical traumas, two competing narratives of return and belonging, reduced to a rhyme shouted through a megaphone.

And then there are the slurs: the truncations and code-words. For example, “Zio.” A syllable masquerading as political shorthand yet unmistakably functioning as ethnic hostility. Its power lies partly in deniability. It skirts the boundary of explicit antisemitism while retaining its charge. Deniable enough to evade sanction, sharp enough to wound. But we should be intellectually honest: this phenomenon is not one-directional. The same phenomenon occurs in reverse when “Islamist” becomes a catch-all smear for Muslim political expression, or when “pro-Palestinian” is lazily equated with antisemitic intent. The grammar of dehumanisation is bipartisan: collapsing an entire spectrum of political and religious identity into a caricature designed to foreclose engagement.

So, what, finally, is in a word?

Not merely meaning, but momentum. Not simply definition, but direction. Words do not sit still; they lean. They incline us toward certain conclusions before we have done the work of thinking. They smuggle history into the present tense and call it common sense. They arrive already freighted—with grief, with fear, with memory, with accusation—and we, often unwittingly, become their couriers.

The temptation, always, is to choose the word that does the most work for us—the one that collapses ambiguity, that secures the moral high ground in a single utterance. But that is precisely where language becomes most dangerous: when it relieves us of the burden of holding two truths at once; when it permits us to name one suffering in a way that erases another; when it transforms description into verdict before evidence has even entered the room.

What we do when we misuse words is not trivial. We erode precision. We inflame passions. We collapse law into slogan. We substitute moral theatre for argument. And perhaps most dangerously, we teach ourselves that the loudest noun is the truest one.

History suggests otherwise. It is rarely the loudest words that endure, but the most exacting; not the most incendiary, but the most honest about complexity. The archive is not kind to slogans. It remembers, instead, where language clarified—and where it concealed.

To speak about Israel and Palestine—indeed, to speak about any conflict so saturated with history—is to enter a linguistic minefield in which every term has a past and every past has its partisans. There is no neutral vocabulary here. Only more or less careful usage. Only degrees of awareness. Only the choice, conscious or otherwise, between illumination and incitement.

The task, then, is not to purify language—that is impossible—but to discipline ourselves in its use. To resist the seduction of the Kampfbegriff when it outpaces our understanding. To ask, each time we reach for a word: what history does it carry? What work is it doing? What—and who—does it leave out?

Because if words can start wars, they can also foreclose the possibility of ending them. And if they are capable, at their best, of opening a space for understanding, then that space is narrow, fragile, and easily collapsed by carelessness.

Language will not resolve this conflict. But without care in language, we will not even be able to speak about it honestly.

Coda

To study a language, in the end, is not simply to acquire vocabulary. It is to acquire conscience. It is to hear the echo behind the utterance—the ghost in the grammar. To recognise that every word, especially here, is a small archive: of exile and return, of fear and defiance, of prayer and propaganda. To speak, then, is to handle those archives with a certain humility, aware that one is always, in some sense, trespassing on someone else’s memory.

History suggests otherwise than our instincts: the loudest noun is rarely the truest one. The archive keeps its own counsel. It remembers where language clarified – and where it concealed.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

And in that shadow – linguistic, historical, human – words do their quiet, consequential work.

Postscript

While writing this essay – contemplating the slipperiness of words and widening the lens to the long weather system that has carried them into our mouths – I found myself returning to a simple, disquieting observation: it is no coincidence that so many of the words we have been parsing are Arabic.

It is not that Arabic words per se have become uniquely prone to distortion, nor that there is anything intrinsic to the language that invites what might loosely be called “gaslighting.” What I was circling, rather, is something more historically contingent – and more revealing.

Many of the most contested political ideas of the present moment – intifada, shahid, muqawama, even place-bound words and phrases that travel into English unchanged – are being transmitted untranslated, or only half-translated, into Western discourse. They arrive carrying dense, layered meanings shaped by decades (sometimes centuries) of conflict, theology, nationalism, and lived experience. And then, almost immediately, they are flattened, reframed, or strategically reinterpreted within a different moral and political vocabulary.

In other words, the instability I am sensing is not linguistic but translational – and beyond that, political.

There is, of course, a history to this. One thinks of how words like jihad were narrowed in Western usage to mean “holy war,” their broader theological and ethical dimensions quietly stripped away; or conversely, how certain terms are defended as benign by appeal to their most anodyne, etymological meanings, while bracketing how they are actually heard in context. The same word may present itself as metaphor, slogan, prayer, or threat – depending on who is speaking, who is listening, and what work the word is being made to do.

It is here that the instinct about Wonderland clicks back into place. The move is not uniquely Arabic; it is Humpty Dumpty’s move: control the meaning, and you control the moral frame. But the reason Arabic terms are so prominent in this moment is that the conflicts which have globalised our discourse – Israel–Palestine above all, but also Iraq, Syria, and the wider post-9/11 landscape – have carried those words into English without fully carrying their context with them. They become, in effect, linguistic migrants: visible, charged, and often unmoored.

So yes, it does say something about the modern world. Not that Arabic is uniquely problematic, but that we are living in an age where conflicts travel faster than comprehension, and where words – lifted from one history and dropped into another – become sites of struggle in their own right.

These words have crossed worlds. And in crossing, they have become unmoored enough to be contested, claimed, and weaponised. That unmooring creates opportunity: for some, to soften; for others, to sharpen; for many, to obscure.

It says something, too, about our times – about the way the Middle East has not merely intruded upon but come to dominate political, and indeed social, discourse for more than half a century; at least for as long as I have been paying attention, which is to say, for as long as I have been trying to make sense of the world and finding the same landscape returning, again and again, like a half-remembered refrain.

Let us take June 1967 as a point of departure. For a few brief weeks, the world’s gaze lifted from the humid, grinding quagmire of Indochina and fixed instead upon the sudden, almost biblical drama unfolding in the not-so-Holy Land – a war measured in days but reverberating in decades. Territory shifted, certainly; but something else shifted too: attention, imagination, the sense that this small, overburdened strip of earth had become a stage upon which the modern world would repeatedly rehearse its anxieties.

The focus has waxed and waned since, but it has never truly moved on. 1973 Oil Crisis and the realisation that the region’s tremors could rattle the global economy. The long, theatre-of-the-absurd years of hijackings and televised terror. Camp David’s fragile choreography. The Iranian Revolution, bending time backward and forward at once. The Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan. Lebanon’s fracturing. The attritional horror of the Iran–Iraq War. Kuwait and the return of great-power spectacle. Oslo’s brief, luminous promise. Then 9/11, collapsing distance altogether, followed by Afghanistan again, Iraq again – the sense of recursion, of history caught in a tightening loop.

Then the Arab Spring – hope flickering, briefly, before giving way to Syria’s abyss, to ISIS and its grotesque theatre, to the multiplication rather than the resolution of fault lines. And through it all – before it, beneath it, after it – Israel and Palestine remain: a permanent fixture in the taxonomy of torment, sans pareil, the conflict that resists conclusion, that absorbs language and returns it sharpened, refracted, or hollowed out.

It is from this long saturation – this decades-long immersion in images, slogans, translations, and retranslations – that our present arguments about words emerge. They are not sudden. They are sedimentary. Each phrase we now parse carries within it the residue of these moments, these crises, these unfinished stories.

Which is to say: when we argue about what a word means, we are never only arguing about language. We are arguing about history – compressed, contested, and still very much alive.

In That Howling Infinite, March 2026

For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany.

See also, Moral capture, conditional empathy and the failure of shock, Standing on the high moral ground is hard work! ‘ Same old stone, different rock. What’s in a word?, Shaping facts to feelings – debating intellectual dishonesty

A Lexicon of Disturbing Language

(words that travel intact, and arrive with their weather still clinging to them)

What follows is not a neutral glossary – if such a thing were even possible here – but a kind of field manual for words that arrive already aflame, freighted with history, sharpened by use, carrying within them entire arguments about the world. They are not merely descriptive; they are performative. To utter them is to place a piece on the board, to tilt the frame, to summon histories that do not politely remain in the past.

Some are legal terms that have slipped their moorings and now drift through polemic. Some are borrowed intact from Arabic or Hebrew, carrying their original cadence like an echo that translation cannot quite still. Others are modern coinages – hybrids, sometimes ungainly – that try to compress entire arguments into a single, breathless label. And a few are names – of places, of movements – that have become arguments simply by being spoken.

What unites them is not agreement but charge. They are contested, elastic, often weaponised. They do not just describe reality; they compete to define it. They do not behave like ordinary vocabulary. They travel across languages without quite translating; they narrow, expand, harden, or blur as they move. They do not simply describe events; they encode perspectives on those events. To use them is not merely to speak—it is to situate oneself, however unconsciously, within a contested moral and historical landscape.

I. Catastrophe & Historical Singularity

  • Nakba (النكبة) – literally “catastrophe.” In Arabic it could name any disaster; in English it has hardened into the disaster—1948—fixed, immovable, dense with exile and keys kept as heirlooms. It no longer describes; it declares.
  • Naksa (النكسة) – “the setback,” 1967. A softer word for a different kind of loss—diminution rather than rupture. Its retention signals an internal Arab chronology, slightly askew from the familiar “Six-Day War.”
  • Shoah (שואה) – “catastrophe” or “destruction,” used specifically for the Holocaust. Left untranslated in part to preserve reverence, in part to resist the easy metaphorisation that “Holocaust” sometimes invites.
  • Holocaust – from the Greek “burnt offering” to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, and then outward into broader usage. Its expansion has given it reach—and thinned its edges.
  • Pogrom (погром) – a Russian word meaning violent devastation, carried into English with the memory of anti-Jewish attacks in Tsarist lands. “Riot” feels too incidental; pogrom carries its own geography.

II. Legal Terms, Moral Weapons

  • Genocide – a word forged in law (Lemkin, 1944), precise in definition—intent to destroy a group. In public discourse, however, it often arrives as accusation before judgment, its moral force outrunning its legal threshold.
  • Ethnic Cleansing – deliberately imprecise, emerging particularly from the Balkan Wars of the Nineties, but predating that in Türkiye after WWI,  Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, and I dia and Pakistan in 1948. Its vagueness is its power: suggestive, elastic, difficult to refute without seeming to concede.
  • Apartheid – Afrikaans for “apartness,” rooted in South Africa but now globally mobile. Once invoked, it frames the system under discussion—analogy and indictment in a single stroke.
  • Colonialism / Settler-Colonialism – analytic frameworks that, once applied, tend to fix the narrative: indigenous and invader, permanence and removal. Illuminating, but often closing off alternative readings.

III. Resistance, Struggle, Sanctification

  • Intifada (انتفاضة) – “shaking off,” like dust from a sleeve. In English it is no longer generic; it points almost unavoidably to the Palestinian uprisings of 1987 and 2000. The word carries images—stones, tyres, and checkpoints—and a moral ambiguity that shifts with the speaker.
  • Muqāwama (مقاومة) – “resistance,” yet left untranslated to avoid the bland universality of the English. Muqāwama signals a particular ideological and regional framing—Hezbollah, Hamas, dignity under pressure.
  • Ṣumūd (صمود) – “steadfastness,” though the translation feels thin. Not an event but a posture: staying, enduring, tending olive trees under threat. Translate it, and it risks becoming sentiment; leave it, and it remains an ethic.
  • Jihad (جهاد) – “struggle,” spanning the inner and the outer. In English, that range has narrowed sharply; the word arrives intact, its semantic field diminished, sharpened toward violence.
  • Shahid (شهيد) – “witness” or “martyr.” It does not merely describe death; it consecrates it. In English, its retention often signals an attempt to preserve that sacred charge.

IV. Faith, Doctrine, and Internal Tensions

  • Kāfir (كافر) – “unbeliever,” literally one who “covers” truth. A theological category that, in polemical use, hardens into insult—a boundary drawn sharply between inside and out.
  • Fitna (فتنة) – “discord,” “trial,” “temptation.” Historically tied to early Islamic civil strife, it carries a deep anxiety about internal fracture. To invoke it is often to warn: this way lies chaos.
  • Taqiyya (تقية) – a specific Shi’a doctrine allowing concealment of belief under threat. In English polemic, however, it has been stretched well beyond its doctrinal bounds—transformed into a generalised suspicion of deception.
  • Hudna (هدنة) – “truce.” Yet when retained in Arabic, it often implies something tactical, provisional—a pause rather than a peace.
  • Fatwa (فتوى) – a legal opinion within Islamic jurisprudence, part of everyday religious life. In English, especially post-Rushdie, it has narrowed into something darker—almost synonymous with a death sentence.

V. Identity, Ideology, and the Politics of Naming

  • Zionism – a 19th-century movement for Jewish self-determination. In English today, it rarely sits neutrally: liberation for some, colonialism for others. The word refracts entirely different histories.
  • Zionist – once descriptive, now often accusatory. Its meaning depends less on definition than on tone.
  • “Zio” – a clipped, abrasive form that has shed any descriptive function. It lands as insult, not argument.
  • Aliyah (עלייה) – “ascent.” More than immigration; a movement upward, spiritually and historically. The English equivalent feels earthbound by comparison.
  • Al-‘Awda (العودة) – “the return.” In ordinary Arabic, a simple going back; in Palestinian discourse, the Right of Return—dense with memory, law, and longing. It sits beside the mafteah (مفتاح, the key), object turned symbol, continuity held in the hand.
  • Settler – on its face neutral; in contested زمین, it hardens into accusation. Biography collapses into ideology.
  • Hilltop Youth – a specific Israeli subculture that has become shorthand for a certain strain of ideological extremity and violence – detail turned symbol.

VI. Totalising Labels & Historical Echoes

  • Nazi – historically precise, rhetorically promiscuous. Now shorthand for absolute evil, its overuse both amplifying and diluting its meaning.
  • Fascist – from Mussolini’s doctrine to a generalised insult; elasticity has eroded precision.
  • “Islamo-fascist” – a hybrid, polemical term attempting to map European categories onto Islamist movements. It says as much about the speaker’s framework as the subject.

VII. Organisations as Symbols

  • Hamas (حماس) – “zeal,” and acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwama al-Islāmiyya. In English, it does not settle: government, militia, resistance, terrorism – meanings shift with the voice that utters it.
  • Hezbollah (حزب الله) – “Party of God.” Political party, armed movement, regional proxy; the name itself already contains a claim to divine alignment.
  • Da’ish (داعش) – acronym for al-Dawla al-Islāmiyya fī al-‘Irāq wa al-Shām (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant). Its use, rather than “ISIS,” often signals rejection; the group dislikes the term, so naming becomes a small act of defiance.

VIII. Circulating & Mediated Words

  • Fawda (فوضى) – “chaos,” but after its journey through Hebrew and global television (Fauda), it now carries a particular aesthetic: kinetic, morally ambiguous, intelligence-driven disorder. Chaos, but stylised.
  • Blitz – from Blitzkrieg, lightning war. In English, softened into metaphor—“media blitz”—yet still faintly haunted by sirens over London.

IX. Place as Argument

  • Al-Aqsa (الأقصى) – “the farthest.” Rarely translated, because the Arabic name carries sanctity, geography, and sovereignty in one breath.
  • Al-Quds (القدس) – “the holy,” the Arabic name for Jerusalem. Its use signals perspective: a city not just inhabited, but claimed, sanctified, contested.
  • Gaza (غزة) – a place-name that has become a metonym: war, siege, suffering, المقاومة. Geography turned symbol.
  • Sabra and Shatila (صبرا وشاتيلا) – no longer merely locations; the names themselves are the event. To say them is to accuse.

Coda: The Grammar of Conflict

What began as a request to a Chat GPT – to gather, sort, define – ends, rather predictably, in something the machine cannot quite resolve. Because the instability is not in the definitions; it is in us. In the way we reach for these words, load them, deploy them, defend them. In the way a term like genocide or Zionist or shahid can close down conversation as quickly as it opens it.

These are not just words. They are positions. Each one carries a shadow text: a history remembered, a grievance asserted, a legitimacy claimed or denied. They compress time, flatten complexity, and yet—paradoxically—expand into entire moral universes the moment they are spoken.

And so the lexicon does not settle the argument; it reveals its terrain.

Between the word and the world, as ever, falls the shadow. And it is in that shadow—where meaning slips, hardens, fractures, reforms—that these battle words continue to do their work, long after they have left the mouth that uttered them.

Lay these words out like this and a pattern emerges. Some words narrow as they travel (jihad, intifada). Some harden into proper nouns (Nakba, Shoah). Some expand until they blur (fascist, genocide). Some are left untranslated to preserve their charge (ṣumūd, muqāwama, al-‘awda).MNone of them are innocent.

They do not simply describe the world; they position the speaker within it. Each word a small act of alignment, a quiet declaration of where one stands. Between what a word once held, and what it is now made to carry, between language as description, and language as argument, there falls that same, shifting shadow. And it is there, in that narrow space, that these words continue to live, and to do their work.

These words do not behave like ordinary vocabulary. They are anchored in place but mobile in use, precise in origin but elastic in deployment. They compress centuries into syllables, turning speech into stance.

To speak them is rarely innocent. Each carries a shadow text- unspoken assumptions, moral alignments, historical claims. They do not simply describe reality; they compete to author it.

And so the disturbance lies here: between what a word once meant, what it now does, and what we need it to prove. In that gap – narrow, shifting, and charged – language itself becomes a kind of battleground, where meaning is not fixed but fought over, again and again.

In That Howling Infinite, March 2026

The following is an essay published in The Australian by economist and commentator Henry Ergas, whom we have republished often in In That Howling Infinite.

Henry Ergas’s essay is essentially an argument about language, memory, and the way slogans prepare the emotional ground for violence long before violence itself occurs. His central claim is that chanting “Globalise the intifada” cannot be dismissed as harmless political speech or reduced to a neutral dictionary definition of intifada as merely “struggle” or “shaking off”. Words, he argues, accumulate historical meaning, and by now intifada is inseparable in the public imagination from the Palestinian uprisings associated with suicide bombings, bus attacks, café massacres, and the Second Intifada’s civilian bloodshed.

Many charged words once had ordinary meanings — holocaust once referred to a burnt offering, pogrom to devastation, nakba to catastrophe. But history hardens language. Certain events become so dominant that they permanently colonise a word’s emotional and moral resonance. Linguists call this “prototype entrenchment”: when people hear “Holocaust”, they do not think of ritual sacrifice; when they hear “intifada”, they do not think of generic resistance. They think of televised violence, bombings, and dead civilians. To insist otherwise is effectively to demand that language forget history.

From there he moves into the philosophy of slogans. A slogan, he argues, is not a precise sentence but a compressed moral universe: heroes, enemies, threats, permissions, identities. He argues that slogans often function through deliberate ambiguity. Their literal wording provides plausible deniability, while their implied meaning carries the emotional force. “Globalise the intifada” can be defended in polite settings as meaning “internationalise the Palestinian struggle”, yet in the street — shouted rhythmically in crowds — it evokes something far darker. The deniability is not a flaw in the slogan; it is part of its design.

The essay’s second movement is about repetition and crowds. Here Ergas draws heavily on Victor Klemperer, the Jewish diarist and philologist who documented how Nazi language gradually normalised extremism. Repetition, he argues, changes moral atmosphere. The first time a slogan shocks; the hundredth time it becomes ordinary. What was once unsayable becomes ambient, then accepted, then difficult to challenge without seeming hysterical or repressive. Language shifts incrementally until society adjusts itself around ideas it would once have recoiled from.

He then turns to crowd psychology, arguing that chants synchronise people emotionally and suppress individual hesitation. In a crowd, slogans cease merely to communicate ideas; they generate collective identity and emotional fusion. The chant creates an “us” and a “them”, and in doing so hardens moral boundaries. Chants such as “Globalise the intifada” are therefore not simply political expressions but mechanisms for creating an atmosphere in which violence becomes imaginable, permissible, even inevitable.

The essay culminates in the claim that the historical relationship between inflammatory slogans and violence is not accidental. Once a society becomes accustomed to rhetoric associated with past massacres, the gap between speech and action narrows. Ergas is careful not to claim that chanting directly causes violence in a mechanical sense; rather, he argues that it conditions people emotionally and morally to accept or rationalise it when it arrives.

Underlying the piece is a broader warning against what Ergas sees as liberal complacency about language — the comforting belief that “they’re only words”. He rejects that entirely. Words, especially ritualised and repeated words, shape moral perception. They define enemies, normalise hostility, and gradually acclimatise societies to what once seemed intolerable. His conclusion is that pretending not to hear the violent historical echoes within “Globalise the intifada” is not tolerance or sophistication, but a dangerous refusal to confront what language is doing in public life.

Chanting ‘intifada’ is a dangerous act that shortens the distance to violence

Henry Ergas, The Australian, May 8, 2026
It took scarcely a moment, once “Globalise the intifada” began to be chanted on our streets and campuses, for its champions to insist the phrase meant nothing of the sort. Intifada, they patiently explained, simply meant struggle; the slogan was no more than a plea to “internationalise the cause”. According to the Palestine Action Group and its Islamist allies, who rallied in Sydney earlier this week, to claim otherwise is to misread the Arabic.

The defence is not merely intellectually dishonest; it reveals why “it is only words” is among the most dangerous sentences people permit themselves to believe.

As an Arabic noun, intifada does indeed possess an old, generic sense: a shaking, a dusting off. That is hardly unusual: holocaust once meant nothing more than a burnt offering; pogrom, in Russian, mere devastation; nakba, in Arabic, a misfortune ranging from mishap to calamity.

Words such as these begin life as ordinary common nouns. But each was claimed by a particular event: from 1945, the Holocaust; from 1987, the intifada. After that, the generic sense survives only in the dictionaries. It does not survive in the public mind.

Linguists call the process “prototype entrenchment”. The mind, hearing a word, reaches for the most vivid, most repeated, most emotionally charged instance and treats that as what the word stands for. Once the historical event has acquired that role, the bare definition recorded in the dictionary can no longer be peeled away from the moral, emotional and political charge the word has come to convey. To hear “Globalise the Holocaust” in 2026 and think “proliferate the supply of burnt offerings” is to misunderstand spoken English.

Asking language to forget history

Exactly the same is true with intifada. Its prototype, in the global imagination, is not struggle in the abstract: it is two uprisings whose iconography, indelibly embedded by the violence that broke out in September 2000, includes suicide bombings of buses, restaurants and a Passover Seder. That is what the word now carries, not at its margins but as its core. The defender of “Globalise the intifada” is in effect asking language itself to forget history. But human communication does not work that way.

The point is more general: a slogan is not a sentence, and the test of whether one has understood it is not whether one can render it in a dictionary gloss. It compresses an entire moral world – heroes, villains, demands, threats – into a phrase made for chanting and succeeds by being two things at once: precise enough to be grasped, ambiguous enough to be denied.

Paul Grice, one of the 20th century’s most important linguistic philosophers, gave the manoeuvre its name: implicature, the part of communication that travels not by what one says but by what one obviously means. To remark “I am not going to call him corrupt” is to inform the room that he is corrupt.

The structure is double-jointed: tested under cross-examination, the speaker retreats to what was literally uttered and accuses the critic of putting words in his mouth. The implicature does the work; the deniability provides the shelter. “Globalise the intifada” provides a textbook case.

A public forum, called “Why it’s right to say: globalise the intifada”, at a park in the Sydney suburb of Redfern, after City of Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore announced council had revoked the organisers’ booking of City of Sydney-owned venue.

A public forum, called “Why it’s right to say: globalise the intifada”, at a park in the Sydney suburb of Redfern, after City of Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore announced council had revoked the organisers’ booking of City of Sydney-owned venue.

Pressed in a courtroom, the chant is glossed away as “internationalise the struggle”. Chanted from a stage on a Saturday afternoon, it means burnt buses, bombed cafes, murdered children.

The audiences who hear it – on both sides – hear that second meaning with perfect clarity. A slogan that everyone really took to mean only “internationalise the struggle” would hardly stir emotions; what does the stirring is precisely the violent imagery the speaker can also deny.

The genuinely dangerous moment, however, is not the slogan in isolation; it comes once the slogan begins to repeat.

The genuinely dangerous moment, however, is not the slogan in isolation; it comes once the slogan begins to repeat.

Repetition is normalisation

Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist who retained his sanity during the Third Reich by recording its language in his diary, observed that the regime’s most powerful instrument was its vocabulary, not its decrees: a handful of words, drilled into daily life, did more to remake ordinary Germans than any speech. “Fanatisch”, once unambiguously pejorative, became under repetition a term of praise. “Aktion” became the bureaucratic veil behind which mass shootings disappeared – to incite an aktion was to incite the slaughter of millions of Jews, without actually saying so. Those shifts required no argument, only iteration.

Repetition is, in short, normalisation: hear a phrase once and it can shock; hear it for the 200th time and it has become part of the air we breathe. The extreme becomes ambient; the ambient, obvious; the obvious, embarrassing to question. Thus, each repetition of “Globalise the intifada” wears the menace in rather than out. The cost of saying it falls while the cost of objecting rises. What was once unsayable becomes ever easier to say.

Repetition does its most lethal work, however, not on the solitary newspaper reader but on bodies in a crowd. Slogans are designed not to be murmured but to be chanted rhythmically in unison. Once a phrase enters a crowd, it ceases to function as communication and begins to function as synchronisation. Voices align, breath aligns, sometimes feet align. Individuals shed the small frictions of doubt and hesitation that, in private, would have given them pause.

Anti-zionism group protest at Town Hall with a sign reading

Anti-zionism group protest at Town Hall with a sign reading “Globalise the Intifada”.

Sociologists call this “collective effervescence” and anyone who has been in a stadium at the right moment has felt it. What was an idea in a single skull becomes a felt fact across thousands. Disagreement is not refuted; in the passion of the moment it simply ceases to be available.

The tool that drills the hatred

This is what the pioneering scholars of mass behaviour – Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Elias Canetti – meant by a crowd “having a kind of mind”. Not a mind in the literal sense but something far more dangerous: a temporarily uniform attention, a uniform emotion and – crucially – a uniform sense of who is “us” and who is “them”. Slogans are the instrument that does the tuning: and they are, as Canetti observed in the rise of Nazi antisemitism, the tool that drills in the hatred.

Put these mechanisms together and the result is not innocent speech but the manufacture of an atmosphere. A word historically captured by a violent prototype, dressed up in a deniable paraphrase and chanted by bodies whose private hesitations have been switched off – that is the recipe by which a society talks itself into permission.

It tells one group who it is by telling it who its mortal enemy is. And it tells “the other” – nowadays “the Zios” – that they are no longer part of the moral community. It hardens the shouters against dialogue and compromise. And it thickens the air with the sense that violence, when it comes, will have been only the natural conclusion of what everyone already knew.

The historical record is unambiguous: where crowds are taught to chant a word that already names a massacre, the distance between word and violence, speech and act, never grows it shortens.

The claim that slogans are innocent has always been a flattering one because it relieves us of the duty to attend to what is being said. It allows us to continue repeating comforting platitudes about freedom of expression. But words are not inert, and chanted words least of all.

Whatever else “Globalise the intifada” may mean in the dictionary, what it means in the street is what we must be willing to hear. Pretending otherwise is not tolerance. It is how societies learn, slowly and without noticing, to live with the unforgivable.

Chaos without a compass … Donald Trump’s Persian “excursion”

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Without seeming to realise what he has done, Trump has exposed the raw fact that the US is no longer a full-spectrum military hegemon able to project power simultaneously in multiple theatres across the planet. It has superb armed forces and technology – but that is not the same thing.                                Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph, 11 March 2026

The Twentieth Century’s “Thirty Years War”, the war of my generation, was waged in South East Asia initially by the colonialist France, and then by neo-imperialist America. France’s war ended in defeat and ignominy for French arms and prestige, and a partition that was but a prelude to America’s Vietnam quagmire. [In In That Howling Infinite, see Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey]

America’s War has since been defined as chaos without compass. It was inevitable that acclaimed historian Barbara Tuchman would chose it as one of her vignettes in The March of Folly, her celebrated study of débacles through the ages characterised by what would appear to be a single-minded determination amounting to tunnel vision that is akin to stupidity.

As Tuchman saw it, exceptionalism and manifest destiny are historically proven folly. Self-belief in American power and righteousness has historically created delusions of grandeur, obstinate attachment to unserviceable goals, stubbornness, and an inability to learn from past mistakes or even admitting error – a wooden-headedness that often sees the US persisting on erroneous paths that lead to loss of blood, treasure, reputation and moral standing.

Why did the US’ experience of backing the wrong horse in China in the forties not provide an analogy and warning in Vietnam in the fifties? Why did the experience in Vietnam not inform it with respect to Iran right up to the fall of the Shah in 1978? And why hadn’t it learned anything when it stumbled into Salvador in the eighties? And then, of course, we arrive in the 21st century with no-exit, never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Middle East that end in retreat and betrayal with the ‘freedom-loving’ USA still backing the wrong horses by supporting autocrats and tyrants against their own people.

Tuchman was describing a particular pathology of statecraft-  the spectacle of governments pursuing policies visibly contrary to their own interests while possessing the intelligence, experience and evidence to know better. Power, in such circumstances, is not lacking. Direction is.

In the American case, she saw something close to a recurring pattern. Self-belief in American power and virtue could generate a peculiar strategic blindness – delusions of grandeur, obstinate attachment to unserviceable goals, and a refusal to learn from past mistakes or even admit error. The result was a form of national tunnel vision: the conviction that sufficient determination and force must eventually bend reality to American purposes. Too often the outcome was the opposite — the expenditure of blood, treasure, prestige and moral authority in pursuit of objectives that proved unattainable.

It is difficult not to hear the echo of Tuchman’s diagnosis when considering the widening conflict now unfolding between Israel, the United States and Iran. The scale of the military campaign alone is remarkable. Australian commentator and security expert David David Kilcullen’s description in an article in The Australian, republished below, reads almost like a catalogue of twenty-first-century warfare: thousands of sorties in the first hundred hours, stealth fighters dismantling air defences, B-2 bombers opening corridors through Iranian airspace, naval engagements stretching from the Persian Gulf toward the Indian Ocean, tankers burning in the Strait of Hormuz while drones and missiles ripple across the wider region. Cyberattacks strike data centres, satellite navigation systems are jammed, and the conflict unfolds simultaneously across air, sea, cyberspace and orbit.

In strictly operational terms the campaign appears formidable. Iranian air defences have been degraded, missile launchers and command networks methodically targeted, naval assets hunted down. Western air power increasingly operates across Iranian skies with relative freedom. In the narrow military sense, success seems plausible.

Yet wars are not judged by tactical success but by political outcome. And here the picture grows strangely indistinct.

The most striking criticism of the conflict — articulated most clearly by Aris Roussinos in an article in Unherd republished below –  is that no one appears able to define what victory would mean. Possible objectives multiply: regime change in Tehran; destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme; the degradation of Iranian military capabilities; or a wider strategic aim of constraining Chinese influence across Eurasia. Each implies a different war. Regime change requires internal collapse or occupation. Nuclear disarmament ultimately requires diplomacy and verification. Strategic competition with China belongs largely to another theatre altogether.

The result is a peculiar strategic ambiguity: immense military force applied in pursuit of ends that remain fluid, sometimes contradictory, occasionally improvised after the fact.

Roussinos therefore invokes an earlier historical analogy: the Suez crisis of 1956 – as have other commentators. That operation was militarily successful yet politically disastrous. British and French forces seized the canal zone quickly and efficiently, only to discover that the political objective — preserving imperial influence — collapsed under international pressure. Today’s conflict, he suggests, may represent a kind of reverse Suez: a large military campaign unfolding before the political objective has even been clearly articulated.

Hovering behind this debate is another and more recent ghost: Iraq. Kilcullen’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan informs his caution. Removing regimes, he notes in an article in The Australian, is often easier than replacing them. The Taliban returned after twenty years of war. Iraq descended into sectarian violence after Saddam’s fall. Libya’s regime collapsed quickly but left behind a fractured state.

Iran, however, is not Libya. It is a nation of ninety million people with a deep historical identity and a political culture shaped by both imperial memory and the Shiite narratives of martyrdom that animate the Islamic Republic. Foreign attack may weaken the regime — but it may also strengthen the nationalist solidarity on which that regime depends.

Here the shadow of Iraq becomes unavoidable. The question that haunted that war returns once more: what happens the day after victory?

Supporters of the campaign insist that what appears chaotic may in fact be the culmination of long-term strategy. Israeli intelligence has spent years penetrating Iranian networks, sabotaging nuclear infrastructure and eliminating key figures. Others place the conflict within the larger geopolitical contest with China, arguing that weakening Iran constrains Beijing’s long-term influence across Eurasia.

Yet even these arguments leave uncertainty intact. If the central contest lies with China, the Middle East becomes a dangerous diversion. If nuclear disarmament is the aim, diplomacy will eventually be unavoidable. If regime collapse is the goal, history suggests that air power alone rarely produces it.

Meanwhile the war itself expands. Hezbollah strikes from Lebanon. Houthi forces threaten shipping in the Red Sea. Missiles fall across Gulf states. Cyberattacks ripple outward through global infrastructure. Modern conflicts rarely remain geographically contained; the networks of trade, alliances and proxy forces ensure that violence spreads outward in widening circles.

Kilcullen’s observation, delivered with the weary clarity of experience, captures the problem succinctly: war is inherently complex and non-linear, unleashing forces that no strategist can fully predict or control.

Old phrases return easily in such circumstances. One of them comes from Cicero: Inter arma silent leges — among arms the laws fall silent. Yet when law falls silent, prudence often follows. The machinery of war — alliances, domestic politics, military planning — acquires its own momentum. Decisions initially framed as temporary expedients become permanent commitments. Vietnam began with advisers; Afghanistan with a punitive expedition; Iraq with inspections and resolutions. History rarely begins with the word “quagmire.”

What is most striking in the debate surrounding the present war is not the intensity of disagreement but the depth of uncertainty. Some believe the Iranian regime is brittle and nearing collapse; others believe foreign attack will strengthen it. Both views rely on historical analogy; neither fits perfectly.

Which brings us back, inevitably, to Tuchman. Her great theme was not that governments make mistakes — that is the normal condition of politics — but that they sometimes continue down dangerous paths even after the warning signs become visible.

Whether the present conflict will prove another example of such folly remains to be seen. It may yet reveal a coherent strategy whose logic becomes clear only with time. Or it may confirm once again Tuchman’s darker insight about the persistence of wooden-headedness in the councils of power.

For the moment the war continues: vast in scale, impressive in its technology, uncertain in its purpose. And somewhere in the background, like an echo from another era, the old phrase lingers once again – chaos without a compass.

And then, of course, there’s Trump. To return to Ambrose-Pritchard, who opened this essay: “So which will prevail in the tug of war within Trump’s personality: his fear of losing the US midterm election? Or his injured vanity and his psychological need to command “escalation dominance”, always and everywhere?

For other articles on Iran in In That Howling Infinite, see: Messing with the Mullahs – America’s phoney war? The quality of mercy … looking beyond Iran’s ghost republic and “Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom, and The end of the line … an epitaph for a tyrant

Trump’s reverse Suez

Starmer should beware another quagmire

Aris Roussinos, Unherd,  March 7 2026 

As we approach the 70th anniversary of the Suez Crisis, from which France’s political class learned to never again let their country’s security become subject to America’s veto, and Britain’s to never again distinguish between its own national interests and Washington’s whims, it is worth remembering that — judged purely as a military operation — the seizure of the Canal Zone was highly successful. The Canal itself, and a buffer zone around it, were captured within days, with limited casualties; the operation’s technical proficiency was praised by the First Sea Lord, Lord Mountbatten, even as he twice attempted to resign in protest at the political folly of it all.

Yet success or failure will be a harder judgment to make for historians of Trump’s own latest Middle East adventure, which is already starting to look like a reverse Suez: its exposure of the limitations of pure military power; the domestic and international hostility; the fragility of alliance systems lazily assumed to be solid; and the wider overtones of an empire wildly overreaching in an attempt to stave off terminal decline. The difficulty in ascertaining, when this ends, whether or not Trump has achieved his war aims rests simply in the fact that the aims so far put forward have differed wildly, and are often mutually contradictory. The Suez Operation possessed a clearly defined military goal which succeeded, and a wider political one, which failed. As it stands, the Trump administration appears in possession of neither.

The broader arguments against the current conflict were most memorably made by Trump himself, campaigning as an anti-war candidate who would keep the United States out of costly and unmanageable Middle Eastern entanglements. His Vice-President, JD Vance, once articulately made the case against this very war. Having successfully demolished his own policy platform, it is difficult to determine what would now count as victory for Trump. The desired outcomes given, at the time of writing, have ranged from the maximalist deliverance of “freedom” to the Iranian people through full regime change in Tehran, through to inspiring an ideal “Venezuela solution” in which more amenable military figures launch an internal coup, then perhaps installing a Shah, ruling Iran remotely from the more stable comfort of Maryland. Or else simply destroying Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity (which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” in June last year). This scrambling for post facto rationales appears to derive from the fact that Iran did not immediately fold, as Trump apparently assumed it would, with the assassination of its leadership: unlike today’s America, it is not a personalist regime.

Yet if America’s war aims are nebulous from a lack of preparation, Israel’s appear haphazard by design. Summing up Netanyahu’s goals, the Israeli strategic analyst Danny Citrinowicz observes that “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future [or] the stability of Iran.” Whatever Netanyahu’s aspirations, a heavily armed but leaderless Iran, engulfed in chaos, represents a strategic threat rather than a victory for the wider West. In this, it appears that America has launched a war alongside, and at the behest of, a notionally junior partner with wildly divergent goals, and which Washington has already admitted it is unable to rein in. For British politicians, all the warning lights should now be blinking red: even the Iraq War, a historic disaster, was vastly better conceived, planned and resourced than this.

“Even the Iraq War, a historic disaster, was vastly better conceived, planned and resourced than this.”

And if America’s war aims are vague and contradictory, their proposed means of achieving these desired outcomes are too — including Iranian submission through aerial bombing alone — a result which has never yet been obtained in the century-long history of air power — through launching a peripheral revolt in which Kurdish and perhaps Baluchi separatists act as America and Israel’s boots on the ground. The best that can currently be said for Trump’s gamble is that the desired end-state is so nebulous in its imagining, and the approach so scattergun, that almost any off-ramp can be spun as a victory by his imperial court and its attendant sycophants. With no single, coherent outcome proposed, Trump can claim, as he already has, that the war has already succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of planners. This is even as he is warning his base that victory may yet take some weeks, and cautioning Congress that “it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary”.

The war was, it seems, resourced for a few days of intensive bombing, with little anticipation of Iran striking back against Gulf states, and American early-warning facilities, with its arsenal of low-cost drones. Policy is now being made on the hoof, with senior administration officials “at each other’s throats” on the need for ground troops. CENTCOM, overseeing the war, has requested an increase in military intelligence analysts “to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days but likely through September”. The spectacle of a days-long special military operation, entered into with an over-confident faith in hard power achieving a swift political solution, then dragging on interminably, is all too familiar. For Vladimir Putin, certainly, America’s unforced error of embroiling itself in a quagmire US presidents have spent a half-century studiously avoiding is a godsend, depleting Western munitions stocks, replenishing the Kremlin’s coffers through rising oil and gas prices, and weakening Europe’s negotiating power.

Judged on strict military terms, though, the operation has chalked up notable successes. Iranian ballistic missile launches have slowed, and no doubt the aerial onslaught is depleting Iran’s arsenal of both munitions and launchers. The looming switch from stand-off munitions to less sophisticated bombs implies that air superiority has already been achieved, as Israel declared last weekend, or will soon be achieved, as the White House more cautiously claims. Whether or not Israel, the US and the Gulf states will run out of interceptor munitions before Iran runs out of missiles is a matter of speculation for even the best-informed analysts. Even as Pentagon sources brief concern over their dwindling arsenal, the Trump administration, for what it is worth, claims that it possesses “unlimited” stocks of munitions for a war that could last “forever” — while simultaneously blaming Ukraine for running down its weapons stockpile.

The most recent American attempt to exert its will in the region through air power alone, against Yemen’s Houthis, who are vastly weaker than Iran, entirely failed. The Houthis have not yet joined the war, as Hezbollah now has in response to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon: the prospects for escalation grow wider by the day. As for boots on the ground, the much-briefed claims that Iran’s Kurds are willing to join in the war against Tehran remains debatable. The Kurdish Regional Government of Northern Iraq, which hosts exiled Iranian Kurdish militias, has been warned by Iran that their entry into the war will invite an Iranian response, and has stressed its neutrality as a result. It has not even been a month since Washington abandoned its last Kurdish partners: they must now judge whether this time round America will prove a more dependable ally.

For all the military risks involved, it is very possible, though far from certain, that US and Israeli bombing can bring about the collapse of the Iranian state, though what happens next is anyone’s guess. The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, reportedly cautioned before the strikes began “about the potential downsides of launching a major military operation targeting Iran”, citing “the scale, complexity and potential for US casualties of such a mission”, and asserting he was “​​unable to predict what the result of a regime change operation would be”. Both the Iranians and the Americans have already claimed to have received, and rejected, the other’s request for a ceasefire, with Israel reportedly seeking assurances Washington is not already seeking private talks. In any case, the Iranians have good cause to be wary of negotiating with Trump, given that their previous rounds of negotiations ended in American and Israeli bombing. Indeed, the current war began with Israel’s aerial assassination of the country’s political leadership in the middle of negotiations which, the Trump administration later boasted, were merely a ruse. Some of America’s intended new rulers of Iran, Trump has claimed, have already been killed by Israel. Having launched a war of choice, at a time convenient to him, Trump may now find ending it a far less simple affair.

As it stands, it is in Iran’s interest to drag out the war for as long as possible, expanding it across the wider region, increasing the economic disruption to American allies, and capitalising on the widespread hostility to the war. As both Trump’s anti-interventionist base and the Democrat opposition rightly proclaim, this war has been entered into without any coherent plan, seemingly through Israel’s chain-ganging of the United States into military action it would not otherwise have chosen, an observation claimed as antisemitic by Israel’s advocates in the United States yet which has nevertheless also — bafflingly — been offered as proof of the war’s necessity by America’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton, and most recently by Trump himself.

As for Netanyahu, he exultantly claims that bringing America into the war is something he has “yearned to do for 40 years”. The Democrats, repeatedly briefingthe attack line that Trump was “the first president stupid enough” to be cajoled by Netanyahu into war with Iran, have now been gifted a path to success in midterm elections which may yet overlap with the conflict itself. When as cynical a politician as Gavin Newsom feels safe questioning future military support to the “apartheid state” Israel, demanding from the podium “Why did we help Israel kill little girls?”, we see the cracks in America’s only true special relationship widening into a gulf. This war was, most probably, Netanyahu’s last chance to enlist the fading superpower against his decades-long foe. Whether it improves Israel’s long-term strategic position is doubtful in the extreme  — but none of this is Britain’s problem.

It goes against instinct to praise the Prime Minister for his lawyerly prevarication. Yet given all the risks and uncertainties inherent to this war the arguments against joining America and Israel’s wild gamble are as strong as can be imagined. Just weeks ago, the same Trump administration which now chides us for our caution was threatening to annex European territory, and mocking our participation in its previous disastrous wars. Even if we exclude, as the Prime Minister does not, the moral factors, Starmer is entirely correct to say that this is a war with “no viable plan”. It appears that the Prime Minister, through his twin flaws of excessive deference to both European opinion and international law, may yet be dragged, unwillingly, towards the national interest. We already have our own war to worry about, in which the desire or ability of the United States to negotiate a satisfactory conclusion looks as doubtful from London as Washington’s reliability as a negotiating partner must look from Moscow. American realists may be correct in stating that the Ukraine war, in which Britain is already dangerously over-exposed, is not a core Washington interest — but neither is Netanyahu’s latest war of choice a British or European interest. Simply put, there is no advantage for Britain in joining this distant conflict, and the national interest, as in the Gaza War of which this is a vast escalation, remains in staying out of the affair as far as possible.

It is absurd, then, to watch Reform politicians, so recently bemoaning Britain’s political enmeshment with distant Middle Eastern conflicts and diaspora grievances, caper onstage with Israeli and Iranian monarchist flags, demanding our involvement in this mess. Farage’s hiring as foreign policy adviser of the neoconservative lobbyist Alan Mendoza, who has never yet seen a disastrous war he did not wish to join, was a rare deviation from his sharp political instincts, and a warning of the major strategic risks inherent in a Reform government, however much their domestic agenda may appeal. The Greens will rightly benefit from this misstep, as will, on Reform’s Right, Restore, edging towards a Powellite indifference to distant wars. If he holds his course, so will Starmer too.

The dilemma now for the Prime Minister is whether or not to join the emergent European policy of defensive neutrality, protecting national and continental interests while refusing involvement in the wider campaign. Yet the almost wholesale capture of the British security establishment by an Atlanticist ethos indistinguishable from vassalage, along with the looming American usage of British bases for offensive purposes, will complicate this. Starmer initially refused to permit offensive raids to launch from British territory, a policy which, in Spain’s case, has seen Trump threaten to use its bases anyway. Such threats would appear less stark, no doubt, if Britain had not already placed the sovereignty of Diego Garcia under question, but we cannot all boast the strategic wisdom of David Lammy’s formerbrain. If allowing British bases to be used cannot be prevented, Starmer can either explain why, or — politically more likely — spin a plausible rationale for active involvement, attempting to make a virtue out of compulsion.

Yet there is another path, the one shown by Emmanuel Macron, now expanding across the continent the French-led defence axis initially trialled with Greece. At the same time, Macron is drawing a sharp dividing line between the interests of Europe and her many nation states, and of the erratic empire which alternately threatens and cajoles us. Seventy years ago, a misadventure in the Middle East saw Britain and France adopt opposing positions on American domination, which led us to this impasse. Through an accident of British politics, it falls to as unlikely a figure as Starmer to make just such another historic choice

How US-Israeli strikes on Iran in ever-widening war could spark a global crisis

Israel’s first air-to-air combat kill signals what it has planned.

Israel’s first air-to-air combat kill signals what it has planned.

On the first night of US-Israeli strikes against Iran last weekend, a friend and former colleague in Dubai sent me a video from his rooftop. Emirati air defences had just intercepted an Iranian drone across the street, metres from his house.

A loud explosion rattled his windows. I could hear car alarms in the background and his wife and young children expressing concern as he calmly escorted them down from the roof. I asked if I could do anything to help, and he came back with one word: “Exfil?”

“Exfiltration” – evacuation from the most heavily targeted areas – is a priority for some locals, most expats and many governments including Australia, which this week mounted one of the largest consular operations in our history.

Leaving not an option

For Iranian civilians facing intensive air and missile strikes after weeks of regime crackdowns that have already killed thousands, leaving is not an option.

Friends elsewhere in the region have decided to stay put, concluding their best bet is to shelter in place. In any case, with US and Israeli aircraft bombing all over Iran, and Iranian rockets striking targets across the Middle East, most have nowhere to go.

Evacuation flights have been made more difficult by sudden airspace closures given lack of warning for the attack, which began with Israeli air strikes while Iran and the US were still in negotiations, right after Omani mediators had announced a possible breakthrough.

Apart from its suddenness – despite a massive US military build-up across the past month, Israel struck without warning – the main feature of the conflict so far is its scope, scale and intensity.

This is by far the largest air campaign mounted by Israel and one of the largest conducted by the US, on a par with the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 or the initial air campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A group of men inspects the ruins of a police station in Tehran struck amid the US-Israel barrage on Iran. Picture: AP

A group of men inspects the ruins of a police station in Tehran struck amid the US-Israel barrage on Iran. Picture: AP

Already, within the first 100 hours, US aircraft had launched thousands of sorties, destroying hundreds of missile sites, command posts and air defences across Iran. Whatever its political framing, in practical terms this is a full-scale war.

The initial main effort was to establish air superiority, with F-35, F-22 and F-15E aircraft destroying Iranian warplanes and air base infrastructure. On the fourth day of the war, an Israeli F-35 shot down an Iranian fighter jet over northern Tehran, the first air-to-air combat kill by an F-35, and Israel’s first such aerial victory in 40 years.

The take-down of Iran’s air force was followed by the destruction of its air defences by US B-2 bombers using stand-off missiles, opening the skies for follow-on attacks by B-1 and B-52 bombers. These non-stealthy aircraft carry a massive bomb load. B-52s have been involved in the campaign already, releasing air-launched missiles up to 370km from their targets. Once Iran’s surface-to-air missiles are suppressed, however, the bombers can operate directly overhead, hugely increasing the weight of bombs dropped.

Expect more

We can expect US and Israeli aircraft, once they can operate with impunity, to further ramp up strikes, roaming the skies over Iran and hitting any identified threat. In effect, they will be working their way down the priority list as successive categories of higher-value targets are destroyed, a process that may take weeks.

A second task – destruction of Iran’s offensive missile launchers, command-and-control systems and storage and production facilities – is now the focus. Israeli and US forces are working in tandem, with Israel focusing on northern and western Iran, and US aircraft striking sites in the country’s central and southern regions.

A satellite image shows damage at Garmdarah missile base in northern Iran on March 4 following precision strikes. Picture: AFP/Satellite Image (c) 2026 Vantor

A satellite image shows damage at Garmdarah missile base in northern Iran on March 4 following precision strikes. Picture: AFP/Satellite Image (c) 2026 Vantor

This aspect of the campaign has been less successful so far. Iran is still launching large numbers of missiles against Haifa, Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, and many are successfully evading Israeli interceptors. Other missiles have been destroyed over urban centres, with falling debris causing casualties on the ground. In strictly military terms, the campaign is going well for Israel and the US. But other aspects of the war have been more problematic.

The killing of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other senior leaders in the first strike may have been intended to decapitate Iran’s regime and dislocate its response. But key leaders such as foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and Ali Larijani – former speaker of parliament, leader of the deadly anti-democracy crackdown in January and head of Iran’s national security council – are alive and in place.

Khamenei appears to have delegated launch authority to lower-level commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose aerospace forces control parts of Iran’s missile arsenal, and the Artesh, Iran’s regular military which controls air defence. Junior commanders, cut off from Tehran in the first hours of the war, are making their own target selections, launching missiles and drones as far afield as Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan. Closer in, Persian Gulf states such as Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates have been particularly hard hit.

Hiogjh-ranking members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) attend an unveiling ceremony of an IRGC underground facility that houses hundreds of domestically built precision-strike missiles. Picture: IMAGO / ZUMA

Hiogjh-ranking members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) attend an unveiling ceremony of an IRGC underground facility that houses hundreds of domestically built precision-strike missiles. Picture: IMAGO / ZUMA

Iranian missiles are targeting civilian infrastructure, diplomatic posts, military bases, oil refineries, gas terminals, hotels, houses and shopping centres. Desalination plants – critical in a water-poor region – also have been targeted. Iran’s Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, seems to have launched the drone that hit Britain’s Akrotiri Air Base in Cyprus; in response, Israel is bombing Beirut, and Israeli troops and tanks have pushed farther into Lebanon, widening the war and inflicting several hundred casualties.

War on water

The war at sea has expanded even further. US and Israeli strikes destroyed the Iranian navy’s command post at Bandar Abbas this week and damaged at least nine warships including Iran’s sole drone carrier, the IRIS Shahid Bagheri, along with several Soleimani-class corvettes, smaller warships capable of operating independently or supporting fast attack craft in the Persian Gulf.

In a major escalation, the larger Moudge-class frigate IRIS Dena was sunk off Sri Lanka by a torpedo from a US submarine, as it made its way back to Iran after joint naval exercises with India, with the loss of up to 150 lives. In another grim milestone, this was the first time since 1945 that a US submarine has sunk an enemy warship by torpedo.

At least 10 oil tankers are now ablaze or sunk in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint that accounts for more than 20 per cent of global oil flow. Commercial shipping has fallen to almost nothing.

On Thursday, Iran allowed a Chinese-flagged tanker through the strait, and the US has offered insur­ance and naval escort for other vessels in the area, but shipping companies and captains are understandably reluctant to run the risk, triggering a 90 per cent drop in traffic.

Further west, Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen are restarting their efforts – suspended after last year’s Gaza ceasefire – to interdict shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb, the chokepoint at the southern end of the Red Sea. The Houthis also appear to have launched missiles into Saudi Arabia, which also has been hit by rockets from Iran itself.

Also this week, a Russian-flagged oil tanker was attacked in the western Mediterranean by a Ukrainian sea drone. Ukrainian attacks continue against Russian ships in the Black Sea, underscoring the connection between conflict in Europe and the newly opened front in the Middle East.

On the ground

On land, there is no sign yet of US or Israeli ground troops entering the war, though Israeli aircraft have begun targeting Iranian internal security forces such as the IRGC and its paramilitary arm, the Basij, which might be used to suppress an uprising. US media outlets are reporting CIA plans to arm and support Kurdish separatists against the regime. Kurdish leaders have denied this, even as Kurdish troops in Iraq are massingon the Iranian border, and there are unconfirmed reports of conflict inside northwestern Iran.

Other dissident groups – the anti-regime democracy movement and ethnic separatist Arab, Azeri and Baloch – suffered severely in January’s regime crackdown but may move against the government if the conflict continues. Such efforts almost certainly will fail unless these groups receive arms and support from external players.

Pakistan, which shares a border with Iran and is allied with Tehran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia, is committed to a war against its own former proxy, the Afghan Taliban, but could join in if the war escalates further.

Israeli police and emergency teams respond at the scene after a missile strike hit buildings in Tel Aviv’s Gush Dan area, in Israel, as Iran's missile attacks in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes continue. Picture: Getty Images

Israeli police and emergency teams respond at the scene after a missile strike hit buildings in Tel Aviv’s Gush Dan area, in Israel, as Iran’s missile attacks in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes continue. Picture: Getty Images

If a ground war does develop, it may look something like the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when intelligence and special warfare teams worked with Afghan allies on the ground, combining with US air power to overthrow the Taliban in less than seven weeks.

Conventional US ground forces are politically problematic for President Donald Trump, given deep scepticism among his MAGA base about foreign wars, American casualties and Israeli intentions.

On the other hand, CIA or special operations teams – given their small numbers and low profile – are seen as less risky, easier to justify, and thus the preferred option.

As in Afghanistan, the question for any ground campaign is what comes next. The potential for full-scale civil war inside Iran, accompanied by state fragmentation and a region-wide flood of refugees, was on the minds of diplomats and intelligence officers with whom I spoke this week, even as the conflict’s future remains unclear.

Taking down the regime is one thing; standing up a stable successor is entirely another, as any Iraq or Afghanistan veteran knows. Many leaders are clearly concerned about this.

All of this makes the current conflict more than just a third Gulf war. Countries that escaped previous conflicts are now suffering direct attacks, up-ending regional relationships as governments scramble to protect their populations. Closure of the Strait of Hormuz involves superpower interests and the global economy much more than previous rounds of conflict. The longer the war lasts, the greater the risk that it escalates even further, pulling more countries in.

International response

Broader responses have been mixed. European countries – following inter-allied controversy earlier this year over US threats to seize Denmark’s autonomous territory in Greenland – have expressed reservations, as has the EU.

An intercepted projectile falls into the sea near Dubai's Palm Jumeirah archipelago on March 1, 2026. Picture: AFP

An intercepted projectile falls into the sea near Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah archipelago on March 1, 2026. Picture: AFP

Britain offered defensive support only, prompting Trump to criticise Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “no Churchill” and complain that the special relationship is not what it once was.

Trump also announced “total suspension” of trade with Spain after Madrid blocked US aircraft from using Spanish bases for the attack. French President Emmanuel Macron declared the US-Israeli attack in violation of international law and called for a return to negotiations, while the UN said it had seen no evidence of ongoing Iranian nuclear weapons programs.

On the other hand, NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte expressed support for the operation.

US adversaries Russia and North Korea – both of which have close relationships with Iran – strongly condemned the attack. China did so too, but so far has offered only rhetorical support. This is somewhat surprising since China is a major weapon supplier to the regime in Tehran and announced, days before the US attack, that it was sending offensive and defensive weapons to Iran.

Under a 25-year agreement signed in 2021, China also accounts for 80 per cent of Iran’s oil exports and depends heavily on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. China has been stockpiling oil for several years, so Chinese leaders may calculate they can afford to wait, letting US stockpiles of bombs and missiles be depleted as the war goes on.

Alternatively, they may be scrambling to catch up with a rapidly evolving situation. Neither Moscow nor Beijing has yet moved to mediate or resolve the war.

Against this background, military lessons are already emerging. Artificial intelligence has dramatically accelerated the targeting process, with the campaign running on a continuously updated dynamic engagement matrix rather than a traditional daily task order. Satellite communications are ubiquitous, with small Starlink antennas seen mounted on American Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System drones, themselves an improved copy of Iran’s Shahed-136 drone, the export version of which played a prominent part in Russia’s arsenal in Ukraine.

Beyond showing how adversaries copy each other’s battlefield technologies, the LUCAS drones illustrate how important space systems such as Starlink now are. Space has emerged as what the military calls a “warfighting domain” alongside air, space, sea and cyberspace. GPS spoofing and jamming, as all sides interfere with each other’s navigation satellites, has been particularly noticeable here as in Ukraine, with knock-on effects for civilian ships, aircraft and infrastructure.

Attacks on data centres, including three Amazon Web Services data centres hit by Iranian drones in the Emirates, underline the vulnerability of AI and cyber systems to physical attack.

An ambulance is parked near a sweeping blaze following Israeli bombardment on a solar farm and electricity generation facility in Lebanon's southern coastal city of Tyre on March 4, 2026. Israeli forces on March 4 advanced into a number of towns and villages in south Lebanon, a source from the UN peacekeeping force in the country, UNIFIL, told AFP. Picture: AFP

An ambulance is parked near a sweeping blaze following Israeli bombardment on a solar farm and electricity generation facility in Lebanon’s southern coastal city of Tyre on March 4, 2026. Israeli forces on March 4 advanced into a number of towns and villages in south Lebanon, a source from the UN peacekeeping force in the country, UNIFIL, told AFP. Picture: AFP

The war’s rapid spread outside Iran’s vicinity emphasises how modern conflicts, irrespective of causes, rarely remain geographically contained. Regional proxies – Hezbollah and the Houthis but also pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, Iranian-sponsored sleeper cells in Western countries, and the possibility that resistance groups may play the leading role in any ground campaign – emphasise how even the most conventional conflicts involve irregular warfare, with non-state armed groups operating on their own or advised by specialist operators.

At the strategic level, one lesson is that, irrespective of Trump’s need for a quick resolution to the conflict, lest it undermine his support ahead of critical midterm elections in November, war is inherently complex and non-linear, unleashing forces that cannot be predicted or controlled. Even now, the campaign is illustrating the impossibility of doing regime change from the air, to say nothing of whether regime change is even a viable goal: 20 years of the war on terror would suggest not.

One thing I heard whispered in Washington this week was that – between Venezuela, Greenland and now Iran – others may be concluding they cannot trust American negotiators. The terms of any deal seem increasingly contingent on political whim in the White House, rather than consistent policy, and attacking a counterparts mid-negotiation makes it less likely that adversaries will themselves negotiate in good faith.

This US navy handout photo released by US Central Command public affairs shows US sailors preparing to stage ordnance on the flight deck of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) in support of Operation Epic Fury. Picture: US navy/US Central Command/AFP

This US navy handout photo released by US Central Command public affairs shows US sailors preparing to stage ordnance on the flight deck of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) in support of Operation Epic Fury. Picture: US navy/US Central Command/AFP

One congressional staffer gloomily told me this week that, under this administration’s force-based approach to international relations, diplomatic consistency carried less weight, but that wouldn’t always be the case. Russia and China were watching this conflict closely, she noted, and if they saw an opportunity to move against Western interests while the US was tied down in Iran, credibility with allies would matter again, fast. The broader potential for escalation – for Gulf War III to become World War III – is not in the forefront of anyone’s mind at present but the risk is real.

Impact at home

For Australia, the implications of the current conflict are stark enough. As a globally connected trading nation, with millions of Australians overseas and massive exposure to the global system, Australians’ safety and our nation’s prosperity can easily be disrupted by events thousands of kilometres away. Just one illustration of this is petroleum imports, which despite rapid growth in renewables still drive almost every aspect of our economy.

The latest Australian petroleum statistics, from December 2025, showed Australia with 50 days net import coverage, 25 days of diesel consumption, enough jet fuel for 20 days and enough automotive petrol for 26 days. In other words, if global oil supplies are interrupted for more than three to four weeks, Australia’s transportation and production systems start grinding to a halt. The government has rightly advised against panic hoarding, but fuel resilience will become a real issue as the conflict drags on.

There is also the possibility that an expanded conflict may lead to a spike in terrorism risk. Iranian-sponsored terror cells aside, unrest among or against Iranian, Jewish, Kurdish, Arab and other communities is a real issue, one that many Western governments are watching, Australia almost certainly included.

A final possibility is that, if the war drags on or escalates, Australia and other allies may receive a US request for support. Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance – including joint facilities in Australia – are almost certainly already involved. No request for warships, aircraft or ground troops has been publicly discussed but planners would be wise to be thinking ahead.

In the meantime, and much more importantly, families such as my friend’s – across Iran, Israel, the Gulf states and elsewhere – are sheltering in basements, comforting their kids, hoping they have enough food, water, cash and medical supplies, and worrying what the future holds. Tens of thousands of Australians and other expats are stranded as they seek to leave the region, and millions more locals have no exit in sight. This war is unlikely to end soon, but it has already changed the game

 

The end of the line … an epitaph for a tyrant

Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

Ali Hosseini Khamenei (born 19 April 1939, Mashhad, Iran, died 28 February 2026, Teheran) was the second and longest-serving Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, holding office since 1989 (the yet the Berlin Wall fell and tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square). A cleric shaped by the Shi’a seminaries of Mashhad and Qom, he was active in opposition to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and was arrested and exiled several times before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. After the revolution, he rose steadily through the new political order: survived an assassination attempt in 1981 that left his right arm partially paralyzed, and later that year became President of Iran, serving two terms (1981–1989) during the Iran–Iraq War. Following the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, the Assembly of Experts selected him as Supreme Leader. In that role, he exercised ultimate authority over Iran’s armed forces, judiciary, state broadcasting, and key strategic decisions, shaping the country’s domestic governance, regional policy, and contentious nuclear program for more than three decades. His tenure was marked by consolidation of clerical authority, periodic internal unrest and brutal repressions, international sanctions, economic collapse, and enduring tensions with the United States and its regional rivals. He is reported to have perished in the rubble of his sprawling presidential compound.

In an eloquent article in The Atlantic, Karim Sadjadpour, American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, casts him as custodian of a mausoleum, spokesman for a ghost, while Orwell hovers like a specter over the scene, reminding us that the dead impose upon the living a worldview and a way of life long after the society beneath it has shifted, urbanised, digitised, globalised. Under Khamenei, the Islamic Republic became precisely that: liturgical slogans, policing of women’s bodies, the hijab both banner and boundary. And yet revolutions, like stubborn shadows, rarely die when their architects do.

For the Islamic Republic was never a single body; it was, Sadjapour writes, an ecosystem, vascular and sprawling: clerical networks, the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij, foundations controlling vast swathes of the economy, a security apparatus honed by decades of sanctions, war, assassination, and unrest. Khamenei may have been the last of the first generation, the final living ligament to 1979—but institutions outlive men. The IRGC, less ghost than organism, adaptive, entrepreneurial, entwined in Iran’s political economy and regional projection of power, had already evolved into a praetorian creature, more barracks than seminary. The revolution had become its own bureaucracy; the fervour was folded into files, the ecstatic theology into choreography. Khomeini was revelation; Khamenei was preservation. And that may yet be his most enduring achievement: he turned prophecy into paperwork, charisma into system, and systems, unlike prophets, require only control, not belief.

Makes no mistake. The regime and its security apparatus and military industrial complex is lodged in the Iranian throat. It will take more than a gargle of American mouthwash to dislodge it! This stark image encapsulates decades of entrenchment, ideology, and bureaucracy, with a sly nod to futility.

So what now? The hinge has turned, though the door may swing in any direction. Three paths suggest themselves. Consolidation: a successor, deliberately colourless, rises, the Guard tightens its grip, ideology becomes theatre while power migrates behind the curtain, the revolution persists because it can control, not because it inspires. Managed mutation: flexibility, the Islamic Republic’s paradoxical talent; controlled elections, tactical moderation, negotiation where expedient. Rhetoric may soften, “resistance” may become nationalist rather than theological, the ghost changes costume but remains on stage. Fracture: succession is a stress test unlike any other; elite rivalries, public impatience, economic exhaustion, and the memory of Mahsa Amini could conspire to splinter the coercive apparatus. The moral centre of Iranian society has shifted far from the revolution’s founding certainties; the dead can govern only so long as the living consent, or are compelled, to remember in the prescribed way.

Sadjadpour warns that Khamenei’s life’s work was to preserve a revolution “heading for the ash heap.” Perhaps. But ash heaps are treacherous metaphors: they imply finality, neatness, closure. Iran’s modern history – constitutionalism, coups, revolution, reformist surges, Green Movement, uprisings—reveals something less linear and more cyclical: endings that seed beginnings, collapses that mutate, institutions that sediment while eras blur. The Islamic Republic may yet prove more durable than its critics predict, or more brittle than its guardians admit; revolutions, like empires, seldom die cleanly—they fade, calcify, mutate, or fall when no one quite expects it.

Obituaries are tidy things. They suggest closure, a soft percussion of earth on coffin lid, the moral summation of man and era alike. But Khamenei’s political body was never contained within his frame. It was diffused: in barracks, seminaries, intelligence files, oil contracts, prison walls, procurement networks, and the muscle memory of repression. You cannot bury that with a single spade. What makes this moment feel epochal is generational: he was the last living ligament to 1979. The revolution has passed from incandescent revelation to bureaucratic inheritance, from the explosive charisma of Khomeini to the methodical, suspicious choreography of Khamenei, and inheritance is always more fragile than creation. One can die for a revolution; it is harder to live bureaucratically for one.

So: exaggerated? If one means the man, no. If one means the era, perhaps—but eras rarely end cleanly. They blur, overlap, leave sediment, rearrange furniture before the house collapses. The hinge has turned. One can almost hear the machinery shifting—the faint metallic groan of succession in closed systems. Whether the door closes, swings wider, or jams halfway remains uncertain. Perhaps the true exaggeration lies not in the reports of death but in the certainty with which commentators predict what follows.

For now, the obituary hovers between elegy and warning. Something has ended. What replaces it may look familiar, at least at first glance, but history delights in surprising both mourners and celebrants alike. And if one must borrow Wilde properly: it is not the death that is exaggerated—it is our confidence about the afterlife.

This short epitaph is a précis of the article by Karim Sadjadpour in the Atlantic in 1March 2026 written by an AI language model 


The limits of Autocracy

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/why-khamenei-is-dead/686198/

Commentator and journalist Graeme Wood’s article in The Atlantic “Why Khamenei Is Dead” is a meditation on the paradoxes of power, the vulnerabilities of authoritarian leadership, and the way human frailty can undermine even the most fortified regimes. At its core, the article is not simply about the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, killed by Israel on March 1, 2026, but about the systemic weaknesses that made such an outcome possible. For nearly four decades, Khamenei cultivated an aura of invincibility. His public persona was carefully theatrical: he issued “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” chants with a casual ease, almost as if greeting the world, performing ideological menace as ritual. Wood recalls seeing him in 2004 at Tehran University, leaving Friday prayers in a polished armored sedan mere seconds after ending a sermon with these death slogans. The memory emphasizes the performative nature of his power—imposing, ritualized, and calculated—but also, ironically, transient: he was physically close, yet untouchable, a man whose presence inspired awe and terror simultaneously.

Yet Wood emphasizes that Khamenei’s public projection of omnipotence masked a deep vulnerability. Iran’s regime has historically proven resilient in many domains: its institutions function, its missile programs act as deterrents, and its military units, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have maintained cohesion. In the past two years, during heightened conflict with Israel and the United States, the regime’s structural defenses held. There were no defections, no breakdowns of command, no collapse of the bureaucratic apparatus. On the surface, Iran remained formidable.

However, the story of Khamenei’s demise is not one of institutional failure but of leadership failure. Wood stresses that leadership—especially at the top—is qualitatively different from structural power. While Iran possessed instruments of coercion and deterrence, the people entrusted to wield them, Khamenei and his inner circle, repeatedly demonstrated incompetence, indecision, and mismanagement. Their missteps—both strategic and operational—rendered what should have been a robust defense porous and vulnerable. No amount of missile silos, armored convoys, or loyal subordinates can compensate for leaders who are themselves the weak link. In Wood’s framing, Khamenei’s death is emblematic of a broader truth: even regimes that appear impregnable crumble when their leadership is flawed or unprepared.

Wood also situates this vulnerability within a moral and psychological frame. He acknowledges that celebrating the death of another, even a reviled autocrat, is morally problematic, yet he simultaneously captures the visceral human desire for retribution. Millions across Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and even Ukraine—regions caught in the crossfire of Khamenei’s ideological ambitions—wished for the opportunity to confront him directly. This duality—the ethical imperative against rejoicing in death versus the natural, almost primal, human desire for vindication—underscores the complex emotional landscape that surrounds acts of political violence. Khamenei, in his own way, was both a global enemy and a personal antagonist for countless individuals.

Beyond morality, Wood’s essay examines the theatricality of power itself. Khamenei’s authority depended on ritualized displays, carefully choreographed public appearances, and ideological performance. Threats and slogans—his “Death to…” chants—functioned less as immediate policy instruments than as a projection of dominance meant to cement fear, loyalty, and perception. Yet this performative power could not substitute for the substance of strategic competence. When leadership faltered—through misjudgment, hesitation, or betrayal—the façade crumbled. The most elaborate defenses cannot shield leaders from the consequences of their own failings.

Geopolitically, the implications are profound. Khamenei’s death is likely to intensify internal debates about succession and strategy within Tehran, potentially destabilizing decision-making in the short term. It may embolden regional adversaries, recalibrate the balance of deterrence with Israel, and force external powers, including the United States, to reassess policy toward Iran. Wood’s piece suggests that this event is not merely symbolic but materially consequential: it exposes the fragility of authority in systems where power is concentrated yet humanly fallible, and where ideological zeal does not automatically translate into operational effectiveness.

Ultimately, Wood’s argument is as much about leadership theory as it is about Iranian politics. Authoritarian regimes often appear indestructible because of their institutions, militias, and propaganda apparatus, yet history shows repeatedly that the personal competence—or incompetence—of those at the very top is decisive. Khamenei’s death, in Wood’s telling, is the product not solely of external force but of internal vulnerability: a leader whose fearsome reputation, ideological fervor, and theatrical command could not mask the shambolic reality of governance. In other words, he was both the architect of Iran’s defiance and the source of its strategic fragility.

In its deepest sense, the essay is a reflection on the human dimension of power: no matter how formidable the structures, the rhetoric, or the image, authority is inseparable from the judgment, courage, and competence of those who wield it. Khamenei’s life—and death—serve as a cautionary tale, reminding us that performance, fear, and loyalty are insufficient substitutes for effective leadership. Wood’s narrative combines historical observation, moral reflection, and personal anecdote to show that authoritarian theater can impress and intimidate, but when push comes to shove, it is the human element that determines survival or downfall. Khamenei’s fall, therefore, is at once historical, psychological, and deeply human: a story of power, spectacle, and the vulnerability at the heart of even the most seemingly impregnable regimes.

This short epitaph is a précis of the article by Graeme Wood in the Atlantic in 1March 2026 written by an AI language model 

The following is a brief analysis of what happened on 28 February 2026 when March was about to “roar in like a lion” – which, indeed, was the name given by the Israeli Defence Force to its second aerial assault in Iran in eight months.

The Second American Iranian War – Reckoning Without a Map

On 1 March 2026, following the initiation of U.S. and Israeli air strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran, The Atlantic published analyses by Anne Applebaum, Graeme Wood, and Tom Nichols, each offering distinct yet complementary perspectives on the unfolding crisis. Collectively, their essays examine not only the immediate military events but the deeper political, ideological, and strategic dynamics that underpin the confrontation.

Anne Applebaum emphasizes the ideological nature of the Islamic Republic. From her perspective, Iran is not merely a state defending territorial or security interests; it is a revolutionary regime whose worldview drives both domestic repression and regional aggression. Applebaum’s central concern is process and planning: the strikes were launched without public explanation, congressional authorization, or international consensus, and no coherent strategy has been articulated for post-strike governance. Without a plan for legitimate political transition, she argues, military action risks chaos, nationalist backlash, and the strengthening of hardliners rather than meaningful reform.

Graeme Wood focuses on the operational and geopolitical consequences of the strikes. He highlights the recent escalation in which Iran targeted Gulf Arab monarchies—including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE—marking a dramatic shift from shadow conflict to overt regional confrontation. Wood argues that these attacks may inadvertently unify Tehran’s adversaries, closing off avenues for containment and amplifying the risk of a broader Middle Eastern war. In his analysis, the strikes are not simply tactical military events; they are catalysts that reshape regional political calculations and threaten to escalate a localized conflict into a multi-front crisis.

Tom Nichols frames the strikes in terms of U.S. strategic coherence and the historical perils of regime-change operations. He stresses that regime change is not a discrete military objective but a complex political project, one requiring alignment of domestic unrest, fractures in security forces, and credible alternatives capable of governance. Nichols warns that absent such conditions, air strikes—even if tactically successful—may produce more instability than progress, mirroring cautionary lessons from Iraq and Libya.

Taken together, these three perspectives converge on a central thesis: while Iran is a hostile actor with a history of regional destabilization, military action alone cannot achieve sustainable political outcomes. Applebaum foregrounds ideological complexity and the necessity of post-strike planning; Wood highlights the regional and geopolitical repercussions of escalation; Nichols underscores the asymmetric risks inherent in regime-change gambits. Their combined insights frame the March 2026 strikes as a high-stakes venture, one in which tactical gains may be easily overshadowed by strategic uncertainty and unintended consequences.

The Bombs Without a Blueprint

Applebaum is particularly critical of process. The strikes were carried out without explanation to the American public, without congressional authorization, and without securing international consensus—a procedural void that mirrors a deeper strategic void. U.S. policy, she argues, has long oscillated between pressure and engagement, alternating sanctions with diplomacy, threats with negotiation, but rarely confronting the ideological core of the Islamic Republic. Bombing nuclear facilities or military infrastructure might degrade capabilities, yet it does nothing to dismantle the regime’s revolutionary worldview or empower a credible alternative political force. In the absence of a plan for governance after the strikes, the result is more likely to be chaos, intensified repression, or nationalist backlash rather than democratic transition.

Nichols similarly emphasizes that regime change is a political project, not a military objective. Even successful strikes do not guarantee that the regime will collapse, that protests will coalesce, or that security forces will fracture. The historical record—from Iraq to Libya—underscores the difficulty of building a functioning political order once a government is weakened or removed. The upside—a rapid emergence of a moderate or reformist government—is narrow; the downside—regional war, prolonged instability, economic shocks, and emboldened hardliners—is broad and asymmetric.

Wood complements these arguments by situating the crisis in the regional context. Iran’s missile strikes against Gulf Arab monarchies, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE, mark a dramatic escalation beyond shadow conflict with Israel or the United States. By attacking states that had previously attempted neutrality, Tehran risks unifying its regional adversaries, erasing remaining arguments for coexistence or containment. Gulf monarchies that had long debated restraint versus confrontation may now lean decisively toward the latter, viewing the Iranian regime as an existential threat that must be confronted. In Wood’s analysis, these strikes have not only military but profound political consequences: they reshape regional alliances, heighten the likelihood of broader war, and create a cascade of strategic uncertainty for both Iran and the United States.

Strategic Whiplash

Applebaum and Nichols also highlight the confusion in U.S. messaging preceding the strikes. During domestic unrest in Iran earlier this year, President Trump encouraged citizens to “take over their institutions,” implying support for revolution. Yet senior officials soon suggested accommodation, framing U.S. interests narrowly around nuclear non-proliferation. This whiplash—between fomenting revolution and hinting at negotiation—reveals a lack of clarity about ultimate objectives, and the strikes themselves appear more a gamble than a coherent strategy.

The risks of this approach are manifold. Iran could retaliate asymmetrically through Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, Houthis, cyberattacks, or strikes on Gulf oil infrastructure, pulling the United States into a wider regional conflict. American forces in the region could become exposed, and global energy markets destabilized. Domestically, hardliners may consolidate power, justifying repression in the name of national survival. The very elements Washington hopes to weaken could be strengthened. Applebaum, Wood, and Nichols each stress that these asymmetric risks are more numerous and plausible than the narrow upside of regime collapse.

Regional Ramifications

Perhaps the most immediate consequence of the March 2026 strikes is the escalation of the conflict beyond Iran’s borders. Wood notes that Iran’s targeting of Gulf monarchies represents a strategic miscalculation of historic proportions. For decades, Tehran benefited from the hesitation, rivalry, and caution of its regional adversaries. By striking countries that had attempted neutrality, Iran may have inadvertently unified the Gulf against it. Saudi Arabia and its allies, long cautious about provoking Tehran, may now view confrontation as inevitable. The calculus of containment and cautious coexistence may be irreversibly replaced by an era of escalation, where Iranian aggression is met with coordinated regional response, potentially with U.S. support.

This shift also reframes the nature of war in the Middle East. What had been a shadow conflict—missile exchanges, proxy skirmishes, and calibrated threats—has become overt. Sovereign states are now active targets, and the implications for regional security, energy stability, and global geopolitics are immediate and profound. The Gulf, long a buffer zone of uneasy coexistence, may now become the front line of a broader confrontation, with consequences that extend far beyond Tehran, Riyadh, or Washington.

Conclusion: Strategy Without a Map

The analyses of Applebaum, Wood, and Nichols converge on a stark assessment: the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, however tactically precise, are untethered from a coherent political strategy. Applebaum warns that ideological complexity cannot be solved with bombs; Nichols reminds us that regime change is a political transformation, not a military objective; and Wood highlights the unintended regional consequences that may escalate the conflict far beyond initial calculations.

Together, they suggest that the March 2026 strikes represent a high-stakes gamble. The narrow upside—rapid collapse of the Iranian regime and the emergence of a moderate government—is contingent on unlikely alignments of internal political and social forces. The downside—regional war, economic disruption, entrenchment of hardliners, and prolonged instability—is broad, asymmetric, and more probable. By acting without a clearly articulated post-strike plan, the United States and Israel have entered a perilous chapter in Middle Eastern geopolitics, one in which the consequences will unfold unpredictably, and in which success cannot be measured merely by the destruction of targets, but by the construction of a viable political order in Tehran and a durable regional equilibrium.

The lesson, as Applebaum, Wood, and Nichols collectively insist, is clear: military action without strategy is a leap into uncertainty. The map may be blank, but the stakes are real, and the cost of miscalculation could echo for decades.

Addendum

We have republished below two articles about the January protests by British historian, author, and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue, who he married to Bita Ghezelayagh, an Iranian artist and architect, in Tehran. They provide a well-written backstory to the above written by one with lived experience of the Islam Republic. From these, once may surmise that Ali Khamanei had only one possible exit. 

The Islamic Republic’s bloody endgame

Credit. Carlos Jasso/AFP/Getty

Iran’s fanatics dream of martyrdom

Christopher de Bellaigue, Unherd, 4 February 2026

As America’s advanced warplanes and ships arrive within striking distance of Iran, Donald Trump has promised attacks “far worse” than those of last June, when Iran’s nuclear sites and air defences were attacked and several of its military leaders assassinated. In response, the Islamic Republic has signalled readiness to return to the negotiations that Trump’s 12-day war with Israel against Iran had interrupted. Parley between Steve Witkoff, the American envoy, and Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, is to resume on Friday in Istanbul. It is unlikely, however, that Iran will accept Israel’s demands that it relinquish uranium-enrichment, dismantle its ballistic missile programme and desist from reconstituting its network of regional proxies: effectively, the unconditional surrender that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has consistently refused to entertain. His inflexibility has come at the price of an unremitting Western hostility that has, along with endemic corruption and mismanagement, crashed the economy and provoked the huge protests, revolutionary in character, which erupted across the country last month. The most plausible explanation for Khamenei’s preparedness to talk, then, is that he is playing for time and hoping that, if the worst comes to the worst, he will be saved by Trump’s aversion to wars which last more than a few hours. On 1 February, the Supreme Leader warned that American aggression would precipitate a “regional” war, by which he meant Iranian attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf and civilians in Israel. A few days earlier, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, an adviser of the Supreme Leader — who had a narrow escape when his apartment was targeted by an Israeli airstrike last summer — promised an “immediate, comprehensive, and unprecedented” response, “directed at the aggressor, at the heart of Tel Aviv, and at all who support the aggressor”. But Iran, we now know, is a spent military force and cannot carry out such threats.

Some 1,200 Iranians were killed in the 12-day war, compared with 28 Israelis and not a single American, while enemy aircraft bossed Iranian airspace. Around 90% of the missiles that Iran fired in response towards Israel were intercepted; a mere handful of its 500 or so drones made it into Israeli territory, the rest meeting a similar fate to that of the Iranian drone that flew close to the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on Tuesday, and was shot down by one of the carrier’s jets. For all Iran’s bluster, the imbalance between a belt-and-braces autarky and the world’s most advanced militaries is as stark as that between the Mahdist army and the British at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, when thousands of Sudanese tribesmen were mowed down by Maxim guns to the loss of 47 British lives; or between the Mamluks and Napoleon’s Armée d’Orient a century earlier, when a medieval cavalry was put to flight by modern infantry squares spitting grapeshot. No, it isn’t chaos in the Gulf nor brimstone over Tel Aviv that need concern us should the negotiations fail. It is the possibility of mass slaughter of unarmed civilians in the Islamic Republic itself.

For an ominous pattern of botched outside intervention and the implacable exercise of monopolised force, look no further than last month’s unrest and its suppression. Having begun as street protests by an “army of the hungry”, in the words of Hatam Ghaderi, perhaps Iran’s most perceptive political analyst, the movement took on a radical character after Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah, asked ordinary Iranians to go out and topple the regime on 9 January. The millions heeding his call were further galvanised by Trump’s promise, made a few days earlier, that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters… the United States of America will come to their rescue”.

In the event, thousands were mown down, Omdurman-style, on the streets of Tehran and dozens of other cities by Revolutionary Guardsmen firing Dushkas and AK-47s. We don’t yet know exactly how many people died, though the death toll certainly exceeds by thousands the nugatory figure of 2,985 conceded by the government — dwarfing also the 3,164 people killed by the Shah’s forces over the 16 years of sporadic revolutionary activity culminating in the monarch’s flight in 1979. As for the help promised by Trump, it never came.

The bloodiest episode of civil strife that Iran has seen for at least two centuries could have been avoided had the 86-year-old Khamenei bowed to longstanding demands and stepped aside. This would have paved the way for elections to an assembly to draw up a new constitution — a relatively bloodless transition, involving members of the current regime untainted by the worst excesses of corruption and cruelty, might have been possible. By refusing such a transition and turning his stormtroopers on mostly unarmed crowds — amid reports of the Revolutionary Guards’ snipers shooting bystanders in the head and of knife thrusts aimed deliberately at the genitals — Khamenei has cleared the field of potential unifiers, in the process condemning the Islamic Republic and its internal opponents to a fight to the finish.

“Khamenei has condemned the Islamic Republic and its internal opponents to a fight to the finish”

A former British official with close connections to Western policy-makers told me this week that the thinking among Western countries, including Britain, is that the regime is out of puff and that a collapse as rapid and as straightforward as that of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is likely. But in 30 years of reporting on the Middle East, I have learned never to be surprised by the ignorance and complacency of our policymakers. Iran resists such a reassuring prognosis; a messier denouement awaits.

Do not be fooled by the worldliness of Iran’s artistic and literary culture or the prosperity and accomplishments of its diaspora. For much of its post-Islamic history, Iran has contained a minority of fanatics; the difference is that today’s fanatics have guns in their hands and their backs to the wall. This is what Hatam Ghaderi refers to as the revolutionary “hard core” which has gathered around Khamenei, and is composed of Revolutionary Guardsmen, hardline clerics and members of the Basij militia.

They learned their trade fighting small, dirty wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen; their worldview formed in prayer halls and barracks where a hatred of the godless West is propagated alongside a deep yearning for the return of the 12th Shia imam, who disappeared from view 10 centuries ago and will emerge to inaugurate an epoch of justice and peace. Religious meetings are conducted by men who sing of martyrdom and purity; they regard the killing of godless “rioters” acting at the behest of Israel as a virtuous act. With blood already on their hands, they have no way back into general acceptability, and nowhere to go but further and further into their own fantasies of martyrdom, all the while nurturing fond expectations of divine intervention. There is no reason to exclude Ali Khamenei from their number.

Whatever happens in Istanbul on Friday, and during the weeks to come, the Islamic Republic is unlikely to survive. Its people hate it too much. But its fall will not be the simple event that is seemingly contemplated in Washington and Jerusalem. The correct analogy is not with the kleptocracy that melted away with the fall of Assad but with those members of the Waffen-SS who carried on fighting even after Hitler’s death in 1945, exhibiting the same unappeasable contempt for death and hatred of their enemies that they did when he was alive.

When Reza Pahlavi was asked whether he took responsibility for the slaughter on the streets of his homeland, he replied coldly, “this is a war, and war has casualties”. That words have consequences means something tangible in a world of bullets and flesh and the destiny of a people. Many Iranians have entered a war with their regime that must end with the elimination of one or the other. Trump should think hard before he next promises Iranians his help, and mean it if he does, or he too will have blood on his hands.

The Ayatollah will fight to the death

He could unleash a killing machine

Christopher de Bellaigue

Christopher de Bellaigue, 12 January 2026

Ever since he became Iran’s Supreme Leader in 1989, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s approach to domestic unrest has been defined by three assumptions. The first is that protesters can be discredited through accusations of collusion with the country’s Western foes. The second is that, having engineered the 1979 revolution that brought the mullahs to power in the first place — and suffered the consequences — Iranians will do anything to avoid another upheaval, the poor letting themselves be seduced by government handouts while judicious shows of force dissuade the middle class from taking to the streets. The third is that Iranians are incapable of uniting around a single opposition figure: whether a disaffected insider like Mir Hossein Mousavi, or Reza Pahlavi, exiled son of the deposed last Shah, easily caricatured as a creature of the Virginia suburbs and who hasn’t seen his homeland in almost half a century. Such assumptions have seen Khamenei and his acolytes in the Revolutionary Guard, the clerical establishment and the Basij militia ride out crisis after crisis, starting with the Green Movement led by Mousavi in 2009, extending through the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022-3 and climaxing in the battering that the country received last summer at the hands of Israeli and US aircraft. Then, calls by Benjamin Netanyahu and Pahlavi himself for ordinary citizens to take advantage of the regime’s military disarray, by going out and toppling it, went conspicuously unanswered. Now all has changed. Initially sparked by economic collapse, two weeks of protests have coalesced into a national movement, one whose aim is nothing less than the destruction of the Islamic Republic. Along the way, the regime’s tenaciously-held assumptions have become obsolete. The authorities have been caught unawares, and seem unable or unwilling to change course. On the contrary, the Islamic Republic remains fatally wedded to the old assumptions while the country enters an unpredictable and explosive new phase. The scene was set by a summer of chronic water shortages and electricity outages. In December, the riyal collapsed and inflation touched 50%, the consequence of mismanagement, corruption and sanctions that the revolutionary oligarchy has knowingly courted and in some cases profited from. Tellingly, the initial protests, on 28 December, were staged not by the hijab-discarding young women, the sort who spearheaded the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Rather, the discontent was sparked by the revolution’s traditional supporters: grizzled, pious traders in the bazaar. They were soon joined by youthful members of the country’s dispossessed middle class: nouveaux pauvres with a Jacobin rage in their hearts and supportive compatriots by their side.

The solidarity that is currently being shown between Iranians of different ages, classes and ethnicities is a far cry from the scenes I observed during the 2009 agitation, when bystanders watched with studied neutrality as protesters were dragged away to police torture chambers. Gone, too, is the inviolability of public property. These days, bystanders wade in with fists and kicks to save protesters from the security forces, while police stations and police cars are torched and — according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency — officers are killed. From the province of Kurdistan in the west to Baluchistan in the east and as far south as the refinery town of Abadan, no part of Iran is untouched. At least one small town, in the western province of Kermanshah, has been seized by rebels.

The regime has responded by killing dozens of protesters before cutting the internet on Thursday night. Behind the blackout, as is clear from video and audio files that continue to trickle out, more protesters are dying, more public buildings are being attacked and more hospitals are becoming war zones as parents smash down mortuary doors and remove the bodies of their dead children before the authorities can surreptitiously bury them. Such confrontations are a throwback to the 1979 revolution, which advanced to the rhythm of Shia mourning ceremonies, each funeral being a magnet for more protests and more deaths.

Only a few government services — notably regime propaganda conducted through social media — have been exempted from the blackout. Card transactions, on which the economy depends, have not. With shops shuttered, the protests seem to be growing. In one video clip of a huge nocturnal gathering, a voice is heard: “They say they are going to come and kill us. Let them try to kill this crowd!”

“They say they are going to come and kill us. Let them try to kill this crowd!”

On Friday, the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence wing warned against “any refusal to act” on the part of other organs of the state, a rare public admission of concern on the subject of regime cohesion. The following day the regular army, which usually takes no role in maintaining law and order, announced that it would safeguard strategic infrastructure and public property, also urging Iranians to thwart “enemy plots”.

But such warnings, and Khamenei’s own denunciation of the protesters as “rioters” whose motivation is to curry favour with Donald Trump, derive from the old reasoning that equates any call by Iranians for foreign intervention with unpatriotic betrayal. The country has a long history of such interventions, not least the 1953 coup in which MI6 and the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s legitimate prime minister. Yet judging by the protesters’ cheerful calls for further attacks by the US and Israel, it is clear that they have rejected their parents’ squeamishness. According to the logic on the streets, another Western aerial campaign would be welcome if it advances the goal of toppling the Islamic Republic.

The main political beneficiary of the growing appetite for outside action is Pahlavi, who on Friday exhorted Trump to “be prepared to intervene to help the people of Iran”. And, for the first time, the self-styled crown prince is regarded as a serious contender for leadership of a new regime whose main attribute would be its good relations with Tel Aviv and Washington.

It is a remarkable transformation for the diffident 65-year-old who left Iran for Lubbock, Texas as an air force cadet in 1978, and was for years dismissed by liberal and Leftist opponents of the regime as an embarrassing reminder of his father’s corrupt and authoritarian rule. Pahlavi’s support for the joint Israeli-US attack on Iran this summer, furthermore, in which more than 1,000 Iranians were killed, appeared to put him at odds with his compatriots. No longer. On the burning streets of Tehran calls of “Long live the Shah!” ring insistently while Pahlavi’s former Leftist critics, in the words of one veteran Iranian analyst, “have started treating him with respect”.

Pahlavi rises, Khamenei falls. As recently as three years ago, the Supreme Leader’s will was unchallenged and his authority total; since then, the so-called “Axis of Resistance” he had built up across the Middle East has been obliterated by Israel, with his own intelligence services clearly compromised. Most significant, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer removed any possibility of an Iranian bomb, in the short term at least.

“Rat Ali”, as Khamenei has been known since his scurrying departure for an underground bunker during the war last summer, looks every day of his 86 years. His death, preferably violent and painful, is being loudly petitioned. No one knows what conversations are going on between the Supreme Leader and his inner circle, which includes his son Mojtaba, for some time seen as a possible successor. But it is utterly implausible that Khamenei would, as The Times recently claimed, “flee to Moscow” if the regime looks close to falling.

Khamenei lost the use of an arm when he was blown up early in the revolution. He is not a quitter but a quietly stolid fanatic who will leave the Islamic Republic horizontally or not at all. And he has yet to turn the full force of his killing machine on the protesters. Observing all this, and fanning his tail feathers after his exfiltration of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, is the US president — who, by immediately reimposing his policy of “maximum pressure” on the Islamic Republic following his election last year, has, it is now clear, helped bring the Islamic Republic to its knees. “If they start killing people like they have in the past,” Trump declared on Saturday, “we’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts.” By that time, of course, the slaughter of protesters was well underway.

Trump has so far avoided meeting Pahlavi, perhaps judging that the regime remains a long way from collapse, or because, if the time comes, he favours a Venezuela-style decapitation and Khamenei’s replacement from within the current set-up. Hassan Rouhani, a former president known both for his moderation and his toughness, might be a candidate.

As if by providential design, the ousting of Maduro lends an aura of inevitability to the demise of the Islamic Republic. And yet regimes are not toppled by auras. They are not toppled because Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, who was born into a good family in Iran in 1969, says that he is looking forward to “investing aggressively” in his homeland in the “first 100 days” after liberation. They are toppled because the men with guns are killed or lose their stomach for the fight. And of that, so far as we know, there is no sign.

A lot has happened since the summer. Iranians have got over their horror of foreign interventions and have adopted the closest figurehead to hand. A people out of time, they are fighting for a liberal democracy, or — quainter still — a constitutional monarchy, just as the brand seems defunct. Behind the penumbra of the communications blackout, a country of 90 million, an ancient culture dishonoured by its leaders, goes to work on itself.

 

 

“When we remember Zion” … what’s in a word?

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Zionism derives from the Hebrew Tsiyon – Mount Zion in Jerusalem  – and symbolizes the city and the Land of Israel. The term Zionismus was coined in 1890 by Austrian Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum, replacing “Hovevei Zion” (“Lovers of Zion”). While the Jewish attachment to Zion is ancient, dating at least to the Babylonian Exile, modern Zionism emerged in late-19th-century Europe in response to anti-Semitism and rising nationalism, formalising the aspiration for Jewish return to their ancestral homeland.

We’ve been here before – not in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney with placards and police lines, nor in the corridors of Canberra where commissions are announced – but in language. Always in language.

For months now, perhaps years, In That Howling Infinite has been circling the same contested terrain: Is Israel a settler state or a returning people? Is Palestinian nationalism resistance or rejection? Is apartheid an analytic category or an accusation? Is “from the river to the sea” a geography or a prophecy? We have spent months disentangling words precisely because they matter: settler colonialism, indigeneity, apartheid, return, self-determination. Each carries law, history, trauma, aspiration. Each can illuminate. Each can distort. [See One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance] and Same old stone, different rock. What’s in a word?]

Now another word –  or rather, an old word under new atmospheric pressure – demands the same care: “Zionist.”

Once a self-description, a term of late-Ottoman and Mandate-era political theory, shorthand for Jewish national revival; now increasingly an epithet, flung with the casual certainty of moral indictment.

Before we continue, let us make clear that the following essay is not an attempt to rehearse the full intellectual or political history of Zionism – its nineteenth-century European origins, its varieties (labor, revisionist, religious), its entanglement with empire and nationalism, its debates over diaspora and return. Those accounts are readily available elsewhere, in libraries,  lecture halls, and  the howling internet. Nor is it an exercise in catechism, for Zionism has never commanded universal assent among Jews; from Bundists to ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists, from liberal diasporists to post-Zionist critics within Israel itself, and among Israelis and Jews today (whom many critics of Israel and its government push to the forefront of their cause as if to demonstrate its righteousness). Jewish history and contemporary politics contains vigorous dissent from the Zionist project. Rather, what concerns us here is a narrower and more combustible phenomenon: the contemporary habit of framing Zionism not simply as mistaken or unjust, but as morally equivalent to Nazism – and the accompanying charge that Jews, through the state that claims to represent their national aspirations, are now committing genocide. It is this rhetorical escalation, and the moral confusion it both expresses and produces, that demands examination.

The escalation and confusion was evident well before October 7 2023. On streets and social media, in university classrooms and in day-to-day conversations, on placards, in memes, sprayed in graffiti, the connection between Israel and the Third Reich was being turbocharged. Zionism was no longer merely criticised; it was Nazified. Israeli policy was not compared to other nationalisms; it was collapsed into World War II. The swastika, once the emblem of genocidal antisemitism, reappeared as rhetorical prop, pasted onto flags and caricatures, deployed for shock and applause.

This escalation did not need Al Aqsa Flood and the war it precipitated to ignite it;  merely intensified what had already been normalised. The analogy, once fringe, had drifted toward the mainstream of protest culture. And it matters –  not only as prejudice, though that is present, but as a symptom of rage, symbolic power, and the moral weight the Holocaust carries in public imagination. Nazism has become shorthand for illegitimacy; to affix it to Israel is an attempt to delegitimise the state’s moral right to exist.

In an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 14 February, appropriately, on Saint Valentine’s Day, Jewish campaigner Danny Berkovic argues that the word has become a socially acceptable proxy for “Jew.” He begins with protests during President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia, where “Zionists” were denounced as malign actors and Zionism was equated with Nazism. In private, he recounts being asked whether he was paid by Israel – the old dual-loyalty trope reissued with updated stationery. When he pressed his interlocutor – should Israel exist? should it exist as a Jewish state with equal rights? – the answer was yes to both. By his definition, that made the accuser a Zionist.

Yet the word was being used as moral condemnation. The definitional battle begins there.

Berkovic offers a deliberately minimalist account. Zionism, he says, is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland; that Israel should exist as a Jewish state; that such existence is compatible with equal citizenship for Jews, Christians, Muslims and others. It does not prescribe borders. It does not require annexation. It does not mandate support for any government. It does not preclude criticism. It is a national movement – broad, internally diverse.

On that definition, most Jews worldwide qualify. The overwhelming majority identify in some fashion with Israel’s continued existence. And so when “Zionist” is spat as a term of inherent evil – supremacist, genocidal, morally bankrupt — it does not land as abstract critique. It lands collectively. The elasticity of the word allows hostility to be expressed while retaining plausible deniability. One need not say “Jew.” One says “Zionist.”

There is truth here.  Victor Klemperer, diarist of the Third Reich, writing in the shadow of a regime that turned vocabulary into vapour and vapour into poison, warned that words can act like arsenic. Not dramatic at first. Not even noticeable. They accumulate. They settle into the bloodstream of public life. They alter what can be said – and what can be thought. Respectable language can metabolise contempt.

Nowadays, while openly targeting Jews is socially taboo; “Zionist” can provide semantic cover. Equating Zionism with Nazism is not policy analysis; it is moral theatre. Suggesting hidden financial allegiance is not debate; it is inheritance from darker grammars.

But the story does not end with etymology.

Because when critics use the term pejoratively, they are often responding not to 19th century ideologue Theodore Herzl’s pamphlet but to rightwing Israeli politician Bezalel Smotrich’s expansionist programme. The definitional struggle is not purely semantic; it is a contest over which Zionism is politically operative – and therefore morally accountable.

Zionism has never been monolithic. Herzl’s liberal nationalism, seeking refuge and recognition among nations, is not Mandate-era Revisionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s iron wall. Cultural Zionism is not religious messianism. Labour Zionism, draining swamps and building institutions, is not identical to today’s annexationist maximalism. Religious Zionism grafted messianic longing onto modern sovereignty. These strands coexisted uneasily, sometimes violently.

Today, some of the most visible exponents of Zionism in power advocate annexation of the West Bank, legal differentiation between populations, and a theology-inflected claim to the whole land. They call themselves Zionists. Their critics do not invent the association; they encounter it on ministerial letterhead.

So when a protester condemns “Zionists,” the referent in their mind may not be Jewish self-determination in principle, but settlement expansion, permanent occupation, the rhetoric of “from the river to the sea” in reverse –  the Greater Israel mirror-image of Palestinian maximalism. To pretend these associations are conjured ex nihilo is disingenuous.

Yet to collapse all Zionism into that current is equally disingenuous.

Here the symmetry becomes uncomfortable. Just as “Zionist” can be weaponised to mean “Jew,” “anti-Zionist” can be weaponised to mean “antisemite,” foreclosing argument before it begins. Language slides in both directions. Each side accuses the other of bad faith; sometimes each is correct.

There are further complications. 1948 is not a footnote. For Jews, it is independence wrested from catastrophe that was the Shoah; for Palestinians, it is al Nakba, literally “catastrophe”, defeat and dispossession. Zionism is not only an abstract right but a historical event –  with winners, losers, and descendants who inherit both triumph and grievance. To define it purely as self-determination is to abstract it from its consequences. To define it purely as dispossession is to erase the catastrophe from which it arose.

The phrase “Jewish state” itself contains layers. A demographic majority? A Law of Return privileging Jewish immigration? National symbols and calendar? A civic democracy with Jewish cultural character but equal citizenship? Zionists disagree among themselves. So do critics. These are arguments about the nature of nation-states in a post-imperial world – arguments not confined to Israel. They are not, in themselves, antisemitic. But good faith requires precision.

If one believes Jewish collective self-determination is uniquely illegitimate – that Israel should not exist in any form as a Jewish polity – one must reckon with how that position will be heard by Jews shaped by statelessness and genocide. If one believes Israel should exist but its current government is reckless or unjust, then “Zionist” is an inadequate synonym for critique. If one believes Zionism’s realisation has entrenched unjust domination, that critique must be articulated without collapsing into collective vilification. And if one believes Jews as a group are morally bankrupt, no semantic pirouette will disguise the prejudice.

We have often warned of mirrored absolutes – annexationist dreams on one side, eradicationist chants on the other. “From the river to the sea” answered by “Judea and Samaria forever”, which envisages an Israel from that sane river to the sea. Each imagines exclusivity; each erases the other. The danger is not solidarity per se; it is the surrender of moral complexity.

In the wake of October 7 2023 and its aftermath, a hardening has taken hold across parts of the West: a rediscovery –  sometimes embarrassed, sometimes defiant – of solidarity with Israel. The term “Zio,” once flung as an epithet in online polemic, has been reclaimed half-seriously, half-sardonically. If the mere assertion of Israel’s right to exist now qualifies one as a zealot, then so be it. But if Zionism becomes a reactive identity badge – tribal solidarity in the face of hostility – it grows thinner than its history.

Historically, it was a spectrum: cultural revival, agricultural collectivism, diplomatic manoeuvre, spiritual longing, armed struggle, parliamentary debate. Palestinian nationalism, too, emerged from late-Ottoman modernity into Mandate uncertainty and war –  not reducible to Hamas, but spanning civic pluralism and Islamist absolutism alike. Both peoples carry aspiration and fear; both narratives are real; neither is complete alone.

Words change their weather. “Zionist” now carries heat – from hatred, from anger at power, from grief, from defiance, from genuine moral outrage at war and occupation. It can be weapon. It can be shield. It can be identity. It can be accusation.

The task is not to pretend the word is pristine, nor to concede it entirely to abuse, but to insist on distinctions.

Zionism is both refuge and sovereignty. It is both survival and statecraft. It contains Tel Aviv’s liberal dissent and Hebron’s fervour; Herzl’s diplomacy and the settler’s certainty. It is Aliyah and, in tragic counterpoint, Al-A’uda –  two grammars of return spoken over the same soil. It is refuge after Auschwitz and control over al Aqsa. It is a flag raised over independence, a checkpoint on a road, and a wall bisecting the land. Sovereignty is never morally weightless.

To deny Zionism’s pluralism is to falsify it; to deny its entanglement with power is to romanticise it.

History suggests that when words are repurposed to disguise prejudice, the damage rarely stops with words. History also suggests that when words are simplified to shield power from scrutiny, resentment ferments. If “Zionist” becomes a safe word for hate, something corrosive takes root. If it becomes a talisman against scrutiny, something else corrodes.

Between those distortions lies a narrower path –  unsatisfying to partisans, necessary for anyone who believes complexity is not weakness – where language is neither weapon nor alibi, but instrument.

The land remains small. The history immense. The language – elusive, illusive – continues to do its quiet work.

Perhaps our work is to be able to speak about Jewish and Palestinian self-determination without collapsing one into caricature and the other into sanctimony. Whether we can hold two national stories – each ancient, each wounded – without converting either into absolution.

The struggle, in the end, is not over a word alone. It is over whether we are willing to let it mean more than our anger requires.

Afterword

There is a moment when any extended discussion of Israel or Zionism tips into the gravitational pull that American attorney Mike Godwin formulated in 1990 as “Godwin’s Law”: that as an online discussion lengthens, there is a high probability of a comparison to Nazis or Hitler. Conceived, in part, to curb the trivialisation of the Holocaust in the unruly early days of internet debate, the maxim has since migrated into broader political discourse, where the invocation of Hitler often signals not illumination but exhaustion – the moment when analogy replaces analysis and moral thunder substitutes for evidence. It is frequently deployed to suggest that the person reaching for the Nazi comparison has, rhetorically at least, “lost” the argument. Yet Godwin himself cautioned that the law is descriptive, not absolute. It does not predict that every exchange will end in such hyperbole, only that, as tempers fray, the temptation becomes statistically likely. Nor did he deny that some comparisons to fascism may be warranted when describing genuinely fascistic behaviour. In a debate as charged as that surrounding Zionism – where accusations of apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and even Nazism circulate with reckless ease – Godwin’s insight serves less as a gag rule than as a warning: once the Holocaust is instrumentalised as metaphor, the space for proportion, history, and moral seriousness contracts accordingly.

This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, and phrasing.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, A Political World – Thoughts and Themes, and A Middle East Miscellany. and also: This Is What It Looks Like, “You want it darker?” … Gaza and the devil that never went away …How the jihadi tail wags the leftist dog, The Shoah and America’s Shame – Ken Burns’ sorrowful masterpiece, and Little Sir Hugh – Old England’s Jewish Question

Read on for Berkovic’s article, and an explainer” in bullet points of the many meanings and interpretations of Zionism.

Zionism – definitions, claims, and contested meanings

In Berkovic’s minimalist framing, Zionism is:

• The belief that the Jewish people constitute a nation entitled to self-determination.
• Rooted in Jewish historical, cultural, and ancestral connection to the land of Israel.
• The view that Israel should exist as a Jewish state.
• Compatible, in principle, with equal civil and political rights for non-Jewish citizens.
• Not inherently tied to:
• Specific borders.
• Settlement expansion.
• Annexation of the West Bank.
• Opposition to a two-state solution.
• Support for any particular Israeli government.
• Compatible with criticism of Israeli policy comparable to criticism directed at other states.

In historical reality, however, Zionism has also been:

• A late-19th and early-20th century nationalist movement emerging from European antisemitism, Ottoman decline, and modern political thought.
• A spectrum of ideological strands, including:
• Liberal political Zionism (Herzl).
• Cultural Zionism (Ahad Ha’am).
• Labour/socialist Zionism (Ben-Gurion, kibbutz movement).
• Revisionist Zionism (Jabotinsky’s “iron wall”).
• Religious Zionism (messianic and covenantal interpretations of sovereignty).
• A movement inseparable in practice from land acquisition, demographic change, and eventually state formation.
• Experienced by Jews primarily as refuge, survival, and national restoration.
• Experienced by Palestinians primarily as dispossession (Nakba) and the beginning of an enduring conflict over sovereignty and land⸻

In contemporary politics, “Zionism” can function as:

• A baseline affirmation of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.
• A broad umbrella identity encompassing Israelis and diaspora Jews across the political spectrum — including fierce critics of Israeli governments.
• A label claimed by religious-nationalist and annexationist actors advocating permanent control over the West Bank.
• A reactive identity marker in the wake of October 7 — reclaimed by some who feel that even acknowledging Israel’s right to exist now invites condemnation

In contemporary polemic, “Zionist” is sometimes used as:

• A synonym for “Jew,” allowing hostility toward Jews to be expressed with plausible deniability.
• A catch-all villain category, attributing collective moral corruption rather than critiquing specific policies.
• A shorthand not for Herzl’s theory of Jewish self-determination, but for the policies of the current Israeli government or the most hard-line currents within it.

Key tensions in the definitional struggle:

• The battle is not merely semantic but political: which Zionism is operative — Herzl’s refuge, Labour’s state-building, or Smotrich’s annexationism?
• Anti-Zionism can range from policy critique to categorical rejection of Jewish self-determination; its moral meaning depends on which of these is intended.
• Equating all Zionism with supremacism erases its plural history.
• Equating all anti-Zionism with antisemitism forecloses legitimate debate about power, occupation, and equality.
• The phrase “Jewish state” itself is contested: demographic majority, civic nation with Jewish character, ethnonational preference, or religious polity?

The core unresolved duality:

• Zionism is both refuge and sovereignty.
• It is both survival after statelessness and the exercise of state power.
• It is experienced as national liberation by one people and as national catastrophe by another.

Any serious discussion must hold those tensions without collapsing them into slogan or slur.

How ‘Zionist’ became a safe word for hate

Sydney Morning Herald, February 14, 2026

At protests against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia, some demonstrators directed their anger not only at Israel’s policies but at “Zionists” themselves – accusing them of malign influence in the media and government. At other recent rallies, Zionism has been equated to Nazism and terrorism.

A sign juxtaposing Zionism and Nazism is displayed at a pro-Palestinian rally last May in Melbourne.
A sign juxtaposing Zionism and Nazism is displayed at a pro-Palestinian rally last May in Melbourne. LUIS ENRIQUE ASCUI

Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic who survived Nazi Germany, warned that words can act like tiny doses of arsenic – swallowed unnoticed, accumulating slowly, until their poison takes hold. His insight was not about shouted slogans, but about respectable language that can normalise contempt. “Zionist” has entered this territory over the past two years.

In the wake of the Bondi attack, I was involved in a public campaign for a federal royal commission into antisemitism. My role prompted a message from someone I have known for more than 20 years. Had I been paid by Israel for my advocacy, he asked. It was an offensive question. The answer was no.

What followed was more revealing. “Zionists have always been morally bankrupt with a superiority complex,” he told me.

I asked him two simple questions. Did he believe the state of Israel should continue to exist? Yes. Did he believe it should exist as a Jewish state, provided Jews, Christians, Muslims and others were given equal rights? Yes.

By the standard definition, he qualified as a Zionist. He either did not understand the term – or he was deliberately repurposing it.

People hold signs at a vigil outside the Australian consulate in New York City after the Bondi massacre.
People hold signs at a vigil outside the Australian consulate in New York City after the Bondi massacre.GETTY IMAGES

That exchange mattered not because it was especially aggressive, but because it was ordinary. It was delivered calmly, with moral certainty, and without any sense of contradiction. It revealed something that has become increasingly common: the use of the word “Zionist” not to describe a belief, but to impugn a target.

Zionism, properly understood, is not complicated. It is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. In practical terms, it is the idea that Israel should exist as a Jewish state. In Australia, Zionism has long been openly supported by mainstream leaders from across the political spectrum as a legitimate expression of Jewish self-determination.

 

Zionism does not dictate borders. It does not prescribe military policy. It does not require allegiance to any government, leader or political party. It does not exclude any race or religion from Israeli citizenship. It does not preclude criticism of Israel and nor does it demand support for all actions taken by the Israeli state. Expansionism is not intrinsic to it, and nor does it require opposition to a two-state solution. To be clear, criticism of Israel that is similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

Like any national movement, Zionism contains a wide spectrum of political views. Many Zionists oppose Israel’s current government. Many Israelis have protested against it for years. Some of the fiercest critics of Israeli policy are Israeli citizens, who nonetheless consider themselves proudly Zionist.

This clarity matters because once a word’s meaning is hijacked, it becomes available for misuse – or abuse.

In recent years, “Zionist” has increasingly been deployed as an insult. The term Zionist is no longer used to identify an idea, but it is spat to assign blame. “Zionists” are held responsible for a wide range of evils, often without definition or limitation. In many instances, “Zionist” is used synonymously with “Jew”, while maintaining just enough ambiguity to deny that Jews are being targeted at all. So why does this substitution occur?

Because openly targeting Jews is no longer socially acceptable. “Zionist” becomes the workaround – broad enough to encompass most Jews, yet elastic enough to provide moral cover. It allows hostility to be expressed while preserving plausible deniability.

We are repeatedly told that hostility toward “Zionists” is merely political critique. But if that were true, the criticism would be of policy. Instead, “Zionists” are accused of supremacy, immorality, or inherent evil. That is not political criticism. It is collective character assassination.

This matters because Zionism is not an abstract ideology for most Jews. It is bound up with history, vulnerability and survival. For many Jews – including those deeply critical of Israel – Zionism represents the belief that Jews should not again be stateless, dependent on the goodwill of others for protection. To insist that “anti-Zionism has nothing to do with Jews” while knowing that the overwhelming majority of Jews identify in some way with Zionism is disingenuous.

At best, it ignores how the word is actually used. At worst, the ambiguity is used intentionally as cover. This is why the definitional battle matters. Hijacking the meaning of Zionism allows hatred to masquerade as politics. The federal royal commission into antisemitism must grapple with these subtleties if it is to understand Jew hatred in Australia.

Existing legal frameworks are poorly equipped to deal with language that is technically deniable yet socially corrosive. They miss the cumulative effect of rhetoric that repeatedly singles out a group under a different name.

If the commission is to be meaningful, it must confront this linguistic sleight of hand directly. It must be willing to ask whether “Zionist” has become a socially acceptable stand-in for “Jew” – a way to legitimise hostility while denying responsibility for its impact. Because when words are repurposed to disguise prejudice, history suggests the damage rarely stops with words.

Danny Berkovic is a Sydney businessman and an organiser of the bondiresponse.com petition, which pushed the Albanese government to announce a royal commission into antisemitism.