Judaism

The past is never past … and reappears unexpectedly

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore
You may not see me tomorrow
Bob Dylan

A wander through the foggy ruins of time …

We had been having conversations at home about Jewish people I had known when I was young – we’ve had a lot to talk about on things like this in this hate filled times – and I recalled that there were not many to speak of. In those days, in the early and mid-1960s at Moseley Grammar School in Birmingham, there were, as I remember it, only three Jewish boys in the school. There may have been a Jewish teacher, but I’m not certain. Though Moseley was non-denominational, it was very much C of E in plain clothes. The Jewish boys and us Catholics – not meant of those either too –  would enter the daily school assembly after the routine prayers and hymns, and we were excused from scripture lessons even though these studied the same Old Testament.

Now, we often talk about memory here at In That Howling Infinite. Memories of our pasts, our younger selves, do not arrive with trumpets. They present themselves all of a sudden, unannounced and often sideways: through a stray remark on the couch of an evening; through a conversation about people once known; through one of those odd moments when the mind, unbidden, opens a door long thought shut and a forgotten face enters the room.

And Nicholas Molnar walked through that door …

On impulse, i went searching for one of those Jewish lads, one I had been friends with during my final years of Grammar School; and google brought up an obituary written by loved ones who bring you up to date, informing me that while I was busy becoming older, so was he.

It was written by members of the the Forres Friends of Woods and Fields, environmental and community garden group based some 40 km east of the northern Scottish town of Inverness, and it paid tribute to the their founder and chairperson who had just passed on. It got me wandering through my backpages

We were born in the same year, 1949, and arrived at Moseley at roughly the same time, around 1960, remaining there until the summer of 1967 (though I stayed another year). The son of German/Austrian parents who had escaped from Nazi Germany, Nick was small of stature, with curly hair, a prominent nose, and friendly, laughing eyes – an expression that always seemed on the verge of amusement. He was very bright, academically gifted, and a natural actor.

School drama productions in those days had a peculiar and often unimaginative tendency to cast according to what teachers thought somehow “fitted”. Nick, being Jewish, often found himself cast in Jewish roles. Looking back now, one raises an eyebrow at the assumptions involved, but at the time it seemed merely how the world worked.

I remember him particularly in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Wolf Mankowitz’s dark comedy The Bespoke Overcoat, a poignant and comic reimagining of Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat, itself a story carrying echoes of Jewish life and exile. These were esoteric two-handers (not quite what one would expect in grammar school drama production*) with one of the other Jewish boys – Chris Field, another outstanding student and gifted actor. The pair of them together had an ease on stage that some people spend a lifetime trying to acquire.

I cannot recall how we became pals. Nor do I remember much about the details of our friendship. But I often visited his home – in Moseley, I think, not far from our school – probably during school holidays.

I do recall that he bought a canoe and took to paddling Brum’s many canals. “Canoe, canal,” he would often refrain. At the time I thought it quite eccentric.

He then bought a second-hand Lambretta scooter. Those scooters possessed a strange glamour, belonging to a brave new world of Mods and movement and urban freedom – and, indeed, rebellion. A couple of my schoolmates had one and sported those long-tailed parkas that later featured in Quadrophenia. I envied them for the speed and freedom and would have loved to do likewise, but that required means and parental permission, and I had neither.

And then our schooldays drew to an end and we put off schoolboy things and ventured out into the wide world – the great divide that so often arrives at the end of adolescence: university, cities, the widening world.

Nick went up to university in London. I am fairly sure it was the LSE, or somewhere very near it in central London. I hitched down to visit him and stayed in his bedsit –  an atmosphere peculiar to student life where one exists in a halfway house between adolescence and whatever comes next.

Was it once or several times? I cannot recall. But I have an image of scooting through wet, wintry streets on the back of a Lambretta.

And he took me to what I recall as the Soviet Bookshop, though it may well have been Collet’s in Charing Cross Road. We had both developed a left-wing outlook on the world, and London at that time possessed a whole ecology of ideas. One could drift through central London moving from second-hand bookshops to political shops to cafés where everybody seemed convinced history itself had reached a point of imminent transformation.

Young people have always believed they stand on the threshold of a new age, but the late sixties had a particular confidence in this regard. Revolutions seemed possible. Societies looked malleable. One felt that history had become less a thing to study than a thing with which one might personally engage.

This was the life, I thought, mindful that I too would soon be taking that road.

Within a year I had left Birmingham for Reading in Oxfordshire and my own particular diversions, and, distractions. Unlike my upper sixth peers, I spent an extra year at Moseley, an unplanned and strange sabbatical during which I hitchhiked around Britain and nurtured my interest in history and politics. In what looks now in retrospect as one of life’s strange coincidences, in the Spring of 1967, I traveled the A98, the long road linking Aberdeen to Inverness – passing through Forres. I slept on the roadside somewhere near the Culloden battlefield and woke in the morning covered in snow.

Though London featured prominently, creatively and romantically in my university years, and I lived there from 1971 until 1978,  and though Nick and I may often have been in close proximity – I returned to that Russian book store several times , buying Lenin’s polemical pamphlets for my uni studies, Russian Revolution posters, and even, inspired by seeing Jethro Tull live, a balalaika (which I never learned to play) – I was never to see him again.

Until he walked through that door in our conversations here in the Tarkeeth forest – in the form of an obituary.

We lost touch – around 1968 –  as people sometimes do. Lives branch quietly. Then suddenly fifty or sixty years have passed and one discovers that entire lives have unfolded beyond one’s sight.

The strangest thing is that memory often preserves people at a fixed age. In my mind’s eye Nick remained perpetually young: climbing onto his Lambretta in his mod anorak, wandering through London, talking undergraduate politics, dropping me at the Tube station for my hitchhike back to Birmingham for school on Monday morning, and then heading off toward some unknowable future.

There is something poignant and bittersweet in discovering that the person you met a lifetime ago had not vanished after all, but had simply carried on further down the road, a.road that, for all its geographical, cultural, and social differences, might have been running parallel to my own.

Riffing on Nick’s biography – a life of service to community and environment as described below in the Forres Friends tribute –  I too became involved in student politics and protests in 1968 and 1969, including demonstrations against the Vietnam War in London, though I later parted company with politics in pursuit of more hedonistic things. I too travelled after graduation – my destiny lay in the Middle East and along the famous Hippie Trail to India and back.

My journey eventually carried me to Australia, where I now live out my latter years in a wildlife reserve and conservation area in the forests of northern New South Wales, caring for the bush while my wife tends our large vegetable garden. En route I have been an accountant, a folk singer, and an activist in Australia’s interminable forest wars.

People often imagine lives changing direction dramatically. We speak of transformations and reinventions. Yet perhaps character is more like a river than a sequence of disconnected events. It bends; it narrows; it widens; but somehow remains recognisably itself.

I had gone looking for a boy I once knew and found a life instead – a rich, generous, deeply lived life that had unfolded beyond my sight. We began with a door opening and a familiar face walking back into the room, but behind that remembered face lay an entire unseen life. There is a curious sadness in such rediscoveries. I found Nick again after all these years, only to discover that he had already rounded the bend and passed out of sight.

As Bob Dylan’s lines at the head of this memoire tell us, it is a reminder of how finite life is …

Paul Hemphill, May 2026

* But then again, maybe not. The young teacher who looked after school drama was of a bohemian bent, and in extracurricular drama classes, he introduced us sixth-formers to the plays of the “Angry Young Men” (a prominent group of working- and middle-class British writers and playwrights who emerged in 1950s postwar Britain), including Arnold Wesker and Joe Orton, and organised outings to the old Birmingham Repertory Theatre (back then, in its Stevenson Street location) to see contemporary plays.

In Tall Tales, small stories and eulogies, see more about my London in the nineteen sixties and seventies:  A Window on a Gone World … London days; Something about London; Song of the Road (1) – my hitchhiking days;; and Ciao Pollo di Soho – the cafe at the end of the M1

In That Howling Infinite has also written more generally about the nature of nostalgia. See: Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment (There is a précis of this below), and Blue remembered hills (2) – the history we hold within us

Forres Friends of Woods and Fields founder Nick Molnar passes away peacefully

Garry McCartney, The Northern Scott, 09 December 2025

A hard-working member of the community with a passion for the environment has passed away.

Forres Friends of Woods and Fields (FFWF) founder and chairman, Nick Molnar, 76, is survived by his wife and fellow volunteer Pippa, brother Michael, sister Nina and their families.

Nick (right) in the early days of the Chapelton polytunnel funded by the Berry Burn windfarm Community Fund.
The early days of the Chapelton polytunnel funded by the Berry Burn windfarm Community Fund.

FFWF chairman, Mick Drury, confirmed he also leaves the charity’s 26 diverse acres of land to be continued to be used for local community food production as well as a space to reconnect with nature.

The town has lost a core member of the community,” he said. “Nick was known for his warmth, helpfulness and involvement with a range of local projects. He had a lifetime’s commitment to the land and to building community.”

Nick was born in 1949 in Hertfordshire to German/Austrian refugees from the Nazi regime of the Second World war, spending most of his childhood in Birmingham.

He studied anthropology at university in London, taking part in student protests in 1967. After graduating, he travelled the world.

Nick then lived in Camphill communities in Norway, Ireland, England and Perthshire – supporting people with additional needs through work on the land. Camphill communities are residential communities and schools that provide support for the education, employment, and daily lives of adults and children with developmental disabilities, mental health problems, or other special needs.

Nick sowing in the Chapelton polytunnel.

 

Over the last five years, FFWF has been Nick’s life’s work, particularly after establishing its community garden at Chapelton.

Mick said: “His commitment and hard work have left a lasting legacy. A core group of volunteers meet there to work together weekly, harvesting for their own needs and making regular donations to Moray’s foodbank.”

The group’s summer open days are very popular now – Nick was always on-hand to welcome attendees and build new relationships.

“He’d always be out supporting the town’s apple and tattie days,” added Mick. “At home, he and Pen would be busy preserving soft fruits, making pickles and chutneys, sauerkraut and kimchi.”

Nick at the growing field and garden near Chapelton Farm.
Nick at the growing field and garden near Chapelton Farm.

Nick’s love of traditional skills and crafts of the countryside led to him trying his hand. Scything was a particular interest, and he was arrested for scything genetically modified crops on the Black Isle in 2001 when a test site was established there.

He was a keen reader and had a great interest in folk music, learning to play the violin in recent years.

Nick passed away at home just over a week after suffering a serious stroke. He was supported by his family, by Kate Clark from the Pushing up the Daisies bereaved charity, and with the “wonderful” assistance of the district nurses.

He was given a quiet send-off at Chapelton, with piper Rory O’Connell and a private green burial. There will be a life celebration for Nick in the new year. Messages of condolence are asked to be sent to forresfriends@gmail.com.

“We are blessed to have known Nick,” finished Mick, “and we will miss him greatly.”

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About Forres, Findhorn and Camphill

Forres is an historic market town in Moray in northeast Scotland, situated approximately 25 miles (40 km) east of Inverness and about 12 miles (19 km) west of Elgin, nestled between fertile farmland and the coast of the Moray Firth. Just 5 miles (8 km) north-east of Forres, a journey of little more than ten minutes by car, lies the small coastal village of Findhorn, set beside Findhorn Bay and opening onto the North Sea. Although distinct places, Forres and Findhorn have long existed in each other’s orbit: one a traditional Highland town with ancient roots, the other a village internationally known for its ecological and communal experiments.

Within this landscape sits Forres Friends of Woods and Fields (FFWF), a community woodland and garden project founded in 2020 by my old school chum Nic Molnar, who served as its founder and chair. The organisation brings together practical environmental work with a strong sense of community life, creating shared spaces where volunteers plant and grow food, manage woodland, support biodiversity, and learn sustainable land practices. Yet projects such as this are about more than gardens and trees. Their ethos is equally social: people gathering for a few hours of work, conversation, and companionship – “a blether and a cup of tea,” as the organisation itself cheerfully puts it. In that sense, FFWF reflects an older village ideal recast in modern form: a communal space where practical labour and human connection become intertwined.

The broader region also carries the influence of the Camphill Communities, an international movement founded in Scotland in 1940 by Karl König and fellow refugees from Nazi Europe. Based on principles of shared living and mutual care, Camphill sought to create communities in which people with learning disabilities and additional support needs lived and worked as equal participants rather than as institutional recipients of care. Farms, gardens, workshops, schools, and shared homes became central features of community life. The Moray region around Forres and Findhorn later developed into one of Camphill’s most significant centres, helping establish the area’s reputation for social innovation, community-based living, and environmental engagement. The underlying principles of König’s Camphill school were derived from concepts of education and social life outlined decades earlier by anthroposophistRudolf Steiner(1861–1925). Today there are over 100 communities worldwide, in more than 20 countries, mainly in Europe, but also in North America and Southern Africa

Findhorn itself added another layer to this local culture through the emergence of the Findhorn Foundation, whose experiments in ecological living and sustainability attracted international attention from the 1960s onward. Together, these overlapping influences –  the traditional town of Forres, the intentional and ecological communities of Findhorn, the Camphill movement, and local initiatives such as Forres Friends of Woods and Fields – have created a small corner of Scotland that is geographically modest yet unusually rich in ideas about community, stewardship, and shared ways of living.

Précis: Blue Remembered Hills — a land of lost contentment

Nostalgia is one of those curious human afflictions that sits somewhere between memory and myth. The Greeks called it nostos: the longing for home, the ache of return. Homer built The Odyssey around it. Houseman called childhood “the land of lost content”. We all know the feeling: that sudden gust of memory carrying with it a place that perhaps never quite existed in the form we remember it. A song, a smell, a taste, a street corner glimpsed through rain –  and suddenly one is standing again in those “blue remembered hills”.

The trouble is that nostalgia can be both consolation and deception. Memory does not preserve the past like amber trapping an insect; it edits, softens, rearranges and, occasionally, invents. It is less a historical archive than a film editor’s cutting room. We tend to remember not the world as it was, but the world as it felt. Childhood roads seem wider when revisited, old houses smaller, old certainties larger. Looking backward is a little like looking in a rear-view mirror: objects appear closer than they really are.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Quite the opposite. Nostalgia often provides continuity in a world moving at bewildering speed. Long-term memory can become a kind of inner refuge, perhaps even biology’s consolation prize for ageing. As we move through life, the past gradually acquires sovereignty over the present. The older we get, the more we discover that Hartley was probably right: the past really is another country. More disconcertingly, we begin to realise it has become home.

Yet nostalgia also has its darker uses. It can become what South Park hilariously called “memberberries”: seductive little fragments of selective memory that rot the brain with sentimental half-truths. “Remember when things were better?” they whisper. Remember when streets were cleaner, people knew their place, children behaved, and chips came wrapped in newspaper? The problem is that these memories often airbrush out the less attractive features of the era: poverty, prejudice, corporal punishment, rigid social hierarchies, casual cruelty and exclusion. There is a tendency to remember cohesion while forgetting whom that cohesion excluded.

And nowhere is this more visible than in those sprawling Facebook nostalgia communities now largely colonised by us boomers. They are fascinating anthropological sites – digital village greens where people gather not to discuss wars, elections or grand historical events but milkmen, street sweepers, bin men, old sweets, cassettes and television programmes long vanished into history.

At first glance it all appears harmless enough: a warm bath of collective memory. Yet beneath pictures of “proper bin men” and school playgrounds often lurk deeper currents of anxiety and resentment. The mundane becomes symbolic. The old milkman becomes shorthand for social trust; the local high street for community; black-and-white photographs of tidy streets for a world supposedly more ordered and comprehensible.

What many are mourning, however, may not be the world itself so much as their own place within it. We do not merely miss old streets or old songs; we miss younger versions of ourselves inhabiting them. We miss possibility. We miss novelty. We miss being twenty and imagining that life was still unfolding rather than slowly arranging itself into memory.

The political danger arrives when nostalgia stops being reflective and becomes restorative — when longing for the past becomes a demand to reconstruct it. The right has often understood this instinct well. It does not necessarily need to persuade people of a compelling future if it can offer an idealised yesterday. “Take back control”, “make things great again”, “return to traditional values”: all are variations on the same emotional melody.

But return tickets are unavailable. The past cannot be restored because it never truly existed in the form imagined. There were never really “good old days”; there were simply days – complicated, contradictory and viewed through younger eyes.

None of this means memory should be discarded. Far from it. There is immense pleasure in basking in les temps perdus. I happily indulge in musical rabbit holes and Facebook reminiscences myself. Songs especially are magical portals because music does not merely remind us of the past –  it briefly resurrects it. A song can collapse fifty years in three minutes.

But I would still choose today.

For all its noise and absurdity, for all the algorithms, grievances and existential clutter of modern life, today contains wonders unimaginable to my younger self. Medicine keeps people alive who once would not have survived. Knowledge sits literally in our hands. Distances have collapsed. Possibilities have expanded.

The trick perhaps is to hold memory gently: to enjoy nostalgia without becoming captive to it. To remember that we are, as Maria Popova put it, all our previous selves stacked inside us like Russian matryoshka dolls –  not discarded versions, but incorporated ones.

The little boy still exists somewhere in the old streets and schoolyards and songs. He is still playing in the enchanted forest with Pooh and Christopher Robin.

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

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.

“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.

 

If you must say it, don’t say it in Jerusalem!

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

It was entitled: “Keeping Wolves from the Flock: The Case for Good Religion to Fight Anti-Semitism”. It was delivered on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January 2026 at the Binyaney Ha’uma Conference Center, Jerusalem, Israel. The presenter was former Australian prime Minister Scott Morrison. It was well received by audience, and praised by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. And it quickly reverberated back home.

The venue, the timing, and the company mattered. Israel, in the midst of an ongoing war and under the leadership of a government increasingly isolated internationally, was hardly a neutral stage. The event itself was framed as a moral gathering – a stand against antisemitism at a moment when Jewish communities worldwide feel newly exposed and embattled. Into this charged atmosphere stepped a deposed and disgraced Australian leader, now embarked on an international, largely ecclesiastical speaking circuit, offering prescriptions not for Israel, but for Islam in Australia.

The reaction in Australia followed well-worn grooves. Conservative outlets and commentators – most loudly those aligned with Murdoch media – cast Morrison as a truth-teller, bravely naming uncomfortable realities about radical Islam and standing up for Jewish security against a censorious, “woke” establishment that had been slow to deal with the acknowledged threat of radical Islamism. Progressive commentators, by contrast, focused on the dangers of securitising religion, the selective targeting of Muslims, exacerbating existing Islamophobia, and the symbolic violence of lecturing Australian minorities from abroad. The argument was instantly polarised, less a conversation than a mirror held up to our own media ecosystems and their predictable reflexes.

What was largely missing, however, was sustained attention to the deeper questions the speech inadvertently raised – questions that recur across debates about diversity, cohesion, and authority in plural societies. Who gets to speak about whom, and from where? How does a liberal democracy balance legitimate security concerns with religious freedom and civic trust? When does critique shade into control, and when does concern curdle into performance? And what happens when discussions about coexistence are conducted not face to face, but at altitude, before distant audiences primed for applause?

It is to those questions – rather than to the outrage or applause – that the brief following essay turns.

The politics of posturing 

There is a particular genre of speech that is recognisable before one even reaches the second paragraph. It is delivered abroad, framed as courageous, freighted with moral urgency, and aimed not so much at those ostensibly being addressed as at a wider, watching audience. Scott Morrison’s address in Israel belongs squarely in this genre. It is less a contribution to Australian social cohesion than a performance within a global culture war, delivered from a stage carefully chosen for its symbolism rather than its suitability.

Morrison, now out of office and out in the world, occupies a familiar post-political niche as he treads an international speaking circuit, heavily ecclesiastical in tone and audience, where moral clarity is prized over policy detail and applause over accountability. This matters, because the speech was not made in the Australian Parliament, not to Australian Muslims, not even in Australia. It was made in Israel – at a moment when Benjamin Netanyahu, politically cornered and morally embattled, will accept reassurance and affirmation from almost any quarter. In that sense, the speech served two purposes: it burnished Morrison’s credentials with a transnational conservative audience, and it offered Netanyahu symbolic solidarity. Australia, and Australian Muslims, were almost incidental.

The content of Morrison’s address has been widely rehearsed: calls for nationally consistent standards for Islamic institutions; accreditation and registration of imams; translation of sermons; expanded scrutiny of foreign funding; praise for Middle Eastern states that have “reasserted authority” over religious teaching. None of these ideas, taken in isolation, are wholly unthinkable. Liberal democracies already regulate religion in numerous ways – through education standards, charity law, financial transparency, and criminal statutes relating to incitement and abuse. No faith operates in a vacuum, and Islam is not exempt from the tensions between patriarchal authority and moral absolutism, and the egalitarian instincts of a secular, humanist society like Australia’s.

Nor is it controversial to observe that Islam, like Christianity before it, is engaged in a long, unfinished argument with modernity. Questions of gender, authority, pluralism, sexuality, and the limits of clerical power are not impositions from outside but live debates within Muslim communities themselves (see, in In That Howling Infinite, Islam’s house of many mansions and Educate a girl and you educate a community – exclude her and you impoverish it ). Australian Islam, however, is overwhelmingly benign, pragmatic, and law-abiding – a quiet negotiation between inherited tradition and lived reality, not a breeding ground of medieval zealotry. The men and women who left Australia to fight for ISIS were not summoned by local mosques but seduced by freelancing radicals in unregulated prayer halls algorithmic feeds, online grievance, and a search for meaning in a fractured digital world in which they find no place..

This is where Morrison’s argument begins to fray. Security agencies themselves – including ASIO director Mike Burgess – have been clear: you cannot arrest your way to social cohesion, nor spy your way to less youth radicalisation. The most rapidly evolving threats now emerge from the post-Covid morass of conspiracy theorists, anti-government paranoiacs, white nationalists, and apocalyptic survivalists – movements that often cloak themselves in Christian symbolism without any expectation that Christianity as a whole should be placed under special surveillance. To single out Islam, therefore, is not just analytically weak but politically loaded.

That loading is amplified by Morrison’s own biography. He is not a neutral secularist but an openly proselytising evangelical Christian, steeped in a tradition that would respond angrily to equivalent proposals applied to its own institutions. His political career was marked by secrecy, performative culture-war gestures, and a tendency to govern by symbolic posture rather than deliberative engagement – a style that ultimately saw him removed from office. These things do not invalidate his right to speak, but they do shape how his speech is received in his home country.

Then there is the matter of exemplars. Morrison’s citing of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan as models of religious regulation is not merely unfortunate; it is disqualifying. These are regimes that suppress women, persecute Christians and heterodox Muslims, criminalise dissent, and weaponise religion as an instrument of authoritarian control. They have form for dealing with Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood with what the Americans euphemistically call “extreme prejudice”.

To invoke them while speaking the language of freedom of worship is to betray a deep confusion about the difference between liberal regulation and illiberal domination. If the aim is integration, these are strange teachers to cite.

Yet even all this misses the most important point, which is not what Morrison said but how and where he said it.

It is presumptuous to lecture Australians from abroad. It is disrespectful to address Australian Muslims without engaging them directly. And it is incendiary to do so from Israel – a place that is anything but neutral in Muslim political consciousness, and where questions of religion, power, land, and legitimacy are already saturated with pain and contestation. To speak from there is to speak over, not to; to align oneself symbolically before dialogue has even begun. No amount of policy caveating can undo that gesture.

This is where the charge of Islamophobia becomes both understandable and, paradoxically, incomplete. Morrison did not denounce Muslims as such, nor did he advocate exclusion or expulsion. But by singling out Islam, invoking authoritarian models, and delivering his critique from a stage freighted with geopolitical meaning, he helped reinforce the sense that Muslims are a problem to be managed rather than citizens to be engaged. That perception matters, because alienation is not a side effect of radicalisation; it is one of its preconditions.

The reactions to the speech followed predictable lines. British commentator Brendan O’Neill, for example, writing in The Australian, cast Morrison as a brave blasphemer, persecuted by a censorious “Islamophobia industry” – a piece of rhetorical theatre entirely consistent with Spiked’s long-standing contrarian brand and its comfortable alignment with Murdoch culture-war politics. Jacqueline Maley, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, and the progressive wing of liberal commentary, focused on the dangers of securitisation, surveillance, and selective moral panic. Neither is wrong, exactly, but neither escapes their own political ecosystem.

What is striking is how little the speech had to do with Australia at all. It was not an attempt to build consensus, to consult, or to wrestle with the messy realities of pluralism. It was an attention-seeking intervention by a man no longer accountable to the electorate and yet nostalgic for its attention, speaking to an international audience that rewards moral certainty and civilisational framing. In that sense, the speech says less about Islam than it does about the temptations of post-power relevance.

If there is a lesson here, it is an old one. Social cohesion is not forged by speaking about communities from afar, nor by borrowing the language of security to police belief. It is built, slowly and imperfectly, through proximity, dialogue, and the unglamorous work of trust. Morrison chose distance instead. And in doing so, he turned a necessary conversation into a symbolic skirmish – one that generated headlines, applause, and division, but very little understanding. One that we hope, unrealistically alas, in today’s febrile political climate, will be forgotten sooner rather than later.

Call it concern if you like; politics has another word for speeches that travel so far to say so little at home: posturing.

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

Recent posts on the current state of Australian politics include Same old stone, different rock. What’s in a word?’ Shaping facts to feelings – debating intellectual dishonesty, Moral capture and conditional empathy, and Standing on the high moral ground is hard work!

Same old stone, different rock. What’s in a word?

Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

We condemn explicit anti-semitism but tolerate coded forms

The arrest of Brendan Koschel, a speaker at the Sydney’s anti-immigration March for Australia on Australia Day who described Jews as “the greatest enemy to this nation” was rightly condemned. Such statements are plainly antisemitic and sit outside the bounds of legitimate political expression. Few would argue otherwise. The speed and clarity of the response reflect a broadly shared moral consensus: explicit hatred of Jews is unacceptable and dangerous.

What is less settled is how society responds when similar animus appears in more indirect, politically coded forms. The case invites a broader examination of consistency – of whether antisemitism is being judged by its substance or merely by the vocabulary through which it is expressed.

There is no question that Palestinians have endured profound and ongoing suffering. The devastation in Gaza, mass civilian death, displacement, and the long history of occupation and statelessness demand serious moral attention. Anger, grief, and protest in response to these realities are understandable, and often justified. Acknowledging Palestinian suffering is not a concession; it is a moral necessity.

Yet since October 7, this moral urgency has unfolded alongside a striking rise in hostility directed at Jews well beyond the scope of political critique. Synagogues and Jewish schools have been vandalised. Jewish businesses have been targeted for boycotts based on ownership rather than conduct. Individuals have been harassed, doxed, or pressured to publicly renounce Israel as a condition of social or professional acceptance. These acts are widely acknowledged as regrettable, but they are often treated as peripheral to the movement that surrounds them, rather than as evidence of a deeper moral asymmetry.

That asymmetry becomes clearer when language is examined more closely. Explicit statements condemning “Jews” as a collective are swiftly identified as racist and, in some cases, criminal. By contrast, sweeping denunciations of “Zionists” are frequently treated as legitimate political speech, even when they rely on imagery of disease, conspiracy, or collective guilt.

This distinction matters because “Zionist” is not an abstract or neutral category. In practice, it commonly refers to Jews who support the existence of a Jewish homeland – a position held by a substantial majority of Jewish people in Australia. Surveys consistently indicate that around 80 per cent of Australian Jews identify, in some form, as Zionist. As a result, hostility directed at “Zionists” often functions as hostility toward Jews as a group, translated into a more socially acceptable register. For more on this, see below, “Looking for the good Jews”.

Those who use such rhetoric often insist that they oppose only an ideology, not a people. That claim deserves to be taken seriously. Criticism of Israel – of its government, its military conduct, and its laws – is legitimate and necessary. Opposition to Zionism as a political project is not, in itself, antisemitic. Jewish political opinion is diverse, and many Jews themselves are critical of Zionism in some or all its forms. Israelis are themselves politically divided

The problem arises when this distinction collapses in practice. When Zionists are described as uniquely evil, conspiratorial, or beyond moral consideration, the language begins to mirror longstanding antisemitic tropes. The shift is not always conscious or malicious, but it is real. What would be immediately recognised as hate speech if applied to Jews directly is often defended when routed through political terminology.

This pattern is reinforced by the dynamics of contemporary public discourse. Slogans such as “from the river to the sea,” “globalize the intifada,” and “death to the IDF” circulate widely, in part because they are rhetorically efficient and algorithmically rewarded. They compress history into chant, complexity into certainty. Yet these slogans are also widely heard—by Jews and Israelis—as eliminationist in implication. They gesture toward the disappearance of Israel, invoke campaigns associated with violence against civilians, or endorse the killing of a collective. Comparable language directed at other groups would not be treated as permissible political speech.

Here again, the double standard is evident. A far-right speaker who names Jews directly is prosecuted and publicly shunned. More educated or progressive actors, using different language to express closely related ideas, face little scrutiny. In some cultural and institutional spaces, their rhetoric is actively celebrated.

This uneven moral landscape is sustained by a broader condition of moral capture. In activist environments shaped by social media, intensity is rewarded, hesitation penalised. Historical complexity gives way to moral theatre; political literacy is displaced by symbolic alignment. Once captured, movements become resistant to self-critique. Harm that flows from their rhetoric—such as the intimidation of Jews with no connection to Israeli policy—is reframed as incidental, or simply ignored.

The result is not the elimination of antisemitism, but its adaptation. It becomes more fluent, more respectable, more compatible with prevailing moral fashions. Speech-policing approaches that focus on the crudest expressions may satisfy the desire to be seen to act, but they leave this refined version largely untouched.

The Koschel case thus illustrates a deeper problem. By punishing explicit hatred while tolerating its coded forms, society draws a moral line based on style rather than substance. Prejudice is not challenged; it is merely taught to speak a different language.

A society genuinely committed to opposing antisemitism would need to confront both its vulgar and its sophisticated manifestations. That means applying the same moral standards to hatred expressed from a rally stage and to hatred embedded in politically sanctioned rhetoric. Without that consistency, condemnation becomes selective—and antisemitism endures, renamed but intact.

Coda: On Consistency

What ultimately emerges from this discussion is not a dispute about free speech or political passion, but a question of moral consistency. Antisemitism is widely condemned when it appears in its most explicit and vulgar forms. When it reappears in coded, politicised, or culturally fashionable language, it is often reclassified as critique and exempted from scrutiny.

This distinction rests on vocabulary rather than substance. Hatred expressed without euphemism is punished; hatred expressed through politically approved categories is tolerated, and at times endorsed. The result is not a reduction in prejudice, but its translation into more socially acceptable forms.

Such selectivity undermines the very principles it claims to defend. If collective blame, dehumanisation, and eliminationist implication are wrong, they are wrong regardless of the speaker’s ideology or the language used to convey them. Moral seriousness requires applying the same standards across contexts, rather than adjusting them to fit cultural or political comfort.

A society that confronts antisemitism only when it is crude teaches a damaging lesson: that prejudice is unacceptable only when it is unsophisticated. In doing so, it leaves itself vulnerable to the more durable and corrosive versions—those that pass as conscience, activism, or moral clarity.

Consistency is not censorship. It is the refusal to let hatred rebrand itself as virtue.

Looking for the “good Jews”

An extract from Moral capture, conditional empathy and the failure of shock

In This Is What It Looks Like, we wrote: “… antisemitism does not arrive announcing itself. It seeps. It jokes. It chants. It flatters those who believe they are on the right side of history, until history arrives and asks what they tolerated in its name”.

One of those jokes landed, flatly, on January 7 when the otherwise circumspect Age and Sydney Morning Herald published a caricature drawn by the award-winning cartoonist Cathy Wilcox. It presented those calling for a forthcoming royal commission into antisemitism as naïve participants in a hierarchy of manipulation. At the surface were the petitioners themselves; beneath them senior Coalition figures – Sussan Ley, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, John Howard, David Littleproud – alongside Rupert Murdoch and Jillian Siegel, lawyer, businesswoman and Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism; and behind them all, setting the rhythm, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Each layer marched to a beat not its own.

Cathy Wilcox cartoon, SMH 7 January 2026

Critics argued that the image revived a familiar and corrosive trope: the suggestion of hidden Jewish influence directing political life from the shadows. The cartoon, titled Grass roots, depicts a cluster of foolish-looking figures demanding a royal commission. They are presumably meant to represent the families of the dead, as well as lawyers, judges, business leaders and sporting figures who had urged government action long before the Prime Minister concluded that continued indifference might stain his legacy. When he finally announced a royal commission—expanded, without explanation, to include the elastic phrase “social cohesion”—no journalist paused to ask what that addition was meant to clarify.

In the drawing, a dog stands among these Australians, holding a placard and thinking, “Don’t mention the war.” The grass beneath their feet is supported by a menacing cast: and stock villains of the anti-Zionist imagination. The implication is unmistakable: that the pleas of grieving families and prominent citizens are neither organic nor sincere, but choreographed – another performance conducted from afar.

That implication did not arise in isolation. Across social and mainstream media, many progressives called for Jillian Segal to be removed and her report rejected out of hand. Others elevated Jewish critics of the war, of Zionism, or of Netanyahu as moral exemplars – “good Jews,” “some Jews tell the truth” – as if Jewish legitimacy were contingent on ideological alignment.  Some wrote openly that Jews, “for their numbers,” exercised excessive influence. One circulating meme complained, “We didn’t vote for a Zionist voice”, whilst other posts informed their echo chamber that Chabad Bondi, a branch of the global Jewish outreach organisation, which had organised the Hanukkah gathering on the fateful Sunday evening and also the local commemorations for the victims (and later, the tribute at the Sydney Opera House) was but another tentacle of the sinister and  uber-influential Jewish Lobby. Some of the most incongruous postings have been of ultra Orthodox Jews – Haredim – with signs condemning the Gaza war and Zionism, as if to say these are the authentic, “good” Jews. Some footage actually shows Haredim protesting against the Israeli government’s efforts to conscript exempt yeshiva students into the IDF – but, as they say, every picture tells a story.

Running beneath this was a persistent misconception. Judaism was treated as a religion, detachable and voluntary, rather than as an ethnoreligious identity shaped by lineage, memory and shared fate. Jews were asked not simply to oppose Israeli policy but to renounce their “homeland,” their inheritance, their sense of collective belonging. Census figures were deployed to minimise Jewish presence, overlooking the fact that many Jews, with Germany in the 1930s still in mind, remain reluctant to advertise religious affiliation. Genealogical platforms tell a different story: the number of people who discover Jewish ancestry far exceeds those who publicly profess the faith.

Another factor further clouds understanding. Jews are rarely dogmatically regarded as part of what Australians loosely call our “multicultural” society – a variegated demographic more often reserved for the post–White Australia waves of migration – communities that are visibly non-European or culturally distinct. Jews slipped beneath that radar. Many arrived well before the Second World War, and those who came before and after tended to integrate, to go mainstream, to succeed, and therefore not to stand out.

As a result, Jews were quietly folded into an older Judeo-Christian demographic, grouped alongside Protestants and Catholics as part of the cultural furniture rather than recognised as a minority with a distinct history and vulnerability. In most urban, and even regional settings, many Australians would be unaware that Jewish families live among them at all. At the same time, a surprising number of people carry Jewish ancestry several generations back, or are connected through marriage or descent, without regarding this as identity in any conscious way.

This invisibility cuts both ways. It has allowed Jews to belong without friction, but it has also made Jewishness strangely abstract – easy to misclassify as belief rather than continuity, easy to overlook as lived experience, and easy, when political passions rise, to treat as conditional.

Here the paradox sharpens, particularly among progressives. There is genuine respect for Indigenous Australians’ reverence for history, genealogy and Country: an understanding that identity is inherited as much as chosen, that land carries memory and obligation across generations. Yet the Jewish connection to Zion is denied that same conceptual dignity. What is recognised as ancestral continuity in one case is dismissed in the other as theology, nationalism or ideology.

The inconsistency is telling. Jewish attachment to place is stripped of its historical depth and cultural persistence, judged by standards not applied elsewhere. In that light, the cartoon does more than offend. It gives visual form to a deeper habit of thought: one that sorts Jews into acceptable and unacceptable categories, organic grief and foreign orchestration, legitimate belonging and suspect attachment- depending on who is being asked to explain themselves, and to whom.

All of this helps to explain the dangerous and disturbing upsurge in antisemitism over the past two years and earlier.

The Bondi massacre did not invent anti-Semitism in Australia; it exposed a system already bent, quietly, against seeing it. Two recent articles in The Australian show in complementary ways two faces of the same failure: one structural, one intimate. On the one hand, Professor Timothy Lynch diagnoses the intellectual and institutional blindness that allows hatred to incubate unchecked; on the other, author Lee Kofman shows the personal toll when grief itself is made conditional on passing someone else’s moral purity test. Together, they reveal a society in which moral frameworks have become cages rather than guides.

For decades, Australian multiculturalism has performed a delicate contortion: apologising for its own history while demanding loyalty from newcomers. Original British settlement is framed as a sin; multiethnic immigration is a progressive corrective. The paradox, Lynch notes, is that the very order migrants join is simultaneously denigrated by the leaders they are expected to trust. Within this structure, Jews occupy an uncomfortable space: electorally negligible, culturally visible, historically persecuted, yet paradoxically recoded as white and colonial. Zionism – a project of survival and refuge – is reframed as a form of imperial wrongdoing, while other nationalisms pass without scrutiny. Anti-Semitism, filtered through progressive identity politics, becomes an exception to the very rules designed to prevent harm.

Bondi rendered these abstract asymmetries concrete. The massacre forced recognition that anti-Semitism, once dismissed as campus rhetoric or aestheticised resistance, could and would become lethal.

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.

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.

The interest in moral capture is analytical rather than accusatory. It is not arguing that writers, academics, or institutions are malicious; rather, it argues that they have become intellectually narrowed by the desire to belong to the “right side of history.” Moral capture explains how good intentions curdle into dogma, how solidarity becomes performative, and how the fear of social exile replaces the discipline of thought. It accounts for the strange phenomenon whereby intelligent people outsource their moral judgment to slogans, and experience constraint not as an intolerable injury to the self.

The Adelaide Writers’ Festival affair iss seen not primarily about Randa Abdel-Fattah, nor even about free speech. It is a case study in institutional failure and cultural self-deception. The mass withdrawals are viewed not as acts of courage or principle but as gestures of affiliation – ritualised displays of virtue by people largely untouched by the substance of the dispute. What is disturbing is the asymmetry: the speed with which a festival collapsed to defend eliminationist rhetoric, and the silence that greeted the doxxing, intimidation, and quiet cancellation of Jewish writers and artists. Adelaide did not fall because standards were enforced, but because those standards were applied selectively and then disowned at the first sign of reputational discomfort.

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.

We are not asking culture to choose sides; you 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

Shaping facts to feelings – debating intellectual dishonesty

Paul Hemphill 7 Comments

In early November last year, we published The most nihilistic war ever …Sudan’s waking nightmare, a harrowing piece about the atrocities being committed in the West Dharfur region of civil-war torn Sudan. A  friend commented on the article, accusing me of intellectual dishonesty in comparing the international outcry over Gaza to the silence on Sudan. His comment was not the first of similar justifications:

“ … with respect to the lack of outrage, the mainstream media can stir outrage on any topic when its political masters and financial backers want it to. Why has it not done so in this instance? Follow the money is one rule of thumb. I assume it suits the powers that be to let the slaughter continue. I hope more people are inspired to become activists against this dreadful situation, but public opinion tends to follow the narrative manufactured by the media more than impel it. When it comes to pro-Palestinian activism it is the story of a long hard grind of dedicated protestors to get any traction at all against the powerful political and media interests which have supported the Israeli narrative and manufactured global consent for the genocide  of Palestinians over many years. And still, although the tide is gradually turning, the West supports Israel to the hilt and crushes dissent. Using the silence in the media and in the streets over the slaughter in Sudan as an excuse to try and invalidate pro-Palestinian activism is a low blow and intellectually dishonest”.

This response is articulate and impassioned, but it also illustrates precisely the reflexive narrowing of moral vision that the comparison between Gaza and Sudan was meant to illuminate. His argument hinges on a familiar syllogism: that Western media outrage is never organic but always orchestrated (“follow the money”), that silence on Sudan therefore reflects elite indifference rather than public apathy, and that to highlight that silence is somehow to attack or “invalidate” the legitimacy of pro-Palestinian activism. It is a neat, closed circuit – morally reassuring, rhetorically watertight, but intellectually fragile.

In That Howling Infinite quizzed ChatGPT to collate, distill definitions and explanations of intellectual dishonest because we sensed its presence everywhere in the debate, including – uncomfortably – around my own thinking. Not as accusation, but as inquiry. The Gaza war has a peculiar way of forcing moral positions to harden quickly, of rewarding certainty and punishing hesitation, of turning complexity into suspicion. In that climate, asking what intellectual dishonesty actually looks like felt less like an abstract exercise than a necessary act of self-defence.

An ideological  comfort zone

Intellectual dishonesty, then, is the deliberate or unconscious use of argument, rhetoric, or selective reasoning to defend a position one knows – or should know – is incomplete, misleading, or false. It is less about lying outright and more about distorting truth for ideological comfort. It includes cherry-picking evidence, using double standards, appealing to emotion over reason, or refusing to acknowledge valid counterarguments. You could even call it “lying to oneself”, and truth be told, we are all guilty at one time or another.

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. What begins as solidarity curdles into slogan; what starts as empathy ossifies into orthodoxy. And because this conflict sits at the intersection of history, identity, trauma, and power, the temptation to simplify—to choose a side and suspend thinking is especially strong.

I asked the question, then, not to sit in judgement above the fray, but to understand how easily moral seriousness can slip into moral performance, and how even good intentions can narrow rather than enlarge our field of vision.

Intellectual dishonesty is rarely the bald lie. More often it is the careful omission, the selective emphasis, the comfortable narrowing of vision that allows us to remain morally certain while thinking we are being rigorous. It is the use of argument, rhetoric, or evidence not to discover what is true, but to defend what feels right. Cherry-picking, double standards, euphemism, emotional substitution for analysis, the refusal to sit with uncomfortable counter-truth – these are not failures of intelligence so much as failures of discipline. They are the betrayal of thought in service of tribe.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the discourse surrounding Gaza. On all sides, intellectual dishonesty flourishes, amplified by mainstream and social media systems that reward moral clarity over moral accuracy, outrage over comprehension, and certainty over doubt. The war has become not merely a catastrophe but a stage upon which external protagonists perform their own identities, anxieties, and loyalties.

On the pro-Israel side, intellectual dishonesty often takes the form of moral laundering. Hamas’s atrocities – October 7, the hostages, the tunnels, the use of UN personnel and facilities – are rightly invoked, but too often as a solvent that dissolves all subsequent scrutiny. Civilian deaths become “collateral damage,” mass destruction becomes operational necessity, and a stateless, blockaded and exposed population is rhetorically elevated into a symmetrical belligerent confronting one of the most powerful militaries on earth. Euphemisms do heavy lifting: “targeted strikes,” “human shields,” “complex urban environments.” Criticism of Israeli policy is collapsed into antisemitism, not to defend Jewish safety but to foreclose moral argument. What is omitted – the occupation, the blockade, the decades of dispossession and accumulated trauma – is as important as what is said.

On the pro-Palestinian side, dishonesty manifests differently but no less pervasively. Moral outrage hardens into narrative absolutism. Hamas’s crimes are erased, justified, or absorbed into the abstraction of “muqawama”, resistance, or “sumud”, resilience, collapsing the distinction between combatant and civilian. Violence is romanticised, militants transfigured into symbols, their authoritarianism and indifference to Palestinian life quietly excised. Empathy becomes selective: Gazan children are mourned, Israeli families are passed over, or worse, subsumed into theory. History is flattened into a single moment of victimhood, stripped of Arab politics, Islamist extremism, regional failure, and internal Palestinian fracture. The powerful are cast as pure evil, the powerless as pure good, until reality itself becomes an inconvenience.

Mainstream media does not correct this; it accelerates it. Impartiality is performed while distortion is practised. Headlines flatten causality, images are severed from context, asymmetry is neutralised by “both sides” language. Social media perfects the process. Algorithms reward fury, not thought; spectacle, not inquiry. Influencers weaponise empathy itself – choosing which corpses to count, which cities to name, which pictures to publish (sometimes none to fussy about which war they portray), and which griefs to amplify. Moral clarity is produced without moral responsibility.

Beneath all this lies a deeper dishonesty, one that is existential rather than rhetorical. Each side insists its justice is indivisible, when in truth each vision of justice requires the other’s erasure. Gaza becomes less a human tragedy than a mirror onto which Western actors project their unresolved conflicts about empire, identity, guilt, and power. It is here that intellectual dishonesty ceases to be merely argumentative and becomes moral.

This is where the comparison with Sudan – and any forgotten or ignored war in this sad world – becomes instructive and also uncomfortable. When the relative silence surrounding Sudan’s catastrophe is raised, it is often dismissed as “whataboutism” or as an attempt to diminish Palestinian suffering. That response itself reveals the problem. The point is not to weigh body counts or rank atrocities, but to interrogate how empathy is distributed. Why does one horror become the world’s moral touchstone while another, no less vast or humanly devastating, barely registers?

The easy answer – “follow the money,” “manufactured outrage” – “media conspiracy” – “the Jewish Lobby” – is reassuring but incomplete. Western silence on Sudan is less conspiracy than exhaustion. Sudan offers no tidy morality play. No clean colonial narrative. No villains easily costumed for Instagram. Its war is fragmented, internecine, post-ideological: warlords, militias, foreign patrons, gold under rubble. It resists hashtags. Gaza, by contrast, offers clarity, identity, and the comforting architecture of blame. Victims and oppressors are sharply drawn; the script is familiar; moral alignment confers belonging.

In Sudan, millions starve while the gold glitters in the darkness deep beneath their feet. In Gaza, ruins are televised, moralised, and weaponised. Both are human catastrophes. Only one has an audience.

To point this out is not to invalidate solidarity with Gaza. It is to expose the limits of our moral imagination. Empathy that depends on narrative simplicity is not universalism; it is performance. Compassion that requires a script is conditional. If justice is truly the aspiration, it must be capacious enough to grieve Darfur and Khartoum alongside Gaza City, to care even when the cameras turn away.

Bringing it all back home  …

And this brings the argument uncomfortably close to home. Are we too guilty of intellectual dishonesty? To be I honest, yes – probably, at least sometimes. But then, who isn’t? The Gaza war is a moral minefield where even careful minds lose their footing. Passion bends the lens; grief distorts perspective; certainty is seductive. No one who cares deeply escapes the pull of identification.

Endeavouring to see all sides of an argument, age, experience, knowledge, empathy – and a growing impatience with historical illiteracy and intellectual laziness – inevitably shape what we see. A lifetime hatred of antisemitism runs through them as well, a moral watermark that does not fade simply because the world grows louder. These influences are not disclaimers; they are facts. Not excuses, merely coordinates. If an argument is bent  to fit a moral arc, felt more keenly for one set of victims, or wearied of slogans masquerading as history, then yes -we have been partial.

The difference lies in knowing it. Intellectual dishonesty becomes moral failure only when it is unacknowledged, when narrative becomes more important than truth, when the lens is never turned inward. What resists dishonesty is reflexivity: the willingness to ask whether one is being fair, whether one is seduced by one’s own argument, whether omission has crept in disguised as clarity.

So yes – guilty, but aware. Fallible, but striving. He who is without sin, after all, should be cautious about throwing stones, especially from within a glasshouse. Perhaps that is as close as any of us come to honesty: to keep turning the lens back on ourselves, again and again, until the view clears – or at least steadies enough to see by.

And that, is arguably not a failure of honesty but a condition of it. To articulate one’s influences is to refuse the pretence of neutrality, to acknowledge that objectivity is not the absence of bias but the discipline of recognising it. Impatience with ignorance is, at its core, a moral impatience: a refusal to see human tragedy flattened into slogans or history reduced to talking points. The danger, of course, is fatigue – after decades of watching the same horrors recur, empathy can harden into exasperation. But awareness of that tendency is itself a safeguard.

We are participants in the long conversation of conscience – who know that clarity and compassion rarely sit still in the same chair, but who insists they at least keep talking. In an age that prizes certainty above understanding, that may be the most honest posture left: to keep turning the lens back on ourselves,, resisting the comfort of tribe, and refusing to let thought become merely another form of allegiance.

Author’s  Note …

This opinion piece is one of several on the 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.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.

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. 

The interest in moral capture is analytical rather than accusatory. It is not arguing that writers, academics, or institutions are malicious; rather, it are argues that they have become intellectually narrowed by the desire to belong to the “right side of history.” Moral capture explains how good intentions curdle into dogma, how solidarity becomes performative, and how the fear of social exile replaces the discipline of thought. It accounts for the strange phenomenon whereby intelligent people outsource their moral judgment to slogans, and experience constraint not as an intolerable injury to the self.

The Adelaide Writers’ Festival affairis seen not primarily about Randa Abdel-Fattah, nor even about free speech. It is a case study in institutional failure and cultural self-deception. The mass withdrawals are viewed not as acts of courage or principle but as gestures of affiliation – ritualised displays of virtue by people largely untouched by the substance of the dispute. What is disturbing is the asymmetry: the speed with which a festival collapsed to defend eliminationist rhetoric, and the silence that greeted the doxxing, intimidation, and quiet cancellation of Jewish writers and artists. Adelaide did not fall because standards were enforced, but because those standards were applied selectively and then disowned at the first sign of reputational discomfort.

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.

We are not asking culture to choose sides; you 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

This Is What It Looks Like

Paul Hemphill 8 Comments

For two years the chant was rehearsed, circulated, aestheticised: “globalise the intifada!”. A resistance moment. A noble liberation struggle, cleansed of consequence. Now that it has arrived not as metaphor but as blood, the same people who normalised the rhetoric – progressive activists, influencers, podcasters, the Greens, the Labor left – present themselves as mourners. Today it is condolences, unity, and prayers.

But you do not get to globalise the intifada and then feign surprise when it turns up.

This did not erupt spontaneously. It was built – patiently, rhetorically – until violence no longer felt aberrant but earned. Shock, at this point, is not innocence; it is evasion.

The Prime Minister calls for unity and convenes the National Security Committee of Cabinet. Necessary, yes – but no longer enough. The problem he faces is credibility. For two years the response to antisemitism has been managerial rather than moral: statements instead of lines, calibration instead of resolve.

The record is plain. Within hours of the October 7 Hamas massacre, and before Israel inflicted its biblical rage upon Gaza, Jews were openly abused outside the Sydney Opera House. Synagogues and childcare centres were firebombed and homes and vehicles vandalised. Hate preachers operated freely. Jewish students and academics were harassed on campus. Jewish artists were doxed and frozen out of cultural life. Antisemitism was rhetorically dissolved by equating it with Islamophobia, converting a specific hatred into a moral blur.

Week after week, marches moved through our cities celebrating “resistance”, praising terrorism, calling for Israel’s elimination, and chanting explicitly for the globalisation of the intifada: violence against Jews, everywhere – for what else could that word mean?  

The Second Intifada (2000–2005) was not a civil-rights uprising or a campaign of mass non-violent resistance. It was a sustained period of armed violence marked by suicide bombings, shootings, lynchings and rocket attacks against Israeli civilians—buses, cafés, nightclubs, markets—alongside heavy Israeli military responses, incursions, assassinations and widespread Palestinian casualties. Over 4,000 people were killed, the majority Palestinian but with a deliberate campaign of mass-casualty attacks on civilians at its core. It ended the Oslo peace process, entrenched mutual radicalisation, and normalised the targeting of civilians as political theatre.

So when activists chant “globalize the intifada,” they are not invoking protest or solidarity in the abstract. They are gesturing – whether knowingly or not – toward the export of that model: decentralised, ideologically justified violence against civilians, transposed from one conflict zone into the wider world. The slogan’s power lies precisely in its ambiguity; its danger lies in what history makes unambiguous.

Step by step, the chant has been normalised.

The year ends with an Islamist terrorist attack at Bondi Beach –  an ordinary, intimate place, place many of us walk, eat, linger. We were in Sydney last weekend, and had we stayed another night, we would very likely have been there ourselves, walking the promenade and then taking refreshment, as is our custom, at the North Bondi RSL, just across the road from the park where the atrocity occurred. Authorities had warned such an incident was probable. They were not speculating; they were reading the climate.

Antisemitism in Australia has risen to levels unseen in living memory – even in small country towns like the one we live near and in Byron Bay, meccas of alternative lifestyles and long-styled as havens of inclusion and wellness. Alongside this rise sits another failure: the government’s inability to confront antisemitism with clarity and force, preferring symbolic gestures and offshore moral posturing while hatred hardened at home.

Now, suddenly, our leaders discover grief. Social media is more revealing. Facebook fills with empathetic words and memes from politicians, public figures and keyboard activists who spent the past two years condemning Israel in ways that blurred – and often erased – the distinction between Israeli policy and Jewish existence, creating at best, indifference to Jewish fear and, at worst, a permissive climate of hostility toward Jews as such. Today it is all tolerance, inclusivity and unity – and an air of regret and reverence that reeks of guilt.

But not all. Social media has fractured along familiar lines. At one extreme are conspiracy theories — false flags, invented victims, claims the attackers were Israeli soldiers. At the other is denial: what antisemitism? Between them sits a more revealing response. There is genuine shock and horror, even remorse – but also a careful foregrounding of the Syrian-Australian man who intervened, coupled with a quiet erasure of the victims’ Jewishness; a reflexive turn to whataboutism; and a refusal, even now, to relinquish the slogans and moral habits of the past two years. If antisemitism is acknowledged at all, it is ultimately laid at the feet of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Why this reticence, this resistance to reassessment after the Bondi attack? Perhaps it lies less in ideology than in psychology. For some, there is a simple inability to relinquish prior convictions- positions publicly held, repeatedly performed, and now too entangled with identity to abandon without cost. For others, perhaps a deeper reluctance to acknowledge having been misinformed or misdirected, an admission that would require not just intellectual correction but moral self-reckoning. Empathy, too, has become selective: extending it fully to Jewish victims would require suspending, even briefly, a framework that collapses Jewish identity into the actions of the Israeli state. And finally, many are no longer reasoning freely at all, but are caught inside the machinery – the rhythms of platforms, slogans, group loyalties and algorithmic reinforcement – where reconsideration feels like betrayal and pause feels like capitulation.

So the question must be asked plainly: can many on the left side of politics, no matter how well-intentioned (and ill-formed) honestly say that nothing they have posted over the past two years contributed, even indirectly, to prejudice against Jewish people? Nothing that helped turn anxiety and empathy into hostility, criticism into contempt?

Australian Jews warned that today’s chant would become tomorrow’s attack. They were told they were exaggerating, weaponising history, crying wolf. Yet despite inquiries, legislation, and repeated arson and vandalism, the ecosystem of hate was allowed to deepen. Two years of weekly protests chanting “From the river to the sea”, “Globalise the intifada” and “Death to the IDF” – calling for the eradication of a nation state and its people – were treated as politics, not incitement. 

In July 2024 the government appointed Jillian Segal, a lawyer and businesswoman, as Australia’s first Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism (followed soon afterwards by the appointment of Aftab Malik as Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia). Her report, released a year later, was unambiguous: antisemitism had become “ingrained and normalised” across universities, schools, media and cultural institutions. She called for curriculum reform, university accountability, migration screening, and a serious national effort to explain what antisemitism is and why it corrodes societies.

Five months on, the government is still considering it. It has been under heavy pressure from many quarters to hasten slowly, including from within its own ranks: there were calls from the Labor left, including motions from branches and petitions, for Segal to be sacked and her report shredded.

Mere days after Bondi, the pushback has already begun. Pro-Palestinian platforms – and even some Labor branches and members – have denounced Jillian Segal, her report, and Prime Minister Albanese’s intention to implement its recommendations as an assault on democratic institutions and civil liberties. So, argue that that the Australian government is using the atrocity as a pretext to accelerate its repression of the Palestine movement, and, even, to protect and defend Australia’s complicity in what is viewed as the Gaza genocide. What this framing conspicuously avoids is any reckoning with the antisemitism the report documents-  or with the immediate, practical questions now facing authorities. Among these are the potential for copycat attacks, and what duty of care is owed to the Syrian-Australian man who intervened to stop the attack? Hamas and sections of Middle Eastern media have already branded him a traitor. In this moral economy, even heroism is conditional – and quickly becomes a liability.

The partisan responses have been opportunistically predictable. The Murdoch media accused the government of weakness. The Liberal Party, led by Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, accused Labor of neglect. Pauline Hanson followed, reliably. None of it alters the central fact identified by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore: the taboo on antisemitism has collapsed. Perhaps because Jewish identity is lazily collapsed into Israel. Perhaps because the world’s oldest hatred never disappears; it waits for permission. That permission was granted – gradually, rhetorically, respectably. And antisemitism does not arrive announcing itself. It seeps. It jokes. It chants. It flatters those who believe they are on the right side of history, until history arrives and asks what they tolerated in its name.

This did not come out of nowhere. It arrived exactly as advertised, and this is what it looks like. 

And shock, now, is not a moral position.

Lifesavers line Bondi Beach, 19 December 2026, Oscar Colman

Postscript … just saying …

The following is a précis of an opinion piece in the  Sydney Morning Herald on 20 December 2025 by satirist and presenter Josh Szeps entitled “What kind of Australia do we want to be? Let’s stop dodging the hard questions”. It encapsulates succinctly the questions we must ask ourselves. It is no satire: 

In the aftermath of Bondi, everyone has an explanation and a slogan. Blame is flung in all directions – Israel, its critics, Muslims, the prime minister, “the world’s oldest hatred” – and consensus collapses into a hollow refrain: say no to hate. Comforting, yes; clarifying, no. Meanwhile, Jewish Australians now fear public gathering, and Muslim and Palestinian Australians brace for backlash of their own. This is the brittle edge of multiculturalism when the shared glue has weakened.

That glue once went by a plain name: liberal universalism – free speech, equality before the law, scepticism toward dogma, the right to criticise ideas without condemning people. Over the past decade it has been displaced by a politics of identity, grievance management, and performative outrage, leaving us unwilling to ask hard but necessary questions: how to integrate insular communities, how to criticise religious fanaticism without collapsing into bigotry, how to balance pluralism with a shared civic culture. Into that vacuum rush provocateurs, algorithms, and foreign actors only too happy to inflame old hatreds.

The weekly Gaza marches exposed this failure. Slogans like “globalise the intifada” or “from the river to the sea” may sound abstract or benign to some, but to many Jews they carry a very concrete historical threat – especially after October 7. That most marchers may not have grasped the implications is precisely the problem. Chanting borrowed slogans in mass, without curiosity or restraint, is not moral seriousness. Nor is pretending that theocratic, homophobic, antisemitic religious doctrines are merely “cultural differences” compatible with the values that made Australia attractive in the first place.

Multiculturalism survives only if it demands something of everyone: discomfort and openness from the majority; reciprocity, restraint and abandonment of imported feuds from minorities. If liberals won’t defend universal values — plainly, without euphemism or ritual throat-clearing — others, far less liberal, will step in and do it for them.

Here are three particularly resonant paragraphs: 

“Week after week, chunks of our cities were overtaken by protesters carrying signs that had nothing to do with Israeli policies, such as “globalise the intifada” and “by any means necessary”. The ubiquitous “from the river to the sea”, benign-sounding to bystanders, proposes that an Arab state ought to sit on top of all the land of Israel – that Jewish people should live at the pleasure of rulers whose theocratic education would make Australia’s most radical imam look like a Jew-loving hippy. Is such a sentiment just innocent political speech? Or, in the wake of the jihadism on October 7, 2023, could it be understood as a threat to conquer the world’s only Jewish safe space? 

… if you found yourself marching across the Sydney Harbour Bridge chanting slogans you didn’t write, about a complex issue you’re not really across, surrounded by crowds chanting the same thing, which others found intimidating … you may, in fact, not have been elevating the discourse. “Intifada” technically means “uprising”, but in the context of Palestinian resistance it implies exploding buses, drive-by shootings and suicide bombers in cafes. (See: “Second Intifada” in Wikipedia, kids). Presumably, most of the protesters didn’t know this. After last weekend, they do. The Intifada has been globalised …

It’s up to all of us to refresh multiculturalism by tethering it to universal values and admitting that it demands sacrifices all around. It demands that people in the majority make themselves uncomfortable, around unfamiliar languages, faiths, customs and food. And it demands that people in the minority give up dogmatism, grudges and cultural feuds”.

i couldn’t express it better myself …

Josh Szeps, satirist and presenter Sydney Morning Herald 20 December 2025

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

Sydney July 2025 (Getty)

Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

“We are cursed to live in a time of great historical significance: when future historians look back at 2023, the distinguishing feature of this year will likely be the recurrence of ethnic cleansing on a vast scale”.

Thus wrote Unherd columnist and former war correspondent Aris Roussinos in December. 2023, but he would draw the same conclusion in 2024 and in 2025. He notes that ethnic cleansing is taking place on a vast scale in many parts of the world. Yet, apart from the current outrage at Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, turbocharged as it is by unprecedented and arguably one-sided mainstream and social media coverage, international reaction has been muted to the point of indifference. Roussinos’ article is republished below, and the following overview is inspired by and draws on his observations.

The term ethnic cleansing is elusive and politically charged. In an age of endemic conflict, identity politics and competing narratives, it has become a contested and often diluted concept invoked with increasing frequency. Yet, it remains undefined in law. Unlike genocide or war crimes, it has never been codified as a distinct offence under international law, and so its use is contested.

A United Nations Commission of Experts investigating violations during the wars in the former Yugoslavia offered the most widely cited descriptions. In its interim report it defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” In its final report the following year, the Commission elaborated: it is “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” What is clear in these descriptions is that ethnic cleansing is deliberate, systematic, and political in nature.

The Commission also catalogued the methods through which such policies are carried out. They include murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual violence, severe injury to civilians, confinement of populations in ghettos, forcible deportation and displacement, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilian areas, the use of human shields, the destruction and looting of property, and assaults on hospitals, medical staff and humanitarian organisations such as the Red Cross and Red Crescent. The Commission concluded that these acts could amount to crimes against humanity, war crimes, and in some instances, fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.

Many people today use the term ethnic cleansing interchangeably with genocide, since both involve the violent removal and destruction of communities and often lead to similar outcomes of death, displacement, and cultural erasure. Ethnic cleansing, which refers to the forced expulsion of a group from a territory through intimidation, violence, or coercion, frequently overlaps with acts that fall under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, such as mass killings and the destruction of cultural or religious life. This blurring of concepts reflects not only the moral outrage provoked by such crimes but also frustration at the narrowness of legal categories, which can leave survivors feeling their suffering has been minimized by technical distinctions. Historical cases illustrate how the line between the two has often been perilously thin: the mass deportations and killings of Armenians in 1915, which many scholars and states regard as genocide and even describe as a holocaust – though Türkiye denies it and Israel avoids official recognition for fear of diluting the unique status of the Shoah – the expulsions and massacres of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, and the flight of the Rohingya from Myanmar all show how ethnic cleansing has so often carried genocidal dimensions – as is particularly the case today with the war in Gaza which has polarized and politicized ordinary people and activists alike worldwide who have through lack of knowledge or opportunism conflated the two.

Yet it is important to recognize that genocide and ethnic cleansing are not strictly interchangeable. Genocide requires proof of an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, whereas ethnic cleansing focuses primarily on expulsion, which may or may not involve that deeper intent to annihilate. Ethnic cleansing can amount to genocide when the purpose is to eradicate a group, but not all instances meet this threshold. In public discourse, however, people motivated more by empathy and emotion than by detailed knowledge of history or law are often inclined to conflate the two, since the lived experience of the victims—violence, displacement, and cultural obliteration – appears indistinguishable from destruction itself. More informed observers, by contrast, emphasize legal precision and historical context, recognizing that while the outcomes often overlap, preserving the distinction remains vital for accurate analysis and accountability.

The moral revulsion ethnic cleansing excites is the natural and humane reaction, but historically and also presently, it is not an uncommon phenomenon. For the American sociologist and academic Michael Mann, ethnic cleansing is the natural consequence of modernity, “the dark side of democracy”: a recurring temptation of the modern nation-state. The following sections provided examples from the last thirty years, followed by a survey of instances of ethnic cleansing during the early to mid Twentieth Century. They describe how ethnic cleansing is not only a crime of forced removal and murder but also an assault on identity, memory, and the very visibility of a people.

[The featured picture at the head of this blog post is one of Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout’s striking illustrations of Al Nakba, the dispossession of tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs during Israel’s war of independence, from In That Howling Infinite’s Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout]. More of his art is included below]

Expulsion, eradication and exile

The Wars of the Yugoslav Succession in the 1990s – encompassing Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo – offer a clear illustration of ethnic cleansing in a modern European context. As Yugoslavia disintegrated, political and military leaders pursued campaigns aimed at creating ethnically homogeneous territories, often through the systematic targeting of civilians. In Bosnia, Serb forces carried out mass killings, forced deportations, rape, and the deliberate destruction of homes, schools, and cultural heritage sites, culminating in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, in which more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed. In Croatia and Kosovo, similar tactics were deployed: ethnic minorities were expelled, villages razed, and communities terrorised into flight. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) documented and prosecuted these actions as crimes against humanity and war crimes, establishing that the campaigns were not chaotic consequences of war, but deliberate, coordinated policies of ethnic removal. The tribunal’s rulings provide a legal benchmark for understanding ethnic cleansing as the purposeful removal of populations through violence, intimidation, and coercion, a pattern that recurs across history and geography—from the forced expulsions of Armenians in 1915, to the population exchanges of Greece and Turkey in 1923, to the contemporary displacement of Rohingya, Palestinians, Ukrainians, and Afghans. These cases demonstrate that ethnic cleansing combines physical violence, forced migration, and cultural erasure, often leaving long-term social, political, and demographic scars that endure generations after the immediate conflict.

Sudan has witnessed repeated waves of ethnic cleansing over recent decades, most infamously in Darfur in the early 2000s, when government-backed Arab Janjaweed militias targeted non-Arab communities with systematic violence. Villages were burned, civilians massacred, women subjected to mass rape, and more than 2.5 million people displaced, in what the International Criminal Court later described as crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. The displacement and destruction in Darfur followed earlier campaigns of forced removal during Sudan’s long north–south civil war, where entire communities in the south and Nuba Mountains were uprooted by aerial bombardment, scorched earth tactics, and starvation sieges. Today, ethnic cleansing has returned with devastating intensity: since April 2023, renewed fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (successors to the Janjaweed) has triggered mass atrocities, including the killing of thousands and the flight of more than 7 million civilians, many across borders into Chad, South Sudan, and Egypt. Reports of targeted massacres against non-Arab groups in West Darfur suggest continuity with earlier campaigns, underscoring how ethnic cleansing in Sudan is not an isolated event but a recurring feature of its violent political landscape.

The Rohingya expulsions in Myanmar provide a stark contemporary example of ethnic cleansing. Since 2017, Myanmar’s military has carried out systematic campaigns of violence, including mass killings, sexual violence, arson, and the destruction of villages, aimed at driving the Rohingya Muslim population from Rakhine State. More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, creating one of the world’s largest refugee crises. The violence has been accompanied by measures of cultural and social exclusion: denial of citizenship, restrictions on movement, and the erasure of Rohingya identity from official records. The United Nations and international observers have described these actions as ethnic cleansing, noting the deliberate intent to remove an entire ethnic group from a geographic area, while some investigators have determined that elements of the campaign meet the criteria for genocide.

Armenia and its surrounding regions have been scarred by cycles of ethnic cleansing for more than a century. The Armenian genocide of 1915–1916, carried out by the Ottoman Empire, combined forced deportations, massacres, and cultural destruction with the intent of removing Armenians from their ancestral lands in Anatolia. More than a million were killed or died on death marches, and countless others were scattered into diaspora communities across the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. Later, in the Soviet period, Armenians and Azerbaijanis experienced repeated forced movements, with pogroms and expulsions erupting during times of political instability. Most recently, the 2023 offensive by Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh resulted in the flight of almost the entire Armenian population of the enclave—around 120,000 people—into Armenia proper, effectively erasing a centuries-old community. These waves of displacement illustrate how ethnic cleansing in Armenia is not confined to the past but has recurred across generations, leaving lasting demographic, cultural, and political consequences for the region.

During the past two years, mass expulsions from neighbouring countries returned large numbers of Afghans to Taliban-run Afghanistan. Pakistan has deported nearly half a million Afghans; Iran has driven out hundreds of thousands more. What is packaged as “repatriation” is, in many cases, forced displacement: exiles who had tenuous livelihoods, access to education, or limited civil freedoms in exile are now returned to a polity where the rights — especially the rights of women and girls — are ruthlessly curtailed. The Taliban’s record on gender is well known: it controls a society where women are barred from education and work, forced into early marriages, and denied even minimal public freedoms. Public-life prohibitions and systematic punishments disproportionately harm women and girls. Returning families are therefore being pushed into what many observers describe as among the worst possible places in the world for women — a profoundly gendered and life-threatening form of displacement.

The erasure of culture and historical memory

Like genocide, ethnic cleansing may not be limited the physical expulsion or eradication of people. It can be political, cultural and geographical, and often works through more insidious forms of erasure.

China’s policies in Xinjiang are an example. It has renamed at least 630 villages in Xinjiang, erasing references to Uyghur culture in what human rights advocates say is a systematic propaganda rebrand designed to stamp out the Muslim minority group’s identity. Human Rights Watch has documented a campaign of renaming thousands of villages across the region, stripping out references to Uyghur religion, history and culture. At least 3,600 names have been altered since 2009, replaced by bland slogans such as “Happiness,” “Unity” and “Harmony.” Such bureaucratic changes appear mundane, but they are part of a systematic project to erase Uyghur identity from the landscape itself.

Ukraine illustrates another, more violent dimension of contemporary ethnic cleansing. Russia is coercively integrating five annexed Ukrainian regions — an area the size of South Korea — into its state and culture. Ukrainian identity is being wiped out through the imposition of Russian schooling and media, while more than a million Russian citizens have been settled illegally into the occupied zones. At the same time, some three million Ukrainians have fled or been forced out. Torture centres have been established, with one UN expert describing their use as “state war policy.” Russian forces have employed sexual violence, disappearances and arbitrary detentions, and carried out massacres. Civilian deaths officially stand at around 10,000, but independent estimates suggest a figure closer to 100,000. Homes and businesses have been seized and redistributed to the cronies of Russian officials and officers. On top of these abuses, thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken from their families and deported into Russia for adoption and assimilation, with the threat that when they reach 18 they will be conscripted into the Russian military. This programme of child transfers has been declared a war crime by international courts, and represents perhaps the most chilling element of the campaign to erase Ukrainian identity across generations. Russian propagandists, including ideologues such as Alexander Dugin, routinely describe Ukrainians as “vermin” to be eliminated — language that many experts say is consistent with genocidal intent.

The long arm of history

Historical precedent is sobering, underscoring how entrenched practices definable as ethnic cleansing are. Some examples follow.

The Armenian genocide of 1915–1916 is a historical example where the term “ethnic cleansing” can be applied alongside, though not identical to, the legal concept of genocide. Ottoman authorities systematically deported, massacred, and starved Armenians from their ancestral homelands in Anatolia, often under the guise of military necessity. Entire villages were emptied, survivors forced on death marches into the Syrian desert, and cultural and religious heritage deliberately destroyed. These actions aimed to remove the Armenian population from the territory of the Ottoman Empire, making the region ethnically and religiously homogeneous, which aligns closely with contemporary definitions of ethnic cleansing. The genocide combined mass killing with forced displacement and cultural erasure, illustrating how ethnic cleansing and genocide can overlap in both intent and method. (See The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye)

The Armenian case also illustrates how recognition of genocide is often bound up not only with history but with contemporary politics. Türkiye continues to deny that the mass deportations and killings of Armenians in 1915 amounted to genocide, framing them instead as wartime relocations within the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Israel, despite wide acknowledgment among its own scholars of the genocidal character of the events, has avoided official recognition, partly out of diplomatic considerations toward Türkiye, once a key regional ally, but also out of concern that equating the Armenian tragedy with the Shoah might dilute the unique historical and moral status attached to the Holocaust in Jewish memory and international discourse. This reluctance is not unique to Israel: several states have long hesitated to employ the term “genocide” for fear of straining relations with Ankara or complicating their own foreign policy priorities. Such debates demonstrate how the line between ethnic cleansing and genocide is not only a matter of legal precision but also of political narrative, with governments and institutions sometimes reluctant to apply the most condemnatory labels even where evidence overwhelmingly supports them.

As the Northern Irish writer Bruce Clark observed in his excellent book Twice A Stranger on the euphemistically termed “population exchanges” between Greece and Turkey exactly a century ago, “Whether we like it or not, those of us who live in Europe or in places influenced by European ideas remain the children of Lausanne,” the 1923 peace treaty, finalizing the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, which decreed a massive, forced population movement between Turkey and Greece”, and in effect, One and a quarter million Greek Orthodox Christians were removed from Anatolia, the heartland of the new republic of Türkiye, and nearly 400,000 Muslims from Greece, in a process overseen by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen leading a branch of the League of the Nations which would later – perhaps ironically – evolve into today’s UNHCR.

During the Second World War, Soviet Union alone deported half a million Crimean Tatars and tens of thousands of Volga Germans to Siberia. In 1945, the victorious Allied powers oversaw the removal of some 30 million people across Central and Eastern Europe to create ethnically homogeneous states. At Yalta and Potsdam, Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union endorsed the expulsion of 12 million Germans, over 2 million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Finns.

The partition of British India in 1947 produced one of the largest and bloodiest forced migrations in modern history. As the new states of India and Pakistan were created, an estimated 12 to 15 million people crossed borders in both directions – Muslims moving into Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs into India – in a desperate effort to reach what they hoped would be safer ground. The upheaval was marked by extreme communal violence, massacres, abductions, and sexual assaults. Between 500,000 and 1 million people are thought to have been killed, and millions more were uprooted from ancestral homes they would never see again. The trauma of Partition continues to shape Indian and Pakistani national identities, as well as the politics of South Asia to this day. (See Freedom at Midnight (2): the legacy of partition) and Freedom at Midnight (1): the birth of India and Pakistan

The dismemberment of Mandate Palestine by the new state of Israel, Jordan and Egypt in 1948 brought two simultaneous mass displacements that remain unresolved. During the first Arab–Israeli war more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what became Israel. Known as the Nakba or “catastrophe,” this created a vast refugee population now numbering in the millions, many still stateless. Jews living in what is now the Old City and East Jerusalem, and the West Bank seized by Jordan were expelled. Jews living across the Arab world in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere – faced growing hostility, persecution, and expulsion. Between 1948 and the 1970s, an estimated 800,000 to 1,000,000 Jews left or were forced out, many stripped of property and citizenship. Most resettled in Israel, where their presence profoundly altered the country’s politics and culture. Palestinians and Jews alike endured dispossession, trauma and exile, and both experiences fuel competing narratives of grievance that continue to define the conflict.

Israelis are themselves, for the most part, the product of 20th-century ethnic cleansings, in the Middle East as well as Europe: indeed the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews, like the Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, are the country’s most radical voices on the Palestinian Question. But unlike the Mizrahim,  and displaced of Eastern and south-eastern Europe, the Palestinians have no Israel to go to. There is no Palestinian state waiting to absorb them. Indeed, for Gaza’s population, the vast majority of whom descend from refugees from what is today Israel, Gaza was their place of refuge, and the 1948 Nakba the foundational event in their sense of Palestinian nationhood. For all that ethnic cleansing punctuates modern history, there is no precedent for such a process of double displacement, and the political consequences cannot at this stage be determined. We may assume they will not be good, and an analogue to Europe’s post-war neighbourly relations will not be found.

Conclusion: The Age of Dispossession 

In many historical cases, expulsions, however brutal, were stabilized by the existence of ethnic homelands ready to absorb the displaced. Refugees were incorporated into nationalist projects in Greece and Türkiye, or into newly homogenized states such as Poland and Ukraine, where they became central to the shaping of modern politics. The Karabakh Armenians driven into Armenia may follow this precedent, potentially reshaping the political order of a small and embattled state.

Ethnic cleansing in the twenty-first century, however, combines these older methods with new techniques. Violence, rape, deportation, and massacre continue, but are now accompanied by cultural erasure, bureaucratic renaming, engineered resettlement, propaganda, and the deliberate targeting of children for assimilation. Unlike many twentieth-century precedents, today’s displaced populations often have nowhere safe to go, forced into territories with no protective homeland or into environments of repression, creating open-ended cycles of dispossession. The erasure of identities in Xinjiang, the coercive integration of Ukrainian territories, the expulsion of Rohingyas and Afghans, the depopulation of Karabakh, and the looming threat of Gaza – where Palestinians face the looming threat of another mass displacement, echoing the 1948 Nakba – collectively demonstrate that ethnic cleansing is not a relic of the past.

It remains a recurring feature of our age – modern history is indeed built upon exodus and displacement – and its human cost is profound and incalculable.

© Paul Hemphill 2024,2025. All rights reserved

Nagoorno Karabakh

Postscript … Al Nakba, a case study in dispossesion

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European Jews came to a land that was already inhabited by another, different people. Over two decades, they forced the guarantor power out by terrorism and took the land by conquest, expelling most of  its original inhabitants by force. They have sowed their share of wind, too. Both sides want all the land for themselves.

Al Nakba, is the Arabic name for the “catastrophe” that befell the Arab inhabitants of Mandate Palestine during the war that was fought between Arabs and Jews in 1947-1948, resulting in the expulsion of upwards of 700,000 Arab Palestinians. That it happened is incontrovertible. But the facts, even those that are attested to by all reputable politicians and academic authorities, including Israelis, have long been subject to doubt and distortion by all sides of what has since been called “The Middle East Conflict” – notwithstanding that there have been conflicts in the Middle East more devastating and bloodier in terms of destruction and mortality including in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Libya, and Sudan.

I do not to intend here to retell the history of Al Nakba. There many accounts available in print including those by Arab and Israeli authors, and in film, particularly an excellent documentary broadcast by Al Jazeera in May 2013 and repeated often?

June 17th, 2018, I wrote about it in a Facebook post:

Al Nakba did not begin in 1948. Its origins lie over two centuries ago….


So begins this award-winning series from Al Jazeera, a detailed and comprehensive account of al Nakba, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians who lived within its borders.

It is a well-balanced narrative, with remarkable footage, that will not please the ardent partisans of both sides who prefer their story of 1948 to be black and white.

Revisionist Israeli historians Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, and Teddy Katz describe the ruthless and relentless military operations to clear and cleanse “Ha’aretz”, the land, of its Arab inhabitants and their history, whilst Palestinian historians tell the story from the Palestinian perspective, describing the critical failings of Palestinian’s political leaders and neighbouring Arab governments. Elderly Palestinians who were forced into exile and to camps in Jordan and Lebanon tell their sad stories of starvation and poverty, violence and death, and of terrible sadness, homesickness and longing that the passing years and old age have never diminished.

“When I left my homeland, I was a child. Now, I’m an old man. So are my children. But did we move forward? Where is our patriotism? Patriotism is about the pockets of our current leaders. They build high buildings and go to fancy banquets. They pay thousands for their children’s weddings”. Refugee Hosni Samadaa.

“We’re repeating the same mistakes. Before 1948 the Palestinian National Movement was split on the basis of rival families. Today, it is split into different parties over ideology, jurisdiction and self-interests. We didn’t learn our lesson. We were led by large, feudal landowners. Today, we are led by the bourgeoisie. Before 1948, we were incapable of facing reality. Today, we are just as inept. Before 1948, people chose the wrong leadership. And today, we are following the wrong leaders”. Researcher Yusuf Hijazi.

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/featured-documentaries/2013/5/29/al-nakba

I republish below Roussinos’ article in full, also a brief but comprehensive account about Al Nakba by economist and commentator Henry Ergas.

al Nakba, Ismail Shammout

al Nakba, Ismail Shammout

The truth about the ethnic cleansing in Gaza – modern Europe was built on exodus and displacement

Aris Roussinos, Unherd, December 18 2023

We are cursed to live in a time of great historical significance: when future historians look back at 2023, the distinguishing feature of this year will likely be the recurrence of ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. In just the past few months, Pakistan has deported nearly half a million Afghan migrants, while Azerbaijan has forced 120,000 Armenians — the statelet’s entire population — from newly-conquered Karabakh, both to broad international indifference. As the UNHCR has warned, the forced expulsion — that is, the ethnic cleansing — of Gaza’s Palestinian population is now the most likely outcome of the current war.

With no prospect of Palestinians and Israelis living together peaceably, anything short of absolute military victory unacceptable to both the Israeli government and its voters, but no meaningful plan for who will rule the uninhabitable ruins of post-war Gaza, the only realistic solution to the Palestinian problem, for Israel, is the total removal of the Palestinians. As Israel’s former Interior Minister has declared: “We need to take advantage of the destruction to tell the countries that each of them should take a quota, it can be 20,000 or 50,000. We need all two million to leave. That’s the solution for Gaza.”

Israeli officials have not been shy in promoting this outcome to a war, according to the President Isaac Herzog, for which “an entire nation… is responsible”. Israel’s agriculture minister Avi Dichter has asserted that “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding for emphasis that the result of the war will be “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”Israel’s Intelligence Ministry has published a “concept paper” proposing the expulsion of Gaza’s entire population to the Sinai desert, and Israeli diplomats have been trying to win international support for this idea. According to the Israeli press, Israeli officials have sought American backing for a different plan to distribute Gaza’s population between Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Yemen, tying American aid to these countries’ willingness to accept the refugees. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, two Israeli lawmakers have instead urged Western countries — particularly Europe — to host Gaza’s population, asserting that: “The international community has a moral imperative—and an opportunity—to demonstrate compassion [and] help the people of Gaza move toward a more prosperous future.” The outcome for Gaza’s Palestinians does not appear to be in doubt: what remains to be haggled over is their final location.

The only actor that can prevent the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is the United States, and for domestic political reasons it is disinclined to do so. While the Biden administration declaresit does not support “any forced relocation of Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip”, it is not taking any action to prevent it. If the expulsion of Gaza’s 2.3 million population comes to pass, the result will be the most significant instance of ethnic cleansing in a generation, which will define Biden’s presidency for future historians. Yet outrage over such events is selective. It is not entirely true, as some Middle Eastern commentators claim, that Western complicity in the looming ethnic cleansing of Gaza highlights a lesser interest in Arab or Muslim lives: the Armenian case highlights that eastern Christians also barely flicker on the world’s moral radar.

This week’s awarding of the right to host next year’s COP29 climate conference to Azerbaijan, just a few months after its ethnic cleansing of Karabakh, reminds us that the supposed international taboo on the practice does not, in reality, exist. When ethnic cleansing is permissible, and when it is a war crime, depends, it seems, on who is doing it, and to whom. Azerbaijan is oil-rich, useful to Europe, and able to buy favourable Western coverage; Armenia is poor, weak and friendless in the world. Similarly, the extinction of much of the Christian population of the Middle East as a result of the chaos following the Iraq War won very little international attention or sympathy: communities which survived in their ancient homelands from Late Antiquity, riding out the passage of Arab, Mamluk, Ottoman and European imperial rule, did not survive the American empire.

Yet while the moral revulsion such events excite is the natural and humane reaction, ethnic cleansing is less rare an event than the crusading military response to its Nineties occurrence in the Balkans may make us think. For the sociologist Michael Mann, ethnic cleansing is the natural consequence of modernity, “the dark side of democracy”. As the Northern Irish writer Bruce Clark observed in his excellent book Twice A Stranger on the euphemistically termed “population exchanges” between Greece and Turkey exactly a century ago, “Whether we like it or not, those of us who live in Europe or in places influenced by European ideas remain the children of Lausanne,” the 1923 peace treaty “which decreed a massive, forced population movement between Turkey and Greece”. One and a quarter million Greek Orthodox Christians were removed from Anatolia, and nearly 400,000 Muslims from Greece, in a process overseen by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen leading a branch of the League of the Nations which would later — perhaps ironically — evolve into today’s UNHCR.

It was a cruel process, wrenching peoples from ancestral homelands in which they had lived for centuries, even millennia— and by the end of it half a million people were unaccounted for, presumably dead. Yet it was viewed as a great diplomatic triumph of the age, perhaps with good reason: without meaningful minorities on each side of each others’ borders to stoke tensions, Greece and Turkey have not fought a war in a century. Indeed, as late as 1993, the Realist IR scholar John Mearsheimer could propose a “Balkan Population Exchange commission” for the former Yugoslavia explicitly modelled on the 1923 precedent, asserting that “populations would have to be moved in order to create homogeneous states” and “the international community should oversee and subsidize this population exchange”. For the younger Mearsheimer, ethnic cleansing was the only viable solution to Yugoslavia’s bloody and overlapping ethnic map: “Transfer is a fact. The only question is whether it will be organized, as envisioned by partition, or left to the murderous methods of the ethnic cleansers.” Thirty years later, however, Mearsheimercondemns Israel’s planned expulsions from Gaza outright.

There is a dark irony here: the forced expulsion of peoples is an affront to liberal European values, yet it is rarely acknowledged that our modern, hitherto peaceful and prosperous Europe is built on the foundation of ethnic cleansing. Perhaps the ramifications of such a truth are too stark to bear, yet it is nevertheless the case that the peaceable post-1945 order depended on mass expulsions for its stability. Using the 1923 exchange as their explicit model, the victorious allies oversaw the forced removal of 30 million people from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe towards newly homogeneous ethnic homelands they had never seen. At the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union settled upon the expulsion of 12 million Germans, more than 2 million Poles and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Hungarians and Finns from their ancestral homes.

As Churchill declared in Parliament in 1944, “expulsion is the method that, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been in the case of Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made.” Only two years later, once the Cold War had begun and the Soviet Union and its vassal Poland become a rival, did Churchill fulminate against the “enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed of” by “the Russian-dominated Polish Government”. In ethnic cleansing, as in so many other things, political context is the final arbiter of morality.

But as a result, Germany has never since unsettled Europe with revanchist dreams; both Poland and Western Ukraine became, for the first time in their histories, ethnically homogenous entities. As the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny has observed, the forced separation of Poles and Ukrainians, once locked in bitter ethnic conflict against each other, has led to today’s amicable relationship: “It seems that the segregation of the two peoples was a necessary precondition for the development of a mutually beneficial relationship between them. Apparently the old adage that ‘good fences make for good neighbors’ has been proven true once more.” That we have forgotten the vast scale of the forced expulsions which established Europe’s peaceful post-war order is, in a strange way, a testament to their success.

Yet what made the mass expulsions following the First and Second World Wars broadly successful was that those expelled at least had ethnic homelands to receive them. In Greece and Turkey, the refugees fully adopted the ethnic nationalism of their new countries, in Greece providing the bedrock of later republican sympathies, and in Turkey the core support for both secular Kemalist nationalism and occasional bouts of military rule. In the newly-homogenous Poland and Ukraine, refugees shorn of their previous local roots and at times ambiguous ethnic identities fully adopted in recompense a self-identification with their new nation-states which has helped define these countries’ modern politics. The 120,000 Karabakh refugees will likely become a political bloc in tiny Armenia, affecting the country’s future political order in ways yet hard to discern.

Israelis are themselves, for the most part, the product of 20th-century ethnic cleansings, in the Middle East as well as Europe: indeed the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews, like the Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, are the country’s most radical voices on the Palestinian Question. But the Palestinians, like the ethnic French narrator of Houellebecq’s Submission, have no Israel to go to. Unlike the 20th century displaced of Eastern and south-eastern Europe, there is no Palestinian state waiting to absorb them. Indeed, for Gaza’s population, the vast majority of whom descend from refugees from what is today Israel, Gaza was their place of refuge, and the 1948 Nakba the foundational event in their sense of Palestinian nationhood. For all that ethnic cleansing punctuates modern history, there is no precedent for such a process of double displacement, and the political consequences can not at this stage be determined. We may assume they will not be good, and an analogue to Europe’s post-war neighbourly relations will not be found.

Egypt’s disinclination to host two million Gazan refugees is not merely a matter of solidarity, but also self-preservation: flows of embittered Palestinian refugees helped destabilise both Lebanon, where their presence set off the country’s bloody ethnic civil war, and Jordan, where they make up the demographic majority. It is doubtful too, given the recent tenor of its politics, that Europe will be eager to receive them, no matter how humanitarian the language with which Israeli officials couch their planned expulsion. Rendered stateless, driven from their homes and brutalised by war, Gaza’s refugees remain unwanted by the world, perhaps destined to become, as the Jews once were, a diaspora people forever at the mercy of suspicious hosts.

A terrible injustice for the Palestinians, their ethnic cleansing may yet provide Israel with a measure of security, even as it erodes the American sympathy on which the country’s existence depends. The broader question, perhaps, is whether or not the looming extinction of Palestinian life in Gaza, like the expulsion of Karabakh’s Armenians, heralds the beginning of a new era of ethnic cleansing, or merely the settling of the West’s unfinished accounts. Like the movements which bloodily reshaped Central Europe, Israel’s very existence is after all a product of the same nationalist intellectual ferment of fin-de-siècle Vienna. In 1923, while acknowledging its necessity, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon called the Greco-Turkish population exchange “a thoroughly bad and vicious [idea] for which the world would pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come”. Exactly a century later, Gaza’s Palestinians look destined to become the final victims of Europe’s long and painful 20th century

Nakba, where Palestinian victim mythology began

‘Nakba Day’ was commemorated this week with even more vehemence than usual. The greatest tragedy is that the Palestinian people who fled remain frozen in time.

The Australian, 18th May 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters hold banners and flags as they listen to speakers at a rally held to mark the anniversary of the ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe’ of 1948, in Sydney on Wednesday. Picture: David Gray/AFP

Protestors at a Sydney rally to mark the anniversary of the ‘Nakba’. David Gray/AFP

On Wednesday, “Nakba Day” was commemorated around the world with even more vehemence than usual as outpourings of hatred against Israel, sprinkled with ample doses of anti-Semitism, issued from screaming crowds.

What was entirely missing was any historical perspective on the Nakba – that is, the displacement, mainly through voluntary flight, of Palestinians from mandatory Palestine. Stripped out of its broader context, the event was invested with a uniqueness that distorts the processes that caused it and its contemporary significance.

It is, to begin with, important to understand that the displacement of Palestinians was only one facet of the sweeping population movements caused by the collapse of the great European land empires. At the heart of that process was the unravelling of the Ottoman Empire, which started with the Greek war of independence in 1821 and accelerated during subsequent decades.

As the empire teetered, religious conflicts exploded, forcing entire communities to leave. Following the Crimean War of 1854-56, earlier flows of Muslims out of Russia and its border territories became a flood, with as many as 900,000 people fleeing the Caucasus and Crimea regions for Ottoman territory. The successive Balkan wars and then World War I gave that flood torrential force as more than two million people left or were expelled from their ancestral homes and sought refuge among their co-religionists.

The transfers reshaped the population geography of the entire Middle East, with domino effects that affected virtually every one of the region’s ethnic and religious groups.

The formation of new nation-states out of what had been the Ottoman Empire then led to further rearrangements, with many of those states passing highly restrictive nationality laws in an attempt to secure ethnic and religious homogeneity.

Nothing more starkly symbolised that quest for homogeneity than the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations signed on January 30, 1923. This was the first agreement that made movement mandatory: with only a few exceptions, all the Christians living in the newly established Turkish state were to be deported to Greece, while all of Greece’s Muslims were to be deported to Turkey. The agreement, reached under the auspices of the League of Nations, also specified that the populations being transferred would lose their original nationality along with any right to return, instead being resettled in the new homeland.

Underlying the transfer was the conviction, articulated by French prime minister (and foreign minister) Raymond Poincare, that “the mixture of populations of different races and religions has been the main cause of troubles and of war”, and that the “unmixing of peoples” would “remove one of the greatest menaces to peace”.

That the forced population transfers, which affected about 1.5 million people, imposed enormous suffering is beyond doubt. But they were generally viewed as a success. Despite considerable difficulties, the transferred populations became integrated into the fabric of the recipient communities – at least partly because they had no other option. At the same time, relations between Turkey and Greece improved immensely, with the Ankara Agreements of 1930 inaugurating a long period of relative stability.

The result was to give large-scale, permanent population movements, planned or unplanned, a marked degree of legitimacy.

Thus, the formation of what became the Irish Republic was accompanied by the flight of Protestants to England and Northern Ireland, eventually more than halving, into an insignificant minority, the Protestant share of the Irish state’s population; that was viewed as easing the tensions that had so embittered the Irish civil war.

It is therefore unsurprising that further “unmixing” was seen by the allies in World War II as vital to ensuring peace in the post-war world. In a statement later echoed by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill made this explicit in 1944, telling the House of Commons he was “not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before”.

The immediate effect, endorsed as part of the Potsdam Agreements and implemented as soon as the war ended, was the brutal expulsion from central and eastern Europe of 12 million ethnic Germans whose families had lived in those regions for centuries. Stripped of their nationality and possessions, then forcibly deported to a war-devastated Germany, the refugees – who received very little by way of assistance – gradually merged into German society, though the scars took decades to heal.

Even more traumatic was the movement in 1947 of 18 million people between India and the newly formed state of Pakistan.

As Indian novelist Alok Bhalla put it, India’s declaration of independence triggered the subcontinent’s sudden descent into “a bestial world of hatred, rage, self-interest and frenzy”, with Lord Ismay, who witnessed the process, later writing that “the frontier between India and Pakistan was to see more tragedy than any frontier conceived before or since”. Yet in the subcontinent too, and especially in India, the integration of refugees proceeded to the point where little now separates their descendants from those of the native born.

All that formed the context in which the planned partition of Palestine was to occur. The 1937 Peel Commission, which initially proposed partition, had recommended a mandatory population exchange but the entire issue was ignored in UN Resolution 181 that was supposed to govern the creation of the two new states.

When a majority of the UN General Assembly endorsed that resolution on November 29, 1947, the major Zionist forces reluctantly accepted the proposed partition, despite it being vastly unfavourable to them. But the Arab states not only rejected the plan, they launched what the Arab League described as “a war of extermination” whose aim was to “erase (Palestine’s Jewish population) from the face of the earth”. Nor did the fighting give any reason to doubt that was the Arabs’ goal.

At least until late May 1948, Jewish prisoners were invariably slaughtered. In one instance, 77 Jewish civilians were burned alive after a medical convey was captured; in another, soldiers who had surrendered were castrated before being shot; in yet another, death came by public decapitation. And even after the Arab armies declared they would abide by the Geneva Convention, Jewish prisoners were regularly murdered on the spot.

While those atrocities continued a longstanding pattern of barbarism, they also reflected the conviction that unrestrained terror would “push the Jews into the sea”, as Izzedin Shawa, who represented the Arab High Committee, put it.

Arabs flee in 1948 ahead of the ‘war of extermination’ against Israel. Picture: History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Arabs flee in 1948 ahead of the ‘war of extermination’ against Israel.
History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

A crucial element of that strategy was to use civilian militias in the territory’s 450 Arab villages to ambush, encircle and destroy Jewish forces, as they did in the conflict’s first three months.

It was to reduce that risk that the Haganah – the predecessor of the Israel Defence Force – adopted the Dalet plan in March 1948 that ordered the evacuation of those “hostile” Arab villages, notably in the surrounds of Jerusalem, that posed a direct threat of encirclement. The implementation of its criteria for clearing villages was inevitably imperfect, but the Dalet plan neither sought nor was the primary cause of the massive outflow of Arab refugees that was well under way before it came into effect.

Nor was the scale of the outflow much influenced by the massacres committed by Irgun and Lehi – small Jewish militias that had broken away from the Haganah – which did not loom large in a prolonged, extremely violent, conflict that also displaced a very high proportion of the Jewish population.

Rather, three factors were mainly involved. First, the Muslim authorities, led by the rector of Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque, instructed the faithful to “temporarily leave the territory, so that our warriors can freely undertake their task of extermination”.

Second, believing that the war would be short-lived and that they could soon return without having to incur its risks, the Arab elites fled immediately, leaving the Arab population leaderless, disoriented and demoralised, especially once the Jewish forces gained the upper hand.

Third and last, as Benny Morris, a harsh critic of Israel, stresses in his widely cited study of the Palestinian exodus, “knowing what the Arabs had done to the Jews, the Arabs were terrified the Jews would, once they could, do it to them”.

Seen in that perspective, the exodus was little different from the fear-ridden flights of civilians discussed above. There was, however, one immensely significant difference: having precipitated the creation of a pool of 700,000 Palestinian refugees, the Arab states refused to absorb them.

Rather, they used their clout in the UN to establish the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which became a bloated, grant-funded bureaucracy whose survival depended on endlessly perpetuating the Palestinians’ refugee status.

In entrenching the problem, the UN was merely doing the bidding of the Arab states, which increasingly relied on the issue of Palestine to convert popular anger at their abject failures into rage against Israel and the West. Terminally corrupt, manifestly incapable of economic and social development, the Arab kleptocracies elevated Jew-hatred into the opium of the people – and empowered the Islamist fanaticism that has wreaked so much harm worldwide.

Nor did it end there. Fanning the flames of anti-Semitism, the Arab states proceeded to expel, or force the departure of, 800,000 Jews who had lived in the Arab lands for millennia, taking away their nationality, expropriating their assets and forbidding them from ever returning to the place of their birth. Those Jews were, however painfully, integrated into Israel; the Palestinian refugees, in contrast, remained isolated, subsisting mainly on welfare, rejected by countries that claimed to be their greatest friends. Thus was born the myth of the Nakba.

That vast population movements have inflicted enormous costs on those who have been ousted from their homes is undeniable. Nor have the tragedies ended: without a murmur from the Arab states, 400,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait after the first Gulf War, in retaliation for the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s support of Saddam Hussein. More recently, Myanmar has expelled 1.2 million Rohingya.

But the greatest tragedy associated with the plight of the Palestinians is not the loss of a homeland; over the past century, that has been the fate of tens of millions. Rather, it is the refusal to look forward rather than always looking back, an attitude encapsulated in the slogan “from the river to the sea”.

That has suited the Arab leaders, but it has condemned ordinary Palestinians to endless misery and perpetual war. Until that changes, the future will be a constant repetition of a blood-soaked past

The first Intifada … Palestine 1936

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

In 1929, there is violence at the Western Wall in Jerusalem – then a narrow alley named for Buraq, the steed with a human face that bore the Prophet Mohammed on his midnight journey to Jerusalem, and not the Kotel Plaza of today. The event, which was actually called the Buraq rising was incited by rumours that Jews planned to overrun the Haram al Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam. A massacre of Jews in Hebron in the south followed. These were a bleak precursor of the wars to come.

Fast forward to mid-April 1936. Following two incidents of killing carried out in by both Arabs and Jews, an Arab National Committee declared a strike in the city of Jaffa. National Committees were formed in other Palestinian cities and representatives of Arab parties formed the “Arab Higher Committee” led by Haj Amin al-Husseini. A general strike spread throughout Palestine, accompanied by the formation of Palestinian armed groups that started attacking British forces and Jewish settlements. Thus began the “Great Palestinian Revolt. It lasted for three years.

British troops run through Jerusalem’s’ Old City during the Great Revolt

 

British soldiers on patrol 1936

Roots and fruits 

The ongoing struggle with regard to the existence Israel and Palestine is justifiably regarded the most intractable conflict of modern times. Whilst most agree that its origins lie in the political and historical claims of two people, the Jewish Israelis and the predominantly Muslim Palestinians for control over a tiny wedge of one-time Ottoman territory between Lebanon and Syria in the north, Jordan in the east, and Egypt to the south, hemmed in by the Mediterranean Sea. There is less consensus as to when the Middle East Conflict as it has become known because of its longevity and its impact on its neighbours and the world in general, actually began.

Was it the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 promising a national home for Jews in an Ottoman governate already populated by Arabs, or the secretive Sykes Picot Agreement that preceded it in 1916, staking imperial Britain’ and France’s claim to political and economic influence (and oil pipelines) in the Levant? Was it the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine after the Treaty of Sèvres of 1922 which determined the dissolution of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Or was it the end of that British mandate and the unilateral declaration of Israeli independence in 1948 and the war that immediately followed?

In his book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) Israeli journalist and author Oren Kessler argues powerfully that the events in Mandatory Palestine between 1936 and 1939 shaped the subsequent history of the conflict for Israelis and Palestinians. The book identifies what was known at the time as The Great Revolt  as the first Intifada, a popular uprising which actually sowed the seeds of the Arab military defeat of 1947-48 and the dispossession and displacement of over seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs, which has set the tone of the conflict for almost a century.

It is a tragic history shared with knowledge in hindsight of the decades of violence and bloodshed in the region that followed. It begins in the time before Palestine became political entity, when mainly Eastern European Jews began settling in progressively larger numbers to the consternation of the Arab populace.

The 1936 conflict stemmed from questions of how to divide the land and how to deal with the influx of Jewish people – questions that remain relevant today. In an extensive interview coinciding with the book’s publication (republished below) Kessler notes that, for the Arab residents, the problem was one of immigration and economics; for the Zionists, it was about finding a home. These two positions soon became irreconcilable issues, leading to sporadic violence and then to continual confrontation.

He believes that the Revolt is the point when both sides really came to see the conflict as zero sum. insofar that whichever community had the demographic majority in Palestine would be the one that would determine its fate. However, in the 1920s, the Jews were so far from that majority that both sides were able to postpone the final reckoning. In the 1930s, the Jews threatened to become a majority, and this was the immediate precursor to the rising. There was no way that the objective of bringing as many Jews to the land as possible could be achieved without bringing about some serious Arab pushback.

It is Kessler’s view that it was during revolt that a strong sense of Arab nationalism in Palestine extended beyond the urban elites to all corners of the country. All segments of Arab society – urban and rural, rich and poor, rival families, and even to a large extent Muslim and Christian – united in the same cause against Zionism and against its perceived enabler, the British Empire. The Arab public in Palestine was becoming increasingly politically aware and consciously perceiving itself as a distinct entity – distinct from its brethren in Syria, in large part because it has a different foe: not simply European imperialism but this very specific threat presented by Zionism.

The British government made early efforts at keeping the peace, but these proved fruitless. And when the revolt erupted in 1936, it sent a royal commission to Palestine, known to history as the Peel Commission, to examine the causes of the revolt. It proposed in effect the first ‘two state solution.’ The Emir Abdullah of Transjordan publicly accepted this plan. The main rival clan to the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, privately signaled that they were amenable – not thrilled, but amenable. And their allies held the mayorships of many important cities – Jaffa, Haifa, and even Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem, which today are centres of militancy. And yet the Mufti makes very clear that he regards this plan as a degradation and a humiliation, and all of these erstwhile supporters of partition suddenly realise that they are against partition.

Kessler believes that this is the point at which a certain uncompromising line became the default position amongst the Arab leadership of Palestine, with dire consequences for the Palestinians themselves, and when Yishuv leader David Ben Gurion saw an opportunity to achieve his long-standing objective of creating a self-sufficient Jewish polity, one that could feed itself, house itself, defend itself, employ itself, without any help from anyone – neither British or Arabs. When the Arabs called a general strike and boycott, cut all contacts with the Jewish and British economies and closed the port of Jaffa in Spring 1936, he lobbied successfully with the British to allow the Jews to open their own port in Tel Aviv, ultimately causing a lot of economic pain to the Arabs and helping the Jews in their state-building enterprise.

This is a mosaic history, capturing the chaotic events on the ground through snippets of action. And also, the people involved. 

There are heroes and villains aplenty in this relatively untold story. The urbane and erudite nationalists Muhammed Amal and George Antonius who strive for middle ground against increasingly insurmountable odds, and who died alone and exiled having failed to head off the final showdown that is today known as Al Nakba. The farseeing, resolute, and humourless Ben Gurion and the affable, optimistic Chaim Weizmann, who became Israel’s first prime minister and president respectively. The New York born Golda Meyerson, more of a realist than either leader, who would also one day become prime minister. The irascible revisionist Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinski, the forebear of today’s virulent rightwing nationalists

The hardliner Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini, whose uncompromising stance, malign political influence, and conspiratorial association with the Nazis set the stage for a long general strike, the Great Revolt, and ultimately, the débâcle of 1948. The flamboyant rebel leaders, Syrian Izz al Din al Qassam, who is memorialized in the name of the Hamas military wing and a Gaza-made rocket, and Fawzi al Qawuqji. Qassam was gunned down by British soldiers during the revolt whilst Qawuqji lived on to become one of the most effective militia leaders in the war of 1948, and to perish therein. Both are remembered today as Palestinian martyrs whilst the Mufti is an arguably embarrassing footnote of history. There’s an article about his relatively unremarked death at the end of this post. 

Amin al-Husseini in 1929

And in the British corner, the well-intentioned high commissioners who vainly endeavoured to reconcile the claims of two aspirant nations in one tiny land, and quixotic figures like the unorthodox soldier Ord Wingate who believed he was fulfilling prophecy by establishing the nucleus of what would become the IDF (like many charismatic British military heroes, and particularly General Gordon and Baden-Powell, both admirers and detractors regarded him a potential nut-case); and the Australian-born ex-soldier Lelland Andrews, assistant district commissioner for Galilee, who also conceived of his mission as divinely ordained. Lewis was murdered by Arab gunmen and Wingate went down in an aeroplane over Burma during WW2.

There are appearances from among many others, Lloyd George, Winton Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Franklin D Eisenhower and Joseph Kennedy.

The book highlights the work of powerful British functionaries in handling early confrontations: they are memorialized for starting commissions to study the matter and to generate ideas, though many of their ideas weren’t followed or were followed to ill effect. None solved the problem, making this account of the earliest days of the conflict all the more heartbreaking.

All under the shadow of the impending Shoah, and the inevitable showdown that would culminate in al Nakba.

The road to Al Nakba

Kessler argues that the Arab social fabric and economy are completely torn and shattered by the end of this revolt that in many ways the final reckoning for Palestine between Jews and Arabs – the civil war that erupts in 1947 – is actually won by one side and lost by the other nearly a decade earlier.

The final paragraphs of Kessler’s enthralling book are worth quoting because they draw a clear line between the events of the Great Revolt and the catastrophe, al Nakba, of 1948:

“For the Jews, perhaps the greatest shift was psychological. they had withstood of powerful sustained assault and lived to tell about it. One book on Zionist leaders” thinking in this era is titled Abandonment of Illusions. The belief of material gains would bring Arab consent now naïve and, worse, dangerous. Instead, by the end of the revolt and the start of the world war, much of Palestine’s Jewish mainstream had accepted the fact that the country’s fate would ultimately be determined and maintained by force.
 
“By 1939, the Yishuv had achieved the demographic weight, control of strategic areas of land, and much of the weaponry and military organization that would be needed as a springboard for taking over the country within less than a decade”, writes the Palestinian American historian Rasheed Khalidi.
 
Khalid argues that the Palestinian catastrophe of 1947 -1949 was predicated on a series of previous failures: “a deeply divided leadership, exceedingly limited finances, no centrally organized military forces or centralized administrative organs, and no reliable allies. They faced a Jewish society in Palestine which although small relative to theirs, was political unified, had centralized para-state institutions, and was increasingly well-led and extremely highly motivated”.
 
For Palestinians, he maintains, the Nakba – the catastrophe of their military drubbing, dispossession and dispersal – was but a forgone conclusion. For them, the terrible events that bookended the year 1948 “were no more than a postlude, a tragic epilogue to the shattering defeat of 1936- 39”.
 
The Great Revolt, Kessler says, has cast its shadow over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since – for the Arabs, for the Jews, and for attempts to resolve the conflict. It is still remembered by Palestinians and Israelis alike. Palestinian folk songs still celebrate the revolt, and in my he regards the. BDS movement as direct descendant of the general strike that preceded the revolt. The two-state solution that is still the international community’s favoured solution to the conflict is but a variation of that original partition plan of 1937.

In so many ways, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this revolt rages on.

© Paul Hemphill 2024.  

Kessler’s interview in Fathom e-zine follows, together with serval informative articles on the Great Revolt and its aftermath, including a Haaretz retrospective of how it reported the beginning of the revolt ninety years earlier. It was, most interestingly, a different newspaper then. 

For more on Israel and Palestine in In That Howling Infinite, see: A Middle East Miscellany

The picture at the head of this post shows British troops marching through Ibn Khatib Square in 1936 past King David’s Citadel and towards the Jaffa Gate

British policemen disperse an Arab mob during the Jaffa riots in April 1936 (The Illustrated London News)

 

Jews evacuate the Old City of Jerusalem after Arab riots in 1936.

Haaretz During the Arab Revolt: Blood Is the Glue That Binds a Nation and Its Land

At the start of the Arab Revolt, which began 90 years ago this week, the newspaper told its readers that ‘the God of Israel wanted our sacrifices,’ and promised that the Jewish community was here to stay

 
Haaretz April 17, 2026
 
“Once again, this land, sacred to all civilized humanity, has absorbed innocent blood,” read the Haaretz editorial on April 20, 1936. “Once again, passions raged and man turned into a desert wolf; decent people, ordinary citizens … did not return home, because murderers cut short their lives.”

The day before, nine Jews had been murdered by Arabs in Jaffa. “Tel Aviv accompanies its slain-saints,” a newspaper heading read. “From horror to horror,” screamed another headline. These were the first days of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 (in which Palestinian Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine rose up against the administration). Hundreds of Jews and Britons and thousands of Arabs were killed.

As a result of the revolt the Jewish community in Palestine focused on strengthening its military capabilities which later proved crucial in the War of Independence. But the revolt also had negative effects as the British closed the gates to Jewish immigration in 1939, sealing the fate of many.

The editorial argued that “all of the people of Israel” were the target of the “wild mob.” The murderers “sought to murder the last national hope of a nation wallowing in its blood and decaying … in its suffering … while trying to lift its soul from the abyss of its distress to new life.” Its language then became even more poetic.

 

A member of the Jewish community in Palestine is wounded in the first days of the Arab Revolt.
 
A member of the Jewish community in Palestine is wounded in the first days of the Arab Revolt. Credit: Haaretz

“From the earliest days of our new national movement, we knew that the renewed homeland would not fall into our laps as a gift from above. We knew that the Land of Israel would be acquired only through suffering and sacrifices. And if it is a tragic necessity that we shall again betroth our ancestral land not only with love and justice and righteousness, not only by the sweat of our brows … but also with the sacrifices of the souls and blood of our sons – the builders of this land– we will accept the decree.

“We have no choice, there is no other way” – the article continued, then adopting a religious tone; “The sacrifice is the justification and right of redemption. … And the blood … covenantal blood of building a people and a homeland, is the glue that binds a nation and its land. … The God of Israel wanted our sacrifices.

“No calamity will move us from our place,” the editorial asserts. “No bloody assassination, no schemes of deceit will turn back the wheel of history or break our new-old covenant with this land. The Hebrew Yishuv [Jewish community] in this land … is a reality that cannot be undone – a reality as natural as the air, the sun, the blue skies over the Judean Hills, and the Mediterranean Sea. The propaganda of so-called leaders will not stand against this natural truth and nor will acts of crime and bloodshed. … From time to time a storm of hatred, a lust for destruction, rises against us. But even these storms reveal and strengthen our power, temper our will, awaken and encourage our spirit.”

"Man turned into a desert wolf; decent people, ordinary citizens … did not return home, because murderers cut short their lives."
 
“Man turned into a desert wolf; decent people, ordinary citizens … did not return home, because murderers cut short their lives.” Credit: Haaretz, April 20th, 1936.
The funerals for those murdered in Jaffa take place in Tel Aviv.
 
The funerals for those murdered in Jaffa take place in Tel Aviv. Credit: Haaretz

Five days earlier, on April 15, 1936, two people driving near Tulkarm had been shot dead in what initially appeared to be a criminally-motivated attack. “Attack on cars near Tulkarm,” read the headline of the brief news report. It later turned out that two victims were Jews and the murder had nationalist motives. It was carried out by members of the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade, whose leader had been killed by the British about six months earlier (the group later lent its name to Hamas’ military wing). The next day, Jews murdered two Arabs in the Petah Tikva area.

On April 17, 1936, Haaretz dedicated its editorial to the attack in Tulkarm. It did not hide its revulsion toward some of the country’s Arabs. “The act of robbery and murder near Tulkarm stunned and shocked the Hebrew Yishuv,” it wrote. In parentheses, the editors added: “We doubt if anyone else in this country, besides the Hebrew Yishuv, is capable of being shocked by these terrible acts.

“We have experience and are under no illusions about the cultural level …of part of the population. … The psychological and moral distance between the ‘civilized’ population of this country and the desert is no less than the geographical distance between them.”

The mourners' notice for one of he first victims of the Arab Revolt.
 
 
The mourners’ notice for one of he first victims of the Arab Revolt. Credit: Haaretz
Scottish soldiers stop Palestinians and their camel at the entrance to Rachel's Tomb near Bethlehem.
 
Scottish soldiers stop Palestinians and their camel at the entrance to Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem. Credit: G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection

Regarding the nationalist motivations of the attackers, the editors wrote: “The specific circumstances of the recent murders arouse particular anxiety. This time there is no room for the naïve assumption that the victims were only coincidentally Jewish.

“The German from Sarona, who drove by the scene was not touched after he told the attackers his nationality, while the Jewish driver was forced out of his car. An Arab car that arrived at the scene passed safely, after it became clear to the murderers that there were no Jews in it,” they wrote. “Now we have robbers who engage in politics, who carry out robbery and murder with nationalist motives. Robbers who seek only Jewish money and Jewish blood.”

The newspaper warned of what was to come. “The current climate is deeply charged; the public mood has been poisoned by unrestrained demagogic propaganda in which all methods are deemed legitimate. This tension could ignite at any time, manifesting in isolated crimes or even mass violence. Meanwhile, the authorities look on, unwilling to fully acknowledge what is unfolding.”

British soldiers in Tel Aviv.
 
British soldiers in Tel Aviv. Credit: Haaretz.

An interview with Oren Kessler

by Oren Kessler
 
 
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Oren Kessler’s new book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) argues powerfully that events in Mandatory Palestine between 1936 and 1939 have shaped the subsequent history of the conflict for Israelis and Palestinians. Called ‘the definitive study’ by Michael Oren, Kessler’s book identifies the revolt as the true first intifada, an uprising which laid the ground for the Arab defeat in 1947-48 and which has set the tone of the conflict for almost a century. He sat down with Fathom deputy editor Jack Omer-Jackaman to discuss the book, recently released in the UK.

 Jack Omer-Jackaman: The general reader, in English at least, has lacked a history of the Great Revolt and its repercussions. What have they been missing and with what consequences for our understanding of the conflict?  

Oren Kessler: I argue that although this is an Arab revolt, it is as much a Jewish story as an Arab story. From the Arab perspective it’s an extremely formative event – it’s the crucible in which Palestinian Arab identity coalesced as virtually all strands of Arab society came together in a common purpose against a common foe. But on the Jewish side this is an equally seminal and decisive event. It’s often forgotten but this is the period in which the words ‘Jewish State’ first appear on the international agenda – not just the ‘national home’ promised in the Balfour Declaration, but a Jewish state to all intents and purposes, as part of a ‘two-state solution.’ It’s also the period in which the British Empire sows the seeds for a Jewish army. So, in all of these ways this is a hugely formative chapter in the history in the Land of Israel/Palestine, for the conflict itself, and for attempts to resolve it. The degree to which this chapter hasn’t gotten its due is actually quite startling. It’s not entirely clear to me why such a pivotal event right before the Second World War hasn’t gotten its due in English outside of a handful of academic works.

JOJ: And why has the 1936-1939 Revolt been relatively ignored?

OK: It’s a very good question. In the book I quote Professor Mustafa Kabha of the Open University of Israel, who argues that in the Palestinian narrative and consciousness, the revolt has been side-lined, marginalised by the overwhelming primacy of the Nakba. The Nakba is much ‘easier’ to fit into the narrative because, from the Palestinian perspective, it’s the moment at which they are betrayed and unjustly treated by Zionism, by British Imperialism, even by their fellow Arabs who fail to rescue them from the Zionist menace. Whereas dealing with 1936-39 requires a lot more soul-searching. There is a huge convulsion of Arab infighting in this period – there is much Arab bloodshed at the hands of fellow Arabs. That is a lot more difficult for a national narrative to rationalise.

Every national movement has its narrative and its storyline, and the Jewish national narrative tends to be quite forward moving: from the first wave of immigration in the late 19th Century, on to the Balfour Declaration, the start of the British Mandate and the Jewish state-building of the 1920s and 30s, then the agony of the Holocaust and finally the redemption of statehood. That’s essentially the Zionist story, and I think a large-scale, concerted nationalist uprising against that story is a somewhat unwelcome blip in the narrative arc.

JOJ: Let’s set the geopolitical scene at that time: talk to us about the connections between European and local events.

OK: Throughout the book, I bounce back and forth between the situations in Palestine and Europe, because they’re inseparable – certainly from a British perspective, and equally from a Jewish one. The revolt begins only three years after Hitler comes to power in Germany in 1933. There are also other antisemitic movements ascendent across Europe, in places like Poland, Hungary and Romania, and very many Jews are desperate to leave. But almost all potential sanctuaries in the world have been closed; the US has been almost closed to immigration since the Immigration Act of 1924. In many ways, Palestine is the only significant possible refuge left for the Jews of Europe. So Jewish immigration into Palestine is skyrocketing in these years – the Jewish population there doubles in the first half of the 1930s. In 1935, 60,000 Jews come into Palestine, which is nearly double that of the year before, so the Jews are approaching 30 per cent of the population by the time the revolt erupts. The revolt is thus a direct result of the European situation, since it’s very clear to the Arabs of Palestine that if things continue this way, Palestine will have a Jewish majority before long.

From a British perspective, the war clouds looming over Europe make it very difficult for the British army to quash the revolt. They simply don’t have the manpower for it, at least until the Munich Agreement of 1938, granting Hitler the Sudetenland. With the appeasement of Hitler, Britain and all of Europe breathe a sigh of relief and buy some time (at least that’s how it felt at the time). After Munich the British are able to send two divisions to Palestine, which constitutes the largest British army deployment in the interwar period. This is another reason it’s startling that this era has been so overlooked.

JOJ: That leads us neatly onto the next topic, which looks at the balance of power post and ante the revolt. How does each side – and let’s include the British – go into the period and how do they emerge?

OK: Until Munich, the British are severely undermanned in Palestine, and this directly benefits the Jews because this is the period in which the British finally accede to a long-standing demand by the Haganah – the Jewish self-defence group that is technically illegal but tolerated by the British – to arm and train Jews in large numbers. And that’s what happens: 15,000-20,000 Jews join the Palestine Police as Jewish Supernumerary Police. And though they receive their weapons, training and part of their salary from the British government, it’s clear to everyone that they’re ultimately answerable to the Haganah. So the Jews, led by David Ben-Gurion – already in this era the clear leader of Palestine’s Jews – are able to turn adversity to advantage and make tremendous gains, militarily and otherwise, throughout the Arab revolt.

it’s the mirror image for the Arab side. The revolt to crush Zionism crushes the Arabs instead. The initial unity of the revolt’s first phase under the leadership of Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini – which includes a six-month general strike – gives way in the second phase (from Autumn 1937) to a convulsion of infighting and score settling. Several thousand Arabs are killed by their fellow Arabs, and the Arab leadership – namely the mufti and his associates – is driven into exile. And of course the British begin taking very heavy-handed measures – including a number of incidents that qualify as atrocities – to quash the revolt. Huge numbers of Arab men are put in prison or killed by the British, and thousands of homes demolished. The Arab social fabric and economy are completely torn and shattered by the end of this revolt. I argue in the book, and this is an argument that has also been made by the Palestinian-American professor Rashid Khalidi, that in many ways the final reckoning for Palestine between Jews and Arabs – the civil war that erupts in 1947 – is actually won by one side and lost by the other nearly a decade earlier.

JOJ: The popular narrative is that Palestinian nationalism – as distinct from wider Arab or Syrian nationalism – was a product of the 1930s. What did your study of the period tell you about this?

OK: I think Palestine is sui generis in many ways, including the development of nationalism there. In my view it is during the Arab revolt that a strong sense of Arab nationalism in Palestine extends beyond the urban elites to all corners of the country. All segments of Arab society – urban and rural, rich and poor, rival families, and even to a large extent Muslim and Christian – unite in the same mission against Zionism and against its perceived handmaiden: the British Empire.

The Arab public in Palestine is growing increasingly politically aware and consciously perceiving itself as a distinct entity – distinct from its brethren in Syria, in large part because it has a different foe: not simply European imperialism but this very specific threat presented by Zionism.

JOJ: So was the 1936-1939 Revolt the crucial event in the origins of the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Was this the point at which it became zero sum for both sides? Or was it just the first time there was a wider realisation of this?

OK: I’ve lost track of how many people who, when I start telling them about my book, assume I’m referring to the Hebron massacre of 1929. In my view the Hebron riots were just that: they were riots, they were an outburst of terrorism, but not a sustained nationalist uprising in the way that the Great Revolt of 1936 is – not an intifada in the parlance of today. I think in many ways, the Revolt is when both sides really come to see this conflict as zero sum. But it was always in a way zero sum in that whichever community has the demographic majority in Palestine would be the one that would determine its fate. This is an age in which the world is moving, however haltingly, from imperialism towards self-determination, and it is clear to both Jews and Arabs alike that having a majority would be absolutely key. However, in the 1920s, the Jews were so far from that majority that both sides were able to postpone the final reckoning. In the 1930s, the Jews are threatening to become a majority, and that’s the immediate precursor to this revolt erupting.

JOJ: Is it fair to say that the tone was set at this time, on the Palestinian side, for this being a conflict that demands hardliners? That the tone was set of leadership by extremists like Qassam and Hajj Amin[1] and not more moderate figures like Faisal or the Nashashibis?

OK: Yes, I do think that this is the period in which the intransigent line taken by Hajj Amin becomes not just mainstream but one from which it is very dangerous to deviate. Hajj Amin, even after fleeing the country in Autumn of 1937, manages to exert his will over the revolt from afar, and anyone who dares step out of line or contemplate reaching some sort of modus vivendi with the Zionist movement tends to find himself dead or in some other serious trouble. A prime example of that is the reaction among prominent Arabs to the partition plan. In late 1936, the British government sends a royal commission to Palestine, known to history as the Peel Commission, to examine the causes of the revolt, and famously it proposes the first ‘two state solution.’ The Emir Abdullah of Transjordan publicly accepts this plan. The main rival clan to the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, privately signal that they are amenable; not thrilled, but amenable. And their allies hold the mayorships of quite a few important cities – Jaffa, Haifa, and even Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem, which today are centres of militancy. And yet the Mufti makes very clear that he regards this plan as a degradation and a humiliation, and all of these erstwhile supporters of partition suddenly realise that they are against partition. So yes, I do think that this is the point at which a certain uncompromising line becomes the default one amongst the Arab leadership of Palestine, with really devastating results for the Palestinians themselves.

JOJ: Let’s look to the Jewish side. Is it the first, or at least a formative, time when differing approaches to state-building and self-defence within the Zionist movement are clearly exposed?

OK: Absolutely. During the Arab Revolt the Haganah adheres to a policy called havlagah, meaning self-restraint, despite the revolt’s very high toll in Jewish blood. Some 500 Jews are killed in this revolt; these are huge numbers, comparable to those in the Second Intifada in much more recent times. The logic is to convince the British that they can be trusted with weapons and, as mentioned earlier, that’s exactly what happens. The Irgun – the Revisionist, right-wing dissident Zionist group, whose ideological leader is Vladimir Jabotinsky – has a very different view, much more in line with ‘an eye for an eye’. They believe that it has to be made very clear to the Arabs that Jewish blood could not be shed unanswered, and that taking the fight to the Arabs, including civilians, would have a deterrent effect. We see dozens of Irgun attacks targeting Arab civilians during the revolt. I don’t think there’s any other way to describe this than terrorism – this isn’t ‘collateral damage’ in an attempt to target militants, but a mentality in which ‘If the Arabs target our civilians, we’ll target theirs’. So, there’s a real schism between these two Zionist movements, but the Haganah are able to convince the British that they are in control and are the mainstream, and that the Irgun is merely a fringe group. And that’s how this crucial British-Jewish military cooperation begins.

JOJ: Could the Yishuv leadership have acted any differently in the years prior to the revolt and forestalled it? Or not without sacrificing immigration?

OK: A very good question, and one which gets back to this question of whether it’s a zero sum conflict. I don’t agree with the rose-tinted analyses of history that I sometimes hear, which claim that in the Ottoman and early Mandate eras the two communities were able to get along in peace and it is somehow British mismanagement that prompted the conflict. Rather it seems to me that when the Jews were a minority, they didn’t present too much of a disruption to the status quo, but as soon as they began to threaten to reach a majority, there is almost no alternative to this conflict breaking out. That’s how Ben-Gurion looks at this situation throughout, and he never agrees to even slowimmigration. By contrast, Chaim Weizmann, head of the world Zionist Organisation, is willing to slow immigration to try to cultivate Arab goodwill and cooperation. I don’t see how that objective of bringing as many Jews to the land as possible could be achieved without bringing about some serious Arab pushback.

JOJ: To what extent was the Arab general strike self-defeating in allowing Ben-Gurion unprecedented opportunities for a key Zionist priority: the conquest of labour?[2]

The general strike starts almost at the very beginning of the revolt and lasts six months – still one of the longest general strikes anywhere in history. It is a source of great Arab pride. As I mentioned, Ben-Gurion really is an expert in turning adversity into advantage. He sees a tremendous opportunity to achieve his long-standing objective of creating a self-sufficient Jewish polity, one that could feed itself, house itself, defend itself, employ itself, without any help from anyone – not the British or the Arabs. In the strike, the Arabs cut all contacts with the Jewish and British economies, and when Jaffa port closed in Spring of 1936, Ben-Gurion pleads successfully with the British to allow the Jews to open their own port in Tel Aviv. The British agree and Ben Gurion is euphoric, hailing the fact that the Jews now have an outlet to the world as a second Balfour Declaration. That’s just one example of how the Arab strike and boycott ultimately cause a lot of economic pain to the Arabs and help the Jews in their state-building enterprise.

JOJ: You benefited tremendously from the declassification of the Peel Commission’s secret testimonies, which threw up some fascinating revelations. What did we learn about the origins of the Balfour Declaration, for example?

This was one of the most interesting troves of archival documents that I found in my research. The British Government kept the Peel Commission documents classified for 80 years, and they were very quietly declassified only in 2017. I wrote an article in Fathom in 2020 about the 1937 secret testimony of David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration, on why the government had issued that historic and controversial document. Explaining his decision of two decades earlier, he says the Jews ‘are a dangerous people to quarrel with, but they are a very helpful people if you can get them on your side.’ He says that he and his ministry were very concerned, in the midst of the First World War, that the Jews of America and Russia might not support the allies but go over to the German side. There were even murmurings that the Germans were thinking of a ‘Balfour Declaration’ of their own. Lloyd George makes very clear in this testimony that that was a primary reason that the Declaration was given at that time. And he says that, in his opinion, the declaration more than paid for itself by the help that the Jews of America and Russia gave in various ways during the war.

JOJ: Herbert Samuel’s testimony was interesting, too.

OK: Samuel was the first High Commissioner for Palestine, as well as a Jew and a Zionist. In his testimony he is asked why he appointed Hajj Amin as Grand Mufti in the first place in the early 1920s – this is the only occasion I’ve ever seen him asked about this decision, which is one of the most fateful taken in the entire history of the Israeli-Arab conflict. He basically says, and I’m paraphrasing: ‘look, I had no choice. We had to appoint someone from the Husseini family because we had already given the other great Arab families various other perks, and so the Husseinis needed to get the muftiship. And Amin was the only Husseini with the requisite religious education having studied at al Azhar in Egypt.’ Samuel doesn’t admit it was a mistake but defends the decision and says that Hajj Amin had more or less behaved well until that point. (That is not quite true: the British had sentenced him in absentia for rabble rousing in 1920.) These are fascinating documents that were originally slated for destruction; the witnesses who give testimony do so on that understanding. But one very forward-looking British official has the foresight to stow them away, scribbling in the margins that they chronicle ‘an important chapter in the history of Palestine and the Jewish people, and will, no doubt, be of considerable value to the historians of the remote future.’

JOJ: Let’s look at Peel’s partition proposals a little deeper. We tend, optimistically, to think that decisions taken by high level politicians and civil servants are subject to forensic detail and informed by expert knowledge. How does the British process for proposing the first two-state solution correct us on this?

OK: That is one of the most fascinating discoveries contained in the secret testimonies: just how this two-state solution is arrived at. One of the commission members is an Oxford don by the name of Professor Reginald Coupland, an Africa-focused historian not particularly well-versed in the Middle East. He arrives at the idea that just as the Greeks and Turks were separated after World War One, in what he referred to as a ‘clean cut’, so Jews and Arabs need to be separated in that same way. It is really Coupland, with the help of a few British colonial servants in Palestine, who pushes through this idea of a two-state solution. And they do so quite hastily – when you look at the minutes of these secret testimonies, it’s just a few pages in which they discuss the practicability and the details of such a solution. It’s Coupland, an irrigation advisor by the name of Douglas Harris, and the assistant district commissioner for Galilee, Lewis Andrews (who shortly thereafter is assassinated) who draft the first two-state solution, which becomes the ideological template for every subsequent attempted solution to the conflict, from the UN’s exactly a decade later onto the various subsequent iterations until our time.

JOJ: Let’s talk about another piece of Mandate administration, the 1939 MacDonald White Paper, which barred Jews entry to Palestine just months before the outbreak of World War Two.  Does your book have anything to say on this that is new?

OK: There’s a general familiarity, at least among Jews, with the White Paper and that it is a bad an unjust thing. But the genesis of the White Paper has not been researched to the degree it deserves, and in the book I devote a whole chapter to it. The Colonial Secretary at the time is Malcolm MacDonald, who is only 37 years old (he is the son of the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald). This is the Chamberlain government, which is dedicated to appeasement, not just in Europe but in the Middle East. Even though MacDonald is a member of the National Labour Party, he is a loyal member of the ministry and determines, with the advice of senior officials in the army and the government, that some drastic changes need to be made to Britain’s Palestine policy in such a crucial period. There is a feeling that world war would break out at any point and that Muslim opinion, particularly in India, has to be appeased, lest Muslim subjects of the empire side with Hitler.

When you look at the discussion, you see that the British policy makers plan to go far in the direction of Arab demands when they call the St James’s Conference in 1939. And yet, throughout these negotiations, they go quite a bit farther even than they originally intend. So, where 60,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine in 1935, the 1939 White Paper limits Jewish immigration to a total of 75,000 over five years, after which Palestine would become an independent state. The White Paper doesn’t say an independent Arab state, but of course if Jewish immigration is limited to keep the Jews under 35 or 40 per cent of the population, it’s clear to everyone that this would be a de facto Arab state. This is mid-1939, when the Jews of Europe are most desperate to find sanctuary outside of Europe, and the White Paper is seen by the Jews and their supporters as a tremendous betrayal, and a reneging not just on the Peel Commission plan of two years previous, but on the Balfour Declaration itself.

This is one of the tremendous ‘what ifs’ of history: what would have happened had the White Paper not been passed, or had the Peel partition plan of 1937 gone through? Ben-Gurion, after the Holocaust, said that had the Jews had the small state promised to them in 1937, six million could have been saved. I think that’s perhaps an overstatement: I’m not sure that the very small state offered to them was developed enough to absorb six million people. It was Golda Meir who said that had the Jewish state been established (and the White Paper not implemented), hundreds of thousands could have been saved: I think that’s a plausible reading of history. The White Paper is what finally turns Ben-Gurion against the British. It’s when he decides that the British-Zionist partnership is essentially over and when he starts to look across the ocean to America as the great potential supporter of Zionism.

JOJ: Finally, it’s fascinating to see how the 1936-1939 Revolt and this period lives in the iconography of both Israelis and Palestinians. You don’t have to look too hard to see it referenced or deployed in the present day. It occupies a place of glory for Palestinians, which is rather ironic given its role in the catastrophe of 1948. And on the Israeli side, it was referenced not too long ago by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

OK: I argue that the revolt has cast its shadow over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since – for the Arabs, for the Jews, and for attempts to resolve the conflict. Just recently, for example, in the Gaza conflict of May 2021, you may remember that the war extended to the battlefield of social media. When the Arabs of Israel and the West Bank joined together in a one-day strike, Twitter was abuzz with comparisons to 1936. And, as you mention, Bezalel Smotrich tweeted: ‘the riots of the Arab enemy take us back many years to the great Arab revolt. Back then a hostile British government protected rioters. Today a worthless, weak Jewish government, a contaminated judiciary and a law enforcement system emasculated by dangerous post-national and post-modern notions…’ Palestinian folk songs still celebrate the revolt, and in my view the BDS movement is a direct descendant of the general strike. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, the two-state solution that is still the international community’s the favoured solution to the conflict is simply a variation of the original partition plan of 1937. In so many ways, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this revolt rages on.

[1] Editor’s note: Hajj Amin al Husseini, appointed by the British Mandate as Grand Mufti in 1921, would become a determined supporter of Nazi Germany. At his 1941 meeting with Hitler, Hajj Amin declared himself ‘fully reassured and satisfied’ with Hitler’s reassurance that once having achieved the ‘total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe… Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere’. In 1943, the SS enlisted Hajj Amin to lead a recruitment drive among Bosnian Muslims, SS Main Office Chief Berger noting the ‘extraordinarily successful impact’ of the Mufti’s activities.

[2] Editor’s note: The concept of Kibbush Haavoda, the conquest of labour, was a key plank in Labour Zionism. Its priorities were the encouraging of manual and agricultural labour amongst Jewish immigrants to Palestine and a reliance on Jewish labour for the Jewish economy

Great Arab Revolt, 1936-1939
A Popular Uprising Facing a Ruthless Repression
 
In 1936, widespread Palestinian dissatisfaction with Britain’s governance erupted into open rebellion. Several key dynamics and events can be seen as setting the stage for this uprising. In Palestine, as elsewhere, the 1930s had been a time of intense economic disruption. Rural Palestinians were hit hard by debt and dispossession, and such pressures were only exacerbated by British policies and Zionist imperatives of land purchases and “Hebrew labor.” Rural to urban migration swelled Haifa and Jaffa with poor Palestinians in search of work, and new attendant forms of political organizing emerged that emphasized youth, religion, class, and ideology over older elite-based structures. Meanwhile, rising anti-Semitism—especially its state-supported variant—in Europe led to an increase of Jewish immigration, legal and illegal, in Palestine.

Unsurprisingly, the combination of these various trends produced periodic upheavals, from the 1929 al-Buraq Uprising to multicity demonstrations in 1933 against the British Mandate. In October 1935, the discovery of a shipment of arms in the Jaffa port destined for the Haganah fueled Palestinian concerns that the Zionist movement was introducing the human and military resources necessary for its state-building project under the nose of the British. Meanwhile, the popular and populist Syrian Shaykh Izzeddin al-Qassam , who preached to the slum-dwelling rural transplants near Haifa’s rail yards and who had spent the early 1930s building a cell-based paramilitary network, was killed in a firefight with British forces in November 1935. Qassam’s funeral in Haifa elicited a mass outpouring of public outrage. These events are often seen as direct predecessors of the mass Palestinian uprising that took place in 1936.

The Great Palestinian Rebellion , or the Great Arab Revolt, as this uprising came to be known, lasted for three years and can be generally divided into three phases. The first phase lasted from the spring of 1936 to July 1937. With tensions throughout Palestine running high since the fall of 1935, the revolt was ignited in mid-April 1936 when followers of Qassam attacked a convoy of trucks between Nablus and Tulkarm , killing two Jewish drivers. The next day, the  Irgun killed two Palestinian workers near Petah Tikva , and in the following days, deadly disturbances ensued in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. In Nablus, an Arab National Committee was formed and a strike was called on 19 April. National Committees in other cities echoed the call to strike, and on 25 April the Arab Higher Committee (Lajna) (AHC) was formed, chaired by Haj Amin al-Husseini , to coordinate and support a nationwide general strike, which was launched on 8 May.

The strike was widely observed and brought commercial and economic activity in the Palestinian sector to a standstill. Meanwhile, Palestinians throughout the countryside came together in armed groups to attack—at first sporadically, but with increasing organization— British and Zionist targets. Some Arab volunteers joined the rebels from outside Palestine, though their numbers remained small in this period. The British employed various tactics in an attempt to break the strike and to quell the rural insurrection. The ranks of British and Jewish policemen swelled and Palestinians were subjected to house searches, night raids, beatings, imprisonment, torture, and deportation. Large areas of Jaffa’s Old City were demolished, and the British called in military reinforcements.

Concurrent with military operations and repressive measures, the British government dispatched a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel to investigate the root causes of the revolt. In October 1936, under the combined pressure of British policies, other Arab heads of state, and the effects of a six-month general strike on the Palestinian population, the AHC called off the strike and agreed to appear before the Peel Commission . A period of lower intensity conflict prevailed as the Peel Commission toured the country, but tensions continued to build in anticipation of the commission’s report. In July 1937, the Peel Commission published its report, recommending Palestine’s partition into Jewish and Arab states. Dismayed by this negation of their desires and demands, the Palestinian population relaunched their armed insurgency with renewed intensity, initiating the second phase of the revolt.

This second phase, lasting from July 1937 until the fall of 1938, witnessed significant gains by the Palestinian rebels. Large swaths of the hilly Palestinian interior, including for a time the Old City of Jerusalem , fell fully under rebel control. Rebels established institutions, most significantly courts and a postal service, to replace the British Mandate structures they sought to dismantle. The British, meanwhile, imposed even harsher measures to try to quash the revolt. The AHC and all Palestinian political parties were outlawed, political and community leaders were arrested, and a number of high-profile public figures exiled. The military aspects of counterinsurgency intensified, and British tanks, airplanes, and heavy artillery were deployed throughout Palestine. The British also meted out collective punishment: thousands of Palestinians were relegated to “detention camps”; residential quarters were destroyed; schools were closed; villages were collectively fined and forced to billet British troops and police. Zionist military institutions took advantage of the situation to build up their capacities with British support. By early 1939, members of the Jewish Settlement Police (about 14,000) were subsidized, uniformed, and armed by the British government as a thinly veiled front for the Haganah, and so-called Special Night Squads  comprising Jewish and British members launched “special operations” against Palestinian villages.

The third phase of the rebellion lasted roughly from the fall of 1938 to the summer of 1939. The British dispatched another commission of inquiry, this one headed by Sir John Woodhead , to examine the technical aspects of implementing partition. In November 1938, the Woodhead Commission report concluded that partition was not practicable, marking a certain British retreat from the Peel recommendation. At the same time, however, the British launched an all-out offensive: in 1939 more Palestinians were killed, more were executed (by hanging), and nearly twice as many were detained than in 1938. Such brutality placed immense pressure on the rebels, exacerbating rifts between the political leadership of the AHC exiled in Damascus and local leadership on the ground, between rebel bands and village populations that were expected to support and supply them, and ultimately between Palestinians who remained committed to the revolt and those willing to reach a compromise with the British. British-supported Palestinian “Peace Bands” were dispatched to battle their compatriots.

In May 1939, the British government published a new White Paperthat proposed the following: Britain’s obligations to the Jewish national home had been substantially fulfilled; indefinite mass Jewish immigration to and land acquisition in Palestine would contradict Britain’s obligations to the Palestinians; within the next five years, no more than 75,000 Jews would be allowed into the country, after which Jewish immigration would be subject to “Arab acquiescence”; land transfers would be permitted in certain areas, but restricted and prohibited in others, to protect Palestinians from landlessness; and an independent unitary state would be established after ten years, conditional on favorable Palestinian-Jewish relations.

The combined impact of Britain’s military and diplomatic efforts brought the rebellion to an end in the late summer of 1939. Over the revolt’s three years, some 5,000 Palestinians had been killed and nearly 15,000 wounded. The Palestinian leadership had been exiled, assassinated, imprisoned, and made to turn against one another. At the same time, the White Paper—despite its limitations—offered certain concessions to the rebels’ demands. Whatever gains Palestinians might have made through the revolt, however, were quickly overtaken by the larger geopolitical processes of World War II , and the combined British-Zionist assault on Palestinian political and social life during the revolt had a long-lasting impact.

Alex Winder 
 
Selected Bibliography:

Anderson, Charles W. “State of Formation from Below and the Great Revolt in Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 47, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): 39-55.

Hughes, Matthew. “From Law and Order to Pacification: Britain’s Suppression of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 39, no.2 (Winter 2010): 6–22.

Kanafani, Ghassan. The 1936–39 Revolt in Palestine.

Shbeib, Samih. “Poetry of Rebellion: The Life, Verse and Death of Nuh Ibrahim during the 1936–39 Revolt.” Jerusalem Quarterly 25 (Winter 2006): 65–78.

Sufian, Sandy. “Anatomy of the 1936-39 Revolt: Images of the Body in Political Cartoons of Mandatory Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 37, no.2 (Winter 2008):  23–42.

Swedenburg, Ted. Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003.

Britain says releasing a 1941 document about Palestine might ‘undermine security’

May
“VISIT OF H.R.H. PRINCESS MARY AND THE EARL OF HARWOOD. MARCH 1934. PRINCESS MARY, THE EARL OF HARWOOD, AND THE GRAND MUFTI, ETC. AT THE MOSQUE EL-AKSA [I.E., AL-AQSA IN JERUSALEM].” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4221.

A two-part archive, labeled “Activities of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem” and dated 1940-1941, sits in Britain’s National Archives in Kew. This writer successfully had the first part declassified in 2014. The second part remains sealed. My 2018 attempt to have these ten pages declassified was refused on the grounds that the archive might “undermine the security of the country [Britain] and its citizens.”[1] None of its secrets are to be available until January, 2042; and if the paired file is any precedent, even in 2042 it will be released only in redacted form.

The ‘Grand Mufti’ in the archive’s heading is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader whom posterity best remembers for his alignment with the Italian and German fascists; and the years 1940-1941 place him not in Palestine, but in Iraq — and if the second archive extends to late 1941, in Europe. What could possibly be hidden in a World War II document about a long-dead Nazi sympathizer that would present such a risk to British national security eight decades later, that none of it can be revealed? At present, only the UK government censors know; but the answer may have less to do with the fascists and al-Husseini than with British misdeeds in Iraq, and less to do with Britain’s national security than with its historical embarrassment.

When in 1921 votes were cast for the new Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini came in last among the four candidates. But votes in Palestine mattered as little then as they do now, and the British, Palestine’s novice replacement occupiers for the Ottomans, handed the post to al-Husseini. At first, he proved to be an asset to the British. But as the years passed, his opposition to Zionism, support for Palestinian nationalism, and ultimately his involvement in the 1936 Palestinian uprising, led to calls for his arrest.

Photograph labelled 'Arab demonstrations on Oct. 13 and 27, 1933. In Jerusalem and Jaffa. Return of Grand Mufti from India. Met by hundreds of cars at Gethsemane, Nov. 17, 1933.'

“ARAB DEMONSTRATIONS ON OCT. 13 AND 27, 1933. IN JERUSALEM AND JAFFA. RETURN OF GRAND MUFTI FROM INDIA. MET BY HUNDREDS OF CARS AT GETHSEMANE, NOV. 17, 1933.” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4218.

In mid-October of 1937, he fled from hiding in Palestine to Beirut. Two years later and six weeks after the outbreak of World War II, in mid-October of 1939, he slipped to Baghdad, where his sympathies for the Italian fascists further alarmed the British. Fast-forward another two years to late 1941, and al-Husseini is in Europe, meeting with Benito Mussolini on the 27th of October, and on the 28th of November meeting with the Führer himself at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

Al-Husseini’s motivation for embracing the Axis was likely a combination of selfish political opportunism and the belief that the alignment would help safeguard against the takeover of Palestine by the Zionists. The reasoning, however grotesque, was the same used by Lehi (the ‘Stern Gang’) in its own attempted collaboration with the fascists: Britain was the obstacle both to Palestinian liberation, and to unbridled Zionism, and for both the Mufti and Lehi, defeating that obstacle meant embracing its enemies. Even the ‘mainstream’ David Ben-Gurion had no moral qualms about taking advantage of Britain’s struggle against the Nazis — a struggle for which his Jewish Agency was already conspicuously unhelpful — by exploiting Britain’s post-war vulnerabilities.[2]

Posterity has treated Lehi’s and the Mufti’s flirtations with the fascists quite differently. Lehi, the most fanatical of the major Zionist terror organizations, was transformed into freedom fighters, and ex-Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir was twice elected as Israeli Prime Minister. In contrast, Zionist leaders quickly seized on al-Husseini’s past to smear not just him, but the Palestinians as a people, as Nazis.

The use of al-Husseini’s unsavory history to ‘justify’ anti-Palestinian racism continues to the present day. Most bizarrely, in 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Hitler had not intended to exterminate the Jews — that is, not until al-Husseini planted the words in his ear — which translates as “got the idea from the Palestinians”. A private citizen would likely have been arrested under German law for this attempt to rewrite the Holocaust.

The mufti of Jerusalem, Sayid Amin al Husseini, meets with Hitler, November 1941.

THE MUFTI OF JERUSALEM, SAYID AMIN AL HUSSEINI, MEETS WITH HITLER, NOVEMBER 1941.

Iraq won limited independence in 1932, just before the Nazis came to power. When the Mufti ensconced himself in Iraq seven years later, the country was under nominally ‘pro-British’ Prime Ministers, and Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah for the four-year-old king, Faisal II. This uneasy British-Iraqi equilibrium ended on first day of April 1941, when four Iraqi officers known as the Golden Square, wanting full independence (and similarly aligning themselves with the fascists in the foolish belief that doing so would help them get it), staged a coup d’état. It lasted two months. British troops ousted the coup on the first day of June — and as they did, anti-Jewish riots rocked Baghdad. An estimated 180 Jewish Iraqis were killed and 240 wounded in this pogrom known as the Farhud.

Why would the momentary power vacuum of the British takeover lead to anti-Jewish terror? While doing research for my 2016 book, State of Terror, I was intrigued by the claim of one Iraqi Jewish witness, Naeim Giladi, that these ‘Arab’ riots were orchestrated by the British to justify their return to power.[3] Indeed, the riots seemed unnatural in a society where Jews had lived for two and a half millennia, and the “pro-Axis” Golden Square takeover two months earlier had not precipitated any such pogrom. Yet it was also true that Zionism had created ethnic resentment, and Giladi did not question that junior officers of the Iraqi army were involved in the violence. The evidence provided by Giladi was compelling enough to seek out clues among British source documents that were not available to him.

And that, along with the hope of shedding new light on the Mufti’s pro-fascist activities, brought me to the archive at issue and my qualified (redacted) success in getting the first part declassified– officially titled, CO 733/420/19. Not surprisingly, much of the file focused on legitimate worry over the Mufti’s dealings with the Italian fascists. Some of the British voices recorded considered him to be a serious threat to the war effort, and a report entitled “Inside Information” spoke of the Mufti’s place in an alleged “German shadow government in Arabia”. Others dismissed this as “typical of the sort of stuff which literary refugees put into their memoirs in order to make them dramatic” and suggested that the Mufti’s influence was overstated.

Whatever the case, by October 1940, the Foreign Office was considering various methods for “putting an end to the Mufti’s intrigues with the Italians”, and by mid-November,

it was decided that the only really effective means of securing a control over him [the Mufti] would be a military occupation of Iraq.

British plans of a coup were no longer mere discussion, but a plan already in progress:

We may be able to clip the Mufti’s wings when we can get a new Government in Iraq. F.O. [Foreign Office] are working on this”.

So, the British were already working on re-occupying Iraq five months before the April 1941 ‘Golden Square’ coup.

A prominent thread of the archive was: How to effect a British coup without further alienating ‘the Arab world’ in the midst of the war, beyond what the empowering of Zionism had already done? Harold MacMichael, High Commissioner for Palestine, suggested the idea “that documents incriminating the Mufti have been found in Libya” that can be used to embarrass him among his followers; but others “felt some hesitation … knowing, as we should, there was no truth in the statement.”

But frustratingly, the trail stops in late 1940; to know anything conclusive we need the second part’s forbidden ten pages: CO 733/420/19/1.

The redacted first part partially supports, or at least does not challenge, Giladi’s claim. It proves that Britain was planning regime change and sought a pretext, but gives no hint as to whether ethnic violence was to be that pretext. Interestingly, Lehi had at the time reached the same conclusion as Giladi: its Communique claimed that “Churchill’s Government is responsible for the pogrom in Baghdad”.[4]

Does the public have the right to see still-secret archives such as CO 733/420/19/1? In this case, the gatekeepers claimed to be protecting us from the Forbidden Fruit of “curiosity”: They claimed to be distinguishing between “information that would benefit the public good”, and “information that would meet public curiosity”, and decided on our behalf that this archive fit the latter.[1] We are to believe that an eight-decade-old archive on an important issue remains sealed because it would merely satisfy our lust for salacious gossip.

Perhaps no assessment of past British manipulation in Iraq would have given pause to the Blair government before signing on to the US’s vastly more catastrophic Iraqi ‘regime change’ of 2003, promoted with none of 1940’s hesitation about using forged ‘African’ documents — this time around Niger, instead of Libya. But history has not even a chance of teaching us, if its lessons are kept hidden from the people themselves.

Note: According to Giladi, the riots of 1941 “gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq” that would culminate with the (proven) Israeli false-flag ‘terrorism’ that emptied most of Iraq’s Jewish population a decade later. Documents in Kew seen by the author support this. But to be sure, the Zionists were not connected with the alleged British maneuvers of 1941.

1. Correspondence from the UK government, explaining its refusal to allow me access to CO 733/420/19/1:

Section 23(1) (security bodies and security matters): We have considered whether the balance of the public interest favours releasing or withholding this information. After careful consideration, we have determined that the public interest in releasing the information you have requested is outweighed by the public interest in maintaining the exemption. It is in the public interest that our security agencies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that would assist those determined to undermine the security of the country and its citizens.

The judiciary differentiates between information that would benefit the public good and information that would meet public curiosity. It does not consider the latter to be a ‘public interest’ in favour of disclosure. In this case, disclosure would neither meaningfully improve transparency nor assist public debate, and disclosure would not therefore benefit the public good.

2. Ben-Gurion looked ahead to when the end of the war would leave Britain militarily weakened and geographically dispersed, and economically ruined. He cited the occupation of Vilna by the Poles after World War I as a precedent for the tactic. For him, the end of WWII only presented an opportunity for the takeover of Palestine with less physical resistance; it also left Britain at the mercy of the United States for economic relief, which the Jewish Agency exploited by pressuring US politicians to make that assistance contingent on supporting Zionist claims to Palestine. At a mid-December 1945 secret meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, Ben-Gurion stressed that “our activities should be directed from Washington and not from London”, noting that “Jewish influence in America is powerful and able to cause damage to the interests of Great Britain”, as it “depends to a great extent on America economically” and would “not be able to ignore American pressure if we succeed in bringing this pressure to bear”. He lauded Rabbi Abba Silver in the US for his aggressiveness on the issue, while noting that he was nonetheless “a little fanatical and may go too far”. (TNA, FO 1093/508). The Irgun was more direct in 1946, stating that Britain’s commuting of two terrorists’ death sentences and other accommodations to the Zionists “has been done with the sole purpose to calm American opposition against the American loan to Britain”. (TNA, KV 5-36). Meanwhile, in the US that year Rabbi Silver’s bluntness on the tactic worried Moshe Shertok (a future prime minister). Although like Ben-Gurion, Shertok said that “we shall exploit to the maximum the American pressure on the British Government”, in particular the pre-election period (and in particular New York), but urged “care and wisdom in this” so as not to give ammunition to “anti-Zionists and the anti-semites in general”. Shertok criticized Silver for saying publicly that “he and his supporters opposed the loan to be granted to the British Government”. (TNA, CO 537/1715)

3. Suárez, Thomas, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel[Skyscraper, 2016, and Interlink, 2017]; In Arabic, هكذا أقيمت المستعمرة [Kuwait, 2018]; in French, Comment le terrorisme a créé Israël[Investig’Action, 2019]
Giladi, Naeim, Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews [Dandelion, 2006]

4. Lehi, Communique, No. 21/41, dated 1st of August 1941

Update: This post originally referred to the “four-year-old Prime Minister, ‘Abd al-Ilah,” not the four-year-old King Faisal under Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah. Commenter Jon S. corrected us, and the post has been changed.

The day the Mufti died 

Yes, Hajj Amin al-Husayni collaborated with the Nazis, but that’s not why he was dropped from the Palestinian narrative 

Martin Kramer, Times of Israel Blogs, July 5, 202

Please note that the posts on The Blogs are contributed by third parties. The opinions, facts and any media content in them are presented solely by the authors, and neither The Times of Israel nor its partners assume any responsibility for them. Please contact us in case of abuse. In case of abuse,

“To His Eminence the Grand Mufti as a memento. H. Himmler. July 4, 1943.” Israel State Archives.

Fifty years ago, on July 4, 1974, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, passed away in Beirut, Lebanon, at the American University Hospital. At age 79, he died of natural causes. The Mufti had faded from the headlines a decade earlier. In 1961, his name had resurfaced numerous times during the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann. But a couple of years later, the Palestinian cause gained a new face in Yasser Arafat. With that, the Mufti entered his final eclipse.

When he died, the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem asked the Israeli authorities for permission to bury him in the city. Israel refused the request. Any Palestinian who wanted to attend the funeral in Lebanon would be allowed to do so, but the Mufti of Jerusalem would not be buried in Jerusalem. Instead, the Mufti was laid to rest in the Palestinian “Martyrs’ Cemetery” in Beirut.

The Mufti was appointed to his position by the British in 1921. Within the British Empire, authorities preferred to work through “native” institutions, even if they had to create them on the fly. So they established a supreme council for Palestine’s Muslims and placed the Mufti at its helm. Although he lacked religious qualifications, he came from a leading family and appeared capable of striking deals.

In fact, he used his position to oppose the Jewish “National Home” policy of the Mandate. The “Arab Revolt” of 1936 finally convinced the British that he had to go, and in 1937 he fled the country.

After a period in Lebanon, he ended up in Iraq, where he helped foment a coup against the pro-British regime. When British forces suppressed the coup, he fled again, making his way through Tehran and Rome to Berlin. There, the Nazi regime used him to stir up Arabs and Muslims against the Allies. He was photographed with Hitler and Himmler, recruited Muslims to fight for the Axis, and attempted to secure promises of independence for colonized Arabs and Muslims. None of his efforts met with much success. His role, if any, in the Holocaust is a contested matter. Hitler and his henchmen hardly needed any prompting to execute their genocidal plans. Clearly, though, the Mufti rooted for Jewish destruction from the fifty-yard line.

After the Nazi collapse, he fell into French hands and spent a year in comfortable house detention near Paris. Later, he fled to Egypt and subsequently moved in and out of Syria and Lebanon. Following the Arab debacle of 1948, Egypt established an “All Palestine Government” in the refugee-choked Gaza Strip, leaving the presidency open for the Mufti. It didn’t last long. He continued to maneuver through Arab politics, but he was yesterday’s man to a new generation of Palestinians born in exile. During the Eichmann trial, the prosecution sought to implicate the Mufti as an accomplice. Yet the Mossad never came after him, and he didn’t die a martyr’s death.

Man without a country

The Mufti was a formidable politician. In 1951, a State Department-CIA profile of him opened with this evocative enumeration of his many talents, which is worth quoting at length:

King of no country, having no army, exiled, forever poised for flight from one country to another in disguise, he has survived because of his remarkable ability to play the British against the French, the French against the British, and the Americans against both; and also because he has become a symbol among the Arabs for defending them against the Zionists. His suave penchant for intrigue, his delicate manipulation of one Arab faction against another, combined with the popularity of his slogan of a united Muslim world, has made him a symbol and a force in the Middle East that is difficult to cope with and well nigh impossible to destroy. The names of Machiavelli, Richelieu, and Metternich come to mind to describe him, yet none of these apply. Alone, without a state, he plays an international game on behalf of his fellow Muslims. That they are ungrateful, unprepared, and divided by complex and innumerable schisms, does not deter him from his dream. 

Profilers would later write similar things about Arafat, but the Mufti had none of Arafat’s cultivated dishevelment. He was manicured, even chic:

The Mufti is a man of striking appearance. Vigorous, erect, and proud, like a number of Palestinian Arabs he has pink-white skin and blue eyes. His hair and beard, formerly a foxy red, is now grey. He always wears an ankle length black robe and a tarbush wound with a spotless turban. Part of his charm lies in his deep Oriental courtesy; he sees a visitor not only to the door, but to the gate as well, and speeds him on his way with blessings. Another of his assets is his well-modulated voice and his cultured Arabic vocabulary. He can both preach and argue effectively, and is well versed in all the problems of Islam and Arab nationalism. His mystical devotion to his cause, which is indivisibly bound up with his personal and family aggrandizement, has been unflagging, and he has never deviated from his theme. For his numerous illiterate followers, such political consistency and simplicity has its advantages. The Mufti has always known well how to exploit Muslim hatred of ‘infidel’ rule. 

So why did the Mufti fade into obscurity? (By 1951, he was on his way out.) Many mistakenly believe his collaboration with Hitler and the Nazis discredited him. It didn’t. Not only did the Arabs not care, but Western governments eyed the Mufti with self-interest. The general view in foreign ministries held that he had picked the wrong side in the war, but not more than that.

The above-quoted American report expressed this view perfectly: “While the Zionists consider him slightly worse than Mephistopheles and have used him as a symbol of Nazism, this is false. He cared nothing about Nazism and did not work well with Germans. He regarded them merely as instruments to be used for his own aims.” If so, why not open a discreet line to him and let him roam the world unimpeded?

Nakba stigma

What finally discredited the Mufti in Arab opinion, where it mattered most, was his role in the 1948 war. It was a war he wanted and believed his side would win. In late 1947, the British sent someone to see if there might be some behind-the-scenes flexibility in his stance on partition, which he had completely rejected. There wasn’t. He explained:

As regards the withdrawal of British troops from Palestine, we would not mind. We do not fear the Jews, their Stern, Irgun, Haganah. We might lose at first. We would have many losses, but in the end we must win. Remember Mussolini, who talked of 8,000,000 bayonets, who bluffed the world that he had turned the macaronis back into Romans. For 21 years he made this bluff, and what happened when his Romans were put to the test? They crumbled into nothing. So with the Zionists. They will eventually crumble into nothing, and we do not fear the result, unless of course Britain or America or some other Great Power intervenes. Even then we shall fight and the Arab world will be perpetually hostile. Nor do we want you to substitute American or United Nations troops for the British. That would be even worse. We want no foreign troops. Leave us to fight it out ourselves. 

This underestimation of the Zionists proved disastrous, even more so than his overestimation of the Axis. He later wrote his memoirs, blaming “imperialist” intervention, Arab internal divisions, and world Zionist mind-control for the 1948 defeat. To no avail: his name became inseparable from the Nakba, the loss of Arab Palestine to the Jews. His reputation hit rock bottom, along with that of the other failed Arab rulers of 1948.

Upon his death in 1974, he received a grand sendoff in Beirut from the PLO. In 1970, Arafat had transferred the PLO headquarters from Jordan to Lebanon, and the funeral finalized his status as the sole leader of the Palestinian people. Four months later, Arafat addressed the world from the podium of the UN General Assembly, achieving an international legitimacy that the Mufti could never have imagined.

The PLO then dropped the Mufti from the Palestinian narrative; nothing bears his name. Even Hamas, which inherited his uncompromising rigidity and Jew-hatred, doesn’t include him in their pantheon. (Their man is Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a firebrand “martyr” killed by the British in 1935.)

If anyone still dwells on the Mufti, it’s the Israelis, including their current prime minister, who find him useful as a supposed link between the Palestinian cause and Nazism. One can understand Palestinians who push back on this; the Mufti was no Eichmann. But that doesn’t excuse Palestinian reluctance to wrestle candidly with the Mufti’s legacy. He personified the refusal to see Israel as it is and an unwillingness to imagine a compromise. Until Palestinians exorcise his ghost, it will continue to haunt them.