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What’s new in In That Howling Infinite?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sydney Sweeney has good jeans

Ten  favourites:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the creator of this blog

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

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

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

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

Check out In That Howling Infinite on FaceBook.

Asemitism … when Jews disappear from the argument

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away
William Hughes Mearns, Antigonish (1899)

When bestselling Australian author Richard Flanagan recently delivered a provocative address at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, he struck a nerve. Conservative commentators were quick to condemn what they saw as a dangerous minimisation of antisemitism, particularly in the wake of the Bondi attack.

His argument was not that antisemitism did not exist, but that much of the contemporary Australian discussion of it had been misdirected. He argued that the “Israel lobby” – a term he used broadly for those campaigning on behalf of Israel and against what they regarded as antisemitism – had helped create a climate in which criticism of Israel was too readily conflated with hatred of Jews. More controversially, he questioned the way the Bondi murders of 14 December last year had been understood, arguing that the killings should not simply be explained as the product of antisemitism, and suggested that provocative actions and rhetoric surrounding Israel and Gaza had contributed to the circumstances in which they occurred.

Three responses, from academic Greg Craven, historian Nick Dyrenfurth, and economist Henry Ergas, each republished below., were particularly interesting, if hardly surprising given their respective positions on the subject.

For Craven, this amounted to a profound inversion of cause and effect: antisemitism was being treated not as something that produced violence, but as something produced by the political conduct of its victims or their alleged representatives. Dyrenfurth similarly saw in Flanagan’s argument a refusal to confront the deeper sources of contemporary Jew-hatred.

Ergas argues that contemporary antisemitism need not take the familiar form of overt hostility towards Jews. Instead, Jews can disappear as people while Jewishness remains present as a political abstraction: “the Lobby”, hidden influence, divided loyalty, or an alleged mechanism of control. Accusations of antisemitism can themselves be dismissed as instruments of Jewish or pro-Israel manipulation.

Yet what particularly caught my attention was something almost incidental in Craven’s response. He suggested that there is a phenomenon distinct from antisemitism, which he called “asemitism”: not hatred of Jews, but a curious inability to see Jews at all – to acknowledge their presence as Jews, or their particular vulnerability, within an argument ostensibly about something else.

The Jew becomes almost invisible as an individual human being, yet somehow omnipresent as an explanation. It is, in effect, absence becoming presence – the  Jew disappearing from view while the imagined Jew remains everywhere.

This struck a chord because it was something I had observed before, although from a rather different perspective, without giving it a name. I have written about the tendency, in arguments over Israel and Palestine, to turn actual people into political abstractions: Israelis into Zionists, Jews into Israel, Palestinians into Hamas, and individuals into representatives of causes they may or may not support.

Craven’s word therefore got me thinking. What happens when Jews disappear from the argument, when they disappear from the moral field as people and reappear only as a political abstraction?

The invisible man

There is a curious form of antisemitism that does not necessarily hate Jews. It simply cannot see them.

The former Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven has given this phenomenon a useful name: asemitism. His immediate target was the novelist Richard Flanagan, whose argument about antisemitism in Australia, as Craven describes it, attributes much of the present hostility to Jews to the activities of an amorphous “Israel lobby”. But the larger idea is more interesting than the particular quarrel. Asemitism describes the tendency to make Jews disappear from a discussion precisely when Jews are among the people most directly affected by it.

The distinction matters. Antisemitism is relatively easy to recognise when it takes the familiar form of hatred, conspiracy theory, racial slurs, intimidation or violence. Asemitism is subtler. It says, in effect: this isn’t about Jews. It is about Israel, Zionism, colonialism, Gaza, the occupation, the lobby, American foreign policy, or something else entirely. Jews therefore need not enter the moral equation.

The problem is that they do.

A Jewish school requiring armed security is not merely a footnote to a debate about Israel. A Jewish child being abused in the street is not simply collateral damage from a geopolitical argument. A Jewish Australian being told that he or she is responsible for the actions of a government on the other side of the world is not participating in a debate about foreign policy. These are things happening to actual people.

Asemitism works by substituting an abstraction for those people. “The Jews” become “the Israel lobby”; Jewish identity becomes Zionism; Zionism becomes Israel; Israel becomes the actions of its current government; and suddenly the ordinary Jew has vanished from view. Once that substitution has been made, almost anything can be explained without reference to the people experiencing it. Antisemitism becomes an invention of the lobby. Jewish anxiety becomes political manipulation. Jewish objections become attempts to silence criticism of Israel. A threat to Jews becomes merely an unpleasant but understandable by-product of protest.

None of this means that criticism of Israel is antisemitic. It plainly is not. Nor is criticism of Zionism, the Israeli government, the occupation or the conduct of the Gaza war automatically antisemitic. Democratic societies depend upon the freedom to make precisely such arguments. Nor should accusations of antisemitism be used as a shield against uncomfortable political criticism.

The test is rather different: can Jews remain visible as Jews and as individuals while the argument is being made?

That question has particular force in Australia because the history of Australian Jewry does not fit neatly into the popular image of multiculturalism as a succession of migrant communities arriving from elsewhere. Jews were here with the First Fleet. They have been part of the Australian story for more than two centuries. They have served in the armed forces, entered Parliament, populated universities and the professions, built businesses, contributed to philanthropy and the arts, and occupied distinguished positions in public life.

In other words, most Australian Jews are not visibly “foreign”. They are Australians.

That makes the contemporary phenomenon of asemitism especially revealing. Australian Jews are often indistinguishable, culturally and physically, from their fellow Australians. Their Jewishness may be expressed through religion, family, memory, community or simply ancestry; it may be barely visible at all. Yet in moments of political crisis they can suddenly be transformed from ordinary Australians into representatives of an imagined foreign entity.

It is a strange reversal. A community that has spent generations becoming unexceptional in the best sense of the word – part of the ordinary fabric of Australian life – is suddenly rendered foreign by the political imagination of others.

There is an analogy here with the long history of Irish Catholics in Australia. They were once regarded by sections of the Anglo-Protestant establishment as a suspect, disloyal or insufficiently Australian minority. Over generations, that distinction largely dissolved. The descendants of Irish immigrants became simply Australians. Their Irishness did not disappear; it ceased to (determine their status as citizens.

Something similar happened with Australian Jews. They did not cease to be Jewish. They became Australian Jews.

Asemitism threatens to reverse that achievement. It does so not necessarily by expelling Jews from the national community but by reassigning them to another political category. You are Jewish; therefore you are assumed to have a position on Israel. You are a Zionist; therefore you are assumed to support everything Israel does. You support Israel’s existence; therefore you are treated as an agent of the Israeli state. You object to antisemitic rhetoric, therefore you are assumed to be defending the Israeli government. The individual disappears beneath the label.

There is an even older pattern here. One of the most persistent features of antisemitism has been the refusal to allow Jews to be merely what everyone else is allowed to be: individuals with differing opinions, loyalties, interests and political beliefs. Jews have historically been imagined as a collective possessing a hidden solidarity and a common agenda. The modern version need not invoke the old language of Jewish conspiracy. It can speak instead of “the lobby”, “Zionists”, “Jewish influence” or “Israel supporters”. The vocabulary changes; the underlying collectivisation can remain.

That is why asemitism is an interesting concept. It identifies the point at which apparently sophisticated political discourse can reproduce an ancient habit without necessarily resembling traditional antisemitic rhetoric.

And it cuts both ways. If every criticism of Israel is declared antisemitic, Jews themselves are reduced to a political instrument: their identity is invoked to protect a government or ideology with which individual Jews may agree, disagree or have no connection. That too makes Jews disappear as individuals. The cure for asemitism cannot therefore be to place Israel beyond criticism. It must be to insist upon the opposite: Jews are entitled to the same diversity of political opinion as everybody else.

Asemitism is, at bottom, a failure of recognition. It is the inability to see the Jewish person standing behind the political abstraction.

That is why the concept is potentially more important than the particular controversy in which Craven introduced it. It allows us to distinguish between hatred and blindness. The antisemite sees the Jew and hates him. The asemite may insist that the Jew isn’t there at all.

But if Jews are absent from the argument, while Jewish schools require guards, Jewish children are intimidated, Jewish institutions are threatened and Jewish Australians are held responsible for events overseas, then something has gone badly wrong with the argument.

The first obligation is simply to see the person.

Before Jew, before Zionist, before Israeli, before Palestinian, before supporter or opponent of any government or cause, there is an Australian citizen standing in front of us. And that, perhaps, is precisely what asemitism makes hardest to see.

In That Howling Infinite, September 2026

Coda: Mearn’s paradox

William Hughes Mearns, the American educator and poet, best known for Antigonish (“The Little Man Who Wasn’t There”). That makes the opening much more directly relevant. His short poem, Antagonish, inspired by a Nova Scotia ghost story, gives us the paradox of something simultaneously absent and impossible to ignore: a phantom whose very invisibility makes him present. It is an apt metaphor for asemitism – not necessarily hatred of Jews, but the tendency to make Jews disappear from the frame while they remain implicated in what is being discussed. The Jewish Australian is “not there” when the subject is Israel, Zionism, Gaza or the lobby, yet somehow reappears in the consequences. In other words, Jews can be rendered invisible as people while becoming conspicuously visible as symbols: the ordinary Australian suddenly recast as “Zionist”, “Israel”, or part of some amorphous “lobby”

That is a neat metaphor for what you are exploring. Asemitism is not necessarily the hatred of Jews; it is the curious phenomenon in which Jews disappear from the frame while remaining the unacknowledged subject of what is happening. The Jewish Australian is “not there”—the discussion is about Israel, Zionism, Gaza, colonialism, lobbying or foreign policy—but somehow the Jew keeps turning up in the consequences.

Indeed, the Mearns poem gives you an even sharper formulation. The man “wasn’t there”, yet the speaker met him. His absence has become an encounter.

That is precisely the paradox you can pursue: Jews can be rendered invisible as people while becoming highly visible as symbols. The Australian Jew may be simply another Australian—neighbour, colleague, soldier, academic, businessperson, friend—until a distant conflict causes him or her to be recast as “Zionist”, “Israel”, “the lobby”, or some other political abstraction.

And this makes your later reference to H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man rather nice. Mearns gives you the whimsical, unsettling version: the man who wasn’t there. Wells gives you the literalised version: a man who is physically present but cannot be seen. Your essay explores a third version: the person who is visible but whom a political culture has learned not to see.

That could become a particularly elegant opening motif for the essay: Mearns’ little poem begins as a ghost story but turns out to be a story about perception. Your argument then asks what happens when an entire category of people becomes similarly imperceptible—not because they have disappeared, but because we have learned to look past them.

The curious asymmetry

There is a paradox here, one that takes us beyond asemitism itself. Many of those caught up in what has become an algorithmic tangle had never previously shown much interest in the Middle East. They had not followed its history, its competing national narratives or its wars, and had never displayed anything like the same intensity about conflicts and atrocities elsewhere in the world. Yet Israel and Gaza have somehow acquired the extraordinary capacity to inflame them—to turn a distant and complicated conflict into an intensely personal moral cause.

There are, of course, perfectly legitimate reasons why Israel–Palestine attracts unusual attention. The conflict has a long and tragic history; it touches three major religions; it has involved the great powers; Australia has its own connections to the region; and the images emerging from Gaza are genuinely horrific. Israel is also a Western-aligned democracy, and it is entirely reasonable to argue that democratic states should be held to demanding standards.

But none of this quite explains the asymmetry.

We do not ordinarily hold Russian Australians responsible for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, or Chinese Australians for the policies of Beijing, or Serbian Australians for the crimes of Belgrade. Indonesians in Australia were not generally treated as proxies for the Indonesian government when East Timor was invaded. There have certainly been outbreaks of hostility towards people associated with countries whose governments have behaved appallingly; nothing about antisemitism is unique in that respect. What is unusual is the persistent tendency to collapse the distinction between a Jewish person and a foreign state.

A Jewish Australian may be expected to explain or condemn the actions of the Israeli government simply because he is Jewish. His views about Netanyahu, Gaza or the occupation may be unknown and entirely irrelevant. His Jewishness itself can become politically diagnostic. The individual disappears and the symbol takes his place.

This is where the algorithmic age adds another layer to the problem. Social media does not require historical knowledge before it delivers moral certainty. A sequence of images of dead children, demolished buildings, grieving parents, angry slogans and simplified historical explanations can turn a previously remote conflict into an emotional universe. The more intensely one reacts, the more of the same material the algorithm supplies. Complexity becomes noise; qualification becomes equivocation; competing narratives become evidence of bad faith. Eventually the viewer may know remarkably little about the history of the conflict while possessing absolute certainty about who is guilty.

The result is not necessarily antisemitism. Many people genuinely care about Palestinian suffering and are motivated by a perfectly legitimate moral impulse. But something else can happen along the way. Israel ceases to be a country whose government is being criticised and becomes a moral abstraction: colonialism, racism, Western imperialism, apartheid, or some other embodiment of political evil. And because Israel is so closely identified with Jews in the popular imagination, Jews can become implicated in that abstraction whether they want to be or not.

This is the point at which the idea of asemitism becomes useful. The Jewish Australian is simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible. Invisible as an individual, because nobody asks who he or she actually is or what they actually believe; hyper-visible as a symbol, because Jewishness is treated as evidence of a presumed relationship to Israel.

The irony is considerable. Australian Jews have been here since the First Fleet. They are not, for the most part, visibly distinguishable from their fellow citizens. They have served in our armed forces, entered Parliament, taught in our universities, built businesses, practised the professions and contributed to public and cultural life. Like the descendants of Irish Catholics who were once regarded as an alien and suspect minority, generations of Australian Jews have simply become Australians.

Yet a conflict thousands of kilometres away can suddenly make them foreign again.

That is the question I find difficult to get past. Not why people criticise Israel—they should be free to do so, vigorously. Not even why this particular conflict attracts more attention than others. But why the asymmetry becomes so pronounced when Jews are involved. Why can an ordinary Australian citizen be transformed, by nothing more than his or her Jewish identity, into a representative of a foreign state? Why is the distinction between a government and the people associated with it so readily maintained in almost every other case, yet so often abandoned here?

There may be many answers: the extraordinary history of antisemitism; the symbolic and religious importance of the land; the polarising power of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; the politics of the diaspora; the peculiarities of the Western left and right; the influence of social media; or simply the human tendency to reduce complicated conflicts to stories of innocent victims and malevolent perpetrators.

Perhaps it is some combination of all of them.

But the question remains. Why this conflict? Why this country? And why, when Israel becomes the object of moral outrage, do Jews so often become entangled in a conflict that is not theirs simply by virtue of being Jewish?

That is where the phantom in Mearns’s poem returns. The Jew who supposedly “isn’t there” turns out to have been there all along.

Pavlov’s progressives

There seems to be a Pavlovian reflex abroad among progressives – whenever there are government moves to combat the upsurge of antisemitism in Australia, and when resources are allocated towards combatting it, and particularly when Jewish organisations are the perceived or actual recipients, people of ostensible goodwill post comments and share memes asserting: that there is no upsurge in antisemitism; that other minorities are the most vulnerable targets of harassment and discrimination, particularly Muslims ; that Jews receive special treatment, and benefits disproportionate to their meagre numbers population-wise; that special treatment runs contrary to our government’s duty to promote equality for all. These arguments were also raised – ironically on the right – during the Voice to Parliament referendum campaign.

Why is this is so?

Part of it is simple moral competition in an age of scarcity – not scarcity of money necessarily, but scarcity of attention, legitimacy, symbolic recognition, and institutional empathy. Modern politics increasingly operates through what sociologists sometimes call a “hierarchy of suffering,” in which recognition of one group’s vulnerability is often interpreted, wrongly but emotionally powerfully, as diminishing another’s.

So when governments announce funding, inquiries, security measures, educational programs, or public condemnations relating to antisemitism, some progressives instinctively translate this not as “the state is addressing one real problem,” but as “the state is privileging this minority over others.”

The response becomes comparative rather than diagnostic: what about Islamophobia? what about Indigenous Australians? what about refugees? In principle, comparative concern can be healthy. In practice, it often slides into resentment politics.

There is also a specifically post-October 7 dynamic at work. For many people on the progressive side, support for Palestinians has become morally central to their political identity. Because Israel is widely perceived within those circles as aligned with Western power, military dominance, and colonial structures, Jews in diaspora communities are sometimes – unfairly and dangerously – perceived as adjacent to that power. The distinction between “Jews,” “Zionists,” “supporters of Israel,” “the Israeli government,” and “organised Jewish institutions” becomes blurred in public discourse. Once that blur occurs, anti-antisemitism initiatives are no longer viewed neutrally as anti-racism measures; they are interpreted as political instruments protecting power.

That helps explain the peculiar reflex whereby even acknowledging antisemitism can be treated with suspicion. If Jewish vulnerability is admitted, then Jews cease to fit neatly into the binary moral framework of “powerful oppressor” versus “marginalised oppressed.” Contemporary activist culture often struggles with complexity of that sort. Jews occupy an awkward sociological position: a tiny minority with visible success in some sectors, but also with a long history of persecution and recurring vulnerability. Minority status and perceived privilege coexist. Many ideological frameworks are uncomfortable holding both ideas simultaneously.

The irony is that similar arguments emerged from parts of the conservative side during the Indigenous Voice to Parliament debate – which led to the failure of the referendum: why should one group receive special recognition? why should resources or institutional mechanisms exist for one minority and not others?

The rhetoric changes, but the underlying egalitarian objection is structurally similar. Liberal democracies constantly wrestle with the tension between universal equality and targeted protections. We accept specialised programs for veterans, Indigenous communities, domestic violence victims, rural Australians, disabled people, and multicultural groups because formal equality alone does not always address particular vulnerabilities. Yet when Jews are involved, some people suddenly become hyper-universalist.

Another factor is the persistence of older tropes about Jewish influence and access. These rarely appear today in openly conspiratorial language among educated progressives. Instead they emerge in coded institutional form: “disproportionate influence,” “special access,” “lobby power,” “politicians are afraid,” “media protection,” “exceptional treatment.” Sometimes there are legitimate discussions to be had about lobbying or political advocacy – every organised community advocates. But Jews occupy a unique symbolic place in Western political imagination, shaped by centuries of antisemitic narratives portraying them as secretly powerful, unusually connected, or able to manipulate institutions for communal gain. Modern educated discourse often reproduces these themes unconsciously while believing itself entirely anti-racist.

Social media worsens all this.

Algorithms reward outrage, simplification, and tribal reinforcement. It is emotionally satisfying within online communities to puncture perceived hypocrisy: “Look, the government cares more about Jews than Muslims.” The claim signals moral sophistication and resistance to establishment narratives. But the medium discourages nuance – for example, the possibility that both antisemitism and Islamophobia have risen; that both Jews and Muslims can feel vulnerable simultaneously; that governments can address multiple forms of racism at once; or that Jewish institutions receiving security funding after synagogue attacks is not evidence of sinister favouritism but a response to assessed threat levels.

There is also an older progressive discomfort with Jews that long predates Israel. Jews historically complicated left-wing narratives because they did not fit neatly into class categories either: often urban, diasporic, literate, commercially successful in in some fields, yet periodically scapegoated, excluded, expelled, and massacred. In some strands of radical thought, success itself becomes suspicious. A minority perceived as “doing well” can lose moral legitimacy in the eyes of movements that increasingly interpret justice through visible disadvantage.

And finally, there is the psychological appeal of inversion. Many educated people like to imagine themselves as resisting dominant power. Since antisemitism is associated in public memory with fascism and the far right, acknowledging antisemitism within progressive spaces threatens self-identity. It is easier to redefine the problem away – to insist concerns are exaggerated, instrumentalised, or distractions from Gaza – than to confront the uncomfortable possibility that movements devoted to justice can also incubate prejudice.

None of this means criticism of Israeli policy is antisemitic, nor that concerns about unequal treatment of minorities are inherently illegitimate. Democracies should debate allocation of resources and consistency of anti-racism policy. But when every discussion of antisemitism immediately triggers denial, deflection, comparative minimisation, or insinuations about Jewish power, something deeper than ordinary policy disagreement is usually operating beneath the surface.

In That Howling Infinite, September 2026

This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, phrasing, and structure.

Postscript:  We’ve been here before.

This opinion piece is one of several which discus the attitudes of progressives towards the Israel, Palestine and the Gaza war, and also, consider the subjects of invisibility and asymmetry.

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. Meet the Crybully, a hybrid of victim and victor, the symbolic citizen of a culture that increasingly confuses feeling wounded with being right, visibility with virtue, and accusation with truth. See also, Regarding Australia’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism, see also in In That Howling Infinite: An Australian Jew’s submission to the Royal Commission

In most of these essays, we concluded with the following segment. It touches on many of the issues and arguments of this article on Asemitism. It is followed by a supplemental section written by ChatGPT on the question of the so-called “Jewish Lobby” that underlies many contemporary narratives on the extreme left and right and what we see as the myth of Jewish influence over Australian politics.

Looking for the “good Jews”

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 refug e- 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. Lynch observes that progressive moral frameworks – micro-aggressions monitored, systemic racism theorised -stop precisely at the Jew. A royal commission, he argues, would not be vindictive; it would be a sober exercise in moral clarity, tracing the cultural and ideological currents that incubated violence. Yet the same cultural institutions that produced those currents remain invested in their own innocence, framing ideas as harmless discourse even as they provide tacit validation for hatred.

The myth of Jewish influence 

The starting question – whether there is “solid, concrete evidence” of Zionist or Jewish influence over Australian government and society – has, since October 7, acquired a sharper edge and a louder echo. In the wake of the attacks, the war in Gaza, and the subsequent rise in domestic tension, social media in particular has filled with claims—often from the progressive side, and not infrequently from otherwise careful and intelligent commentators – about the malign and disproportionate influence of a “Zionist” or “Jewish lobby.” This rhetoric has been further amplified in Australia by the appointment of Jillian Segal as the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, and by the establishment of a parliamentary inquiry (often loosely described as a “royal commission”) into antisemitism on Australian university campuses and in public life. Together, these developments have been read by some as evidence not of a policy response to rising antisemitism, but of the very influence they allege.

That interpretation, however, only makes sense if one begins from the assumption that such influence exists in a covert, coordinated, and disproportionate form. The more useful approach is to step back and examine how influence actually operates across the Australian system as a whole.

Australian public life is shaped most heavily by large, well-resourced peak bodies, particularly in business and industry. Organisations such as the Business Council of Australia, the Minerals Council, the Property Council, and the Australian Energy Producers (formerly APPEA) are permanent fixtures in policy formation. They produce economic modelling, maintain direct access to ministers and departments, and help define what governments regard as economically viable. Their influence is not hidden; it is structural, continuous, and grounded in resources, expertise, and institutional proximity to decision-making.

Alongside them sit the trade union movement, coordinated by the ACTU and expressed through powerful sectoral unions like the CFMEU, ANMF, and TWU. Their influence operates through membership, industrial leverage, and formal ties to the Labor Party. They shape debates on wages, workplace law, and social policy, sometimes from within government, sometimes through public campaigns. Like business groups, their role is embedded and enduring.

A third layer consists of issue-based advocacy organisations, particularly in the environmental sector. Groups such as the Australian Conservation Foundation, Greenpeace, WWF, and the Climate Council have been central to elevating climate and environmental concerns within national politics. Their influence tends to operate through public persuasion, media engagement, and strategic litigation rather than direct economic leverage. They rarely determine policy outcomes alone, but they have significantly shifted the parameters of debate over time.

The social welfare sector – including ACOSS, Anglicare, Mission Australia, and the St Vincent de Paul Society – contributes a different kind of influence. These organisations draw on service delivery and lived experience to inform policy on poverty, housing, and inequality. They are less dominant in fiscal decision-making but play an important role in shaping the ethical and empirical context in which those decisions are made.

In health and medicine, bodies such as the AMA, RACGP, and Cancer Council exercise influence grounded in professional authority and public trust. Their input is often decisive in technical areas of policy and becomes especially prominent during national crises, though it remains part of a broader advisory ecosystem.

Legal and civil liberties organisations – the Law Council, Human Rights Law Centre, and others – operate at the level of principle, scrutinising legislation and advocating for rights-based constraints on government action. Their influence is typically indirect but can be significant in shaping legal frameworks and public debate.

Within this wider system sit community and diaspora advocacy groups, including Jewish organisations (such as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council), Muslim organisations (AFIC, ANIC), and others (such as FECCA and Armenian advocacy bodies). These groups engage in standard democratic practices: making submissions, meeting with policymakers, contributing to public debate, and, at times, facilitating international engagement. Their influence is real in the sense that they are part of the policy conversation, particularly on foreign affairs and multicultural issues. However, in comparative terms, they are generally modest in financial resources, institutional reach, and structural power relative to major business or union actors.

Finally, think tanks such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the Lowy Institute, and the United States Studies Centre play a distinct role. They do not represent mass constituencies, but they shape the analytical frameworks within which policy is discussed, particularly in foreign policy and national security. Their influence lies in framing, expertise, and elite networks rather than direct political mobilisation.

Against this broader landscape, the claim that “Jewish or Zionist interests control or infiltrate many of these groups” does not withstand scrutiny. To sustain such a claim would require evidence of coordinated, cross-sector control—shared command structures, dominant funding pipelines, or consistent policy alignment traceable to a central directive. No such evidence exists.

What does exist is something far more prosaic: Australians of Jewish background, like Australians of every background, participate across public life. Some hold senior roles in business, academia, media, and government. Their views are not uniform. Some are strongly supportive of Israel; others are critical; many occupy positions in between. That diversity alone makes the idea of a single, coherent “Zionist interest” directing multiple sectors implausible.

Moreover, the organisations themselves behave exactly as their mandates would predict. Industry groups advocate for industry; unions for workers; environmental organisations for climate action; welfare bodies for social support. Their positions frequently conflict – not only with each other, but also with the policies of Israel, the United States, and indeed with the views of different Jewish organisations. If there were hidden coordination, one would expect consistency. What we observe instead is disagreement, fragmentation, and issue-specific alignment.

It is also important to recognise a recurring pattern in such claims. Assertions of diffuse, concealed Jewish influence have historically relied on association, inference, and aggregation—not on demonstrable mechanisms of control. By the normal standards of evidence applied to any other claim of political power, they fall short.

This returns us to the initial concern. There is clear, concrete evidence that Jewish and pro-Israel organisations—like many other advocacy groups – engage in lobbying, public debate, and policy advocacy in Australia. There is also clear evidence that they do so openly, within democratic norms, and on a scale generally smaller than that of major economic or industrial actors. What is not supported by credible evidence is the claim that they exercise covert, disproportionate, or controlling influence over Australian government or society.

The more accurate picture is not one of hidden command, but of a system in which many organised interests compete to persuade, and where outcomes reflect the shifting balance between them.

Richard Flanagan’s dangerous idea is just a chilling form of denial

Greg Craven, The Australian, September 02, 2026.

At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Richard Flanagan asked where the antisemitism was in the Bondi massacre and answered: “Nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere”. Pictures: News Corp/Supplied

At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Richard Flanagan asked where the antisemitism was in the Bondi massacre and answered: “Nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere”. Pictures: News Corp/Supplied

It’s always a good opening to a column to write that the only thing needed for evil to triumph over good is that good men stay silent. But this nostrum is not entirely true. The added element is that supposedly good people cannot recognise evil when they see it – or misattribute it to the wrong source or spend so much time denying it they end up with an apologia.

The longwinded speech by novelist Richard Flanagan at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas last month, flicking aside the reality of antisemitism, falls into all these categories. When it comes to identifying evil, here is a bloke who could not pick Satan out of a line-up of nuns.

Flanagan’s position seems to be that antisemitism in Australia is all the fault of “the Israel lobby”, a loathsome gang he never satisfactorily defines but you have a horrible feeling includes every Australian Jew – and probably non-Jew – who dares disagree with Flanagan on the October 7 attack, the Bondi Beach massacre and the war in Gaza.

His elaborated thesis is that the Bondi murders were not fundamentally antisemitic but were incited by provocative acts and misrepresentations by – you guessed it – the “Israel lobby”. What’s more, if things get any worse it will be all its fault as well.

A menorah is lit as people participate in a candlelight vigil at Bondi Pavilion. Picture: Getty Images

A menorah is lit as people participate in a candlelight vigil at Bondi Pavilion. Picture: Getty Images

Two general things stand out about Flanagan’s rant. First, it illustrates there is no correlation between creative talent, whether writing, acting or tap dancing, and intelligence. Flanagan is a passable author, but as a cultural analyst he ranks well below most rugby league commentators. Second, as an exercise in bad schoolboy debating, Flanagan has the lot. In his speech he packs in denial, deflection, blame-shifting, abuse, threats, distraction, conspiracy and obfuscation. Where was he when I needed him in grade 4?

This is not his first foray into mangled prose. His famously garbled Gould’s Book of Fish was reviewed by my brother Peter as comprising “multiple verbal collisions” and “massive lapses of narrative judgment”. I’m with you, brother.

Flanagan’s central and most bizarre claim is there actually was no antisemitism present at Bondi, other than the two shooters themselves. He seems incapable of comprehending that those monsters fired their guns from within a wider capsule of social antisemitism that walked alongside them. The shooters did not produce antisemitism. It produced them.

But let us indulge the Fish Man just for a moment. His analysis is the best let out for any war criminal so far detected. So as long as you were not the man pouring the Zyklon B into the gas chamber, you’re off scot-free. The person who hands you the canister, the man who orders it, the man who makes it and the man who thought up the idea in the first place are neither antisemitic nor murderers. They are just bystanders to the guilty physical act of another.

In the same way, vicious antisemites abusing Jews in the streets, chanting infamy and intimidation, and forcing Jewish schools to be secured by armed guards are not an actively authorising environment but merely a realistic human context.

If you tried to apply this analysis to the persecution of any other minority group in Australia, whether Indigenous people or indeed our Muslim brothers and sisters, you rightly would be run out of town on a very sharp rail.

Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal appears at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal appears at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

The constant references to the “Israel lobby” are less illogical than chilling. One of the oldest stereotypes of Jewish history, the existence of some shadowy, all-powerful Jewish conspiracy, is wheeled out one more time.

Of course, Flanagan does accept that these insidious Jewish types are supported by an array of malicious non-Jewish Australians. It is unclear why they have joined the plot. Money, probably.

This is where it all gets rather more sinister. Flanagan makes repeated references not only to antisemitism being the result of the insidious actions of the “Israel lobby” itself but hints pretty broadly that future horrors also will be self-inflicted.

He seems to have a particular terror of special envoy to combat antisemitism Jillian Segal. Apparently she plans a McCarthyistic takeover of the Australian nation-state. Good luck to her.

In fairness to Flanagan’s positions, they may not be positively antisemitic. Instead, they may represent a different form of Jewish dismissal. This is asemitism.

Asemitism does not involve hating Jews, it just involves never being able to see them in any debate or controversy. So, there’s no antisemitism here because it’s not about the Jews. I’m not antisemitic, I just hate all Zionists and the state of Israel. These protests aren’t threatening anyone, they’re just healthy instances of freedom of assembly.

As Basil Fawlty might have put it: “Don’t mention the Jews.”

Greg Craven is former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.

Source: The Australian. Full Article at theaustralian.com.au.

Why Richard Flanagan is in denial on the true sources of Jew hate

Nick Dyrenfurth, The Australian, 31 August 2026

 

Author Richard Flanagan speaks at No Stadium Rally in Hobart. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

Author Richard Flanagan at No Stadium Rally in Hobart. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

I am a writer. Public writing is an inherently narcissistic business. You presume your thoughts deserve other people’s attention. Writers overreach. I have done it myself and no doubt will again. But there is overreach, and then there is Richard Flanagan.

Not long ago I stood in synagogue saying Kaddish for my late grandmother. Kaddish is called the Jewish prayer for the dead, though it says almost nothing about death. It is about life, God and continuity. Like so much of Judaism, it is an act of memory. Zachor – remember.

The command runs through Jewish civilisation. We remember slavery in Egypt, Jerusalem, persecution, liberation, catastrophe and survival. Jewish tradition is scaffolded by memory.

That is why much of the Australian left does not understand what happened to Jewish Australians since October 7, 2023. They imagine war ends, the marches will shrink, social media will move on, old alliances will re-form and everyone will forget what was said and done. Left-wing Jews like me will not.

The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has finished its public hearings. But where was the accountability for those who celebrated October 7, romanticised slaughter as “resistance”, doxxed Jews, reduced Jewish grief to propaganda or revived ancient ideas about Jewish money and conspiratorial power with “Zionist” substituted for “Jew”?

Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. Zionism itself has been an argument among Jews since its birth. But something remarkable has happened to the word. In sections of the left, Zionist has mutated into a receptacle for old fantasies about Jews: greedy Zionists, bloodthirsty Zionists, media-controlling Zionists. Change the noun and the grammar is ancient.

The Soviets did not invent Zionism or Zionist but after 1967 Soviet propaganda helped perfect their use as a proxy for Jew. Secret power, divided loyalty, financial influence and conspiracy were repackaged. The Jew became the Zionist; the conspiracy remained.

Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia Aftab Malik. Artwork: Frank Ling

Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia Aftab Malik. Artwork: Frank Ling

At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Flanagan asked where the antisemitism was in the Bondi massacre and answered: “Nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere.” He argued instead that an “Israel lobby” politicised the massacre and asked whether that lobby might be fuelling antisemitism.

Think about that. Jews are massacred at a Jewish festival and an acclaimed Australian writer peers into the wreckage, concludes antisemitism is absent, then turns his suspicion back on organised Jewish Australians. Flanagan distinguishes the “Israel lobby” from Jews, then attributes to it extraordinary power over government, universities, broadcasters, schools and public debate.

Antisemitism survives because it adapts to the moral vocabulary of each age.

The same alarm sounds in a recent piece published by The Shot. Dave Milner describes an “Epstein class” comprising “vampiric corporations, techno-fascists, militarists, Zionists” and American imperial power. Elsewhere he writes of Labor being “beholden to the Zionist lobby”, called for “Zionist plants” to be expelled from trade unions and described government as acting for a “cadre of genocidal pedophiles”.

Epstein. Zionists. Pedophiles. Secret influence. A corrupt ruling class controlling governments and institutions. At what point does a supposedly progressive publication hear the historical alarm screaming? Jeffrey Epstein was a real criminal. Turning “Epstein” into a metaphysical category of global power and placing “Zionists” inside it is something else.

You do not need the Protocols open on your desk for the architecture of an ancient conspiracy theory to become recognisable. For Jews of the left, Jews like me, the betrayal is profound.

We were not tourists in left politics asking for indulgence. Jews helped build trade unions, labour parties, civil rights campaigns and anti-racist movements.

Many of us spent our lives insisting minorities should be listened to when they describe hatred directed at them.

Jews as politically diverse as Mark Leibler and Henry Pinskier backed the voice to the hilt precisely because they believed Indigenous Australians should be heard when describing their own experience of dispossession and prejudice. That instinct was treated as a basic principle of anti-racism. Yet when Australian Jews asked for the same courtesy, parts of the left decided lived experience required ideological clearance.

A menorah is lit as people participate in a candlelight vigil at Bondi Pavilion at Bondi Beach. Picture: Audrey Richardson / Getty Images

A menorah is lit as people participate in a candlelight vigil at Bondi Pavilion at Bondi Beach. Picture: Audrey Richardson / Getty Images

Jewish fear was “weaponised”. Jewish grief was “politicised”. Jewish institutions became suspect. Jews were expected to denounce Israel before their experience of antisemitism could be admitted into evidence.

Solidarity that operates only for minorities whose politics you approve of is not solidarity. The answer is not censorship. It is argument, daylight and accountability. Ask people what they meant. Make movements defend their rhetoric. Stop allowing Palestine to function as an intellectual indemnity against ordinary standards of decency.

The left once knew hatred matters before it becomes violence, language prepared the ground for dehumanisation and minorities do not have to earn the right to be afraid. Jews know something else: hatred mutates, and memory helps us recognise the mutation.

Recently I was at a public Jewish festival with my seven-year-old daughter. She noticed the security men at the festival’s entrance, then their guns. “Why do they have guns?”

There are questions you expect from a seven-year-old at a festival. Can I have something to eat? Can we go on that ride? Not that. I gave her the answer a seven-year-old could understand. One day she will be old enough for the longer answer.

And when that day comes, I will remember standing in synagogue saying Kaddish for my grandmother. I will remember these years. I will remember who stood beside us, who remained silent, who explained it away – and who, even after Jews were murdered on an Australian beach, somehow managed to make the Jews answer for antisemitism.

Nick Dyrenfurth is executive director of the John Curtin Research

Source: The Australian. Full Article at theaustralian.com.au. For corporate sharing, find licensing options at the end of the article.

 

Richard Flanagan’s dangerous ideas were intellectually lazy

Henry Ergas, The Australian, 11 September 2026
At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Richard Flanagan asked where the antisemitism was in the Bondi massacre and answered:

At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Flanagan asked where the antisemitism was in the Bondi massacre. He answered: “Nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere.”: News Corp / Supplied

Richard Flanagan’s speech at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas has one merit and one merit only: it crystallises the falsehoods, delusions and hypocrisy at the heart of the wave of hatred that has swept Australia since October 7, 2023.

Listening to the litany of factual errors, it is hard to know whether Flanagan is stupid, ignorant or both. He claims, for example, that Einstein was ardently opposed to Zionism. Yet Einstein famously called Israel “our state” – “unser staat”, a possessive stronger in German than any English can convey – bequeathed his papers to the Hebrew University and was working, when he died, on an address celebrating Israel’s seventh Independence Day.

Flanagan equally presents the Bund – a Jewish socialist movement – as implacably hostile to the state of Israel, conveniently ignoring that in 1955, as the reality of the Holocaust and of Stalinist antisemitism sank it, the Bund’s Third World Conference clamorously reversed its position.

But the factual errors are not mere intellectual sloppiness: they contribute to demonising Israel and the Australian Jews who support its right to exist, in some cases by ignoring reality in others by not providing crucial context.

To take just one instance, Flanagan recycles the Committee to Protect Journalists’ contention that “more journalists have been killed in Gaza by the IDF than in the entirety of World War Two”. What he omits is that the comparison applies a far looser definition of “journalist” to Gaza than to World War Two.

Worse, as the scholarly source underlying the wartime tally acknowledges, it excludes journalists killed on the Soviet and Chinese fronts, where 80 per cent of combat fatalities occurred, as well as journalists reporting from the Axis forces. Making those adjustments shows the claim to be utterly baseless – a fact Flanagan either knew or should have known.

All that, however, merely prepares the ground for “exposing” a conspiracy of monstrous scope and ambition. There is, in Flanagan’s telling, an ominously amorphous “Israel lobby”, operating both directly and through the Special Envoy for Antisemitism, Jillian Segal. Aided by “sustained” yet “mysterious” pressure from the Trump administration, its aim is to control “every significant arena of Australian public life”.

The “lobby’s” not-so-secret weapon is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which it wants enforced by “oversight committees” designed to “cower civil society and curb free speech”, leaving “Australians silenced, fearful and divided”. The restrictions those committees impose are “certain to be (on) terms that please Israel, a foreign nation”, so that this country would be controlled not by “the Australian state, but essentially the Israeli state”. Australians would become vassals of a foreign power, denied even the freedom to criticise their overlords.

Faced with those claims, one is irresistibly reminded of Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay on the paranoid style in American politics. Unlike clinical paranoids, the conspiracists Hofstadter focused on did not see themselves as singled out by a hostile world. Rather, they perceived, lurking behind every event, the sinister hand of a demonic force directed “against a nation, a culture, a way of life”.

Hofstadter called this style paranoid, he explained, “because no other word adequately evokes its qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy”. And its archetypal expression is the malevolent fiction of a Jewish cabal plotting to bring the world to heel.

Little wonder then that direct references to “the Lobby’s” machinations account for almost a third of the words Flanagan utters. Yet what is most telling is not what Flanagan says but what he leaves unsaid. In a speech devoted to Gaza, Israel is mentioned 60 times; Hamas once. Jews are mentioned 43 times; Islam and Muslims, never.

The distortions that bias creates are glaring. Demonstrating that abject ignorance cannot dent his outrage, Flanagan foolishly claims that Zionism, whose intellectual origins owe incomparably more to Mazzini’s liberal nationalism and Moses Hess’s romantic socialism than to Fichte’s chauvinistic illiberalism, “arose out of the same fetid, ethno-nationalist ferment” that “gave the world Nazism, fascism, extreme nationalism and authoritarianism”. What he does not say is that this ferment, which left no discernible imprint on Zionism, shaped post-war Arab nationalism and modern Islamism, reinforced by fascism and Nazi ideology’s vitriolic antisemitism.

Equally, he endlessly excoriates the “Israel lobby”. Yet he never mentions the lavishly taxpayer-funded Muslim lobby, with its own special envoy, which has coalesced a wide range of Islamic and pro-Palestinian organisations in submissions to public inquiries, including the royal commission, urging, among other things, for the terrorism legislation to be weakened.

And while denouncing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition in vitriolic terms, Flanagan passes over the far more sweeping restrictions on what they call Islamophobia proposed by those organisations and by the Islamophobia Special Envoy: restrictions advanced without even the sketchiest definition of the “Islamophobia” they seek to repress.

The double standard then reaches its nadir in his suggestion that the representative bodies of Australian Jewry benefit from inciting hatred against the very people they represent – a charge he would never level at their Muslim counterparts.

To describe those assertions as outrageous would be an understatement; and Flanagan is plainly aware of their enormity. He therefore moves to pre-empt criticism by adopting the manoeuvre notoriously associated with former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who dismissed every charge of antisemitism as an attempt to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.

The goal is simple: to avoid addressing the substance of the charge by impugning the accuser’s supposed motives. Critics are presumed to be acting in bad faith, fabricating persecution to advance their political ends. Hatred is thus rebaptised as legitimate criticism, while those who object become accomplices in a secret campaign to stifle debate.

With every attempt to expose antisemitism is therefore just further proof of Jewish deceit, allowing the Jews to be accused of inventing the antisemitism that now mars our national life.

But Flanagan’s evasive tactics do not end there. Aping the techniques that saturate social media, he repeatedly poses as merely asking questions. The rhetorical approach is puerile: “A question needs to be asked,” Flanagan declares, casting himself as prepared to ask what others dare not. Then the inflammatory allegations are smuggled in: “To what extent has the Israel lobby itself contributed to antisemitism in Australia”, because it would, “perhaps perversely”, “accord with their existential message that only in Israel are Jews safe”? The insinuation is left hanging, as though the answer were self-evident, allowing Flanagan to don the mantle of truth-telling without ever shouldering the burden of proof it entails.

Every one of those claims and tactics could and should have been ruthlessly demolished on the day. Yet the so-called Festival of Dangerous Ideas evidently considered that prospect too dangerous to countenance. Its lineup featured Israel haters, but it included absolutely no one who would take them on.

The imbalance is, unfortunately, completely unremarkable: it is now a deeply ingrained feature of this country’s increasingly mediocre cultural life. But that only makes it even more important that those who purport to care about the truth should restore the balance that has been destroyed.

It is therefore much worse than scandalous that the festival was sponsored by the Ethics Centre and the NSW state government. It is an unforgivable disgrace.

A historian talks about Palestine’s deep history

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

Talking about Palestine and Palestinians

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet there is another trap which Dalrymple carefully avoids.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelers’  tales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A personal coda

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, August 2026

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

Eastward, aye, he wandered

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

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

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

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

The Guardian,17 Oct 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Beside Strange Waters

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

One might attribute all this, in Waters’s case,  to a Momentary Lapse of Reason – the title of Pink Floyd’s 1987 album. There is a double irony here: a song thereon, On The Turning Away, is a longtime favourite of mine. What is there to object to in the lyrics of what is a powerful, melodic and anthemic song – and one that was not written by Waters, who left the band in 1985 due to personal, musical and political differences, but by cofounder David Gilmour and Floyd collaborator Anthony Moore.

No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It’s not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there’ll be
No more turning away?

The dark side of Roger Waters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript

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

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

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

Paul Hemphill, August 2026

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

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

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

June 18, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was the change in audience reaction really that extreme?

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

Israel is waiting for Roger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the failed experiment?

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

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

Field of wheat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flyers for the Roger Waters concert in Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

קהל אנשים צופים רוג'ר ווטרז ווטרס

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

No-show in Neve Shalom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aviv Geffen arrives by chopper

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

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

דיויד גילמור

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

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

“Both,” Porter says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth and love, lies and hate

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

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

Certainty and the independent mind

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Time, time again, it is said
We will hear, we will see
See it all-in his wisdom-hear
His truth will abound the land
This truth will abound the land
This state of independence shall be
Evanghelos Papathanassiou & Jon Anderson

We live in a time of anxiety – yet we long for certainty.

Not certainty born of wisdom, experience or careful reflection, but certainty manufactured and amplified by technologies, institutions and cultures that reward simplicity over complexity, outrage over understanding, and tribal loyalty over independent thought. Never before have we had access to so much information, yet rarely has there seemed so little patience for ambiguity. Every issue arrives pre-packaged with approved opinions. Every controversy demands allegiance. Every debate is framed as a struggle between competing moral absolutes.

The pressure to choose a side is relentless.

Whether the issue is climate change, immigration, Indigenous recognition, Israel and Palestine, Donald Trump, nationalism, globalisation, identity politics or any number of the controversies that dominate contemporary discourse, citizens in countries like ours are increasingly expected to sort themselves into camps and remain there. To question one’s own side is often viewed as disloyalty. To acknowledge complexity is mistaken for weakness. To recognise competing truths can invite accusations of moral cowardice. Nuance, once regarded as evidence of maturity, is frequently condemned as equivocation.

Yet there is a deeper paradox at work. We often confuse certainty with conviction and conviction with wisdom. We mistake confidence for competence, consistency for truth and, increasingly, certainty for authenticity itself. In an age of institutional distrust and social fragmentation, those who sound most certain are often assumed to be the most honest. The politician who never wavers appears authentic; the citizen who hesitates appears weak. Doubt becomes suspect. Reflection begins to look like indecision.

At the centre of this lies a curious development. The word independent has itself become strangely contested.

Traditionally, independence implied a particular intellectual virtue. It suggested someone who weighed evidence, resisted fashion, distrusted slogans and arrived at conclusions through reflection rather than tribal loyalty. The independent thinker might be right or wrong, but their independence lay in their willingness to examine competing arguments, question prevailing orthodoxies and tolerate ambiguity. Independence was not a destination but a habit of mind.

Today, however, independence is viewed through very different lenses.

For some, it has become shorthand for conspiracy, contrarianism or the performative scepticism of the “do your own research” cohort. The independent thinker is recast as someone marinating in YouTube rabbit holes, Facebook memes and endless distrust of expertise. Independence becomes less a mark of judgement than a rejection of established knowledge.

For others, independence has become suspect for an entirely different reason. In an age defined by existential moral struggles – Trumpism, Gaza, Ukraine, climate change, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, democratic decline and a host of other causes that demand urgent attention – the person who refuses to choose a side can appear not thoughtful but evasive. Independence comes to look less like intellectual courage than moral cowardice, a refusal to commit when commitment is required.

Yet both assumptions are flawed. The first mistakes independence for reflexive distrust. The second mistakes uncertainty for indifference.

There is a profound difference between refusing to think and refusing to join a tribe. There is an equally important difference between acknowledging complexity and lacking conviction. The independent mind is neither conspiratorial nor apathetic. It is not defined by permanent scepticism, nor by a determination to stand in the middle of every argument. Rather, it is characterised by a willingness to follow evidence wherever it leads, to question assumptions – one’s own particularly- and to resist the comforting certainties offered by political, ideological and cultural tribes.

The tragedy of our age is that such independence is increasingly difficult to sustain. The incentives run in the opposite direction. Algorithms reward outrage. Social media rewards certainty. Activist movements reward loyalty. Political parties reward conformity. Every institution, it seems, encourages us to choose a side and remain there. The space for doubt, reflection and intellectual humility narrows a little more each year.

Yet life rarely conforms to such neat divisions.

History certainly does not. Human beings are complicated creatures. Nations are complicated creations. Political problems are rarely solved by slogans and almost never by certainties. The ability to hold two truths in tension at the same time – to recognise that a cause may be just yet imperfect, that opponents may sometimes be right, that allies may sometimes be wrong, and that competing moral claims can coexist- is becoming one of the most valuable and least celebrated civic virtues.

This essay is, in part, a reflection on that disappearing virtue. It draws upon a lifetime spent marching, protesting, arguing, campaigning, reading, writing and observing. It traces a journey from the certainties of youth to a greater appreciation of complexity; from the exhilaration of causes to a deeper awareness of unintended consequences; from the satisfactions of belonging to the more demanding discipline of independent judgement. Along the way it explores the distinction between moral clarity and moral certainty, the phenomenon of moral capture, the seductive appeal of authenticity, the dangers of passionate intensity, and the democratic necessity of intellectual honesty.

Above all, it is a defence of the independent mind – not as a posture of detachment or superiority, but as a commitment to judgement, humility and the difficult task of remaining intellectually free in an age that increasingly rewards certainty and punishes doubt.

Certainty, conviction and the curse of complexity

One of the curiosities of life is discovering that certainty becomes less attractive just as complexity becomes more apparent. When I was young, certainty seemed abundant. The world appeared neatly divided into camps. There were causes to join, banners to carry, songs to sing, villains to oppose, journeys to be made and futures to build. The moral landscape looked reasonably well ordered. There was right and wrong, justice and injustice, progress and reaction. The task, it seemed, was simply to determine which side one was on and then commit oneself accordingly. It was an age of grand narratives and great causes, and like many of my generation I threw myself into them with enthusiasm.

I marched against the Hydrogen Bomb and I marched against America’s war in Vietnam. I sat down, occupied buildings, disrupted meetings and occasionally found myself caught up in the odd mêlée when passions overflowed into something more physical. Later in life, I marched for East Timor and Bougainville and against French nuclear testing in the Pacific. I marched for forests, gun laws and airport noise. I confronted politicians, ambushed ministers and once helped surprise a Prime Minister at an election campaign launch. Looking back, I regret very little of it. There is something admirable about citizens who care enough to leave the comfort of their homes and enter the public square. Democracies require dissent. They need people willing to challenge power, question orthodoxies and occasionally make nuisances of themselves.

What I have learned, however, is that participation and wisdom are not the same thing.

That may sound obvious, but it is a lesson often forgotten. One of the enduring pleasures of activism is the feeling that one is participating in history. There is camaraderie in a march, solidarity in a crowd, a sense of shared purpose that can be intoxicating. One feels part of something larger than oneself. There is also a certain vicarious satisfaction in having “done something”, a sense of moral exoneration that comes simply from having turned up. If the cause succeeds, one can share in the triumph. If it fails, one can at least claim to have been on the right side.

Yet causes and solutions are often very different things. It is relatively easy to identify a grievance. It is much harder to resolve it. It is relatively easy to denounce injustice. It is much harder to construct a better alternative. It is relatively easy to carry a placard demanding perfection. It is much harder to govern a society of imperfect human beings.

This is not cynicism. It is simply an observation born of watching decades of politics unfold.

In recent years I have often found myself asking a question that rarely receives much attention. When people tell us that Australia is a racist country, that we live on stolen land, that our prosperity was built on dispossession and suffering, what exactly follows from that? If those propositions are accepted, what practical obligations arise from them? What policies should be adopted? What institutions reformed? What outcomes are being sought? Likewise, when people demand sanctions against one country, boycotts against another, the cancellation of this person or that organisation, do they imagine governments can simply comply? Do they believe that governments, with all their responsibilities, alliances, competing obligations and access to information unavailable to the rest of us, can simply act on moral impulse alone?

These are not dismissive questions. They are political questions. Indeed, they are the questions politics exists to answer.

There is often a significant gap between diagnosis and prescription. Many activists are extremely good at identifying injustices, hypocrisies and failures. Sometimes they perform a valuable service in doing so. Every society needs its critics. Every society needs people willing to point at uncomfortable truths that others would rather ignore. Yet identifying a problem is only the beginning. The harder question is what comes next. What is the proposed destination? How do we get there from here? What are the costs, the risks and the unintended consequences? These are the questions that confront governments every day. The activist’s role is often to pull society’s attention towards an issue. The government’s role is to balance competing goods, competing interests and competing risks. The activist can demand the impossible. The government must live with the consequences.

It is here that I find myself increasingly preoccupied by the distinction between moral clarity and moral certainty. The two are frequently confused, but they are not the same thing. Moral clarity involves recognising that some things are plainly wrong. The deliberate murder of civilians is wrong. Racism is wrong. Antisemitism is wrong. Corruption is wrong. Authoritarianism is wrong. Human suffering matters regardless of who experiences it. These are moral judgements that do not require ideological membership cards. They do not depend on tribal affiliation.

Moral certainty is something different. It is the conviction that one’s own side possesses not merely some truth but all of it. It is the belief that complexity is merely an inconvenience, that ambiguity is weakness and that every disagreement can be explained by malice, ignorance or bad faith. Moral certainty seeks to simplify the world into a contest between heroes and villains. It transforms politics into a morality play. It demands allegiance. It leaves little room for contradiction.

The difficulty is that reality is full of contradictions.

One of the most important lessons I have learned is that citizenship requires the ability to hold two truths in tension simultaneously. This is becoming increasingly difficult in a culture that rewards certainty and punishes complexity. Yet many of the most contentious issues of our age demand precisely this capacity. It is possible to believe that October 7 was an atrocity and that Gaza has suffered terribly. It is possible to oppose antisemitism while criticising aspects of Israeli government policy. It is possible to support Palestinian self-determination while condemning Hamas. It is possible to acknowledge the dispossession of Indigenous Australians while also recognising the achievements of modern Australia. It is possible to support immigration while discussing its challenges. It is possible to care deeply about the environment while recognising economic realities. None of these positions should be controversial. Yet increasingly they are treated as evidence of indecision, weakness or insufficient commitment.

The pressure today is not merely to possess moral clarity but to display moral certainty.

The photograph at the head of this essay and those below are of the 1966 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Aldermaston March reaching central London. The writer was somewhere in its ranks.

Moral capture and the discomfort of doubt

This pressure is reinforced by a phenomenon I have come to think of as moral capture. Moral capture occurs when a cause becomes so central to a person’s identity that every question must be filtered through it. Facts cease to be facts in their own right. Instead they become assets, liabilities, weapons or threats depending on whether they support the cause. The question is no longer whether something is true. The question becomes whether acknowledging it helps or hinders the narrative.

At that point intellectual honesty begins to erode.

Intellectual honesty is one of the most demanding virtues because it requires us to acknowledge facts we would rather avoid. It requires us to recognise when our opponents are correct and when our allies are mistaken. It demands that we apply the same standards to friends and enemies alike. It obliges us to distinguish between evidence and preference, between analysis and advocacy. Most importantly, it requires us to accept that reality does not rearrange itself to accommodate our politics.

This is remarkably difficult. Human beings are tribal creatures. We enjoy belonging. We like certainty. We prefer the comfort of the crowd to the discomfort of doubt. The tribe offers affirmation. The slogan offers simplicity. The crowd offers solidarity. Complexity offers none of these things. Complexity is untidy. It frustrates neat conclusions. It introduces caveats where certainty seeks absolutes.

Modern technology has made this problem worse. The algorithms that increasingly shape our information environment are not designed to cultivate wisdom. They are designed to cultivate engagement. Outrage is engaging. Certainty is engaging. Nuance is not. A meme travels further than a history lesson. A slogan spreads faster than an argument. A false analogy often possesses more emotional power than a careful comparison. Every issue is compressed into a binary choice. Every debate becomes a loyalty test. The first question is no longer whether a statement is true but which side it helps.

The result is a culture increasingly dominated by assumptions, preconceptions and caricatures.

I think back sometimes to those old marches through London in the 1960s. As we walked along singing earnest and often dreadful protest songs, members of the public would call out from the footpaths. “Get a haircut!” they would shout. “Have a wash!” “Get a job!” The implication was always the same. Protesters were outsiders. Troublemakers. Layabouts. Dreamers disconnected from reality.

Years later, in Australia, at that Liberal Party campaign launch I mentioned above, a young Liberal supporter deployed exactly the same line. “Get a job!” she called to me. I reached into my pocket and handed her my business card – back then, I was chief accountant with a small “c” conservative publishing firm. The look on her face was priceless. For a brief moment the stereotype collapsed as an assumption collided with reality. The protester turned out not to be the caricature she had imagined.

The incident was trivial, but the lesson was not. Much of political discourse today consists of people arguing with caricatures rather than engaging with reality. We sort one another into categories and then proceed as though the categories explain everything. Activist. Conservative. Progressive. Populist. Elite. Nationalist. Globalist. Zionist. Anti-Zionist. The labels become substitutes for thought. The person disappears behind the category.

Yet reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate. Human beings are more complicated than their labels. Nations are more complicated than their histories. Political problems are more complicated than their slogans.

The perils of passionate intensity

As I reread these reflections, I find myself returning to two observations that have echoed through much of my adult life. The first is Yeats’s famous warning from The Second Coming: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Like many celebrated quotations, it is often invoked more than it is examined. It is frequently used to lament the supposed timidity of moderates or to argue that our age requires more conviction, more certainty and greater willingness to fight for what we believe. Yet that was not Yeats’ point. He was not celebrating passionate intensity. He was warning about it.

Writing amid the upheavals of the early twentieth century, Yeats was observing a world in which restraint, balance and judgement appeared to be collapsing while fanaticism, absolutism and ideological fervour were on the rise. The “passionate intensity” belonged not to wise statesmen or thoughtful citizens but to those who possessed an unshakeable belief in their own righteousness. It was a description of certainty untethered from humility.

History would soon provide abundant examples.

The twentieth century was not a century that suffered from a shortage of conviction. Fascists possessed conviction. Communists possessed conviction. Religious extremists possessed conviction. Nationalists, revolutionaries and racial supremacists possessed conviction. None lacked certainty about the correctness of their cause. None doubted that history, morality or destiny stood firmly on their side.

The problem was never too little certainty. The problem was too much of it.

That is why Yeats’ warning speaks so powerfully to our own age. We live once again in a time of passionate intensity. Political tribes, activist movements, media ecosystems and online communities all encourage us to embrace certainty. The incentives are obvious. Certainty is emotionally satisfying. It creates solidarity. It simplifies complexity. It identifies heroes and villains. It provides meaning, belonging and purpose. Above all, it relieves us of the burden of doubt.

Yet doubt, properly understood, is not a weakness. It is one of the disciplines that protects us from ourselves.

The second observation, one we have touched upon above, comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay collection, The Crack-Up, who wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Whether Fitzgerald consistently met his own standard is perhaps beside the point. The insight itself remains profound.

One might see Fitzgerald’s observation as a kind of antidote to Yeats’ warning. Where Yeats alerts us to the dangers of passionate intensity, Fitzgerald reminds us of the intellectual discipline required to resist it. The capacity to hold competing truths in tension, to acknowledge complexity without succumbing to paralysis, to recognise ambiguity without abandoning judgement—these are among the most important habits of mind a democratic citizen can possess.

Indeed, the independent mind is simply the refusal to surrender that capacity.

Not because all sides are equally right. Not because truth is unknowable. Not because every question has two equally valid answers. But because reality is usually larger, stranger and more contradictory than our tribes permit. Human beings are complicated. Nations are complicated. History is complicated. The slogans painted on our banners and the memes shared across our screens rarely capture more than a fragment of the truth.

Certainty and the attraction of  authenticity

One of the reasons certainty remains such a powerful force in politics is that people often confuse it with authenticity.

A recent observation about populist Australian politician Pauline Hanson captured something important. Her views have not substantially changed in thirty years, and that certainty about what she stands for forms part of her appeal to voters who feel alienated, anxious or ignored. Whether one agrees with Hanson or not is almost beside the point. The observation reveals something larger about the political culture in which we now live.

In times of uncertainty, certainty itself becomes politically valuable.

When people are struggling with rising costs, housing pressures, declining trust in institutions, geopolitical instability and the bewildering complexity of modern life, they are naturally drawn towards voices that appear confident and consistent. Human beings have always preferred clarity to ambiguity and confidence to hesitation. We are pattern-seeking creatures. Faced with confusion, we look for certainty. Faced with complexity, we look for simplicity.

The attraction is understandable.

What is often misunderstood, however, is that certainty and wisdom are not the same thing. Nor are certainty and conviction.

A politician may possess strong convictions while remaining open to evidence, criticism and changing circumstances. Indeed, that is probably what we should hope for in a democratic leader. Conviction involves knowing what one believes and being prepared to defend it. Certainty goes a step further. It is the belief that one cannot be wrong. Conviction allows room for learning. Certainty often does not.

Yet from a distance the two can look remarkably similar.

This is particularly true in an era when so much mainstream politics appears managerial, cautious and focus-grouped. Many contemporary politicians sound as though every sentence has been tested, refined and stripped of anything resembling genuine belief. They speak in carefully calibrated formulations designed not to offend any particular constituency. Such caution may be politically prudent, but it often creates an impression of evasiveness. Voters may not always agree with a politician who speaks plainly, but they often appreciate knowing where that politician stands.

People forgive a surprising amount in leaders they regard as authentic. What they struggle to forgive is the suspicion that their leaders believe one thing and say another.

This helps explain why figures as different as Pauline Hanson, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Nigel Farage have attracted passionate followings. Their supporters frequently describe them not as wise, sophisticated or nuanced, but as “authentic”. What supporters often mean by authenticity is consistency. They know what these figures believe. The message may be right or wrong, attractive or repellent, but it is recognisable.

That consistency becomes especially attractive when the political centre appears uncertain of itself.

The irony is that certainty often flourishes precisely when trust is declining. When institutions command confidence, when living standards are improving and when mainstream parties appear competent, certainty on the political fringes tends to have less appeal. When trust collapses, however, certainty becomes a scarce commodity. Voters begin searching for leaders who seem sure of themselves, even if the proposed solutions are simplistic or unrealistic.

This is where the independent mind must exercise caution.

The temptation is to mistake certainty for competence, confidence for wisdom and consistency for truth. History repeatedly warns against such assumptions. The twentieth century did not suffer from a shortage of certainty. Some of its greatest disasters were fuelled by people who were utterly convinced of their own righteousness. Fanatics are rarely troubled by doubt. Ideologues seldom lack confidence.

Yet there is an equal danger in the opposite direction. A politics devoid of conviction quickly descends into managerial drift. Citizens want leaders who possess principles. They want to know where their leaders stand. They want evidence that there is something beneath the polling, the slogans and the spin.

The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between conviction and uncertainty, but to distinguish conviction from certainty. Conviction says, “This is what I believe, based on the evidence and experience available to me.” Certainty says, “This is what I believe, and no evidence could persuade me otherwise.”

The difference may seem subtle, but it is profound.

After decades of marching, arguing, protesting, campaigning and often, tilting at windmills, I have not lost faith in causes. Nor have I become indifferent to injustice. If anything, experience has reinforced the importance of civic engagement and public participation. Democracies need citizens who care. They need people willing to stand up, speak out and occasionally make nuisances of themselves.

What experience has changed is my relationship with certainty.

I have become more wary of movements that claim exclusive possession of truth. More alert to false analogies, seductive slogans and the temptations of moral capture. More conscious of unintended consequences. More appreciative of intellectual honesty, especially when honesty requires acknowledging facts that complicate one’s preferred narrative. More willing to question my own side as rigorously as I question its opponents.

In short, I have become less impressed by passionate intensity and more interested in judgement.

The challenge of democratic citizenship is not to choose between conviction and doubt. It is to possess enough conviction to act and enough doubt to remain honest. It is to seek moral clarity without succumbing to moral certainty. It is to care deeply about injustice while resisting the temptation to reduce every issue to a morality play. It is to recognise that one’s opponents may occasionally possess a fragment of truth and that one’s allies may occasionally be mistaken.

That is not fence-sitting. It is not moral relativism. It is not indifference.

It is the difficult and often uncomfortable work of remaining intellectually free.

And perhaps that is the final lesson. The independent mind is not characterised by the absence of belief but by the refusal to surrender judgement. It is not a rejection of commitment but a resistance to dogma. It is conviction disciplined by humility, passion tempered by experience, and certainty held in check by the recognition that the world is almost always more complicated than it first appears.

A healthy democracy requires leaders with convictions strong enough to act and citizens thoughtful enough to question them. It requires moral clarity without moral absolutism, confidence without arrogance, and principle without dogma. Above all, it requires the capacity to recognise that knowing what one stands for is a virtue, but believing that one possesses all the answers is not.

That distinction lies at the heart of the independent mind. It is not an argument against commitment. It is an argument against the seductive comfort of certainty. For while certainty may be politically attractive, judgement remains the rarer and more valuable quality. Yeats warned us about passionate intensity. Fitzgerald reminded us of the discipline required to resist it. Between them lies a space that democratic societies desperately need to preserve: a place where conviction and humility coexist, where competing truths can be held in tension, where citizens remain free to think for themselves, and where wisdom begins not with certainty but with the humility to recognise that reality is usually far more complicated than the slogans painted on our banners. In an age increasingly defined by certainty, that may be the most radical act of all.

Judgement and the Limits of Certainty

At this point an obvious question arises. If certainty is so dangerous, why place such faith in judgement? Are we not equally vulnerable to error there as well?

After all, our judgement is shaped by the very things that make us human. It is influenced by our experiences, upbringing, education, culture, temperament, loyalties, fears, aspirations and prejudices. None of us approaches the world as a detached observer. We all carry assumptions into every argument. We all inhabit particular histories. We all see some things more clearly than other.

A former refugee may view immigration differently from someone whose family has lived in the same town for generations. A soldier may understand war differently from a pacifist. An Indigenous Australian may experience Australian history differently from a recent migrant. A Jew may hear echoes in antisemitism that others fail to recognise. A Palestinian may understand displacement in ways others cannot. These perspectives do not necessarily cancel one another out. Nor does any single perspective possess a monopoly on truth. Each illuminates part of the landscape while leaving other parts in shadow.

The independent mind does not somehow escape these influences. It merely becomes conscious of them.

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of intellectual maturity is recognising that our own perspective is necessarily incomplete. We are all standing somewhere. We are all looking from a particular vantage point. The challenge is not to eliminate subjectivity – an impossible task – but to understand its influence upon us.

This is why judgement differs from certainty.

Certainty assumes that because we have reached a conclusion, the matter is settled. Judgement recognises that conclusions are always provisional, always vulnerable to new evidence, new experiences and new insights. Certainty seeks finality. Judgement remains open to revision.

In this sense, judgement is less about arriving at the right answer than about cultivating habits that reduce the likelihood of arriving at the wrong one. It requires a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves. Why do I believe this? What assumptions am I bringing to the issue? What evidence would change my mind? Am I applying the same standards to friends and enemies alike? What facts am I tempted to ignore because they complicate my preferred narrative?

These questions rarely provide certainty. They do, however, encourage honesty.

That honesty is particularly important because many of the most important questions confronting democratic societies involve genuine tensions rather than simple choices. Liberty and equality, security and freedom, justice and mercy, order and compassion, national interest and universal values – these are not problems to be solved once and for all. They are competing goods that must be balanced, negotiated and continually reassessed.

Politics, at its best, is not the elimination of such tensions but the management of them.

History offers countless reminders of the dangers of forgetting this. Time and again, the greatest political disasters have emerged not from excessive doubt but from excessive certainty. The fanatic, the ideologue and the zealot are rarely troubled by ambiguity. They know exactly where they stand. They possess answers for everything. They are convinced that history, morality and truth march in step behind them.

Yet history is littered with the wreckage left by people who were absolutely certain they were right.

This is where the independent mind returns to the insights of Yeats and Fitzgerald.

Yeats warned of those who are “full of passionate intensity,” not because conviction itself is dangerous, but because conviction unrestrained by humility can become fanaticism. Fitzgerald, meanwhile, celebrated the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Between those two observations lies a profound truth. Mature judgement is not confidence in one’s own infallibility. It is awareness of one’s own limitations.

The paradox is that the people with the best judgement are often those most conscious of how easily judgement can fail.

The more one learns about history, politics and human nature, the harder it becomes to believe that complex questions have simple answers. Good intentions can produce disastrous outcomes. Bad policies can emerge from noble motives. Opponents can occasionally be right. Allies can occasionally be wrong. Causes that deserve support can still produce unintended consequences. Human affairs are untidy in ways that slogans rarely acknowledge.

Yet none of this absolves us of responsibility. Citizens must still make choices. Governments must still govern. Voters must still vote. We cannot escape the necessity of judgement simply because certainty is unattainable.

The alternative to imperfect judgement is not objectivity. It is paralysis.

The challenge, therefore, is not to become certain of our judgement but to hold it provisionally: firmly enough to act, yet lightly enough to revise. To possess convictions without becoming imprisoned by them. To care deeply without succumbing to moral capture. To remain committed to principles while accepting that our understanding of them may always be incomplete.

Perhaps that is the most difficult discipline of all. Certainty says, “I know.” Judgement says, “This is my conclusion based upon the evidence and experience available to me, but I remain open to the possibility that I have missed something.”

The difference may appear subtle, yet it is immense. Certainty seeks closure. Judgement remains in conversation with reality.

And reality, unlike ideology, always has the last word.

In conclusion

Perhaps the independent mind has become one of the last unfashionable virtues.

It lacks the emotional satisfactions of certainty, the camaraderie of tribal belonging and the reassuring simplicity of slogans. It offers no guarantee of popularity and few opportunities for self-righteousness. More often than not, it leaves its advocate stranded between opposing camps, criticised by all sides for refusing to embrace the approved orthodoxy of any one of them. Yet it remains indispensable to the health of a democratic society because it asks something increasingly rare of us: that we think before we choose, question before we condemn, and understand before we judge.

A lifetime of political engagement has convinced me that neither protest nor power possesses a monopoly on wisdom. Activists can identify genuine injustices while proposing unworkable solutions; governments can understand practical realities while losing sight of moral obligations. Both require scrutiny. Both require criticism. Both require citizens willing to think beyond inherited narratives, ideological loyalties and partisan certainties. But this is not really an essay about protest, nor is it ultimately about independents in the electoral sense. It is about a disposition of mind: the determination to remain intellectually free in a culture that increasingly rewards conformity.

When we are young, we often imagine that the opposite of commitment is apathy. We assume that doubt is the enemy of conviction and that certainty is evidence of moral seriousness. Yet a lifetime of politics, protests, campaigns, victories, defeats, enthusiasms and disillusionments suggests something rather different. The real opposite of commitment is not apathy but dogma.

It is entirely possible to care passionately about injustice while resisting moral capture. It is possible to hold strong convictions while remaining open to evidence, criticism and changing circumstances. It is possible to stand for something without believing that one’s own side possesses a monopoly on virtue, wisdom or truth. Indeed, that may be what genuine conviction looks like. Conviction says, “This is what I believe.” Certainty says, “Nothing could persuade me otherwise.” The person who never questions themselves has ceased to serve a cause and has instead begun to worship it.

That, ultimately, is the thread running through this essay: a defence of judgement over certainty.

The phrase that recurs most often in my mind – and has featured prominently in this essay – is that notion of holding two truths at once. It sounds simple enough, yet it runs directly against the grain of contemporary political culture. Our public life increasingly rewards simplification. Algorithms prefer one truth. Activists often prefer one truth. Partisans almost always prefer one truth. The pressure is constant: choose a side, embrace a narrative, identify the villains and remain loyal to the script. Yet reality stubbornly resists such neat arrangements. Mature citizenship frequently requires us to live with competing realities, overlapping truths and unresolved tensions.

It is possible for a nation to be both admirable and flawed, for a people to be both victims and agents of their own history, for a cause to be just and yet produce harmful consequences, for an opponent to be right about one thing and wrong about another. As we have written, it is possible to condemn the atrocities of October 7 and mourn the suffering of Gaza. It is possible to oppose antisemitism while criticising Israeli policy, to support Palestinian aspirations while rejecting Hamas, to acknowledge the dispossession of Indigenous Australians while recognising the achievements of modern Australia. These are not contradictions to be eliminated but tensions to be navigated. They require judgement rather than certainty, humility rather than righteousness.

I find myself returning, too, to WB Yeats and Scott F Fitzgerald, writers who have hovered over these reflections. Between them lies the intellectual territory occupied by the independent mind: conviction tempered by doubt, clarity balanced by complexity, belief disciplined by self-examination.

This is not because all sides are equally right, nor because truth is unknowable, nor because every argument lies somewhere in a comfortable middle ground. Rather, it is because reality is usually larger, stranger and more contradictory than our tribes permit. Human affairs do not fit neatly into ideological categories. History rarely conforms to our preferred narratives. Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. Sincerity does not confer correctness. Authenticity does not guarantee wisdom. The world is full of competing goals, unintended consequences and moral ambiguities that cannot be resolved by slogans alone.

Perhaps that is the final irony. After decades of marching, arguing, protesting, campaigning, reading, writing and, more than occasionally, tilting at windmills, one does not necessarily end up believing in fewer causes. One does not become indifferent to injustice, retreat from public life or cease caring about the future. Rather, one becomes more wary of certainty, more conscious of unintended consequences, more alert to false analogies and seductive slogans, and more appreciative of the rare virtue of intellectual honesty.

One becomes more aware of the distinction between the high moral ground and the low moral ground disguised as the high moral ground. One becomes more sensitive to the dangers of moral capture, more sceptical of movements that demand conformity of thought, and more willing to question one’s own assumptions as rigorously as those of one’s opponents.

That is not a retreat from conviction. It is conviction disciplined by humility. It is passion tempered by experience. And experience, unlike ideology, has a habit of teaching modesty about what we know and caution about what we merely think we know.

In the end, that may be the independent mind’s greatest contribution to a democratic society. Not certainty, but judgement; not tribal loyalty, but intellectual honesty; not the comforting illusion of possessing all the answers, but the willingness to ask difficult questions, follow evidence wherever it leads, and hold competing truths in tension without surrendering either one’s principles or one’s capacity for doubt.

There is, however, one final irony. A defence of judgement over certainty should not be mistaken for confidence in one’s own judgement. We are all prisoners, to some degree, of our experiences, our histories, our loyalties and our blind spots. None of us sees the whole landscape. The independent mind is not distinguished by superior wisdom so much as by an awareness of its own limitations. It understands that every perspective illuminates some truths while obscuring others. Its task is therefore not to eliminate doubt but to live productively with it; not to achieve perfect objectivity but to remain open to correction. If certainty begins with the belief that one cannot be wrong, judgement begins with the recognition that one might be.

It is in that uneasy space between certainty and cynicism, between conviction and humility, between passion and judgement, that citizenship is at its most demanding and, perhaps, at its most valuable. Democracy ultimately depends not upon the certainty of its partisans but upon the wisdom of its citizens. Wisdom begins with the recognition that reality is usually more complicated than our slogans, larger than our causes, and far too important to be entrusted to those who claim to possess all the answers. In an age that increasingly rewards certainty, the independent mind remains one of the few places where freedom, judgement and humility can still coexist.

In That Howling Infinite, June 2026

This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation. What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: selected, tested, revised and revised again, and owned.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, A Political World – Thoughts and Themes, including: Moral capture, conditional empathy and the failure of shock, Standing on the high moral ground is hard work and Shaping facts to feelings – debating intellectual dishonesty

Author’s Note

The essays published in In That Howling Infinite reflect a lifelong engagement with politics, history, culture and public affairs. They are not intended as manifestos, nor do they seek to recruit readers to a particular ideological camp. Rather, they represent an ongoing attempt to understand a complex world while resisting the temptations of certainty, tribalism and intellectual complacency.

The views expressed in this essay are not therefore confined to these pages. Rather, they form part of a broader body of work that range from Australian history and politic, the Middle East,  and Russian history to contemporary activism, political discourse, identity, memory and public morality. They are connected by a number of recurring themes.

Among these is the belief that genuine understanding requires intellectual honesty: the willingness to follow evidence even when it challenges our assumptions, complicates our preferred narratives or discomforts our own side. Another is the conviction that moral clarity and moral certainty are not the same thing. One may recognise injustice, condemn cruelty and defend human dignity without imagining that any individual, movement or ideology possesses a monopoly on truth.

These essays also reflect a persistent concern with what I have elsewhere called moral capture: the process by which a cause becomes so central to personal identity that facts are no longer evaluated on their merits but according to whether they support or undermine the cause itself. Closely related is the phenomenon of conditional empathy, where compassion is extended selectively—depending on the identity of victims or perpetrators—rather than consistently across human suffering. Both tendencies, I would argue, diminish our capacity for honest inquiry and weaken our ability to navigate complex moral questions.

Readers familiar with One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance will recognise another recurring principle: the necessity of holding two truths in tension at the same time. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is perhaps one of the clearest examples of a subject that resists simplistic narratives, demanding that we acknowledge competing histories, competing grievances and competing aspirations without reducing either side to caricature. Yet the same principle applies far beyond the Middle East. It applies equally to debates about national identity, immigration, colonial history, religion, social justice, populism and democratic governance.

Throughout these essays runs a scepticism towards slogans, false analogies and the seductive simplicity of binary thinking. The modern information environment rewards certainty, outrage and performative moral confidence. It is less hospitable to ambiguity, nuance and self-questioning. Yet history repeatedly suggests that the greatest errors are often committed not by those troubled by doubt but by those convinced they possess exclusive access to truth.

For that reason, the essays collected in In That Howling Infinite should be read not as declarations of certainty but as exercises in inquiry. They are attempts to ask difficult questions rather than provide final answers; to explore tensions rather than dissolve them; and to defend the increasingly unfashionable proposition that intellectual independence remains both possible and necessary.

If there is a single thread connecting them all, it is the belief that democratic citizenship requires more than passion and more than conviction. It requires judgement. It requires humility. It requires the capacity to hold competing truths in tension without surrendering either one’s principles or one’s willingness to question them.

In an age increasingly organised around tribes, narratives and certainties, that may be one of the most important responsibilities a citizen can undertake. The essays are offered in that spirit. They do not ask the reader to agree with every conclusion. They ask only that the questions remain open, the evidence be examined honestly, and the conversation continue. After all, the purpose of independent thought is not to win arguments, but to understand the world a little better than we did before.

 

An Australian Jew’s submission to the Royal Commission

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

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

Whitewashing slavery’s deep and dark history

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Forward. The Gravest Crime – and selective conscience

On March 25, the UN General Assembly declared the transatlantic slave trade the “gravest crime against humanity.” 123 countries voted in favour, three against, and 52 abstained – including the UK, all 27 EU member states and Australia.

The moral core is unobjectionable. The slave trade was monstrous, its consequences did not end with abolition, and saying so plainly is not theatre  –  it is history. But UN resolutions are not history lectures. They are political instruments.

This one was carefully engineered. Its most controversial element was the recognition of slavery as a violation of jus cogens  – peremptory norms of international law binding on all states. Not a historical observation, but a legal foundation for future liability claims. The EU noted the resolution’s “unbalanced interpretation of historical events” and legal references inconsistent with international law, including retroactive application of rules that simply did not exist at the time.

The 123 who voted yes include states with active, present-tense records of forced labour and ethnic persecution. Their zeal for condemning 18th-century European slave traders carries a faint whiff of convenience. And the Western abstentions were the diplomatic equivalent of leaving before the bill arrives – not endorsement, but not courage either.

Slavery was real. The suffering was immense. But a resolution shaped by reparations politics and the arithmetic of bloc voting is not the act of collective moral reckoning it claims to be. It is politics, dressed, as so much UN business is, in the language of justice.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Whitewashing slavery’s deep and dark history

Slavery sits in the human story like a dark, deep river that refuses to keep to its banks. It runs from the Assyrian deportations and Roman estates, mines and galleys, through the markets of old Baghdad and the longships on the rivers of Keven Rus, down into the Atlantic crossings from Africa to the Americas and thence to Europe. and out again into the contract-labour regimes and hidden rooms of the present. Names change – thrall, concubine, slave, servant, “sponsored worker” – but the underlying grammar is stubborn: power converting vulnerability into utility, often with a theory to justify it and a market to sustain it.

Into this long, uneasy history steps the modern urge to judge it – to apportion blame, to rank crimes, to extract from the past a usable morality for the present. The UN resolution is one such attempt: part commemoration, part indictment, part politics by other means. A counter-brief insists that this particular ledger has been selectively drawn, that some entries are inked in heavily while others are left in the margin or omitted altogether. Between them lies not a settled account but a contested one, in which the Atlantic system with its Islamic trades, and African agency, “King Cotton” and John Brown, and modern forms of coercion all jostle for place and proportion.

The following essay does not endeavour to tidy that argument into a single verdict. It widens the frame without dissolving the particulars; to hold in view both the universality of slavery and the distinctiveness of its forms; to recognise the rarity of abolition without mistaking it for completion. History, in this register, is less a courtroom than a map – dense, overlapping, and resistant to clean lines.

The deep and dark river 

That UN resolution formally condemned slavery as a universal crime – indeed, the “gravest crime”. But, in practice it narrows its indictment to the transatlantic trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, presenting it as a distinctively Western, racialised, and capitalist enterprise.

It is precise, almost prosecutorial, assigning blame, embedding the trade in a narrative of structural injustice that echoes into the present. Yet it grows evasive when confronting the forces that ended slavery: the Enlightenment, abolitionist movements, legal reforms – reduced to a kind of historical afterthought.

More significantly, as economist and commentator Henry Ergas argues in an article in The Australian, republished below, the resolution omits the long and substantial history of slavery in the Islamic world – trans-Saharan, Red Sea, Indian Ocean – systems that endured for centuries, moved millions, and in many places persisted well into the modern era. Unlike in the West, he contends, there was no sustained, institutionalised moral revolt against slavery at scale; abolition came late, often under external pressure, and in some cases remains incomplete in practice.

He pushes further. By declaring the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity, the resolution risks collapsing distinctions – most notably between exploitation and extermination – thereby, in his reading, relativising the Holocaust. And finally, he notes the political choreography: strong support from authoritarian states and those with troubling contemporary records, contrasted with the hesitant abstention of many Western democracies.

That is his case – straightforward, and cleanly drawn –  perhaps a little too cleanly. Because once we widen the frame, the lines begin to blur in ways that resist both the UN’s moral staging and Ergas’s counter-brief.

Slavery is not an aberration of one civilisation but a near-constant of many; and it spans millenia. The Assyrians and Persians deported whole populations as instruments of empire. Sennacherib and other potentates would empty a conquered land of its indigenous peoples and replace them with deportees from another conquest. The Romans built an economy on servile labour whilst the Byzantines continued the practice. Muslim caliphates and emirates, including the Abbasids and Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans, sustained vast networks of concubinage and domestic and military slavery.

The Vikings – often reduced in popular memory to picturesque if violent raiders – operated something closer to a transcontinental syndicate. The river systems of the Rus, threading south through the Volga and Dnieper, connected the Baltic to the Black Sea and Baghdad. Silver flowed north; human beings flowed south. This was not episodic plunder but a business model – structured, repeatable, and profitable. And conducted across astonishing distances. Baghdad and York sat at the far ends of a human supply chain. [The illustration at the head of this article is that of a young Slavic woman being sold into slavery by Vikings to a Persian merchant (Image: Tom Lovell / National Geographic)]

So, in short. Salvery has existed in some form in almost every known civilisation. In the ancient world, captives were routinely taken, bought, sold, and traded. Greek city-states enslaved defeated populations; Rome built much of its economy on slave labour; raiding societies from the Eurasian steppe to the Atlantic world, and across the ocean, among the First Nations people of the Americas, treated slavery as part of warfare and survival. For most of human history, slavery was seen less as a moral evil than as an accepted social institution, however tragic it might be for those caught within it.

It is necessary therefore to resist any account that isolates the Atlantic trade as if it emerged sui generis from European wickedness. The Islamic world sustained large-scale slave systems over a long durée; and African polities were not merely passive victims but active participants in capture and sale; Arab traders were integral intermediaries. The Atlantic system, or “the Middle Passage” and “Triangular Trade” as it was euphemistically described, depended in its operation on a web of local agency as well as European demand. To acknowledge that is not to dilute culpability but to complicate it – uncomfortably, but necessarily.

And yet – here the counterweight – the Atlantic system was not merely one more iteration of an ancient practice. In the Americas – north and south –  fused race, heredity, and commerce into something peculiarly rigid and self-reproducing. Slavery became not just a condition but a caste, encoded in law and biology, and scaled through plantation economies that fed a global market. Cotton, sugar, coffee and tobacco were not marginal commodities but engines of early modern capitalism. The system’s brutality was not incidental; it was structural.

It is here that the North American story assumes its central, paradoxical role. Chattel slavery became both foundational and explosive – so deeply embedded in the economy that its removal threatened the entire edifice, and yet so morally corrosive that it generated its own opposition. The American Civil War was among many things, the moment when that contradiction could no longer be managed rhetorically or regionally; it was settled, instead, in blood. Abolition here was not simply argued into being; it was fought into being.

Slavery was America’s original sin, and its malign influence ricochets still through its politics and society. [See American historian Sarah Churchwell’s.chilling account of darkest Dixie in In That Howling Infinite’s The Wrath to Come. Gone With the Wind and America’s Big Lie]

Which brings us to what may be the most historically unusual feature in all of this: not slavery itself, but the sustained movement to abolish it. The West generated, from the 17th century onward, a mounting moral and political challenge to slaver, in legal cases, religious agitation, popular campaigns – that eventually dismantled it – significant help from the Royal Navy. Comparable, system-wide movements were less evident in the Islamic world, where dissent existed but did not crystallise into mass abolitionism with similar force or effect.

The distinction matters. Saying it did not happen is a statement of fact; suggesting it could not have happened, or that its absence reflects some deeper civilisational failing, goes beyond the evidence. The divergence likely owes as much to political economy, state structure, and the contingencies of modernity as to theology alone. Which is where English historian and The Rest is History podcaster Tom Holland’s excellent doorstop of a book Dominion hovers, suggestively, over the argument [See In That Howling Infinite’s Getting back to the garden – Tom Holland’s Dominion 

Holland’s claim – broadly put – is that the moral vocabulary underpinning abolition in the West owes much to a Christian inheritance: the elevation of the weak, the insistence on the equal worth of souls, the suspicion of unrestrained power. Even as the Enlightenment secularises these ideas, it carries their imprint. One need not follow him into every chapel of that argument to see the outline: abolition is historically anomalous, and anomalies tend to have genealogies. The West did not simply stumble into anti-slavery; it argued its way there, drawing on intellectual and moral resources that had been accumulating, often ambivalently, for centuries.

One must exercise caution here. Moral discomfort with slavery existed elsewhere and earlier, even if it did not produce mass abolitionist movements in the same way as in the West. Nor does the existence of Western abolition somehow erase the brutality or scale of European colonial slavery, particularly the Atlantic slave trade and plantation economies. The West occupies both roles in history: architect of the largest racialised slave system in modern history, and birthplace of the most influential abolitionist movements against it.

History is often untidy like that.

Old poison, new bottles

The story end in the 19th century however much resolutions might prefer it to. The Gulf states remind us that abolition in law does not always mean abolition in practice. The kafala system – sponsorship, contract labour – operates in a grey zone where dependence can harden into coercion. Passports withheld, mobility constrained, recourse limited: not chattel slavery, but an echo, or perhaps a mutation. History rarely repeats itself verbatim; it adapts, keeping the structure while altering the terminology.

And then there are the moments when the past returns not as echo but as revival. ISIS, with its enslavement of Yazidi women, did not merely exploit chaos; it articulated a doctrine. Slavery, and most particularly, sexual slavery, was justified, systematised, and bureaucratised with price lists, allocations, and rules, and even, trans-national trafficking: one captive ended up in Gaza where she was eventually rescued from a war zone. It was, in the grimmest sense, a reactivation of an old logic under modern conditions. Old poison in new bottles. If abolition was an anomaly, here was the reminder that anomalies can be reversed.

Governments and citizens of ostensibly westernized states should look to their self-awarded laurels. We should be wary of treating coercion as something that happens “over there.” The exploitation of domestic workers – underpaid, over- controlled , sometimes effectively trapped – appears not only in the Gulf but in Lebanon, Israel, and also parts of Western Europe and North America, where immigration status and private households create shadows the law struggles to reach. And closer still, in our own economies, sweatshop labour, debt bondagea and various forms of servitude persist at the margins, along with physical violence and sexual exploitation – which is precisely why regulation, inspection, and enforcement remain not moral luxuries but necessities.

Against this broader canvas, the UN resolution begins to look less like a statement of history than a negotiation, negation, even – of memory. Its selectivity – foregrounding Western guilt, backgrounding Western abolition, omitting other systems – is not unusual in such documents; it is, in some sense, as we have often seen, their defining feature. They are less concerned with completeness than with consensus, less with analysis than with alignment. Countries with difficult presents often find it convenient to condemn curated pasts.

Ergas is justified in objecting to that selectivity. Where he overreaches is in answering it with a counter-selectivity of his own – one that risks understating the distinctiveness of the Atlantic system and overstating the clarity of civilisational contrasts. History, inconveniently, refuses to stay within either brief.

On the question of the Holocaust, however, his warning lands. To rank atrocities – to declare one “the greatest” – is to turn history into a macabre competition. More importantly, it obscures differences of intent. Most slave systems, however brutal, were premised on exploitation; the Holocaust was premised on annihilation. That distinction is not a matter of moral bookkeeping but of historical substance.

And so we arrive, circuitously, at a position that satisfies no one entirely – which is probably how one knows it is closer to the truth.

Slavery is not the property of any one civilisation; it is a recurrent human institution, appearing wherever power, profit, and permission align. The Atlantic trade is distinctive but not unique; Islamic and African systems are substantial but not singular; modern forms persist under altered names and legal veneers. What is genuinely unusual is the emergence of sustained, organised movements that declare slavery illegitimate and succeed – partially, unevenly – in abolishing it.

Between the UN’s moral narrowing and Ergas’s corrective widening lies a more uncomfortable landscape: one in which culpability is diffuse, agency is shared, and progress, where it occur, is contingent, fragile, and slow. The past does not arrange itself into neat indictments or tidy vindications. It lingers, instead, as habit and warning.

And, if one is honest, as a question still not fully answered.

On the Holocaust comparison, Ergas is on firmer ground. Collapsing all historical crimes into a single ranked category – the greatest” – is less analysis than moral theatre. The distinction between exploitation and extermination is not pedantic; it goes to intent. The Nazi project was annihilatory in a way most slave systems, however cruel, were not. History flattens at our peril.

And then there is the politics of the thing. UN resolutions are not monographs; they are negotiated texts, shaped by blocs, interests, and the quiet arithmetic of votes. Selectivity is almost baked in – as is prejudice. Countries with uncomfortable presents often find safety in condemning selective pasts. Western abstentions, too, are rarely acts of intellectual surrender; more often they are the diplomacy of not quite wanting to pick a fight that cannot be cleanly won.

Unfinished business 

So we end where we began, with a familiar tension. Yes, slavery is a near-universal inheritance, and any telling that singles out one civilisation to the exclusion of others is suspect. But neither does the universality of the crime dissolve its particular forms. The Atlantic system, the Islamic trades, ancient chattel systems – they rhyme, but they are not identical verses.

And there remains a broader, less comfortable truth: the story of slavery is not a morality play with a single villain, but a long human habit, periodically challenged, never entirely extinguished, and always ready, given the right circumstances and excuses, to return.

History, in other words, refuses both the courtroom brief and the absolution. It is messier than Ergas allows, but also less conveniently moralised than the resolution he criticises.

It leaves us not ranking guilt, but paying closer attention. The Atlantic system was distinctive; the Islamic and other trades were vast and enduring; African rulers and Arab merchants were participants as well as intermediaries; the West generated powerful abolitionist movements even as it profited from what it eventually condemned. None of these claims cancels the others. Together they form a picture that is, at once, more accurate and less flattering than any single narrative allows.

And the present refuses to sit quietly beneath the verdicts we pass on the past. The exploitation of domestic workers in the Gulf, Lebanon, Israel, and parts of Western Europe; the persistence of sweatshop labour, debt bondage, and coerced work within Western economies themselves – these are not historical footnotes but contemporary reminders. Laws and conventions matter, but so do inspection, enforcement, and the unglamorous work of closing the gap between principle and practice.

Which is why the most suspect posture, at the end of such an inquiry, is self-congratulation. There is no stable ground here for laurel wreaths, no civilisational vantage point from which to survey a completed moral victory. At best there is a difference in degree – of scrutiny, of institutional capacity, of willingness to act. And even that requires constant renewal.

Slavery, in its older forms, has been dismantled in many places; in its newer guises, it adapts. The question is less who was worst than who is still looking, and still prepared to do something about what they find.

Postscript: Etymology

The history lingers, as it often does, in the words. They carry within themselves their own freight.

“Slave” in English carries within it a map of early medieval Europe. The term is widely traced to the Latin sclavus, itself derived from Sclavus – “Slav” – a reflection of the large numbers of Slavic peoples captured and sold through the trading networks that ran from the Baltic down the great river systems to Byzantium and the Islamic world. What began as an ethnonym hardened into a condition. By the High Middle Ages the word had shed its geographic specificity and settled into general use- esclave, schiavo, esclavo, slave – the person eclipsed by the status, the origin story buried in the syllable. The modern word is not, in itself, a slur; but its lineage is a reminder of how readily a name can be stripped of personhood and repurposed as a category of subjection.

Arabic offers a parallel, though not an identical one. The root ʿabd (عبد) denotes a servant or slave, but in its primary register it is theological: ʿabd Allāh, servant of God – a posture of submission before the divine rather than a description of worldly bondage. Yet the plural ʿabīd (عبيد) – once a straightforward term for slaves – acquired, over time and in certain contexts, a sharper edge, used for Black slaves and, by extension, Black people more generally. In modern usage it can carry derogatory force, depending on context and intent, illustrating how a neutral descriptor can drift into insult as it absorbs the hierarchies of the societies that use it.

In both cases, language records a quiet transformation. A people becomes a condition; a condition gathers associations; those associations harden into overtones that may wound long after their origins are forgotten. The vocabulary survives the systems that shaped it, carrying their traces forward – compressed, half-visible, but still there for those inclined to listen.

Afterword: Thraldom, it’s unwinding and its afterlives

A final turn of the lens, back to northern Europe, where the language and the practice briefly align – and then, tellingly, reappear in altered guises.

In Anglo-Saxon England, þræl – thrall – named a condition within a broader spectrum of unfreedom. These were the captured, the indebted, the born into it: men and women who laboured in households and on estates, who could be bought and sold, though not yet within the fully racialised, hereditary system that would later define Atlantic chattel slavery. The boundaries were hard but not always impermeable. Manumission occurred; over generations, absorption was possible. It was a system of subjection, but not yet a totalising one.

The British port of Bristol stands as a reminder of how visible and organised that system could be. It became wealthy with the transatlantic slave trade. But in the 11th century it also functioned as a significant slaving port, exporting captives – often from Wales and the Welsh borderlands – into Irish and wider networks. This was not an anomaly but a node in a broader medieval traffic in human beings, linking the British Isles to circuits that extended, directly and indirectly, toward the Mediterranean and beyond.

Nor was England unique. Across medieval Europe, slavery persisted in varied forms: Italian city-states drew on Black Sea supplies; Iberian polities, both Muslim and Christian, trafficked in captives amid the long wars of the Reconquista; eastern Europe fed human cargo into Byzantine and Islamic markets. The word “slave” itself, with its Slavic root, is a linguistic fossil of that traffic (see below)..

And yet, in England at least, something shifted – and the Norman Conquest appears to have hastened it. On the eve of 1066, Domesday would soon record servi in significant numbers, perhaps around a tenth of the population. By the 12th century, however, chattel slavery had largely withered. The causes were less a single decree than a convergence. The Norman regime imported a more continental feudal logic, in which labour was bound to land rather than owned outright; a villein, fixed, dues-paying, and reproductively stable, was often more useful than a saleable slave. The Church, already critical of slave trading – Wulfstan of Worcester’s condemnation of the Bristol trade is emblematic. – found firmer footing in the new order, aligning moral pressure with institutional power. Trade patterns shifted too, as England’s orientation tilted across the Channel, loosening older Irish Sea networks that had sustained export markets.

None of this amounted to abolition in the modern sense. What replaced slavery was serfdom: a different architecture of dependence, less overtly transactional but hardly free. The change was real, but it was also a translation—from one form of unfreedom into another, quieter one.

And, as if to underline the point, elements of the older logic resurfaced later under new names. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain exported large numbers of indentured labourers – many English, but also Scots and Irish, including prisoners of war and political rebels after uprisings – to the American colonies and the Caribbean. Bound by contract rather than owned outright, they nonetheless occupied a coercive world of limited rights, harsh discipline, and restricted movement. The loss of the American colonies in 1783 did not end this habit of displacement; it redirected it. Transportation – of convicts and dissidents – to Australia became the next imperial outlet for managing surplus and troublesome populations, a system different in law but recognisably akin in its logic of removal and compelled labour [see in In That Howling Infinite, Farewell to Old England forever … reappraising The Fatal Shore 

Meanwhile, further east, a different trajectory prevailed. In eastern Europe and Russia, serfdom did not wither but intensified. From the late medieval period into the early modern era, landlords consolidated control over peasant populations, binding them ever more tightly to the land and to service. In Russia, this culminated in a system that, by the 18th century, bore striking resemblances to slavery in practice, if not always in name – serfs bought, sold, and mortgaged along with estates, their mobility sharply curtailed, their obligations exacting. Emancipation would come late: 1861 in Russia, and even then imperfectly, leaving behind structures of dependency that proved stubbornly durable.

Which is, perhaps, the thread worth keeping in hand. Systems of coercion rarely disappear cleanly; they evolve, recur and rephrase. From thrall to serf, from market to manor, from indenture to transportation, from eastern estate to western plantation. The names change; the grammar does not. Waiting, as ever, for the conditions that allow it to harden once again. waiting, as ever, for the conditions that allow it to harden once again.

In that Howling Infinite, May Day 2026

This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to researching, drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation. What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: directed and selected, revised and revised again, and owned.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, A Political World – Thoughts and Themes, and A Middle East Miscellany


Coda

When this essay was published on Facebook, it elicited several comments that amounted to a polemical defense of the West that began with a legitimate historical observation – slavery was historically near-universal and abolitionism emerged most powerfully from Enlightenment Europe – but then overextended  the claim into a triumphalist narrative about Western moral uniqueness and non-Western incapacity for self-criticism. Its tone is combative, culturally chauvinistic, and marked by sweeping generalisations about “the Third World,” Islamic societies, Arabs, and Asian civilisations.

Intellectually, they mixed valid historical points with selective history, rhetorical exaggeration, and resentment politics. They treated “the West” as unusually self-critical and morally generative, while caricaturing other societies as conformist or authoritarian. The result is less a sober historical analysis than a reaction against contemporary anti-Western discourse, expressed through broad-brush civilisational language.

A more balanced critique might read as follows:

Slavery has existed in some form in almost every known civilisation. In the ancient world, captives were routinely taken, bought, sold, and traded. Greek city-states enslaved defeated populations; Rome built much of its economy on slave labour; raiding societies from the Eurasian steppe to the Atlantic world treated slavery as part of warfare and survival. For most of human history, slavery was seen less as a moral evil than as an accepted social institution, however tragic it might be for those caught within it.

One of the major intellectual shifts of the Enlightenment era was the emergence, particularly in Western Europe and North America, of the idea that slavery itself was morally illegitimate. Philosophical ideas about natural rights, combined with religious and humanitarian movements, helped give rise to organised abolitionism. Britain, France, and the United States were deeply implicated in the Atlantic slave trade, yet they also produced influential movements that eventually challenged and dismantled it. Modern international norms against slavery owe much to these developments.

At the same time, slavery was not uniquely Western, nor was opposition to injustice confined solely to the West. Different forms of servitude and human bondage existed across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, and criticism of oppression has emerged within many cultures and traditions. The historical record is complex: societies can simultaneously perpetrate injustice and generate the ideas that challenge it.

Contemporary debates about slavery and colonialism sometimes oversimplify history by treating Europe and the West as uniquely culpable, while overlooking the broader global history of slavery. But responding to that simplification with sweeping condemnations of non-Western societies is equally reductive. A more useful approach is to recognise both the universality of slavery in human history and the particular historical significance of the abolitionist movements that emerged during the Enlightenment and after.

UN resolution on slavery falsifies history by ignoring Islamic world’s role

Henry Ergas, The Australian, 1 May 2026

The UN resolution on slavery has sparked debate over historical interpretation. Picture: Getty Images

The UN resolution sparks debate over historical interpretation: Getty Images

Henry Ergas, The Australian, 1 May 2026

That the African slave trade was a monstrosity, inflicting unspeakable cruelty on millions of innocent victims, is beyond dispute. But the resolution the UN General Assembly passed two weeks ago, marking the trade’s commemoration, is nothing less than an appalling falsification of history.

Formally, the resolution condemns the African slave trade as a whole. Substantively, every concrete reference targets the transatlantic trade, fixating on a “racialised capitalist system” and its purported Western antecedents. The cumulative effect is unmistakeable: to brand the trade a distinctively Western crime. To sustain that impression, the resolution parades a sequence of decrees, starting with the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455, which it casts as the founding charters of the enslavement and “structural racism” that still unjustly impoverishes Africa, thereby grounding a claim to substantial reparations.

Yet, having been forensically specific about blame, the text turns conspicuously evasive when it confronts the forces that brought the Atlantic trade to an end. The Enlightenment, the abolitionist movements, and the Western legal and political campaigns that culminated in the trade’s eventual demise are, it appears, unmentionable.

While the offending decrees are named, dated and indicted, the tide of opposition to slavery, which gathered momentum in the 17th century, is dismissed as “certain legal challenges and judicial developments in the 18th century” that “questioned the legality and morality of chattel enslavement”.

That descent into vagueness reflects a deliberate strategy: to particularise the guilt while diluting the credit. Merely cataloguing the misrepresentations, confusions and factual errors this strategy produces would require far more space than is available here. What is especially striking, however, are the omissions.

It is, for example, intellectually dishonest to invoke the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 while ignoring Pope Paul III’s bull of 1537, which denounced as an invention of the devil the idea that native peoples “should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service”, and affirmed “that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty”.

Paul III’s exhortations had limited immediate effect; so too did Cartwright’s Case (1569), which declared that England’s air was “too pure for slaves to dwell in”. What matters is what they reveal: an unceasing moral interrogation of slavery within the West itself – an interrogation that gave abolitionism the bedrock on which to build.

Here, too, the resolution’s selectivity is purposeful. It allows it to avoid an obvious and crucial comparator: the long history of slavery under Islamic rule, which it ignores altogether. From the Arab conquests to the early 20th century, some 14 million black slaves were transported into the lands of Islam via the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes, with nearly a million more carried beyond the East African coast. Add to these more than a million white slaves, and the total comfortably exceeds the 10 million to 12 million who landed in the Americas.

Yet the numbers are not what is most significant. The salient fact is the absence of any sustained doctrinal or institutional challenge to the morality and legality of the slave trade within the Islamic world – even where it starkly contradicted the Koranic prohibition on enslaving Muslims. As Bruce Hall shows in his study of Saharan and Sahelian slavery, by the 19th century – when the West was vigorously suppressing chattel slavery – the operative presumption among Maliki jurists was that black Africans, routinely described as “savages”, were enslavable by default, whatever their faith.

There were individuals who objected strenuously to chattel slavery, such as Syrian reformer Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855-1902); but no Muslim opponent of slavery ever forged those concerns into a mass movement. Bernard Lewis’s verdict that “even the most radical Muslim modernists” fell well short of matching the fervour and effectiveness of Western abolitionists retains all its force.

It is therefore unsurprising that Islam’s leading theologians, far from championing abolition, actively resisted it – beginning with the infamous 1855 fatwa, issued with the full authority of Mecca’s Shaykh Jamal, which declared any prohibition of the slave trade “contrary to the holy law of Islam” and any official who attempted to enforce it “lawful to kill”.

Nor is it surprising that Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery only in 1962, the United Arab Emirates in 1964, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania – after repeated ineffectual measures – in 2007. Moreover, even where slavery was formally abolished, forms of vassalage have remained firmly in place: of the 10 countries with the highest incidence of “modern slavery”, eight are majority-Muslim.

But the resolution does not merely distort history by pretending Islamic slavery didn’t exist. It declares the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity ever committed. Although not explicitly stated, a central purpose of this travesty – which converts the horrors of the past into a “suffering Olympics” – is again transparent: to relativise the Holocaust.

It is frankly obscene to degrade moral evaluation into a body count, with medals of ignominy awarded by a show of hands. Yet even in so repulsive a spectacle, realities should have been allowed to intrude. Those realities are well known. Death rates in the Holocaust – whose unrelenting aim was the complete extermination of Jews – were close to or above 90 per cent. So complete was the indifference to fatalities that the German railways were paid whether the Jews being shipped by them lived or died during their transport – and the few who survived the journeys were killed, on average, within days of arrival.

In contrast, as investor Thomas Starke wrote to Captain James Westmore in 1700, “the whole benefit of the voyage lyes in your care of preserving negroes’ lives”. As a result, strenuous efforts were made to ensure slaves remained alive and saleable, including by granting handsome bonuses to captains for high survival rates and imposing stiff penalties for excess mortality.

Although those efforts hardly eliminated the trade’s horrors, they did mean that by the late 18th century, death rates for black slaves on the “middle passage” had declined dramatically, to the point where they were only marginally greater than those for crews. To pretend otherwise is to erase the distinction between exploitation and extermination: for there was nothing in the slave trade even remotely comparable to the systematic mass murder at the heart of the Holocaust.

But to acknowledge those facts – which flatly contradict the assault on the standing of the Holocaust – might have eroded the overwhelming support the resolution secured. And the composition of that support says everything one needs to know about the resolution.

Thus, every one of the 20 countries that have the highest incidence of modern slavery and forced labour cynically voted in its favour; so did all the authoritarian states that participated in the vote, with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; and, again with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it received the active backing of every Muslim-majority country.

Yet that is not the real tragedy. Rather, it is that only three Western countries – the US, Israel and Argentina – had the decency to vote against the falsification of history, instead of abstaining, as Australia and the European Union did. Those three were willing to oppose this charade. Why weren’t we?

 

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.

Ulster’s history and the long shadow of The Troubles

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

In a famous 1922 speech, Winston Churchill lamented “the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone”, a literary device for the inter-communal conflict in Ulster which, even as great empires collapsed in the wake of the Great War, and new nations were born across Europe, continued with a grim and relentless dedication not far short of romantic obsession. As he remarked, “The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.”

This is not a comprehensive history of Ireland. It is, rather, an explainer – a guide for the interested reader to understand how the late twentieth-century conflict, known in euphemistic understatement as The Troubles, began, endured, and proved so intractable. Though the guns and bombs have for the most part fallen silent, memories endure. In some quarters, the bitterness remains, the venom lingers, and the need to keep fighting – at least in memory, at least in ritual – has not entirely faded. As the old rebel song goes, “No surrender is the war cry of the Belfast Brigade”. Its notes echo still across streets, walls, and the ever-present consciousness of a place where the past is never far from the present. Though the hatchet may be buried, many remember where they buried it.

The Troubles did not begin in 1969 when civil rights marchers were viciously ambushed by Protestant gangs (an event portrayed chillingly in Disney channel’s adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s investigative history, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland). They erupted then. Their deeper roots stretched back to the early seventeenth century, when the English Crown undertook the Plantation of Ulster after the defeat of Gaelic lords in the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603). After the Flight of the Earls in 1607, when those lords fled to continental Europe, James VI of Scotland –  now also James I of England – set about remaking Ulster. Confiscated land – taken from Irish Catholic chieftains – was granted to “undertakers” from England and, crucially, from lowland Scotland. This was not mere migration; it was a state project of demographic engineering, designed to pacify and anglicise a rebellious province.

The Plantation was not simply an English imposition; it was profoundly Scottish. Tens of thousands of Presbyterian Scots crossed the narrow North Channel. The geography made it almost inevitable: on a clear day you can see Scotland from Antrim. What had once been a porous Irish sea became, in effect, a corridor of Protestant settlement.

These were not aristocrats alone. Many were farmers, tradesmen, smallholders – industrious, Calvinist, wary of episcopal hierarchy and religious certainly wary of Rome. They brought with them kirk discipline, covenant theology, and a hard-earned suspicion of both Catholic rebellion and Anglican condescension. In the seventeenth century they were themselves dissenters within the British confessional order – not the establishment, though they would become it locally. From that moment, land, religion, and political loyalty fused. Ownership mapped onto confession. Power mapped onto identity.

So when we speak of “settlers,” it is not an abstraction. It is families. It is surnames. It is my own father’s ancestors crossing from Ayrshire or Galloway into Antrim or Down, carving farms from confiscated land, building kirks, speaking Scots-inflected English, marrying within their community, and slowly – almost without noticing – becoming native to a place that had been politically engineered for them. Over generations, the settler becomes the local. The memory of arrival fades; the memory of threat remains.

The seventeenth century hardened the divide. The 1641 Irish Rebellion, with massacres of Protestant settlers, entered Protestant folk memory as proof of Catholic barbarity; Cromwell’s subsequent campaign (1649–53), with its sieges and land seizures, entered Catholic memory as atrocity and dispossession. The Williamite War (1689–91), culminating in the Battle of the Boyne, sealed Protestant ascendancy. In Ulster especially, victory became ritualised memory –  parades, commemorations, banners – history as annual rehearsal.

That is one of the deep paradoxes of Ulster: both communities can claim indigeneity and grievance simultaneously. Catholic memory looks back to dispossession; Protestant memory looks back to siege – 1641, the Boyne, 1798. One narrative emphasises loss of land; the other, survival against massacre. Each contains truth. Each edits.

The eighteenth century formalised Protestant dominance through the Penal Laws, which marginalised Catholics politically, economically, and educationally. Landownership remained overwhelmingly Protestant. Catholics were not exterminated; they were subordinated. Resentment, therefore, did not burn out. It banked.

The nineteenth century complicated everything. The Act of Union (1801) abolished the Irish Parliament and bound Ireland directly to Westminster. Catholic Emancipation (1829) removed many legal disabilities, but not structural inequities. An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) (1845–52) devastated the island demographically and psychologically; in Ulster, its effects were uneven, reinforcing regional distinctions. Meanwhile, industrialisation made Belfast a Protestant-majority, shipbuilding powerhouse – economically dynamic, culturally British, and deeply anxious about being subsumed into a Catholic-majority Ireland.

By the nineteenth century, the descendants of those Scottish Presbyterians were no longer temporary colonists but industrial citizens of Belfast — shipbuilders, linen magnates, skilled labourers — economically confident, culturally British, and deeply anxious about being subsumed into a Catholic-majority Ireland.  As Irish nationalism (increasingly Catholic in composition, though not exclusively) pressed for Home Rule — limited self-government within the United Kingdom. Ulster unionists resisted fiercely. “Home Rule is Rome Rule” was not merely a slogan; it was an inherited reflex. Paramilitary formations appeared before the twentieth century: the Ulster Volunteer Force (1912) to oppose Home Rule; the Irish Volunteers (1913) to advance it. Guns were imported on both sides. The pattern was set.

The First World War postponed the crisis but did not dissolve it. The Easter Rising (1916), the War of Independence (1919–21), and the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) partitioned the island. Six counties of Ulster -with a built-in Protestant majority – became Northern Ireland, remaining within the United Kingdom. Partition did not resolve identity; it institutionalised it.

Northern Ireland’s new parliament at Stormont operated, for decades, as a Protestant-dominated state. Catholics faced systemic discrimination in housing allocation, employment, and electoral boundaries. This was not apartheid in the South African sense, but it was structured inequality, visible and resented.

By the 1960s, inspired partly by global civil rights movements, Northern Irish Catholics began peaceful campaigns for equal voting rights, fair housing, and an end to discriminatory practices. The response from elements within the Protestant community and the security apparatus was defensive, sometimes violent. Marches were attacked. The police (RUC), largely Protestant, were perceived as partisan. In 1969, serious sectarian rioting broke out; the British Army was deployed initially as peacekeeper. Very quickly, it became another protagonist.

From there, the Troubles crystallised: Provisional IRA campaigns against British presence and unionist authority; loyalist paramilitary violence against Catholics; tit-for-tat bombings, assassinations, internment without trial, Bloody Sunday (1972), hunger strikes (1981), urban segregation hardening into peace walls and psychological walls alike. Roughly 3,500 people died between the late 1960s and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. That number, in global terms, is small. Its density in a small place was immense.

Which is why the Troubles cannot be reduced to simple binaries of coloniser and colonised, though that language has its place. The Ulster story is more entangled. Plantation created a settler community; centuries created a rooted one.

The Good Friday Agreement did not erase those centuries. It acknowledged them obliquely: consent as the principle of sovereignty; power-sharing between unionist and nationalist parties; recognition that identity in Northern Ireland could be British, Irish, or both. It was less a solution than a framework for managing disagreement without bloodshed.

And that, perhaps, is the long arc: from plantation to partition to power-sharing. Land engineered into loyalty. Religion hardened into political identity. Memory ritualised into grievance. Grievance institutionalised into governance. Governance resisted into violence. Violence exhausted into compromise.

History hardens. Families blur.

Memory, and the theatre of symbols

It is old but it is beautiful, and its colours they are fine,
It was worn at Derry, Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne,
My father wore it as a youth in bygone days of yore,
And on the Twelfth I love to wear the sash my father wore.
Traditional Orange anthem

If history is the argument, memory is the costume in which it appears on stage.

In Ireland – and perhaps nowhere more intensely than in the North – the past does not lie quietly in archives. It walks. It marches. It drums. Specifically, the Lambeg drum is a large traditionally orange-painted drum, beaten with curved malacca canes brought out for  Unionist and the Orange Order’s street parades. Along with the bagpipes, it is one of the loudest acoustic instruments in the world, frequently reaching over 120 dB. Named for the village of  Lambeg it is commonly believed to have come to Ulster with the English settlers orvekse with the army of William of Orange during the Williamite war. Having its roots in 17th-century European military instruments, it was originally smaller. Traditionally it was accompanied by the shrill fife, a small transverse flute similar to the piccolo – and sometimes irreverently referred to as the Audi Orange Flute.

Oliver Cromwell is not merely a seventeenth-century general and dictator; he is a moral shorthand. For Catholics, his name condenses siege, massacre, confiscation – Drogheda and Wexford becoming synecdoche for atrocity itself. “To Hell or to Connacht” may not survive scholarly cross-examination as a verbatim decree, but as memory it requires no footnote. It signals dispossession. It names a wound. Invoke Cromwell and one need not rehearse the details; the symbol carries the freight.

William of Orange – King William III – King Billy – performs a parallel function on the other side of the ledger. Astride his white horse at the Boyne, he is less a Dutch Protestant prince than a guarantor of survival. The Battle of the Boyne (1690) was, in European terms, a minor theatre in a wider war. In Ulster, it became sacrament. Each Twelfth of July, sashes are worn, drums beaten, banners unfurled – if through or adjacent to Catholic areas, so much the better – not to refight the battle but to rehearse belonging and dominion.The Orange Lodge is both fraternal society and mnemonic device. Its rituals keep memory warm. Its parades trace routes that are never neutral, geography turned into catechism.

Thus Oliver Cromwell and King Billy face each other across centuries like bookends of grievance – one representing conquest, the other deliverance –  though each is also more complicated than the emblem allows.

Move forward, and symbolism thickens.

The War of Independence (1919–21) and the Civil War (1922–23) fractured Irish nationalism itself. Partition in 1922 was not only a constitutional arrangement; it was an emotional amputation. For nationalists in the North, the new border confirmed abandonment and unfinished struggle. For unionists, it secured a state in which they would not be submerged. The same act – partition – functioned simultaneously as betrayal and salvation.

Martyrs followed. The executed leaders of 1916. The hunger strikers of 1981, their faces rendered in mural form, eyes large and unsurrendered. Martyrdom, in Ireland, has rarely required embellishment; death itself supplies the poetry. Funerals render it local – masked men in military dress fire shots into the damp airship air. Graves become pilgrimage sites. Names become incantation. Commemoration ceremonies bind past sacrifice to present purpose, as if history were an unfinished sentence demanding completion.

And always, the Protestant marches. The Twelfth of July. Apprentice Boys in Londonderry – a name that changes with  one’s allegiance. Even the name of the city is a declaration. The ancient Derry” gestures toward Gaelic continuity; “Londonderry” toward plantation charter and imperial connection. To choose a word is to choose a side. Language itself becomes boundary wall.

In 1969, the Bogside in Derry turned symbolic geography into lived confrontation. “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” was not merely graffiti; it was a claim to moral and territorial autonomy. The walls and wire that later cut through Belfast –  peace walls, they are called, with a certain exhausted irony –  materialised distrust in concrete and corrugated steel. They were defensive architecture, but also mnemonic devices. Every barrier says: remember.

And then the murals.

On the Falls Road and the Shankill, gable walls became galleries of memory. Masked volunteers with rifles. King Billy crossing the Boyne. Bobby Sands’ thin, resolute face. The Red Hand of Ulster. Palestinian flags in nationalist districts; Israeli flags in loyalist ones – global conflicts borrowed to refract local identity. These images are not random decoration. They are narrative shorthand, pedagogy in paint. Children grow up under them. They learn who they are by the stories on the wall.

Symbolism, of course, simplifies. It flattens ambiguities into heroes and villains, saints and tyrants. Cromwell the monster. King Billy the saviour. The hunger striker the pure martyr. The volunteer the defender of the realm. Real history is messier: Cromwell was brutal and also a product of his century’s ferocities; William’s victory secured Protestant liberties while entrenching Catholic subordination; the independence struggle produced both liberation and internecine slaughter. But symbols do not trade in nuance. They trade in clarity.

Yet the Good Friday Agreement, too, is a symbol – though a quieter one. No horse. No musket. No mural of triumphant death. Its symbolism is procedural: consent, parity of esteem, power-sharing. It offers not a martyr but a mechanism. Its genius is almost anti-theatrical. It asks people to live with ambiguity rather than resolve it in blood.

And so Northern Ireland today remains a place where the past is both curated and contested. Bonfires blaze each July; wreaths are laid each Easter; murals are repainted; walls still stand, though some have gates that open by day. Memory has not faded. It has been domesticated, partially, into ritual rather than riot.

Perhaps that is the final paradox. Symbols once mobilised for war now coexist within a fragile peace. The same banners flutter, but fewer guns answer them. The same songs are sung, but often as heritage rather than summons.

History argues. Memory performs.

And in Ulster –  and in the bloodlines that carry it beyond Ulster – the stage is never entirely dismantled.

What have I now?” said the fine old woman
“What have I now?” this proud old woman did say
“I have four green fields, one of them’s in bondage
In stranger’s hands, that tried to take it from me
But my sons have sons, as brave as were their fathers
My fourth green field will bloom once again” said she
Tommy Makem

Personal Reflection

For me, this is not abstract history. My own lineage embodies that braid: Scottish Protestant migration on one side, Irish Catholic inheritance on the other – far from Belfast or Derry, those threads met in my family; I grew up carrying both memories, the power of both histories.

When I watch film footage or view pictures of Orange parades and civil rights marches, of explosions, street riots and military manoeuvres, of walls and murals, I am not a casual onlooker viewing a “quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”, to borrow Neville Chamberlain’s fateful words. I feel weight of dual inheritance. Scottish Presbyterian settlers on one side, Irish Catholic dispossessed on the other –  both lineages threading through my own family, colliding and entwining in Birmingham, far from the streets of Belfast or Derry. I was baptised a Catholic. Family apocrypha recounts  that I was surreptitiously whisked off to the local church. It also clams that my dad was expelled from the local lodge in County Tyrone for marrying a Taig and a papist. We’ll never know the truth of either story.

I grew up knowing these histories not as abstractions but as intimations, as stories that shaped who I was. Though vicariously, I feel the pull of both pasts –  the grievance and the survival, the displacement and the rootedness. Perhaps that is the quiet hope: that memory, with all its violence and ritual, can also be inherited as empathy, that symbols can teach not just fear, but recognition; that families, however braided by history, can live in the space between suffering and reconciliation.

This short history of The Troubles was largely written by an AI language model as an explainer first and foremost, and not as an opinion piece. 

Read more on The Troubles in In That Howling Infinite in Free Derry and the battle of the Bogside: and on Irish history, Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody, The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir and O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song 

Dreaming in the night, I saw a land where no man had to fight
Waking in your dawn, I saw you crying in the morning light
Lying where the Falcons fly, they twist and turn all in you e’er blue sky
Living on your western shore, saw summer sunsets asked for more
I stood by your Atlantic sea and I sang a song for Ireland
June and Phil McLough

Postscript … from Blood and Brick … a world of walls

In Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, there are imposing walls that have actually stood longer than that in Berlin. Now called the the Peace Walls, they were first erected by the British army in 1969. They were temporary affairs of corrugated iron, as the inter-community conflict solidified and ossified, they were soon extended and upgraded to bricks, steel and concrete. The walls separated predominantly Protestant loyalist and Catholic nationalist enclaves throughout The Troubles, the three decades of bombings, murders, riots and civil-rights protests.

Though not all linked, 38 kilometres of walls still slice through the city, outliving the conflict that engendered them. Only some short sections have been removed – partly they’ve become a tourist attraction, while the communities that live closest to them say they still provide a sense of security – though tensions may have eased, people are easily divided and it’s much harder to bring them together again. In the Shankill and Falls roads area of western Belfast, which were particularly notorious during The Troubles, the wall is splattered with political messaging, which makes it easy to know which side you’re on. One side has portraits of British soldiers and the queen and kerbs are painted red, white and blue. On the other the colours of the Irish flag predominate, framing portraits of Republican heroes and hunger-strike martyrs.

Belfast’s Peace Wall

Blood and Brick … a world of walls

“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.