Middle East

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.

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.

 

Smyrna 1922 and the Ottoman endgame

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

History has a habit of turning up unexpectedly in everyday life.

Some fifteen years ago, a muso friend of ours told us about his family’s Greek origins in Ottoman Smyrna. We were in the Black Sheep wine bar in King Street, Newtown, sitting down with a Greek Australian who’d just finished a great set of blues and soul standards talking about events that occurred almost a century earlier. Nationality, language, religion and ancestry did not always fit the neat boxes into which the twentieth century subsequently tried to place them.

We visited Smyrna – now modern İzmir – in May 2014. We walked along the harbourside promenade, looked across the Aegean Sea, and took photographs that we  sent them to our friend. They were ordinary holiday snaps, in one sense: the waterfront, the sea, the city behind us. But they carried something else with them. We were standing in a place from which his Greek forebears, had once looked towards the same water in circumstances unimaginably different from ours.

It is one of the peculiarities of history that the past can sometimes feel closer through a family anecdote or a photograph than through a library full of books. The old cliché about history leaving fingerprints is, perhaps, not entirely a cliché. Places retain traces of people who have gone, even when almost nothing visible remains of the communities that once inhabited them.

Smyrna is an especially powerful example.

It was once an Ancient Greek city located at a strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, and was actually two successive settlements: Old Smyrna, founded around the 11th century BC as an Aeolian settlement before being taken over and developed by the Ionians during the Archaic Period, and Smyrna proper, the new city founded from the 4th century BC onward, whose establishment is associated with Alexander the Great. Due to its advantageous port conditions, its ease of defence, and its good inland connections, Smyrna rose to prominence, reaching metropolitan proportions under the Roman Empire, with most of its surviving remains dating from that era, largely following reconstruction after a 2nd-century AD earthquake. Since 1930, the city’s official name has been İzmir.

Modern Izmir, May 2014

In September 1922, the city’s waterfront became the final refuge of tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian civilians as Turkish nationalist forces entered the city and violence and fire engulfed its Christian quarters. Within a few years, the overwhelmingly Greek character of one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean had largely disappeared. But Smyrna was not the beginning of this story. It was one of the last chapters in the extraordinarily violent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

The story reaches backwards through the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman-Russian conflicts, the massacres of Armenians in the 1890s, the First World War and the destruction of Armenian and Assyrian communities, and forwards through the Greek Turkish and War, the Treaty of Lausanne and the compulsory exchange of populations. It is a story of imperial collapse and national self-determination, but also of refugees, massacres, deportations, competing territorial claims and the brutal desire of emerging nation-states to make populations conform to political borders.

It is therefore tempting to reduce it to a morality tale. There is certainly no shortage of moral horror in the record. But moral judgement and historical explanation are not alternatives. The challenge is to understand how a multi-ethnic empire that had survived for centuries gave way, through war and revolution, to a collection of more nationally defined states — and why that transformation was accompanied by such extraordinary human suffering.

That is the longer story of Smyrna, and of the Ottoman endgame.

The leaving of Smyrna, September 2022

Smyrna and the Ottoman Endgame

In September 1922, the cosmopolitan city of Smyrna became the final, terrible act in a drama that had been unfolding for more than a decade. The city’s waterfront filled with Greek and Armenian refugees as Turkish nationalist forces entered the city and Christian neighbourhoods were engulfed by fire. Behind them lay the ruins of communities that had existed in Anatolia for centuries; ahead was the Aegean and, for many, an uncertain escape to Greece.

The familiar account of Smyrna begins here, with the fire, the refugees and the ships of the Allied powers lying offshore, apparently unable or unwilling to intervene in one of the final acts in a war that they had effectively lost. But history did not begin in Smyrna. Nor did the destruction of Anatolia’s Christian communities begin with Turkish commander Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist movement. To understand what happened in 1922, one has to go back through the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman defeat in the First World War and, before that, the increasingly violent crisis of the Ottoman state’s relations with its subject peoples.

This is the broader story told, with considerable geographical and archival range, by Sean McMeekin in The Ottoman Endgame. It is also the story explored in In That Howling Infinite’s The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye : the dissolution of an empire was not a single event but a succession of wars, revolutions, occupations, expulsions and attempts at national reconstruction. The First World War was the central episode, but it was also part of a much longer Ottoman endgame.

The wars before the war

It is convenient to imagine Europe as peaceful until August 1914. It was not. The Ottoman Empire had already been fighting for its survival.

Italy went to war with the Ottomans in 1911, seizing Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the territories that became Libya. Then came the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, in which the Ottoman Empire lost almost all its remaining European territories. Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro expanded at Ottoman expense, while Albania emerged as an independent state. Romania, often included rather casually in this account, was already an independent kingdom, although it acquired territory from Bulgaria after the Second Balkan War.

The Balkan Wars were particularly important because they demonstrated what the disintegration of a multinational empire could mean in an age of nationalism. Armies advanced, borders changed and populations moved. Christians were expelled from territories conquered by Muslim powers and Muslims were expelled from territories conquered by Christian states. Villages were destroyed, civilians massacred and refugees displaced on a large scale. The demographic transformation of the Balkans was already underway before the First World War began.

This matters because the later violence in Anatolia did not occur in a political vacuum. Ottoman Muslims, many of them themselves refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus, had seen their homes and communities disappear. The Ottoman state increasingly came to regard the survival of its Muslim population as a matter of national security. At the same time, Christian minorities – particularly Armenians and Greeks – increasingly looked beyond the empire towards their own national movements and, in some cases, to foreign powers.

The result was a vicious feedback loop. Nationalism encouraged separatism; separatism encouraged repression; repression encouraged further separatism. War made the whole process considerably worse.

Armenians and the First World War

The Armenian catastrophe has to be treated separately from what happened to the Greeks and Assyrians, although there were connections between them.

The massacres of Armenians during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II in 1894–96 were already a warning of what could happen when imperial authority, Muslim majoritarian sentiment and fears of territorial disintegration collided. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed in massacres and associated violence. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 initially raised hopes of a more constitutional and inclusive Ottoman order, but those hopes deteriorated rapidly as the empire suffered military defeat, territorial losses and political crisis.

When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in late 1914 on the side of Germany and the other Central Powers, the Armenian question acquired an altogether more dangerous dimension. Ottoman forces were fighting Russia in the Caucasus, and some Armenian organisations and volunteers did indeed cooperate with the Russians. Armenian soldiers fought in Russian formations, while armed Armenian groups operated behind Ottoman lines. Ottoman fears of an Armenian fifth column were therefore not entirely invented.

But this context does not explain what followed, still less justify it.

In 1915 the Committee of Union and Progress government – what we know as The Young Turks (now a common term to describe ambitious young upstarts) – began the systematic deportation of Ottoman Armenians. Armenian political and community leaders were arrested and killed. Men were separated from their families and frequently murdered. Women, children and the elderly were deported southwards, many towards the Syrian desert. Deportation became a mechanism of destruction.

The death toll remains debated in detail, as such figures inevitably are, but the broad historical conclusion is not seriously in doubt: hundreds of thousands, probably well over a million Armenians, died through massacre, deportation, starvation, disease, exposure and deliberate deprivation. Many women and children were forcibly converted or absorbed into Muslim households. Sexual assault was commonplace. Armenian property was confiscated. An ancient community was not merely displaced; its institutional, demographic and economic foundations were systematically dismantled.

The Ottoman government and its successors have contested the term genocide and have emphasised the extraordinary circumstances of wartime collapse, Armenian collaboration with Russia and the deaths of Muslim civilians. Those Muslim deaths were real and often horrific. But they do not negate the evidence for the organised deportation and destruction of the Armenians. Nor does acknowledging Armenian collaboration with Russia turn an entire ethnic population into a legitimate military target.

The same period brought massacres and deportations of Assyrian Christians in southeastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. The historical record is less comprehensive than for the Armenians, but the destruction of Assyrian communities belongs to the same wider story of wartime demographic violence.

The Greek catastrophe was different – and connected

The fate of the Ottoman Greeks followed a somewhat different chronology.

Greeks had lived throughout the Ottoman domains for centuries. In Anatolia they were concentrated particularly along the Aegean and Black Sea “Pontic” coasts, but Greek communities were also found in the interior. They were not simply recent immigrants or colonial settlers. They were part of the social and economic fabric of the late Ottoman Empire.

During the First World War, some Greek communities were deported or otherwise subjected to coercion and violence. In the Pontic region of the Black Sea, Greek nationalists and armed groups also became involved in conflict with Ottoman authorities and later with Turkish nationalists. The question of Greek communities in Anatolia consequently became entangled with the wider struggle over what would replace the Ottoman Empire.

The decisive change came after the Ottoman defeat.

The Armistice of Mudros in October 1918 effectively ended Ottoman participation in the war. Allied forces occupied strategic parts of the empire, including Constantinople. The victorious powers then contemplated a drastic settlement of Ottoman territory. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 proposed a severely truncated Ottoman state and envisaged Greek control or influence over substantial parts of western Anatolia.

The Greek military landing at Smyrna in May 1919 was therefore not an isolated act of Greek aggression. It occurred within the post-war Allied occupation and with Allied approval. Greece, was encouraged by its wartime territorial ambitions and by the vision of the Megali (great) Idea, – a Greek nationalist and irredentist vision that emerged after Greek independence (1821–1829) that  called for the revival of the Byzantine Empire by uniting all regions with significant Greek populations – including parts of the southern Balkans, Anatolia, and Cyprus – still under Ottoman rule into a single Greek state.

Greece believed that it had an opportunity to incorporate territories containing substantial Greek populations and places of enormous symbolic importance to Greek history. But the settlement soon collided with another nationalism:  Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish counter-revolution

Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the Ottoman commander who had become famous at Gallipoli, emerged as the principal leader of the Turkish nationalist movement. The movement rejected the partition of Anatolia contemplated at Sèvres and sought to establish national sovereignty over the Turkish heartland.

Mustafa Kemal and other Ottoman officers at Gallipoli

This was not simply an Ottoman army fighting a foreign invader. The Ottoman government in Constantinople accepted the Allied settlement; the nationalist movement centred in Anatolia rejected it. Turkey therefore experienced something approaching a war of national liberation combined with civil conflict.

The Greek army advanced deep into Anatolia. For a time, it appeared that Greece might achieve a substantial territorial settlement. But Turkish resistance stiffened. The nationalists defeated the Greek advance and, in August–September 1922, launched the offensive that drove the Greek army back towards the Aegean.

The Greek retreat was accompanied by atrocities and destruction on both sides. Turkish nationalist forces and irregulars committed massacres and expulsions against Christian civilians; Greek forces and retreating troops were themselves responsible for atrocities against Muslim civilians during their occupation and withdrawal. None of this is usefully understood through a simple morality tale in which one side was innocent and the other intrinsically barbarous.

There was, however, an important asymmetry in the final outcome: the Turkish nationalist victory made possible the consolidation of a Turkish nation-state in Anatolia, while the Greek population of much of the region was about to disappear.

Smyrna, September 1922

The events at Smyrna remain among the most contested episodes of the war, particularly regarding responsibility for the city’s fire and the precise number of people killed. The broad outlines are clearer.

Turkish nationalist forces entered Smyrna on 9 September 1922. The Greek Orthodox metropolitan, Chrysostomos, was murdered. There followed widespread looting, violence and attacks on the city’s Christian population. On 13 September a fire began in the Armenian quarter and subsequently consumed large parts of the Greek and Armenian districts.

The city contained a large Muslim population as well as substantial Greek and Armenian communities, and the precise course of the fire remains disputed. What is not disputed is the appalling predicament of the refugees trapped along the waterfront. Tens of thousands, probably far more, sought escape by sea. Allied warships were present. Their crews could see the fire. Their governments were reluctant to intervene militarily in what had become a Turkish nationalist victory and were constrained by the political circumstances of the time. Some Allied personnel and ships did rescue refugees; the larger failure was that the international presence did not prevent the catastrophe.

Smyrna was therefore both an atrocity and a symbol. It marked the end of a substantial Greek and Armenian presence in one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean.

But it was not, strictly speaking, the moment when that population vanished. Much of the Greek population had already fled or been displaced during the preceding years, and the final settlement was still to come.

The leaving of Smyrna, September 2022

The population exchange

The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 replaced Sèvres and internationally recognised the sovereignty of the new Turkish Republic over Anatolia and eastern Thrace. Mustafa Kemal, now Atatürk, had won the war.

Lausanne also gave international legitimacy to the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. Approximately 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were transferred from Turkey to Greece, while roughly 400,000 Muslims were transferred from Greece to Turkey, subject to various exemptions, including the Greek population of Constantinople and the Muslim population of western Thrace.

The exchange was presented as a solution to the problem of minorities. In reality, it was the formalisation of a demographic revolution already substantially achieved through war, massacre, deportation and flight.

It is important not to describe this simply as the expulsion of Christians from Anatolia. Muslims had also been expelled from territories lost by the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars, and the compulsory exchange itself displaced Muslim as well as Christian populations. Nor was the exchange an exclusively Turkish initiative: Greece and Turkey agreed to it, and the victorious European powers incorporated it into the Lausanne settlement.

It was nevertheless an extraordinary admission of failure. The ideal of a multi-ethnic Ottoman political order had effectively given way to the principle that stability could be achieved by separating populations according to religion and, increasingly, nationality.

The irony was profound. The Ottoman Empire had survived for centuries precisely because it did not require everyone within its borders to be Turkish, Arab, Greek, Armenian, Serbian or Bulgarian. Its subjects belonged to overlapping religious, linguistic and local communities. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries progressively replaced that imperial pluralism with nationalism. By the 1920s, population transfer had become one of the instruments by which the new states sought to make their populations conform to their national boundaries.

The longer Ottoman endgame

This is why I find McMeekin’s The Ottoman Endgame such a useful corrective to the conventional Western story of the First World War.

The war in the Ottoman world was not merely a sideshow to the trenches of France and Belgium. It stretched from Gallipoli to Gaza, Baghdad to Baku, the Caucasus to the Arabian Peninsula. Its consequences extended from the Balkans through Anatolia and the Levant to Mesopotamia. And it was intimately connected with the Russian war, the Russian revolutions and the subsequent Russian Civil War.

The Ottoman collapse also cannot be reduced to the familiar caricature of Britain and France simply carving up an otherwise coherent Middle East according to the lines of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Sykes–Picot was real and consequential, but it was one of several competing wartime schemes for the disposition of Ottoman territory. Russia, too, had imperial ambitions. Constantinople had long been an object of Russian strategic and religious aspiration. France had its own ambitions in the Levant. Britain was concerned with India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf and the routes linking them.

And the Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Turks and other peoples of the empire were not merely passive pieces on a European chessboard. They had their own political ambitions, national movements and armed organisations.

The same complexity applies to Gallipoli. The campaign was certainly a military disaster, and Churchill was one of its principal advocates. But it was not simply Churchill’s personal folly, as the mythology subsequently suggested. It emerged from a much wider strategic debate about how best to defeat the Ottoman Empire and assist Russia. Its failure helped establish Mustafa Kemal as a military leader of consequence.

That matters because the man who became the founder of modern Türkiye was not an outsider who suddenly appeared after the Ottoman collapse. He was an Ottoman officer, a product of the imperial military system and a veteran of the Balkan Wars, Libya and Gallipoli. The Turkish Republic was born not from a clean break with the Ottoman past but from its ruins.

A demographic revolution

There is a tendency, particularly in polemical accounts of this period, to describe the destruction of Anatolia’s Christian communities as a single uninterrupted campaign stretching from the Hamidian massacres through the Armenian genocide to Smyrna. The chronology is more complicated than that.

There were massacres under Abdulhamid II. There were the catastrophic deportation and destruction of the Armenians under the wartime Committee of Union and Progress. There were attacks on Assyrian communities. There were violence and displacement affecting Ottoman Greeks during and after the First World War. There were massacres of Muslims during the Balkan Wars and the Greek occupation and retreat in Anatolia. There was the Turkish nationalist war against Greece. There was Smyrna. Finally, there was the compulsory population exchange.

These events were not identical. Their perpetrators, political circumstances and immediate objectives differed. Nor should the existence of Muslim suffering be invoked to dilute the particular historical responsibility for the Armenian genocide.

But they belong to the same larger transformation: the violent passage from empire to nation-state.

What disappeared was not literally a civilisation that had remained unchanged for two thousand years. Anatolian Christianity itself had changed enormously over those centuries. Byzantine Christianity, Armenian Christianity, Syriac Christianity and Greek Orthodoxy had their own histories and communities. Ottoman society was neither a paradise of tolerance nor a permanent state of persecution. It was a hierarchical imperial order in which religious communities possessed considerable autonomy while remaining unequal before the state.

What disappeared in the early twentieth century was that plural Ottoman world.

By the middle of the 1920s, the Armenian presence in Anatolia had been largely destroyed; the great majority of Anatolian Greeks had gone; Assyrian communities had been devastated and dispersed; and millions of Muslims displaced from the Balkans and Caucasus had been absorbed into the Turkish heartland. The new Republic of Türkiye inherited an Anatolia that was considerably more homogeneous than the Ottoman Empire had been.

The transformation was accompanied by enormous human suffering and the appropriation of property on a vast scale. It also produced the demographic foundations of the modern Turkish state.

The wars of Ottoman succession

Seen from this distance, the Balkan Wars, the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence can be understood as parts of a longer sequence: the wars of Ottoman succession.

The Ottoman Empire had once encompassed much of southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Its disappearance created a succession problem of extraordinary dimensions. Who would inherit its territories? Russia, Britain, France, Greece, Italy and the emerging Arab states all had answers. So did the Turks. The Balkan peoples had already answered the question in their own way before 1914.

The wars did not end neatly in 1918. The Ottoman defeat was followed by the Greek-Turkish war; the Russian Revolution and Civil War transformed the Caucasus; Britain and France established mandates in former Arab Ottoman territories; the Turkish Republic emerged from the nationalist victory; population exchanges attempted to impose demographic order upon territories in which communities had been intermingled for centuries.

That is one reason the consequences remain visible today.

The modern Middle East was not simply invented at a European conference after the First World War. Nor was it simply the inevitable product of ancient ethnic and religious hatreds. It emerged from the interaction of imperial collapse, nationalism, local political movements, European intervention, Russian expansion, war, revolution and demographic engineering.

Smyrna was therefore not the beginning of the story, and neither was it quite the end. It was one of the last great convulsions of the Ottoman endgame.

The ships in the harbour in September 1922 were looking at more than a burning city. They were looking at the consequences of a political order that had been collapsing for generations. Behind the flames lay the Balkan Wars, the deportations of 1915, the battles between Greeks and Turks, the Russian-Ottoman struggle in the Caucasus, the Allied occupation, Sèvres and the nationalist revolt led by Mustafa Kemal. Ahead lay Lausanne, the population exchange and the Republic of Türkiye.

The Ottoman Empire had gone. The Greek presence in Anatolia had largely gone with it. So too had the Armenian communities that had survived there for centuries.

But the story was not one of an ancient world simply disappearing beneath the flames. It was the much messier story of modern nationalism being born from the wreckage of empire.

And that is perhaps the more uncomfortable historical lesson. Empires can suppress national conflict without resolving it. When they collapse, the suppressed conflicts do not necessarily disappear. They can return in a more radical form, as competing peoples attempt to turn mixed imperial territories into national homelands. Borders are drawn; populations move; minorities become suspect; refugees become instruments of politics; and, in the worst circumstances, demographic homogenisation becomes a military objective.

The Ottoman Empire was not the only empire to discover this. The Habsburg, Romanov and German empires would suffer their own violent disintegration. Timothy Snyder’s later description of the lands between Germany and Russia as the “Bloodlands” has a broader resonance here. The territories left behind by the collapse of Europe’s great empires became some of the most violent political spaces of the twentieth century.

The Ottoman endgame was one of them. And it is still playing its echoes.

Izmir, May 2014

When we stood on the Izmir waterfront in 2014, there was little to suggest what had happened there ninety-two years earlier. The promenade was busy; the Aegean glittered beyond the harbour and modern İzmir was very much a Turkish city looking confidently towards its future. There was no visible boundary between the city that had been and the city that is.

Yet somewhere in the photographs I sent to our friend back home in Australia was a connection between those two worlds. His family’s roots lay in a city whose Greek population had once been large enough to constitute one of its defining communities. The people themselves had gone, their neighbourhoods transformed, their institutions dispersed, their descendants scattered across Greece and the wider diaspora. But the sea remained.

That is the strange persistence of history. People disappear; places survive. Names change, buildings are demolished, languages fall silent and populations are exchanged. Yet descendants carry fragments of the vanished world with them. Sometimes it is a family story, sometimes a photograph, sometimes a surname whose meaning has travelled further than its bearers ever imagined.

A Greek family descended from Smyrna and living in Sydney is itself a reminder of the untidy human geography of the Ottoman world. It tells us something that maps coloured in the clean shades of modern nation-states cannot: people moved, intermarried, converted, fled, were expelled and reinvented themselves. Their identities were rarely as tidy as the borders that eventually enclosed them.

The history of Smyrna is therefore not simply the story of one massacre or one burning city, terrible though those events were. It belongs to the much larger history of the collapse of empires and the rise of nationalism. The Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian genocide, the destruction and displacement of Assyrian and Greek communities, the Greek advance into Anatolia, the Turkish nationalist victory and the compulsory population exchange were different episodes, with different actors and circumstances. Together, however, they transformed the demographic and political landscape of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Ottoman Empire had not been a harmonious multicultural paradise, and its dissolution did not produce violence from nowhere. But its disappearance removed an imperial framework within which different communities had lived, however unequally, alongside one another. The national states that replaced it promised sovereignty and security. Too often they sought both by making their populations more homogeneous.

That is the uncomfortable lesson of the Ottoman endgame. The twentieth century did not simply replace old empires with neat national democracies. It also produced refugees, minorities without homelands, homelands without their former minorities, and borders drawn through landscapes inhabited for generations by people who had never imagined themselves foreigners.

And yet history is not entirely erased by political transformation.

The harbour is still there.

In 1922, people crowded along that waterfront desperate to escape across the same Aegean. In 2014, an Australian friend of Greek Smyrna ancestry received photographs of that same waterfront from another traveller, standing there in very different circumstances. Between those two moments lies a century of catastrophe, migration and memory.

Perhaps that is what the old phrase about history leaving fingerprints really means. The fingerprints are not always found in monuments or memorials. Sometimes they survive in a surname, a family story, a photograph sent from a distant city — or in the simple recognition that, although the people have gone, you are standing where they once stood.

Roots and fruits.

The empire is gone. The city has changed. The people have dispersed.

But the fingerprints remain.

© Paul Hemphill, August 2026.

The old and the new in modern Izmir, May 2014

Also, in In That Howling Infinite, The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye; Ottoman Redux – an alternative history; Sailing to Byzantium; The Watchers of the Water; Cha-cha-cha-changes; People watching in Sultanahmet; and on displacement, Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement

For more on the Middle East, see A Middle East Miscellany

The Great Unravelling – modern history is built on exodus and displacement 

Beside Strange Waters

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

The dark side of Roger Waters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript

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

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

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

Paul Hemphill, August 2026

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

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

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

June 18, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was the change in audience reaction really that extreme?

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

Israel is waiting for Roger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the failed experiment?

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

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

Field of wheat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flyers for the Roger Waters concert in Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

קהל אנשים צופים רוג'ר ווטרז ווטרס

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

No-show in Neve Shalom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aviv Geffen arrives by chopper

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

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

דיויד גילמור

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

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

“Both,” Porter says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth and love, lies and hate

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

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

Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical Atlases

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

General World History

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

Military, Political and European History

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

Archaeology and Exploration

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

Biblical History and Geography

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

5. Biblical Geography  – Evangelical Reference

  1. NIV Atlas of the Bible –  Zondervan / HarperCollins

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

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

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

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

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

“Corrupt on Earth” … Death in Sanandaj

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
WH Auden, The Shield of Achilles

Among the many phrases that echo through modern Iranian history, few are as chilling – or as elastic – as the charge of “corruption on Earth” (mofsed-e-filarz). Rooted in Islamic jurisprudence but broadened by revolutionary courts into a political instrument, it has served as one of the Islamic Republic’s most powerful and feared accusations.

It was among the charges levelled against the eleven Kurdish prisoners executed at Sanandaj Airport in August 1979, their deaths immortalised in Jahangir Razmi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. In the years that followed, the same accusation would be invoked against Kurdish activists, political dissidents, monarchists, communists, members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, protesters, and others deemed enemies of the revolutionary state. The charge’s very vagueness became its strength. To be declared “corrupt on Earth” was not merely to have broken a law; it was to be cast as a threat to the moral and political order itself.

Nearly half a century later, the phrase remains woven into the fabric of Iranian political life. It resurfaced during the prosecutions that followed the Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022–23, and again in the trials and executions that have followed subsequent unrest and acts of political violence, and particularly, in the wake of the demonstrations and subsequent massacres of January 2026 and the US-Israeli aerial assault the began a month later. Governments change their rhetoric, revolutions age, and generations pass, yet certain words endure. In Iran, “corruption on Earth” has become more than a legal charge. It is a window into how revolutionary states define legitimacy, identify enemies, and justify the use of ultimate power.

The story that follows is, in part, the story of that phrase – and of the people whose lives have been shaped, and often ended, by its invocation.

Iranian photographer Jahangir Razmi’s famous image, later known as “Firing Squad in Iran,” won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography. It remains the only Pulitzer awarded to an anonymous photographer. Razmi’s identity remained concealed for twenty-seven years before being publicly revealed in 2006 with his consent. The photograph endures as one of the defining visual records of the violence that accompanied the consolidation of the Islamic Republic.

The Revolution Devours Its Own

The Red–Green Alliance, Iranian Edition

In early June 1983, the Kurdish city of Mahabad awoke to grim news. Fifty-nine Kurdish prisoners had been executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Many were young. Some, according to Kurdish human-rights sources, were still school students. Their crime was not murder, terrorism or armed insurrection in any conventional sense. Their offence was opposition to the revolutionary order that had emerged from the upheavals of 1979.

Amnesty International later documented the executions as part of a wider campaign of repression that was sweeping across Iran. By then, the Islamic Republic had moved beyond the revolutionary euphoria of its founding years and into a phase familiar to students of revolutions throughout history: the consolidation of power. The idealism, pluralism and competing visions that had animated the overthrow of the Shah were being replaced by something far narrower and far less forgiving.

The executions in Mahabad were not an aberration. They were part of a pattern.

History offers many examples of revolutions that begin as broad coalitions and end as monopolies of power. The French Revolution consumed Girondins, Hébertists and Dantonists before eventually turning upon Robespierre himself. On the scaffold, Manon Roland is said to have exclaimed “O Liberté! O Liberté! que de crimes on commet en ton nom”. The Bolsheviks devoured Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and later their own Old Guard (see in In That Howling Infinite, Stalin’s Great Terror). Revolutions often unite disparate forces against a common enemy; once victory is achieved, the question becomes who will rule. At that point, yesterday’s allies can quickly become today’s enemies.

Iran followed a similar trajectory.

The revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979 brought together an unlikely alliance. Liberals sought constitutional government. Nationalists hoped for greater independence from foreign influence. Marxists and socialists imagined a future shaped by class struggle and social justice. Religious activists envisioned an Islamic state guided by clerical authority. What united these groups was opposition to the Shah, whose increasingly authoritarian rule, close alignment with the United States and powerful security apparatus had generated widespread resentment.

Yet while many revolutionary factions viewed the alliance as temporary, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers possessed something their rivals lacked: a coherent vision of power and an organisational structure capable of seizing it. The mosques provided a nationwide network. The clergy enjoyed enormous social legitimacy. Religious symbolism offered a language that resonated far beyond university campuses and political cells.

Many on the secular left underestimated this advantage.

For some Marxists, political Islam appeared less as an ideological rival than as a useful partner in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism. The Shah was seen as a pillar of Western influence in the Middle East; therefore, any force capable of helping to overthrow him could be accommodated. The expectation, explicit or implicit, was that once the revolution succeeded, history would proceed along more familiar revolutionary lines. The clerics would either moderate, share power or eventually be superseded.

Events unfolded differently.

By 1980, universities were being purged and “Islamised” during what became known as the Cultural Revolution. Liberal and nationalist opponents were marginalised. Independent centres of authority were systematically dismantled. The Tudeh Party, Iran’s principal communist organisation and one that had initially supported the new regime, was outlawed. Its leaders were arrested, imprisoned and in some cases executed. Former revolutionary allies appeared on television delivering forced confessions. Political prisons filled. Revolutionary courts handed down death sentences with alarming speed.

The process was not unique to the Iranian left. Kurdish movements that had sought autonomy found themselves facing military campaigns. Women’s organisations that had supported the revolution discovered that many of their aspirations were incompatible with the state’s vision of Islamic governance. Student activists, secular intellectuals and minority groups encountered similar realities. The coalition that had overthrown the Shah steadily narrowed until meaningful opposition became impossible.

The Kurdish experience was particularly harsh. In regions such as Mahabad, Sanandaj and other Kurdish centres, resistance to central authority was met with military force and mass arrests. The executions of June 1983 were one episode in a larger struggle between the Islamic Republic and Kurdish political movements. For the families involved, ideological debates about revolution and anti-imperialism mattered little. The reality was imprisonment, exile and death.

The broader lesson is not confined to Iran, nor is it simply a story about the mistakes of the political left. Rather, it is a warning about the dangers of defining political movements primarily by what they oppose rather than by what they seek to build.

Opposition to a monarchy did not tell Iranians what kind of state would emerge after the Shah. Opposition to Western influence did not answer questions about civil liberties, minority rights, women’s equality or democratic institutions. Those questions remained unresolved until power was won—and by then it was largely too late.

This is one reason why the history of the Iranian Revolution continues to resonate.

Across the political spectrum there remains a temptation to view movements through the lens of a single conflict. If a regime opposes one’s enemies, its internal character can seem less important. If it stands against a disliked power, its treatment of dissidents, minorities or political opponents may receive less scrutiny than it deserves. Such thinking is hardly confined to any one ideology. Throughout modern history, people of varying political persuasions have excused authoritarianism when it appeared to serve a larger strategic or ideological purpose.

Iran offers a cautionary example of where that logic can lead.

Many who helped create the revolution imagined themselves as partners in a broad project of national liberation. Some believed they could influence its direction. Others assumed that shared opposition to the Shah guaranteed a shared future. Instead, they discovered that revolutionary coalitions are often marriages of convenience rather than communities of principle.

The tragedy of Mahabad, and of countless similar episodes in revolutionary history, is that those who helped bring down one form of authoritarianism often found themselves confronting another.

The revolution had succeeded. Then it began to consume its own.

Every picture tells a story

The story of Jahangir Razmi’s photograph is worth including because it captures, in a single frame, the moment when revolutionary justice gave way to revolutionary terror.

On 27 August 1979, at Sanandaj Airport in Iranian Kurdistan, eleven prisoners—most of them Kurdish militants or activists—were brought before a revolutionary tribunal. The proceedings reportedly lasted little more than half an hour. The charges ranged from weapons trafficking and murder to inciting unrest against the new Islamic Republic. There was no meaningful due process, no opportunity for appeal and no delay between verdict and sentence. Convicted by the revolutionary court, the prisoners were taken directly to a dusty section of the airfield, blindfolded and lined up before a firing squad.

Jahangir Razmi, a young photographer working for the Iranian newspaper Ettela’at, was present. Managing to position himself slightly behind and to one side of the execution squad, he captured the exact instant the rifles fired. The resulting image is extraordinary and horrifying in equal measure. Some of the condemned are already collapsing; others remain momentarily upright, suspended between life and death. The executioners stand almost casually, performing what the revolution had already normalised as an administrative task. There is no drama in the cinematic sense. That is precisely what makes the photograph so unsettling. It records death not as a battlefield tragedy but as bureaucratic routine.

The image appeared in Ettela’at the following day without a photographer’s credit. The omission was deliberate. In the volatile atmosphere of post-revolutionary Iran, public association with such a photograph could have endangered Razmi’s life. The picture was subsequently distributed internationally through United Press International and quickly became one of the defining images of the revolution’s aftermath. In 1980 it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography—the only Pulitzer ever granted to an anonymous photographer.

For more than a quarter of a century, the identity of the man behind the lens remained a secret known only to a handful of people. It was not until 2006 that Wall Street Journal reporter Joshua Prager traced the photograph’s origins and revealed, with Razmi’s consent, the identity of the photographer who had captured one of the twentieth century’s most haunting images.

Placed alongside the executions in Mahabad four years later, the photograph acquires an even deeper significance. It was taken not at the end of the Islamic Republic’s consolidation of power but near its beginning. The victims at Sanandaj were among the first casualties of a revolutionary process that would soon expand far beyond Kurdish militants to encompass liberals, communists, students, women’s activists, ethnic minorities and former revolutionary allies. In retrospect, the image serves as an early warning. The firing squad at Sanandaj was not an isolated excess. It was one of the first visible signs that the revolution had begun to devour its own.

As photographs go, it possesses the rare quality of becoming more disturbing the longer one studies it. It is not merely a record of eleven deaths on a Kurdish airfield. It is a glimpse into a larger historical pattern: the moment when a revolution, having seized power, turns from overthrowing its enemies to eliminating its competitors. The rifles are aimed at eleven men, but the photograph foreshadows the fate of thousands who would follow. In that sense, Razmi captured not just an execution but a prophecy.

Firing Squad in Iran. Jahangir Ramzi’s Pulitzer winning photo, 1980.

Death in the camera’s eye

The photo reminds me of Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier (1936), the death of a republican soldier taken during the Spanish Civil War, and Eddie Adams’s photograph of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong prisoner on a during the1968; Offensive. [These pictures are not shown here so as not to detract from the immediacy and tragedy of Razmi’s photograph.

The comparison is a fascinating one because all three photographs have become shorthand for entire conflicts, yet each captures a very different relationship between photography, truth and death.

Robert Capa’s iconic photograph taken during the Spanish Civil War, purportedly shows the exact moment a Republican militiaman is struck by a bullet and collapses backwards. It became one of the most famous war photographs ever taken, embodying the courage and vulnerability of those fighting fascism. Yet for decades historians have debated whether the image was genuine, staged, or a reconstruction. The controversy has never been fully resolved. Ironically, the photograph’s power derives not only from what it may show, but from the uncertainty surrounding it. It sits on the uneasy border between journalism, art and myth.

Eddie Adams’s photograph of South Vietnamese General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street during the Tet Offensive in 1968 occupies the opposite end of the spectrum. There is no ambiguity about what happened. Adams captured the precise instant the bullet entered the prisoner’s head. The image is shocking because it is so immediate and undeniable. For millions of viewers, it crystallised the brutality of the Vietnam War. Yet Adams himself later lamented that the photograph reduced a complicated human story to a single frozen moment. The prisoner had allegedly participated in killings during the offensive; the general spent the rest of his life defined by one fraction of a second. “The general killed the Viet Cong,” Adams later wrote, “I killed the general with my camera.”

Jahangir Razmi’s photograph from Sanandaj belongs in the same company. Like Adams’s image, it records an actual execution rather than a symbolic representation of one. Like Capa’s photograph, it came to symbolise an entire conflict and a wider historical struggle. Yet there is something uniquely unsettling about Razmi’s image. Adams shows a single victim and a single executioner. Razmi shows eleven condemned men and a firing squad acting in concert. The killing is not spontaneous or personal. It is institutional. The state itself is pulling the trigger.

Viewed together, the three photographs almost form a visual history of modern political violence. Capa’s image represents the romantic age of ideological struggle, when young men went off to fight for causes larger than themselves. Adams’s photograph captures the moral chaos of Cold War counterinsurgency, where certainty dissolves into horror. Razmi’s image depicts something colder still: the machinery of revolutionary justice transforming human beings into categories—“counter-revolutionary,” “enemy of God,” “corrupt on Earth”—before extinguishing them.

All three photographs freeze the instant between life and death. But they also remind us of something else. Photographs rarely explain. They reveal, they shock, they haunt—but they do not provide context. Capa’s militiaman may or may not have been dying. Adams’s prisoner and general carried histories invisible to the camera lens. Razmi’s eleven Kurds had been reduced by the revolutionary court to a handful of accusations and a death sentence. The photograph records their end, but not the complexity of their lives.

And perhaps that is why such images endure. They force us to confront history in its most compressed form: a single irreversible moment, laden with all the arguments, ideologies, hopes and hatreds that brought it into being. The photograph captures the second. Understanding the story behind it can take a lifetime.

In That Howling Infinite, June 2026

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

A Chilling Photograph’s Hidden History

Twenty-six years ago, a picture of an execution in Iran won the Pulitzer Prize. But the man who took it remained anonymous. Until now.

December 6, 2006, The Wall Street Journal

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TEHRAN — On Aug. 27, 1979, two parallel lines of 11 men formed on a field of dry dirt in Sanandaj, Iran. One group wore blindfolds. The other held rifles. The command came in Farsi to fire: “Atesh!” Behind the soldier farthest to the right, a 12th man also shot, his Nikon camera and Kodak film preserving in black and white a mass execution.

Within hours, the photo ran across six columns in Ettela’at, the oldest newspaper in Iran. Within days, it appeared on front pages around the world. Within weeks, the new Iranian government annexed the offending paper. Within months, the photo won the Pulitzer Prize.

Taken seven months after Islamic radicals overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah, the photo remains one of the most famous images of Iran. It is an icon of government terror, invoked in critiques of the regime from the 1979 poem “Screaming,” to the 1986 music video “Speak To Me From My Land, Iran” to the 1997 book “Kurdistan.” Davood and Davar Ghassemlouie, brothers who operate a photo shop in Los Angeles, say they have made tens of thousands of reprints for demonstrators, including 200 in late September when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the U.S.

Says Shahrokh Hatami, a pioneer of Iranian photojournalism: “It is the most revealing photograph of the beginning of the Iranian revolution.”

Ettela’at, however, didn’t print the photographer’s name, fearing his safety. The Pulitzer was officially awarded to “an unnamed photographer of United Press International,” the news service that distributed the photo in the U.S. It remains the only time the award has ever been given to an anonymous recipient.

In the years since, several people have falsely claimed to be “Anonymous.” When Iran’s most famous photographer died in 2003, his obituaries were filled with mentions of a Pulitzer some say he had insinuated winning. Last September, another prominent Iranian photographer living in France was quoted in Paris Match magazine claiming credit for the work.

In fact, nearly three decades after the epochal photograph first appeared, almost no one knows who took it.

Jahangir Razmi grew up in the industrial city of Arak, in central Iran, the first child of a housewife and military clerk. Governed by the Shah, the nation was at peace. The boy was shy and happiest in a local photo shop helping a cousin develop film and shoot portraits of brides and soldiers. In 1960, at the age of 12, he bought a Russian Lubitel-2 camera.

He quickly put it to use. When one day a boy shot a girl dead outside his studio, a reporter urged Jahangir to photograph the scene. He did, the skirt and shirt of a bloodied school uniform preserved in the newsprint of Ettela’at.

When his father died, Mr. Razmi says he found work in a Tehran photo shop. When he served in the army, he found reprieve from military drills in a darkroom on base. When he photographed a 20th birthday party, he found a wife. And when Ettela’at — Farsi for “Information” — hired him in 1973 to shoot breaking news, he found a career.

“Although we were colleagues and there was a competition, his pictures were better,” says Jafar Danyeli, then one of seven staff photographers. Razmi, as everyone called him, paid attention to composition and chiaroscuro, the interplay of light and shadow. He sat at the desk closest to the stairwell. “I was always the volunteer to go,” says Mr. Razmi, then 25. “I was quick. I was young. I was braver than anyone else.”

On Jan. 16, 1979, the Shah fled Iran following mass demonstrations protesting his rule. Sixteen days later, Ayatollah Khomeini, a radical Islamic cleric, returned from France and seized control. Mr. Razmi photographed Mr. Khomeini in his Qom headquarters so regularly that he came to greet the imam with a handshake. Using his favorite Nikon lens, a 28mm wide-angle lens with automatic exposure, Mr. Razmi chronicled the conversion of Iran to theocracy from autocracy.

By August, about 500 alleged counter-revolutionaries and officials of the former regime had been executed. The judiciary decreed it illegal to criticize Islam and Iran’s spiritual leaders. A holding company formed by the regime appropriated Kayhan, the only newspaper in Iran larger than Ettela’at. Journalists who pushed back at censorship under the Shah were petrified.

“Under Khomeini they would kill you,” says Amir Taheri, then editor of Kayhan and now a political analyst living in England. “It was a different ballgame.”

On Aug. 16, Mr. Khomeini called on Iranian troops to suppress restive Kurds hoping for autonomy. Thousands of soldiers headed 300 miles northwest to the Iranian province of Kurdistan. Mr. Razmi and Khalil Bahrami, an Ettela’at reporter, followed.

Ten days later, Mr. Bahrami received a tip that a judge he had befriended was set to try Kurds in an antechamber of the municipal airport at Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan. The reporter, then 37, had worked at Ettela’at for 22 years and was thankful he was paired with the young Mr. Razmi, whose father had lived in Sanandaj and had raised his son to admire the Kurds and their traditions. “He knew his responsibility,” says Mr. Bahrami, who lives in Iran and is retired. “And he was quicker than the others.”

At the airport, Mr. Razmi stood ready outside the makeshift courtroom as 10 handcuffed men filled a wooden bench before the judge, a black-bearded Shiite cleric named Sadegh Khalkhali. An injured 11th prisoner lay on a stretcher beside the door.

The judge removed his turban, Mr. Bahrami recalls. He removed his shoes. He put his feet on a chair. Scanning the prisoners through thick eyeglasses, he asked their names. Officers of the court told of the defendants’ alleged crimes — of trafficking arms, inciting riots and murder. The prisoners, some with leftward or nationalist leanings, denied the accusations.

No evidence was presented, Mr. Bahrami says. “It was pure speculation.” After roughly 30 minutes, Mr. Khalkhali declared the 11 men “corrupt on earth” — mofsedin fel arz — the Koranic phrase he cited before issuing a sentence of death. A few of the men cried.

Mr. Bahrami summoned his colleague Mr. Razmi. “It was Razmi’s luck that day that he was with me,” the reporter says.

Mr. Razmi withdrew from his green canvas shoulder bag a 35-80mm lens and attached the zoom to his Nikon FE. The handcuffed men were blindfolded. Each put his hand on the shoulder of the man before him and together they walked single-file through the airport’s concrete lobby, through a metal doorframe and toward an open airfield. Mr. Razmi darted ahead and shot, untroubled by security forces: “I was totally free,” he says. Unbeknownst to Mr. Razmi, a soldier present also was taking pictures, which were never published.

The caravan passed roughly 30 airport workers, both men say. Up front walked Mr. Razmi. In the rear, both men say, was Ali Karimi, one of the judge’s bodyguards, wearing white shoes, white pants, white shirt, sunglasses and twin hip holsters. After about 100 yards, an officer halted the condemned on a plain of dry dirt. All but one of the executioners tied about their own heads Iranian shawls called chafiyehs. Both the faces of the Shiites and the eyes of the Kurds were now concealed.

Mr. Karimi asked the prisoners if they had last words, the two journalists recall. The men didn’t, all silent save a man Mr. Bahrami later reported to be Essa Pirvali, who wept aloud. A sandwich maker, he belonged to no political party but possessed a handgun and had been accused of murder. “He was scared,” Mr. Razmi says. “He wouldn’t stand.” The soldiers instructed a fellow prisoner to hold him.

An afternoon sun shone behind the prisoners and Mr. Razmi reached for his 28mm lens. He sidled in behind members of the firing squad, who stood in brown leather boots laced to the calf. He thought, he says, only about “speed and angle.” The prisoners stood in plainclothes. The firing squad crouched in camouflage.

“Afrad mosallah!,” yelled the commanding officer, calling his troops to attention. His charges aimed their G3 rifles at the midsections of the men standing little more than a body’s length away.

Standing farthest to the right, Naser Salimi, an employee of the Sanandaj health department, raised his right hand to his chest. It was bandaged, injured in a street fight that had led to his sentencing, according to contemporary newspaper reports. Opposite him, the only soldier who wore no chafiyeh raised his rifle.

Mr. Razmi stood a few feet behind this unmasked gunman. He raised his camera. At 4:30 p.m., the command came to fire: “Atesh!” Eleven guns discharged. Eleven bodies dropped. “When they fell, it was dusty,” Mr. Razmi says. The photographer lowered his camera.

The soldiers eyed Mr. Karimi, the judge’s bodyguard, lifting a pistol off his right hip. Not all of the men were dead, the photographer recalls. The bodyguard leaned over Ahsan Nahid, the injured prisoner on the stretcher, and fired one bullet into his head. Mr. Razmi snapped his Nikon. Mr. Karimi stepped to the next man and shot him, too. He proceeded along — one bullet per body, both journalists say. (Recent efforts to locate Mr. Karimi were unsuccessful.)

WITHIN MINUTES, ambulances ferried away the 11 bodies, airport workers returned to work, the huddle of soldiers thinned and Mr. Razmi stowed his two rolls of Kodak 400 film in a pocket of his canvas bag. After a helicopter flight landed the pair too late to cover a second execution, Mr. Razmi left his colleague, flagged a passing minibus and returned to the airport in Sanandaj, where at 8 a.m. the only daily flight to Tehran departed.

The photographer fell asleep. He was awakened at a checkpoint by shouts from airport officers, the same men who had shared their lunch with him the previous afternoon as they awaited the Kurdish prisoners. “It’s me!” yelled Mr. Razmi. “Jahangir!” The men held their fire. Mr. Razmi told them he had film and an article that had to get back to Tehran. “I put it in an envelope and gave it to the flight attendant,” he says, needing to continue his work in the region.

Mr. Razmi called Ettela’at, which dispatched a courier to the airport. The man picked up the white envelope from Tehran airport and delivered it to the newspaper. Ali Akbar Moradi, head of the paper’s darkroom, says he knew the 70 exposures were taken by Mr. Razmi and that he turned them into two contact sheets with the help of a technician. An office runner gave them to the photo editor, the late Fereydoun Ebrahimzadeh, who marked the frames he wished turned into prints and delivered them to Mohammed Heydari, the chief Ettela’at editor, Mr. Heydari says.

Mr. Heydari was examining the layout of that day’s front page and flipped through the stills. At about noon, he says, he stopped, overwhelmed by a single image of the moment when some of the squadron had fired and some hadn’t. Bodies fell. Dust rose.

Mr. Heydari, then 35, had little time to think — the afternoon paper was about to go to print. He says he told himself that the country was conflicted over the killing of the Kurds and angry over censorship. He decided to publish the photograph, although not in the edition distributed in the Kurdistan province, where it would be tantamount to a call to arms. “Considering the political climate, I knew I could get away with it,” Mr. Heydari says.

The Ettela’at editor made another snap decision. The photograph would run with no credit. “I was aware that if I published his name, he would be in danger,” Mr. Heydari says. “I wanted to protect Razmi.”

By 2 p.m., newsstands across Tehran trumpeted word of the Kurdish executions. The banner headline read: “Forty People Executed in Sanandaj, Marivan and Saqqez.” The accompanying photograph was a sensation, the seven months of Iranian firing squads distilled to one image.

Copies of Ettela’at sold out and representatives of international news agencies hustled to Khayam Street to buy prints. The photo editor, Mr. Ebrahimzadeh, “sold it to everyone like he was selling French fries,” says Alfred Yaghobzadeh, 47, then a photographer for the Associated Press, now a photojournalist based in France.

The first to arrive at Ettela’at was Sajid Rizvi of United Press International. Mr. Rizvi, then 30, had seen the newspaper at his home, ordered a copy by phone and sped off in the company’s pistachio-colored sedan. He picked up the photo roughly 15 minutes later inside the Ettela’at newsroom.

“It was almost wet when I took it,” says Mr. Rizvi, now editor of an arts publishing house in London. “I don’t think I have ever seen a picture as moving as that,” he says. “It is a picture between life and death.”

Mr. Rizvi asked who had snapped it. “They said, ‘better not to give out the name of the photographer.’ ” Once home, he walked into the bathroom he had converted into a darkroom, dried the photo with a hairdryer, composed a caption on his yellow Olympus typewriter, phoned the UPI desk in Brussels and transmitted the print.

Genghis Seren, a photo editor in Brussels, sat transfixed beside the company UniFax. “The drama of that machine was that the picture took 15 minutes to complete,” recalls Mr. Seren, then 25 years old and in his first year at UPI. “It came a 10th of an inch after a 10th of an inch…. It was something!” Mr. Seren forwarded the photo to UPI bureaus in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and to company headquarters in Manhattan.

“It was transmitted to us with no name,” says Larry DeSantis, the UPI managing editor who received the photo 11 stories above 42nd Street. “Not knowing who made it interested me.”

At about 3 p.m., several armed agents from the Islamic Revolutionary Council arrived at Ettela’at, ascended four flights and entered the office of the editor, Mr. Heydari. They asked for the negative of the photo and asked to speak with the photo editor, Mr. Heydari recalls.

Mr. Heydari refused. “I said, ‘No. I am the editor. I take full responsibility.’ ” Mr. Heydari says he told the men: “If I am arrested, the negative consequences will outweigh the effect of this photo.”

The chief agent backed off. Both men telephoned government and religious officials, and the judge who ordered the executions radioed the agent seated beside Mr. Heydari, the editor says.

Mr. Khalkhali, the judge, declared the photo a fabrication and told the agent to arrest the editor, Mr. Heydari says. He says he responded by offering to show the negatives to the agent “as long as you agree not to use force to confiscate them.”

The agent agreed and viewed the negatives with two fellow officials. “They were astonished,” recalls Mr. Heydari. The agent made another call and told Iran’s attorney general that “the newspaper has been considerate to only publish this one,” Mr. Heydari remembers. The agents left with one proviso: Upon their return from Kurdistan, Messrs. Bahrami and Razmi should come in for questioning.

THAT SAME DAY, Mr. DeSantis, the UPI editor, had prints of the photo distributed by motorcycle to the New York papers and by telephoto machine to thousands of papers across the country. On Aug. 29, the New York Times, Washington Post, Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin and the Daily Telegraph in London were among the many newspapers to run it. Nearly all credited UPI.

“Our play was fabulous,” exults Mr. DeSantis, now retired. “It was a once in a lifetime…. Like it was a movie set. One guy kneeling, aiming. One guy falling. A mass execution.”

Mr. Razmi remained in Kurdistan, where at a Sanandaj newsstand he came across a copy of Ettela’at featuring one of his other photos showing the blindfolded men standing in wait. He understood why his more incendiary photographs were unprinted but nonetheless was disappointed. “I expected my name to be published,” he says.

Two days later, reporter and photographer returned to the Ettela’at office in Sanandaj. The office manager lifted from his desk the Tehran edition of the paper that had reported the execution, they recall. He said copies brought to Kurdistan were selling for more than double the cover price. The manager was a Kurd and Mr. Razmi recalls him saying: ” ‘We have to build a statue of gold of you.’ And because of what he told me, I understood that this photo was dangerous.”

Close readers of Ettela’at could have surmised Mr. Razmi was the photographer. On Aug. 26, the day before the execution, the newspaper named him as one of three employees it had sent “to the Western portion of the country.” An Aug. 29, the day after the photo ran, the paper reported on its front page that he and Mr. Bahrami had been “sent to Kurdistan.”

Home in Tehran, after a long shower, Mr. Razmi spoke about the execution to his wife and again the next morning to curious colleagues in the newsroom. He says he asked Mr. Heydari why his photo had carried no credit and didn’t object when the editor explained his worry. “I told him jokingly that you would have also been executed in Kurdistan on the spot,” Mr. Heydari says.

Mr. Razmi walked to the newspaper darkroom and saw for the first time what had been the 18th exposure of his first roll of film. “There I realized what I had taken,” he says. Turning on the red safelights in the studio, the photographer made prints of eight stills and preserved on a contact sheet 27 of his 70 photographs.

Mr. Razmi asked the darkroom supervisor for his negatives and locked them in the middle of his three metal drawers together with his other prints. A few days later, he slipped the contact sheet and stills into the fold of a newspaper and hid them in his home, “somewhere no one would have noticed,” he says. The next morning, he returned to Kurdistan.

On Sept. 9, the Islamic Revolutionary Council published a notice in the Islamic Revolution newspaper: “we hereby draw your attention to the picture which was published on the front page of [Ettela’at] on 6/6/1358 and was objected to harshly by the public.” It continued: “If this occurs again, serious decisions will be made.”

A serious decision already had been made. The day before, the Foundation for the Disinherited — the holding company that in August had swallowed Kayhan, Iran’s largest paper — also seized Ettela’at. Overnight, the paper, privately held since 1920, became state-owned.

The image continued to spread. Reza Deghati, then 27, a free-lance Iranian photographer, had seen the photo. It is “the most stirring execution picture in the history of photojournalism, of the human being,” he says. Mr. Deghati says he procured five additional photos of the execution from an Ettela’at employee and mailed them to SIPA, the Paris agency that had been publishing his own photos since the revolution.

Goksin Sipahioglu says he received the prints from Mr. Deghati at his agency on Paris’s Rue Roquepine. Even though UPI had already published one, Michele Sola, photo editor of Paris Match magazine, paid 14,000 French francs (about $10,000 today) for the additional prints. Mr. Sipahioglu forwarded half that sum to Mr. Deghati in Tehran.

The magazine went on sale in Paris days before its Sept. 21, 1979, cover date. About 2,600 miles east, readers in Iran turned to page 66. Titled “Les Kurdes, sous les balles d’Allah” (“The Kurds, under Allah’s bullets”), the photos spread rapidly. People paid 20 times the cover price for the magazine, and dozens of Iranians tacked the photos about town.

No one, however, neither Mr. Razmi nor the Iranian brain trust, seemed to notice the magazine’s erroneous credit — “Reza (Sipa)” — printed in the lower left corner of the index page. “When someone sends a picture to us,” explains Mr. Sipahioglu, “we always credit him.”

Mr. Deghati says he sent SIPA a letter saying he didn’t take the photos and that SIPA sent out a news release via the AP retracting his name. Representatives at SIPA, Paris Match and the AP don’t recall Mr. Deghati clarifying the matter and didn’t find such a release in their archives.

Mr. Razmi returned from Kurdistan in late September and Mr. Ebrahimzadeh approached him at his desk. The photo editor asked for the negatives of the 70 photos and extended his hand. “I couldn’t protest,” Mr. Razmi says. “It belonged to him.” He unlocked his metal drawer. Mr. Ebrahimzadeh told the photographer the police wished to speak to him in Tehran’s Evin prison, Mr. Razmi recalls.

Mr. Razmi says he arrived at the prison with Mr. Bahrami and two Ettela’at editors, and quickly found himself alone with the late Asadollah Lajevardi, a future warden of the prison already notorious for torturing inmates. As part of his newspaper duties, Mr. Razmi had often photographed men housed in Evin whom the state would soon execute. “I had a right to be nervous,” he says.

Mr. Lajevardi asked him who had photographed the Sanandaj execution, Mr. Razmi says. When Mr. Razmi said he had, the guard asked why he had hidden his negatives in the drawer. “So that no one would take them,” Mr. Razmi recalls answering.

He told Mr. Lajevardi that he had permission from the judge to shoot the scene and that he hadn’t sent the pictures overseas. The interrogation was soft, and it became apparent to Mr. Razmi that he wouldn’t be harmed. Mr. Razmi returned to the paper, and a few weeks later was consumed with work when, on Nov. 4, Iranian students took hostages inside the U.S. Embassy.

The next month, UPI managing editor Mr. DeSantis sat down to submit his newswire’s best work of the year for awards. At the top of his list was the execution photo. “I was a very good picture editor,” Mr. DeSantis says, “but on this one you could be a dumb dog and pick this out.”

That neither he nor anyone at UPI knew who took the photo was of little concern. The agency had been the first to provide it to the press and presented it as the work of an unnamed UPI photographer, which, says Mr. DeSantis, he assumed it was. “It came on the UPI wire,” he explains.

“Because of the present unrest in Iran,” wrote the editor to the Pulitzer committee, “the name of the photographer cannot be revealed at this time.”

Mr. Razmi didn’t know his photograph had been nominated for the Pulitzer. He didn’t know the jury nominating finalists for Spot News Photography was overwhelmed by the entry UPI titled, “Firing Squad in Iran.” Robert Duffy, then an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and chairman of the jury, says he informally lobbied a member of the Pulitzer Board that spring to pick the photo. “We were hell-bent on giving the prize to ‘Anonymous,’ ” he says.

On April 14, 1980, seven days after the U.S. severed diplomatic relations with Iran, ‘Anonymous’ won the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Heydari told Mr. Razmi the news. But the same people who, in effect, had ordered the execution now owned his employer. Mr. Heydari says he was fired two months later. Representatives of the paper cancelled an August 2005 appointment at their Tehran head office and declined to be interviewed for this article.

Ettela’at didn’t report news of its prize-winning employee. Mr. Razmi says he “didn’t have the guts to celebrate.”

UPI did. The newswire flew its Tehran bureau chief Mr. Rizvi to the U.S. and had him speak to subscribers. “They were trying to show me off,” he says. Asked about the anonymous photographer, Mr. Rizvi recalls answering: “Eventually it will be revealed.”

IN THE SPRING, Ettela’at promoted Mr. Razmi, then 32, to photo editor. Iraq attacked Iran in September and Mr. Razmi covered the war. A mortar deafened his right ear in 1987. When months later Ettela’at asked him to work in Iraq, he decided he was tired of war. He quit his employer of 15 years, sold the home he had built by himself in a leafy neighborhood of northern Tehran, bought an apartment and opened a photography studio.

Forty years old, the photographer had come full circle, developing film and shooting portraits as he had as a boy. Says Mr. Razmi: “I was looking for a peaceful life.”

Mr. Razmi called the studio “Abgineh,” the Farsi word for glassware, which he says connoted for him the clarity of water. He didn’t advertise the studio. Still, six days a week, brides in gowns flocked to the shop, looked at Mr. Razmi and smiled.

Mr. Razmi thought often of Sanandaj. In his shop, he hung a large portrait of a boy wearing a Kurdish shawl and sash. Every summer, during the month of Shahrivar, he locked himself in his bedroom and looked at the execution photographs he had hidden.

On Aug. 3, 1997, three weeks before Shahrivar, Mohammad Khatami took office as president of Iran and hired Hashem Taleb to head his public relations. Mr. Razmi had met Mr. Taleb years before and saw a business opportunity. He drove to the office of the president, pronounced the headshots of Iranian officials unbefitting their rank and “suggested I take photographs of the president and the cabinet,” he recalls. Mr. Taleb hired him.

Days later, Mr. Razmi, the first “Official Photographer of the President and his Cabinet,” set up his flash umbrellas inside the Iranian presidential residence at the intersection of Palestine and Pasteur streets. He shot pictures of the new government. He developed the color portraits. Before mailing the prints to the president’s office, he stamped his name on the back of each.

The name Jahangir Razmi, however, remained unconnected to his most famous photograph. Monir Nahid, mother of two of the executed men, who has since settled in Los Angeles, says over time, “10, 20 people came to me and said, ‘I took the picture.’ ”

Among them, say Mrs. Nahid and her daughter, was Mr. Deghati, the stringer who in 1979 sent the photo to Paris Match. Mr. Deghati, who left Iran in 1981 and today lives in France working for Webistan Photo Agency, says he has never met the Nahids. Last September, Paris Match magazine quoted him saying he took the photo, adding in French that Mr. Khomeini “was furious.” Mr. Deghati says he knows Mr. Razmi took the photo, and that the magazine misquoted him.

Mr. Razmi says he first learned about a decade ago that others were claiming his work. Kaveh Golestan, Iran’s best-known photographer, reported to him that Mr. Deghati had said as much at a European photo exhibit. Mr. Razmi didn’t know that Mr. Golestan also had taken credit for the photo in classes he taught, according to several of his photojournalism students at Tehran University.

When Mr. Golestan died in 2003, after stepping on a landmine in Iraq, newspapers around the world reported that he had won a Pulitzer Prize. His widow, Hengameh Golestan, says her late husband never took credit for the photo and that the obituaries were mistaken. Mrs. Golestan says she knows Mr. Razmi took the photo.

On the fourth floor of a cement apartment building in northern Tehran, Mr. Razmi sat on a dimpled leather couch. His living room walls were barren of his work. Beside him on his couch, his son Ali sat rapt, tamping down a pinch of Cavendish tobacco in his father’s pipe. Mr. Razmi struck a match and puffed.

“My sons have told me a lot of times that I should go and prove that I am the photographer,” Mr. Razmi said, his voice soft and his eyes cast down. “I said, ‘No. Better not.’ ”

It is understandable why he feared claiming credit for such a public indictment of the Islamic Revolution. The hardline Mr. Ahmadinejad, elected in June 2005, shuttered Shargh, the country’s last large reformist newspaper, three months ago. Mr. Razmi also was still the official government photographer and returned the next morning to the presidential residence to shoot Mr. Ahmadinejad’s cabinet, including the defense minister who in 1979 helped quell the Kurds.

But Mr. Razmi, who is now 58, said part of him always wanted to step forward. He was disappointed when he first saw that his photo didn’t carry his name. He was irked when others took credit, people who “never feel the danger,” he said. And all the time, he was weighted by his secret, that of an ordinary man witness to extraordinary events. “Without this picture,” he said, “I wouldn’t be anything.”

Emboldened by time and dismayed by the opportunism of his fellow photographers, Mr. Razmi decided the moment was right to tell his tale after this newspaper approached him. “My name should be there,” he said.

Minced lamb and baghali polo — a dish of green rice and beans — awaited Mr. Razmi at home, and he sat down to eat with his wife and sons, his sister, two nephews and his father-in-law. They talked about Mr. Razmi identifying himself, for the first time, as the anonymous photographer.

Mr. Razmi had done nothing wrong, they reasoned. He photographed the execution with the permission of the judge. He turned over his negatives to the photo editor. He described his work to the prison guard. He wasn’t the one who sent the six images abroad. He didn’t earn a single rial or credit from his photo, the rights to which had passed from UPI to the Bettmann Archive to Corbis Corp.

The family approved of his decision to come forward. Voicing hope that it wouldn’t harm Mr. Razmi, eight people around the table spoke as one: “Inshallah,” if Allah wills it.

Past midnight, Mr. Razmi retreated to a bedroom closet and lifted his canvas camera bag by the faded strap that had hung over his shoulder during the 1979 revolution. Here in pale black ink on the inside flap of a pocket was written in Farsi, “Jahangir Razmi, Ettela’at, 328 331” — the newsroom number to phone in the event of his death.

Mr. Razmi returned to his living room. He had unearthed his contact sheet and stills for his annual look back at the execution. “I have pictures that have never been published,” he said.

The photographer held in his right hand a sheaf of black-and-white photographs, 27 images that were 26 years, five days old. He withdrew from a plastic sleeve a furling photo of the sandwich maker who cried as he waited to be shot.

Mr. Razmi thrust it forward. “Who has this picture?” he asked, his voice rising. “Nobody.” He thrust forward a photo of the dust that rose over 11 fallen men. “Who has this picture?” he asked. “Nobody.” He thrust forward a photo of the bodyguard surveying the men he had shot. “Who has this picture?” he asked. “Nobody.”

Mr. Razmi returned the photos to the sleeve that had held them since 1979. And for the first time since he had secreted them home in a folded newspaper, he put them in a Samsonite briefcase he had long used to store chosen photos from his career.

Says Mr. Razmi: “There’s no more reason to hide.”

Copyright © 2006 The Wall Street Journal. All Rights Reserved

The Great Unravelling – modern history is built on exodus and displacement 

GalleryPaul Hemphill 2 Comments

And who will live in the house after us, my father?
The house, my son, will remain as it was!
Why did you leave the horse alone?
To keep the house company, my son.
When their residents go, the houses will die.
Together we will hold on
until we return.
When, my father?
Tomorrow, my son, and perhaps in another day or two!
That tomorrow trailed behind them, chewing the wind
in the endless winter nights.
Mahmoud Darwish

Two years ago, in an essay in In That Howling Infinite published entitled Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement we wrote: “The term ethnic cleansing is elusive and politically charged. In an age of endemic conflict, identity politics and competing narratives, it has become a contested and often diluted concept invoked with increasing frequency. Yet, it remains undefined in law. Unlike genocide or war crimes, it has never been codified as a distinct offence under international law, and so its use is contested.”

Henry Ergas’s essay begins from a premise that is not wrong in itself: the Palestinian Nakba did not occur in isolation from the twentieth century’s wider history of mass displacement. Modernity proved remarkably adept at producing refugees. The collapse of empires, the rise of nation-states, world wars, partitions and revolutions uprooted tens of millions of people. Greeks and Turks, Armenians, Germans, Poles, Indians and Pakistanis, Jews from Arab lands, and many others found themselves swept into movements of population that often combined violence, dispossession and the attempt to create more homogeneous states.

This broader historical context matters because contemporary discussion of Israel–Palestine often proceeds as though 1948 emerged from a vacuum. It did not. The creation of Israel, the Palestinian exodus, and the simultaneous flight and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries all unfolded in a world where population transfer – while morally disturbing to modern sensibilities – was often treated by governments as regrettable but practical statecraft.

Yet Ergas then moves beyond historical context into a stronger argument: that the Palestinians constitute a unique exception because their refugee status became institutionalised rather than resolved. Here too there is a substantial point beneath the rhetoric. Unlike most post-war refugee populations, Palestinian refugee status passed across generations through UNRWA rather than being handled under the broader UNHCR framework. The expectation of return became central to Palestinian national identity and politics. The refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and elsewhere became not simply humanitarian spaces but political spaces.

But this is where the argument narrows and history becomes more selective.

The essay tends to compress a complex chain of causes into a single line of responsibility. The 1948 refugee crisis did not arise simply because Arab leaders invaded and then refused to absorb the consequences. As discussed previously, historians describe a more tangled picture: military collapse, fear, local expulsions, battlefield conditions, psychological warfare, direct expulsions in some areas, and decisions by Arab authorities all played roles that varied from place to place.

Nor does the proposition that Arab states “created” the refugee crisis command broad historical consensus. What is more broadly accepted is that many Arab states subsequently chose policies that preserved refugee distinctiveness rather than encouraging full integration, often because permanent absorption was seen as abandoning claims of return or acquiescing in Israel’s legitimacy.

There is also a danger in drawing too neat a lesson from other twentieth-century displacements. Many of those “successful” examples came after immense suffering and often under conditions we would now regard as profoundly unjust. The Greek–Turkish exchange, the expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe, and Partition in India all left deep scars that continue to shape politics generations later. Stability eventually emerged, but stability and justice are not identical things.

This recalls themes from that earlier essay of ours. There,  the argument was not that ethnic cleansing or forced population movements are unique, nor that Israel–Palestine should be detached from wider historical patterns. Rather, the point was almost the opposite: modern history itself appears built on recurring acts of uprooting and demographic engineering. Michael Mann called this “the dark side of democracy”: the tendency of modern states toward homogeneity, where political belonging becomes increasingly tied to identity.

The distinction matters because Ergas implicitly suggests that history eventually tidies itself up – that refugees are absorbed, wounds heal, and life moves on, except in the Palestinian case. The historical record appears less orderly. Displacement rarely disappears; it becomes memory, and memory becomes politics.

The Armenian diaspora still carries the memory of 1915. Partition remains embedded in Indian and Pakistani consciousness. The descendants of expelled Germans preserved memory of lost homelands for decades. Jewish memory of exile persisted for two millennia and became central to Zionism itself. Human beings have shown little inclination simply to reconcile themselves to history and forget.

Which brings us back to a previous discussion about stories and belonging in our Blue remembered hills (2) – the history we hold within us – Tolkien’s sub-creation, Scruton’s observations on home, Tyrion Lannister’s line that “there is nothing more powerful than a good story.” Nations are, among other things, stories people tell about themselves. Refugees do not merely lose houses or land; they lose continuity – the narrative linking memory, place and identity.

Palestinians constructed such a narrative around the Nakba. Israelis constructed one around return after exile and persecution. Both narratives contain truths; both contain mythologies; both can harden into absolutes.

That perhaps is the deeper tragedy. The problem was never simply refugee camps or UN agencies or demographic statistics. It was that two peoples built foundational stories around dispossession and return in the same small strip of land – your earlier “TARDIS nation”: a place physically tiny but historically and emotionally vast, where centuries of memory somehow occupy the same ground at the same time.

The twentieth century produced many displaced peoples. Most eventually found states, borders or political settlements that transformed exile into citizenship. Palestinians remain suspended between memory and statehood, between return and permanence. Whether this makes their situation unique is debatable. That it makes it unusually enduring is harder to deny.

The unravelling, then, may not be the Nakba itself, nor UNRWA, nor even 1948. It may be the wider unraveling of an older assumption: that history’s brutal rearrangements eventually settle into stable endings. History has shown a disconcerting habit of reopening what people believed was closed. And memory, unlike borders, seldom remains where states draw the lines.

What about ‘Whataboutism’?

When one widens the frame as we have dine here, an accusation appears sooner or later, often delivered with a certain weary certainty: whataboutism. The implication is not merely that one has made a weak argument but that one has committed a kind of moral sleight of hand- that by widening the frame one is really narrowing the conscience; that by speaking of Greeks and Armenians, Germans and Jews, Indians and Pakistanis, Bosnians and Rohingya, one is attempting to diminish Palestinians by dissolving them into statistics.

The charge deserves attention because there is such a thing as genuine whataboutism. The old Soviet formulation – and what about your own crimes? – was never an attempt at understanding. It was an escape hatch, a manoeuvre for changing the subject rather than addressing it. One suffering became a shield against discussing another. The object was evasion.

But comparison and evasion are not the same thing.

History itself is an exercise in comparison. Historians are forever placing one event beside another, not because they believe suffering can be ranked on some grotesque league table of misery, but because isolated events often become clearer when seen against a wider landscape. The Nakba did not occur on another planet. It unfolded amid a twentieth century that seemed to possess a grim talent for uprooting people from ancestral homes and redistributing them across maps with ruler-straight borders and bureaucratic efficiency. The century moved populations around with astonishing confidence, as though nations were puzzles whose pieces merely needed rearranging.

To note this is not to say that Palestinian suffering was unimportant, or unreal, or somehow cancelled out by the suffering of others. Human beings do not experience tragedy comparatively. Nobody standing beside a burning village pauses to think, yes, but larger displacements occurred elsewhere. People experience loss in the singular. The family home is not less mourned because millions of others lost theirs too.

And yet memory and history often operate differently. Memory looks inward. History looks outward. Memory says: this happened to us. History asks: where else has this happened, and why?

Perhaps the tension lies there.

Because the Holy Land –  a curious, poorly understood TARDIS territory, tiny on a map and infinite in emotional and historical dimensions – contains overlapping stories of exile and return. Palestinians built a national memory around dispossession; Israelis built one around return after exile and persecution. Both stories contain truth. Both contain myth. Both contain wounds carried across generations.

To place one beside wider human experience is not necessarily to belittle it. Sometimes it is the opposite. Sometimes it is an attempt to recognise that the Palestinian tragedy was not an aberration committed by monsters from another species, but part of a recurring and deeply human pattern – our alarming capacity to convince ourselves that peace, security or national redemption can be achieved by separating peoples and remaking maps.

The question, then, is not whether comparison itself is suspect. It is whether comparison is being used to illuminate or to dismiss.

The former enlarges understanding. The latter shrinks it.

And perhaps that distinction matters, because if modern history teaches anything, it is that human beings have shown little talent for forgetting and remarkable talent for carrying stories — stories of homes left behind, keys kept in drawers, vanished streets and remembered landscapes — across decades and across oceans.

Borders may eventually settle.

Memory seldom does.

Keys, homelands and the stories we carry within us

We did not weep
when we were leaving –
for we had neither
time nor tears
and there was no farewell.
We did not know
at the moment of parting
that it was a parting
so where would our weeping 
have come from?”
Taha Muhammad Ali

There is perhaps a further answer to the question of whether widening the frame becomes a form of whataboutism, and it lies in something written years earlier in In That Howling Infinite, in an essay on Mahmoud Darwish, Ismail Shammout and the symbolism of al-’awda –  return: Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout]. 

That essay did not begin with demographic tables, refugee agencies, diplomatic resolutions or arguments about international law. It began instead with Darwish’s father and son, with a house left behind and a horse kept company in the absence of those who had gone. It entered history through memory rather than politics. The language was intimate and domestic because exile is experienced first not through abstractions but through ordinary things: streets once walked, kitchens once occupied, olive trees, neighbourhoods and names. Long before displacement becomes a political problem, it is a human one.

Darwish understood Palestine not merely as territory but as metaphor: a homeland certainly, but also a language of longing, absence and dispossession. Palestine became not simply a place on a map but a way of expressing exile itself. Around that idea grew al-’awda, the dream of return, symbolised by al-muftah, the key that appears throughout refugee camps, paintings and political iconography. The key became more than metal. It became continuity –  evidence that interrupted lives had not entirely ended. Villages might disappear, maps be redrawn, and landscapes altered beyond recognition, but the key remained as a quiet refusal to surrender memory.

The earlier essay eventually moved into more contested territory, discussing UNRWA, inherited refugee status and the possibility that institutions established to preserve refugee welfare had also preserved expectation itself, transforming temporary exile into a political condition transmitted across generations. Yet the order in which those arguments appeared matters. The essay did not begin by reducing Palestinians to a demographic question or a bureaucratic problem. It first sought to understand what loss meant to those who carried it.

Perhaps that touches upon the larger issue raised here. Comparative history and lived memory often ask different questions and operate at different scales. History asks about patterns, causes and precedents. It seeks connections and broader landscapes, comparing one experience with another to understand how societies and states behave across time. Memory is more particular and less interested in patterns. It concerns itself with the singular experience of those who lost something and who continue to carry the memory of that loss.

The two perspectives are not necessarily opposed, but neither are they interchangeable. Statistics without memory can become sterile and detached. Memory without wider historical context can harden into myth, becoming a self-contained narrative resistant to complication.

This has been a recurring theme across earlier discussions – from Tolkien’s idea of sub-creation and Scruton’s reflections on belonging to Tyrion Lannister’s observation that there is nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Stories are not merely embellishments laid over identity; they often become identity itself. They explain where people came from, who they are, and where they imagine themselves to be going.

Palestinians built such a story around the Nakba and the hope of return. Jews built one around exile and return as well: Jerusalem remembered across centuries, prayers ending with Next Year in Jerusalem, memory transformed into national aspiration. Both peoples, in different ways, carried keys. Some were literal objects passed through generations; others existed in memory and imagination.

Perhaps this explains why the accusation of whataboutism can feel misplaced in such discussions. Comparison does not necessarily diminish suffering by placing it alongside other suffering. Sometimes it attempts the opposite. Sometimes it seeks to recognise that exile, loss and the desire for return are among the oldest and most enduring of human experiences.

The danger lies not in telling stories but in mistaking stories for complete maps of reality. A key can indeed open a door, but after enough years –  after generations have passed, after landscapes have changed and houses have disappeared – it may become something else entirely. It becomes not a practical instrument but a memory carried in the hand, a reminder that home is not always a physical place waiting patiently at the end of a road. Sometimes it survives most completely in the minds of those still searching for it.

In That Howling Infinite, May 2026

In That Howling Infinite  has recently published a long essay explaining its position with regard to what is probably the most intractable conflict in modern times: One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance 

See also in In That Howling Infinite, Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement, Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout , We did not weep when we were leaving – the poet of Nazareth 

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

Al Miftah

How the Arab world recast the Nakba

Henry Ergas, The Australian, 23 May 2026
Every May, Nakba Day, with its noisy demonstrations on our streets, brings the same charge against Israel: that the displacement of some 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 was a unique crime in modern history. The reverse is closer to the truth. Almost nothing about the Palestinian exodus was singular. What was singular – and which still disfigures the lives of Palestinians, Israelis and the wider world – is what was done with it ­afterwards.

For two centuries, modern states have been built on the unmixing of peoples. The idea is older than the romantic nationalists who weaponised it. Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, and Philip III the Moriscos a century later, precisely because they could no longer imagine a unified crown ruling a religiously mixed people. France’s revolutionary Jacobins, alarmed at Breton, Provencal and Alsatian, declared linguistic uniformity the price of citizenship; Mazzini and his epigoni said much the same for Italy.

Even that arch-liberal John Stuart Mill argued in 1861 that ­representative institutions could scarcely function in countries divided among “different nationalities” speaking different languages.

Bismarck drew the operational conclusion, expelling tens of thousands of Polish and Jewish “foreigners” from Prussia’s eastern provinces in 1885-86 – a program regarded at the time as enlightened statecraft and applauded throughout the liberal press of central Europe.

The unmixing accelerated as the great land empires – Ottoman, Habsburg, Romanov – gave way to nation-states. The Crimean War alone drove 900,000 Muslims from the Caucasus and Crimea into Ottoman territory; the Balkan Wars and the First World War uprooted two million more.

By 1923, the movements were no longer an incidental consequence of war; they were being designed. The burning of Smyrna in September 1922, which destroyed one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the eastern Mediterranean and drove 200,000 Greeks and Armenians into the harbour while Allied warships looked on, made any continued Greek presence in Anatolia impossible – and the world’s diplomats simply codified the new reality.

The Lausanne Convention of January 1923 compelled roughly 1.3 million Greek Orthodox to leave Anatolia for Greece and 400,000 Muslims to leave Greece for Turkey, stripping each of nationality, their possessions and any right of return. Cretan Muslims who had never seen Anatolia and knew only Greek were shipped to Anatolia; Cappadocian Greeks who knew only Turkish were shipped to Greece.

Set against the Armenian genocide of 1915, the exchange was hailed as humane and progressive, and Athens and Ankara settled into the longest peace they had ever known. Raymond Poincare spoke for the age when he concluded that “the mixture of populations of different races and religions has been the main cause of troubles and of war”.

That lesson governed what came next. In 1944, with Hitler’s empire collapsing, Churchill told the Commons he was “not alarmed by the prospect of the ­disentanglement of populations”. The Potsdam Agreement formalised it, providing for the expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe.

The 1948 Palestinian exodus, known in Arabic as the Nakba. Picture: via Getty Images

The 1948 Palestinian exodus, known in Arabic as the Nakba. Picture: via Getty Images

The German share of Czechoslovakia’s population fell from 23 per cent to less than 2 within five years, under Benes’ decrees that stripped ethnic Germans of citizenship and property overnight. Equally, Poland’s minorities, 30 per cent of its inter-war population, were reduced to under 5 per cent; in 1947, the Ukrainian remnant was forcibly scattered across the new western territories to prevent any cohesive ethnic block reforming.

Meanwhile, the dismantling of Japan’s empire moved another five million Japanese back from Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan and Sakhalin, often after long internment, while Koreans and Chinese were marched in the opposite direction. And in 1947, Partition uprooted between 12 and 20 million people on the subcontinent; Pakistani Punjab’s Hindus and Sikhs went from 20 per cent of the population to 0.2 per cent in four years, amid massacres on the Lahore-Delhi railway that nobody who lived through them ever forgot.

Shortly afterwards it was the turn of the Jewish communities of Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Morocco.

Some 800,000 people, whose ancestors had lived in those lands for two millennia, were evicted, forced to flee or statutorily expelled, losing their nationality and all their assets in the process. Iraq’s Jews, once 40 per cent of Baghdad’s population and producers of the country’s first finance minister, were down to under 1 per cent within five years.

In each case the expectation was the same: the receiving state would absorb its co-religionists or co-ethnics and prevent revanchism. Ataturk’s Turkey did exactly that – any attempts by the Muslims expelled from Greece to organise politically were firmly ­repressed.

So did the Allied occupiers, and then Adenauer’s Federal Republic, banning refugee parties in Germany and shutting down any attempt at creating new ones. Forced to accommodate to their new country, West Germany’s 12 million expellees – many of whom either spoke no German or antique forms of German locals could barely understand – powered the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) and helped ­rebuild Germany’s fabled network of small firms.

Nor were they alone in proving a source of flexibility and innovation. In West Bengal, Hindus expelled from East Bengal transformed the jute industry, making it a pillar of India’s economy. The million-odd North Koreans who fled south during and after the Korean War, Chung Ju-yung of Hyundai prominent among them, supplied the entrepreneurial core of what became the South Korean miracle.

Israel, for its part, absorbed almost the entirety of the displaced Jews of the Arab lands: Operation Ezra and Nehemiah airlifted some 120,000 Iraqi Jews in 1950-51; Operation Magic Carpet flew 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel in 1949-50; Operation Moses, in 1984, collected the Beta Israel from the Sudanese desert, every wave transforming the country and yielding generations of military heroes and entrepreneurs.

Palestinian fighters beside a burned-out Israeli Haganah supply truck near Jerusalem in 1948. Picture: via Getty Images

Palestinian fighters beside a Haganah supply truck near Jerusalem in 1948. Picture: Getty Images

The pain was always immense; the absorption, almost everywhere, successful. Almost everywhere. For the Palestinians were the single, decisive exception.

In 1948, the Arab states had launched a war the Arab League’s Secretary-General announced would be “a war of extermination and a memorable massacre comparable to the Mongol massacres and the Crusades”, urged on by the rector of Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque, who told Muslims resident in Mandatory Palestine to “leave the territory temporarily so that our warriors can freely undertake their task of extermination”.

But unlike every other immediate historical precedent, the Arab states, having lost the war, refused to absorb the refugees their own actions had created. King Abdullah I of Jordan, who alone among Arab leaders had been prepared to come to terms with Israel and absorb the Palestinians, was assassinated at al-Aqsa in 1951 – a warning that subsequent Arab rulers heeded, until Anwar Sadat repeated the gesture in 1981 and met the same fate.

Predictably, the UN played a major role in the tragedy. Of the roughly 50 million people displaced by the Second World War and its aftermath, only two groups – Koreans and Palestinians – were given country-specific UN refugee agencies, and both were meant to be temporary. The UN Korean Reconstruction Agency wound up in 1958. UNRWA’s own founding report warned that “sustained relief operations inevitably contain the germ of human deterioration” and committed to speedily shut down.

Seven decades later, UNRWA still exists. It employs roughly 31,000 staff to serve almost six ­million registered “refugees”, the overwhelming majority of whom were born decades after 1948 and have never set foot in Mandatory Palestine. A fifth-generation Gazan whose ancestors left Jaffa remains classified as a refugee in a way that would be inconceivable anywhere else on earth.

The result was not merely administrative absurdity but political radicalisation. From the Cairo Agreement of 1969 onwards, the Palestinian camps in Lebanon became autonomous political and military zones. There and elsewhere, UNRWA facilities rapidly evolved into an integral part of the terrorist infrastructure.

Refugeehood ceased to be a temporary humanitarian condition and became an institutionalised political identity organised around the goal of destroying Israel, in an illusion that has instead destroyed generation after generation of Palestinians.

The Nakba charade

Those, in short, are the historical realities. But they do nothing to prevent the annual Nakba charade from insisting that Israel committed a uniquely monstrous act of “ethnic cleansing” in 1948.

Well, if ethnic homogenisation was truly the goal, Israel pursued it with startling incompetence. Arab citizens of Israel today are roughly a fifth of the population, a share slightly larger than at independence. And far from being “ethnically cleansed”, Israel is by far the most plural state in its region with its population Jewish (Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, Russian), Arab Muslim, Christian, Druze, Circassian and Baha’i.

Compare that with northern Cyprus, where Greek Cypriots went from 82 per cent of the population in 1973 to zero within two years of the Turkish invasion.

Erdogan nevertheless stands among the loudest voices accusing Israel of practising precisely what Turkey has long excelled at – the expulsion and displacement of unwanted peoples, most recently the Kurds of northern Syria. Nor is Turkey alone. Saudi Arabia expelled 800,000 Yemeni workers in 1990 in retaliation for Sana’a’s tilt towards Saddam Hussein, while Kuwait expelled every single one of its 400,000 Palestinians in 1991 for the same offence.

These were not isolated episodes of political vengeance or wartime coercion. They formed part of a much broader regional trajectory: the ongoing, largely forced displacement and disappearance of the Muslim Middle East’s non-Muslim and minority populations.

Albert Hourani’s Minorities in the Arab World (1947) brilliantly mapped a region whose Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Druze, Alawites and countless smaller communities sustained a dense and intricate civic fabric. It was, unfortunately, a world on the cusp of extinction.

Today, the Christian share of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon combined – around 11 per cent in 1945 – has fallen to 3 per cent, and the decline is accelerating. Syria’s Christians have declined from 9.7 per cent of its population in 1970 to under 2 per cent today; Iraq’s, once above 6 per cent, are well under 1 per cent; Egypt’s Copts continue their long erosion, from 8 per cent to no more than 3 per cent. Lebanon’s Christians, who made up over half of the population in 1970, are now below a third.

Nor is it a question of Christians alone. The Zoroastrians, whose religion once shaped an empire from the Indus to the Nile, have vanished from the Arab Middle East.

The Yazidis were enslaved and slaughtered in their thousands at Sinjar by Islamic State in 2014, in what was unquestionably a genocide. The Man­daeans of southern Iraq, who numbered 60,000 a generation ago, are now a remnant of perhaps 4,000. Almost everywhere, the Baha’is and Ahmadis have fled.

Stark contrast

As for the Jews, they are entirely gone, a population of close to a million across the Arab world reduced to a few thousand, almost all elderly; Egypt’s once 80,000-strong community now numbers in the low hundreds, and Yemen’s 50,000-strong Jewry, planted there in antiquity, was essentially lifted out by Operation Magic Carpet, with the Houthi takeover erasing the few that remained.

The trend is unmistakeable, the contrast stark. While the West accommodates ever more Muslims, the Arab world accommodates ever fewer non-Muslims. Its activists and their Western fellow travellers demand multiculturalism elsewhere; they ruthlessly deny it at home. They denounce Israel; but they are the ones engaged in the systematic destruction of ethnic and religious variety.

That is the historical fact the Nakba charade cannot accommodate. The 20th century normalised population transfer on a colossal scale, and the suffering it caused was sustained, widespread and ­immense.

But no international movement emerged demanding the restoration of Breslau to Germany, the ethnic reconstitution of the Sudetenland, a right of return for the Jews thrown out of the Arab lands, or hereditary refugee status for the descendants of the enormous population movements that swept across what had been British India. The displaced were expected to rebuild their lives where they arrived. However ­brutal the process, however bitter the pain, the governing assumption was clear: refugeehood was to disappear, not reproduce itself across generations.

The Palestinians alone were taught a different lesson – and that is the true Palestinian uniqueness. They were told not to end refugeehood but to preserve and reify it; not to build a future where they were, but to await the destruction of the state beside them; not to reconcile themselves to history, but to believe that history itself could be reversed.

For 75 years, generation after generation has been raised on that promise. It has brought not return but ruin, not recovery but repeated catastrophe. And as Gaza now demonstrates once again, it is the Palestinians themselves who pay the highest price for the post-war world’s longest and costliest political fraud.

An Australian Jew’s submission to the Royal Commission

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In That Howling Infinite, April 2026

Long story short …

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

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

From this premise, the essay unfolds in widening circles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author’s Note…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Royal Commission into Antisemitism: One Australian’s Submission

Andrew Wirth, Times of Israel Blogs, 2 May 2026

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

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

Who I am

I write as an Australian Jew.

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

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

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

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

Aims of this submission

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

My primary contentions are that:

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

Background

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debate over public discourse and anti-Jewish incidents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Activists claim to target Zionists and not Jews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This “spoiler effect” is not without precedent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some notes from personal experience

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

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

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

Since October 2023 something has changed.

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

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

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

Conclusions and recommendations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Commission is accordingly asked to consider the following recommendations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deborah Conway Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Zionism a ‘genocidal impulse’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Larger than life’: Tribute to slain Rabbi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No friends left’: Jewish 15yo targeted online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Propaganda fuelling ‘disunity’ and ‘discord’

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

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

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

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

Rabbi Daniel Rabin Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewish musician’s career and business destroyed after doxxing

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

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

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

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

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

Musician Joshua Moshe  Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

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

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

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

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

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

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

ECAJ researcher targeted with ‘horrifying’ anti-Semitic caricature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fireworks in the street is Israel was ‘counting its dead

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

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

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

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

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

 Picture: Gaye Gerard /NewsWire

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hearing continues

The US-Iran war … beware of false analogies

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

President Donald Trump has described the US bombing campaign against Iran as “a little excursion,” then a “skirmish,” then a “mini-war” – ostensible breaches of a subsequent ceasefire are called “trifles”. He was doing something powerful men have always done: reach for a word small enough to sit comfortably in a sentence while the fires it describes are still burning, without actually committing to the potential political consequences calling the conflict a war. The gesture is familiar. Vladimir Putin called his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.” History, in the end, has usually insisted on its own vocabulary. What begins as euphemism tends to end as a chapter heading.

The US-Iran conflict – a sustained bombing campaign, a naval blockade constricting a fifth of the world’s oil supply, and an increasingly fragile ceasefire – is, by any honest accounting, a war. That we have not yet fully agreed to call it one is itself revealing. Language shapes the choices we are willing to contemplate; the choices we refuse to contemplate have a habit of being made for us, usually at greater cost and on someone else’s timetable.

But naming the war is only the first act of reckoning. The second – and more treacherous – is understanding it. And here, almost instinctively, we reach backwards. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, the analogies arrive.

For this is what nations do when confronted with uncertainty: they search the past for usable maps. Yet wars are not equations, and analogies illuminate only by partial light. Gallipoli warns of overconfidence and the fantasy of the decisive stroke. Crimea evokes mismanagement and systemic incoherence. Vietnam and Iraq conjure the slow dread of entanglement – wars that move, expensively and violently, without ever quite arriving at conclusion.

We rarely encounter a new war on its own terms. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, it is already being narrated through the past – the Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – names invoked less as history than as instruments of comprehension. This reflex is not mere intellectual laziness. War, in its immediacy, is too vast, too contradictory, to grasp without scaffolding; analogy supplies the frame. It tells us where to look for overconfidence, where to suspect mismanagement, where to anticipate drift. Yet it also does something subtler, and more dangerous: it invites us to believe that the present can be read off the past, that by matching patterns we might master outcomes.

The essay that follows proceeds from that tension. It does not treat these conflicts as competing verdicts on America’s confrontation with Iran, but as different lenses trained on different moments of a war’s life: conception, execution, and duration. Each captures a recognisable failure mode – the decisive stroke that overreaches, the system that cannot align means to ends, the conflict that persists beyond its rationale. To “refight” these wars in argument is not simply to indulge historical memory; it is to reveal how deeply our strategic thinking remains shaped by unresolved experiences. The past, in this sense, is not behind us. It is the grammar in which we continue to write the present.

Seeking storylines to explain the present

The quest begins, as these often do, reaching backwards in search of a usable past, a storyline that suits the present and what is now unfolding between America and Iran.

No war arrives naked; it comes draped in analogy. War is too large, too chaotic, to apprehend all at once; analogy shrinks it to something graspable. Analogies, like maps, tell you where to look, but also, just as often, where not to. Gallipoli (1915–16) is summoned, and Crimea (1853–56), and then, inevitably, Vietnam (1955-75, the war of my generation, though one that we British chose not to join) and Iraq (2003-11), those twin lodestars of modern American unease. Each is offered up as a key. Each, in its way, fits a lock. None, taken alone, opens the door.

Start with the British campaign during WWI to seize the strategic Dardanelles straits with the aim of threatening Istanbul and taking the Ottoman Empire out of the war. That analogy tends to be invoked by those who see overconfidence at the top: a belief that a bold stroke – decapitation strikes, limited escalation, a sharp application of force – can produce a decisive political outcome in a complex theatre. Gallipoli was conceived as a shortcut around stalemate; it became a lesson in underestimating geography, logistics, and the enemy’s will. If the critique is that Washington imagined a controlled, almost surgical confrontation with Iran that would bend reality to its design, then Gallipoli fits – particularly in its early optimism curdling into stubborn, costly entanglement.

There is something almost aesthetic about the Gallipoli temptation. It promises clarity. A narrow strait, a defined objective, a hinge upon which the whole great mechanism might turn. Strategy reduced to geometry. Yet wars have a way of refusing such elegance. The Turkish defence stiffened; the terrain asserted itself; the timetable dissolved into dust and flies and blood. The decisive stroke became an extended ordeal. And here the analogy deepens: not merely in the initial miscalculation, but in the dawning realisation that what was meant to be quick has become something else entirely – sticky, resistant, unyielding.

The Crimean War comparison is subtler, and in some ways more damning. Ostensibly a campaign by Britain and France (ironically, the architects of the Dardanelles venture) to challenge Czarist Russia’s design on the ailing Ottoman Empire – the so-called Eastern Question. Crimea was not just a military muddle; it was a war of misaligned systems: unclear objectives, poor coordination, inflated rhetoric masking administrative incompetence, and a media environment that amplified both heroism and absurdity (the Charge of the Light Brigade as both myth and indictment). If the Iran conflict appears strategically incoherent – multiple actors, shifting goals, allies pulling in different directions, public narratives outpacing operational reality – then Crimea begins to look uncomfortably familiar. It’s less about one disastrous decision and more about a system that cannot quite align means with ends.

Here the failure is quieter, but more pervasive. Not the single grand error, but the accumulation of smaller ones: supply chains that falter, commands that overlap, allies who agree in principle but diverge in practice. Crimea is what happens when the machinery of war – bureaucratic, logistical, political – fails to mesh. The guns fire, the troops advance, the dispatches glow with rhetoric, but somewhere beneath it all the connection between effort and outcome frays. One might say, borrowing that withering line in the 1960 Encyclopedia Britannica, that it becomes “perhaps the most ill-managed campaign in English history” – and the sting lies precisely in that word managed. Not conceived, not fought, but managed: as though war were an administrative exercise that has slipped its clerical bounds.

And then, inevitably, we arrive at America’s misbegotten wars in Indochina and Iraq. When people reach for these, they are usually pointing to something deeper: not the opening moves, but the trajectory. Vietnam is the archetype of gradual escalation into a conflict that cannot be cleanly won because its political premises are flawed. Iraq (particularly post-2003) adds another layer: the illusion of quick victory followed by insurgency, fragmentation, and the long tail of unintended consequences. If Iran becomes a drawn-out contest of proxies, asymmetric retaliation, and domestic fatigue – where tactical successes accumulate but strategic clarity recedes – then Vietnam/Iraq is the more predictive analogy.

Vietnam was once called “chaos without a compass,” and the phrase endures because it captures the feeling of the war more than its formal doctrine. There was, in fact, a compass – containment, credibility, dominoes – but it spun uncertainly, pointing in several directions at once. Washington oscillated between coercion and restraint, escalation and negotiation, measuring progress in tonnage dropped and bodies counted, even as the political centre of gravity drifted further out of reach. The war moved, violently and expensively, but it did not arrive. It accumulated.

Iraq echoes that pattern but begins differently – with a burst of clarity that dissolves into ambiguity. The regime falls; the statue topples; the map is redrawn in a matter of weeks; victory is declared. And then the afterlife begins. Insurgency, sectarian fracture, proxy entanglement- the slow discovery that winning the war is not the same as securing the peace. Iraq is what happens when the end state is assumed rather than constructed. It is, in that sense, less a campaign than a condition.

Set beside these, the earlier analogies sharpen. Gallipoli was not “chaos without a compass” at the outset; it had a very clear aim. Nor was it quite Crimea’s administrative farce, though elements of mismanagement crept in as the campaign stalled. Its distinctive flaw was the belief that a bold, limited stroke could shortcut the hard arithmetic of war – geography, supply, enemy adaptation. When that belief failed, the campaign slid, almost reluctantly, toward something more protracted, more wearing, with flashes of Crimean dysfunction flickering at the edges.

And this is the point at which the analogies begin to overlap, to blur into one another. The opening may be Gallipoli: confident, compressed, persuasive in its apparent simplicity. The conduct may drift toward Crimea: systems straining, coordination fraying, rhetoric outrunning reality. The trajectory may lengthen into Vietnam or Iraq: time stretching, purpose thinning, the war becoming less an event than an environment.

So which is most apt? If you’re judging initial strategic conception: then it is Gallipoli. If you’re judging systemic dysfunction and coalition incoherence: it’s Crimea. If you’re judging likely long-term dynamics and risk of quagmire: look to Vietnam and Iraq.

Forced to choose one, the most useful analogy is probably Iraq (with a Vietnam shadow). It captures both the confidence of the opening act and the chronic instability that can follow when political end states are ill-defined. Gallipoli was a failed gamble; Iraq became a condition. And it is the risk of becoming a condition – open-ended, absorbing, resistant to tidy resolution – that should trouble policymakers more than the memory of any single historical blunder.

For there is something peculiarly modern in that transformation. Nineteenth-century wars could be mismanaged; early twentieth-century campaigns could be disastrously conceived; but late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century conflicts have a habit of enduring. They slip their temporal bounds. They resist conclusion. They persist in the form of insurgencies, proxy struggles, regional destabilisations, so-called “forever wars” – echoes rather than endings.

History, in this sense, does not repeat so much as it offers a set of recurring traps, each labelled in a different hand. The names change – Lone Pine and The Nek, Balaclava, Khe Sanh, Fallujah – but the pattern is recognisable: ambition outruns understanding; institutions struggle to keep pace with intention; time erodes clarity; and strategy discovers, too late, that the map was never the territory.

The past, obligingly, provides the metaphors. The present decides which of them it is willing to become.

Forever wars and the persistent Eastern Question

Ironically, the repercussions and ricochets of the Crimea and Gallipoli linger still in the “forever wars” of the Ottoman Succession that continue to be fought in the Levant. Though the “sick man of Europe” has long gone, so-called “Eastern Question” that he precipitated is with us still.  And the irony is not merely poetic, it is structural.

The Crimean War and Gallipoli were not just episodes in the long decline of the Ottoman Empire; they were moments in which the European powers tried, and failed, to manage that decline without resolving it. The Eastern Question – what to do with a weakening empire whose territories sat athwart trade routes, faiths, and ambitions – was never answered. It was deferred, patched, internationalised, moralised, and, when necessary, fought over. But never settled.

Crimea was, in essence, a war about containment without clarity. Britain and France fought not to destroy the Ottoman Empire, nor to reform it decisively, but to prevent Russia from exploiting its weakness. The result was a kind of geopolitical holding operation – costly, confused, and inconclusive. The patient survived, but the illness deepened. The war did not solve the Eastern Question; it ensured that it would return, more complicated than before.

Gallipoli, sixty years later, was almost the inverse: an attempt at decisive intervention that miscarried. Where Crimea sought to stabilise the system, Gallipoli tried to break it open – knock the Ottomans out of what became known as The Great War, reorder the strategic map, and force a resolution. It failed, and in failing, prolonged the life of the very problem it aimed to solve. When the Ottoman Empire did finally collapse in 1918, it did so not through elegant strategy but through cumulative exhaustion – and the settlement that followed (the infamous Sykes–Picot agreement, the Treaty of Lausanne that ended the Great War and shaped the modern Middle East, the mandates, improvised borders, and the legacies inherited by Israel and Palestine, by Syria and Lebanon, and by Iraq carried within it the seeds of future instability.

And here is the connective tissue to the present: the “forever wars” of the Levant are, in a very real sense, the afterlife of those unresolved choices.

The Ottoman system, for all its inequities, provided a kind of imperial coherence – a loose, often improvised order that managed diversity through hierarchy rather than uniformity. Its removal created a vacuum that external powers attempted to fill with lines on maps and imported state structures, often indifferent to local realities, including religious and ethnic divisions. The mandates were not solutions; they were transitional fictions that hardened into permanence. The Eastern Question did not end; it metastasised.

Thus the region becomes a palimpsest of earlier interventions:

  • The Crimean instinct persists in modern coalition warfare – external powers seeking to contain instability without fully committing to its resolution, managing symptoms rather than causes.
  • The Gallipoli impulse reappears in periodic attempts at decisive intervention – strikes, invasions, regime-change strategies – each promising to reset the board, each discovering the board is more complicated than imagined.
  • And over all this hangs the long shadow of Vietnam and Iraq: the recognition that once engaged, these conflicts do not conclude cleanly, but evolve into layered, persistent struggles involving states, militias, proxies, and narratives.

What we call “forever wars” are, in this sense, not aberrations but continuations – the modern form of an old, unanswered question. The Ottoman Empire is gone, but the strategic problem it embodied remains: a region where internal fractures intersect with external interests, where no single power can impose order, and where every intervention alters the conditions for the next.

There is a quiet, almost melancholic symmetry in this. Nineteenth-century statesmen spoke of the “Sick Man of Europe” as though the problem were a patient to be diagnosed and treated. But the illness was never confined to the patient; it was embedded in the system around him. Remove the patient, and the condition does not disappear – it redistributes itself.

So when modern observers reach for Gallipoli, or Crimea, or Vietnam, or Iraq, they are not merely searching for analogies of method. They are circling, perhaps without quite naming it, the persistence of a problem without closure.

The Eastern Question was never answered. It simply changed its language.

Challenging the analogies

You can’t really make sense of the analogies – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – without restoring Iran itself to the centre of the frame. Otherwise the country becomes a backdrop, a stage upon which other powers replay their historical anxieties. But Iran is not the Ottoman Empire in decline, nor Iraq in 2003, nor Vietnam in 1965. It is an old state with a long memory of being acted upon – and that memory shapes how it acts now.

What changes, once you bring Iran back in, is the direction of the analogy. The earlier comparisons mostly describe how outside powers misjudge wars. Iran’s history reminds you how those same powers are often experienced from the inside – as intrusion, manipulation, or existential threat.

Iran enters the story not as an abstraction – “the enemy,” “the regime,” “the theatre” – but as a historical actor formed in the crucible of the very system the earlier analogies describe.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Persia was itself entangled in a version of the Eastern Question, pressured by Russian and British imperial competition, its sovereignty compromised, its politics penetrated. The First World War and its aftermath did not dismantle Iran as they did the Ottoman Empire, but they confirmed its vulnerability to external design. The Second World War made that vulnerability explicit: Anglo-Soviet occupation in 1941, the removal of Reza Shah, and the installation of his son – an early demonstration that great powers could, when required, rearrange Iran’s internal order.

From there, the pattern sharpens. The 1953 coup against the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh – engineered by Britain and the United States – lodges itself in Iranian political consciousness as a defining moment: not simply a change of government, but a lesson about the limits of independence in a world of larger powers. The Shah’s subsequent rule, modernising yet authoritarian, Western-aligned yet domestically brittle, becomes the next act in this long drama of externally entangled sovereignty.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 then reads, in part, as a rupture with that pattern- a violent reassertion of autonomy, clothed in religious language but grounded in political memory. “Neither East nor West” was not just a slogan; it was a rejection of the very dynamics that had shaped Iran’s modern history. Yet revolutions do not escape geography. The new regime inherits the same strategic environment, the same pressures, the same suspicions.

The Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) is crucial here. For eight years, Iran fights a brutal, attritional conflict against Saddam Hussein – largely isolated, facing external support flowing to its adversary. This is Iran’s Vietnam, one might say, but with a different lesson drawn: not the futility of war, but the necessity of endurance. The war entrenches a doctrine of asymmetry, resilience, and proxy capability – precisely the features that later confound American strategy in the region.

From that point on, the Islamic Republic is not simply surviving; it is adapting. It builds networks – Hezbollah, militias, regional alliances – not as ideological ornaments but as strategic depth. It becomes, in effect, a state that has internalised the lessons of the very wars others use as analogies. Where outside observers see Vietnam or Iraq looming, Iranian planners see something else: a long game in which time, patience, and indirection offset conventional inferiority.

To reinsert Iran into the narrative is to complicate every analogy. Gallipoli assumes an opponent who will react predictably to a decisive blow; Iran’s history suggests otherwise. Crimea assumes mismanagement on one side; Iran’s experience reminds us that what appears as dysfunction externally may be met by coherence internally. Vietnam and Iraq warn of quagmires; Iran has, in many respects, built its strategy around drawing others into them.

In that sense, the question is not only which past war America risks refighting, but which past experiences Iran believes it is reliving – or avenging. The 1953 coup, the isolation of the 1980s, the long memory of foreign interference: these are not background details, but active ingredients in the present.

And so our frame subtly shifts. It is no longer simply about the hazards of analogy, or the repetition of strategic error, but about the collision of historical memories. One side reaches for Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq- warnings drawn from its own past misjudgments. The other carries a different archive: intervention, resistance, survival.

Between those two archives lies the present conflict – less a replay of any single war than a convergence of many, each side reading from a different script, each convinced, in its own way, that history has already shown it how this story goes.

Conclusion

To refight old wars in the mind is, at one level, an act of prudence. It reminds us that others have stood at similar thresholds, armed with confidence, intelligence, and good intentions – and have nonetheless misjudged the terrain, the enemy, or themselves. But there is a fine line between learning from history and being governed by it. Analogy can clarify; it can also constrain. It can sharpen perception, or it can trap us in inherited scripts, seeing Gallipoli where the problem is administrative, or diagnosing Vietnam when the flaw lies in the opening wager.

The deeper unease running through these comparisons is not simply that wars go wrong, but that they linger – that they slip their boundaries and become conditions rather than episodes. From the mismanaged campaigns of Crimea to the failed gambles of Gallipoli, from the disorientation of Vietnam to the long aftermath of Iraq, one sees not repetition but recurrence: ambition outrunning understanding, institutions straining to keep pace, time eroding clarity. And beneath it all, especially in the Levant, the longer echo of an older, unanswered question – how to order a region where external power and internal fracture are perpetually entangled.

History does not offer a single, authoritative mirror. It offers a cabinet of them, each slightly warped, each catching a different angle of the present. The task is not to choose one reflection and mistake it for reality, but to recognise the distortions for what they are – and to ask, with some humility, whether we are illuminating the path ahead or merely retracing, with greater eloquence, the steps that led others into the same uncertain ground.

The Western cabinet of mirrors – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – captures recurring pathologies: the overconfident opening stroke, the misaligned machinery, the war that lingers beyond its logic. Yet these are, inescapably, insider narratives. They describe how campaigns look from the bridge, the штаб, the situation room. They are diagnoses of our own errors.

What the Iranian story, set against the longer afterlife of the Eastern Question, forces back into view is the perspective from the other shore. The Young Turks, confronting encroachment and dismemberment, did not experience Gallipoli as a misjudged Allied gamble; they experienced it as a defence of survival. Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese did not inhabit “chaos without a compass”; they pursued a coherent, if costly, struggle against a foreign presence. Iraqi insurgents, and later ISIS in its own brutal and aberrant way, did not parse the war as a case study in post-conflict planning; they resisted, adapted, endured, and exploited.

They did not conduct war games about us. They fought.

Iran belongs in that lineage – not as an analogue, but as an heir to a particular historical consciousness: one shaped by intervention, by imposed settlements, by long wars of attrition, and by the conviction that time can be turned into a weapon. From that vantage, what appears to Western observers as drift or dysfunction may look like opportunity; what is feared as quagmire may be cultivated as strategy.

And so the question shifts. It is no longer simply which past war America risks refighting, but whether the very act of choosing among Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, and Iraq obscures the more important reality: that the other side is not reading from the same book – or as many commentators are reminding us today, “the enemy has a vote”. One side searches its history for warnings about overreach; the other draws from its own past a repertoire of resistance.

History, then, does not just offer competing analogies. It offers competing memories. And where those memories diverge – where one side analyses and the other endures – there lies the most persistent danger: not that we will repeat the past, but that we will misunderstand the present, even as we describe it with perfect historical fluency.

In That Howling Infinite, May 2026

Read more about history  in In That Howling Infinite in Foggy Ruins of Time.

On World War I, see Ottoman Redux – an alternative, The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye and November 1918 – the counterfeit peace. On the Balfour Declaration and its repercussions, see The hand that signed the paper. On Vietnam, see The Ballad of Denton Crocker – a Vietnam elegy, Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey, and Shadows in search of a name … requiem for a war. On the US-Iran war, see Chaos in without a compass … Donald Trump’s Persian “excursion”

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?