A Cold Jewish Morning

It was before dawn though the darkness of the night was starting to fade to a sort of murky grey and Rocky, having been subjected to a quite substantial haircut a week ago, shivered in the cold, his legs thin now, legs I thought, of an aging ballerina — for Rocky, even in old age, still dance-walks—when we turned the corner onto Barkly Street.

I am not sure why we had walked this way except that in the murky grey cold, walking along the unsheltered boardwalk at the beach did not feel right for Rocky, though this may just have been a bit of transference: it was beyond me to believe that I could ever forgo the beach for the subtle — if there are any — attractions of Barkly Street. 

We turned the corner into Barkly Street. There was some sort of tape across the footpath and there was a police four wheel drive parked by the tape and there were a couple of guys holding cameras — the cameras are so small now I thought—who looked a bit bored and so I instantly understood that these were television crews.

Beside one of the camera men, stood a man wearing a small white yarmulke. He was a policeman. A Jewish policeman. He was not the only policeman there — two others stood by the police four-wheel drive— but as far as I could tell, he was the only Jewish policeman.

I single him out in this way, by his Jewishness, for two reasons, firstly because I assume — and this may be no more than prejudice — Jewish police men, or women for that matter, are a rarity in Melbourne and perhaps the whole of Australia. And secondly because this yarmulke wearing Jewish policeman is protecting a crime scene and the crime scene is the electoral office of Labor’s Josh Burns, the member for McNamara. 

Burns is Jewish and McNamara is the most `Jewish’ electorate in Victoria and here we are Rocky and I looking at the stones-damaged windows of the office and the red-painted graffiti sprayed across the photo of Burns — ZIONISM IS FASCISM — and looking at the Jewish policeman and thinking:  Is this where I live now and if it is where is this? 

In an attempt to start to answer these questions, I approached the Jewish policeman, introduced myself, and asked the wrong opening question, a question a reporter just starting out in a life or trying to ask the right questions would not ask first up: Are you here because Burns is a Jew, and he has many Jews in his electorate?

The Jewish policeman was silent. He looked at me with something that looked like recognition in his eyes. Then he said he was there to guard the crime scene, he and the other police standing in front of the police four-wheel drive. I wanted to ask him whether he lived in Caulfield, the suburb of the Jews but thought better not. 

Still, there was something about his being there that I found unsettling though I cannot say exactly what it was but just that a religious  Jew, a policeman, guarding a crime scene where the principal victim was a Jewish member of parliament— would have been unthinkable not so long ago.

And the graffiti that confronted the Jewish policeman— ZIONISM IS FASCISM in red paint across the face of the Jewish Josh Burns— that too would have been unthinkable—not so long ago, all of it unthinkable, the Jews and genocide graffiti and the placards on university campuses full of genocide accusations and murder charges and infanticide charges and the chants that to me, in the end, are calling for death to the Jews, death chants they are— listen to them, the tone of them, the almost hysterical hatred — all once unimagined. By me anyway.

We stood there in front of the graffiti covered photo of Burns and left the Jewish policeman to his guarding duties.  Burns has been to Israel post October 7. He visited the places in southern Israel near the Gaza border that were attacked by Hamas terrorists. He has criticised some of the positions on Israel and the Palestinians taken by foreign minister Penny Wong. 

He has warned about what he considers to be the alarming increase in antisemitism since the Hamas massacre and the subsequent war in Gaza. And he has talked about how Jewish people in his electorate feel anxious and uncertain about the future. And he has copped a fair bit of hate on social media and perhaps even threats of violence. 

I am a writer. I am obsessed with words, their meaning, their sound, with how to create sentences that use words in sequences that are precise but that create something beyond words, a sort of music I suppose.  

I am obsessed with words and as I look at the graffiti scrawled across the face of the Jewish politician — ZIONISM IS FASCISM— I think the corrupters of language, those who use words as weapons, words like fascism and genocide and evil and Nazi, have managed to make these words commonplace, acceptable, when used to describe Israel and Zionism and even Jews. 

I think what I found most shocking about the smashed up electoral office of Josh Burns, scrawled in red paint across his face, as if written in the blood of innocent victims, was the graffiti equating Zionism with Fascism. This is a lie like the genocide accusation for instance, on countless placards and banners. But these lies — and there are many more — are no longer shocking, certainly not on most university campuses and I fear in most newsrooms. To many students and academics and journalists, they may not even be considered lies. 

When we arrived home, I saw that a friend had texted me a statement made by the prime minister. He condemned the attack of course and said the people who did it should face the full force of the law. He said it was a serious attack and that the targeting of a Jewish MP was distressing. Then he said this:

“It does nothing, it undermines the cause that people purport to represent.”

This was a statement put out on social media by his office, so I assume he thought it was okay, did the job, expressed his outrage and his concern for Burns and his staff. No place in Australia…all those cliches.

But what about the graffiti Prime Minister, I hoped someone would ask him, was that okay, the sentiment that Zionism is Fascism? And when you say that this sort of violence `undermines the cause that people purport to represent,’ what cause is that Prime Minister? The cause that aims to delegitimise Israel and Zionism and banish Jews from the public sphere who support genocide and the fascism that is Zionism? 

I assume no-one asked the Prime Minister these questions. I assume that was because for most journalists, the equating of Zionism with fascism, is uncontroversial and not at all shocking. Neither is it shocking that Jews who refuse to repudiate Israel are called fascists and supporters of genocide. 

Perhaps the Prime Minister does not find any of this worth calling out. Perhaps he did not find it shocking, worth calling out on a day when one of his backbenchers had the words ZIONISM IS FASCISM, in blood red, scrawled across his Jewish face.