Confronting anti-Semitism

This article was published in The Saturday Paper on 10^th of May

A few weeks ago, a young singer-songwriter booked flights to Melbourne. She did so on the basis that the venue for her gig had confirmed things were all set to go. Then last week, in the final week of the election campaign, she was informed by the venue that the gig had been cancelled following objections.

She contacted the venue and asked for a more forthright explanation. Here, in part, is what she wrote:

Look, I get that venues have their policies, but cancelling over political stuff feels pretty harsh, especially for an indie artist just trying to make music and pay the bills…

Here’s the thing—when you confirmed the show, I immediately jumped into action. I spent money and time designing a poster, and I booked flights interstate that I cannot get refunded. I’m not asking for the full amount, but half of what we agreed on would really help cover some of these costs … It would mean a lot honestly.

She received this response from the person who had booked her show:

I understand your frustration and the last thing I want to do is tell artists they’re not allowed to play, believe me. However, having identified yourself proudly and publicly as a Zionist and putting that out in the world via social media puts a small business like ours in a precarious position and immediately up for public scrutiny/backlash once the broader community connected to our business takes a hold of it…

He went on to say he was under no obligation to help with the cost of her flights.

This was not an isolated incident for the singer-songwriter. She has been unable to get gigs in Australia ever since, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, she posted on social media that she stood with Israel and its people and condemned Hamas and those who questioned what had happened that day.

It is hard to say how many Australian musicians, and artists and writers, on the basis that they have been identified as Zionists, have been attacked and threatened on social media and have had gigs and art exhibitions and book events cancelled. It would be more than a few.

How are we to understand this? What does it mean? What are we to make of the fact that none of the publicly-funded organisations — Music Australia for instance — have come to her aid or condemned her treatment?

In the same week as the singer-songwriter’s show was cancelled, flyers were distributed by a neo-Nazi group in Melbourne seats with significant numbers of Jews, including in Macnamara – the most “Jewish” electorate in Victoria, held by the Jewish MP Josh Burns. Posters of Burns were defaced with red stars painted across his face. These flyers and the defaced posters were widely — and unanimously — condemned. It is not a hard thing to do when the pamphlets are full of Nazi stereotypes of Jews with tentacles into every area of Australian life.

For months, Burns has been the focus of a virulent hate campaign on social media, a campaign that has portrayed him as a genocidal Zionist. In June last year, his electoral office was vandalised, smashed up. Inside the shattered plate glass window, devil’s horns were painted on a large photograph of Burns.

The Jew as the devil’s worker, if not the devil himself, has figured in Jew hatred for hundreds of years. The consequences for Jews have been dire. The attack on Burns’ office was widely reported in the media, but the image of the Jew as a devil was not discussed.

Perhaps that was because the vandals had painted the words “Zionism is fascism” across the photograph. For many journalists, this complicated the motives of the vandals. They were, most probably, anti-Zionists who harboured no ill-feeling towards Jews as such, despite their use of an ancient and deadly anti-Semitic trope.

For significant parts of the left, the anti-Zionist left in particular, left-wing anti-Semitism is considered a minor issue. If it does exist, then it is thought of as an understandable response to what has happened in Gaza and, for that matter, what Israel — the Jews — have wrought in Palestine since 1948. Zionist Jews deserve the hostility they have been subjected to; they are not victims of racism but, rather, the victimisers.

Burns was re-elected on Saturday, part of Labor’s historic landslide. He increased his primary vote by just over 5 per cent. In the 2022 election, the Greens candidate had come within several hundred votes of winning the seat. This time, the Greens vote went backwards more than 2 per cent.

Despite the fact the war in Gaza was covered with such extraordinary and sustained intensity by the media over the past 18 months, despite the fact that it sometimes dominated political debate, it did not have a significant effect on the election result. Not even in those seats with significant Muslim or Jewish voters.

What does all this mean for the young singer-songwriter and the writers and artists who, since October 7, 2023, have been shunned? What does it mean for the people who have had the places where they work, or the small businesses they run, targeted with graffiti and demonstrations and hate on social media, who have been unable to perform, unable to mount exhibitions of their work, unable to get published?

The election outcome does not diminish the way their lives have been ruined, basically because they are Jews of a particular kind, bad Jews, Zionists, which has come to be a term of abuse – Zionists as the new Nazis.

Their experience is real. The persecution is real, not a malign invention designed to cover-up their support for genocide and colonialism, their support for a state that was founded on an evil ideology and is therefore unredeemable. The casting out of Jews, Zionist Jews, from the culture in which Jews have thrived and which philanthropic Jews have supported with such great enthusiasm, has had profound effects and the lives of some of these Jews will never be the same again.

It is the lack of support from those organisations that are meant to promote the work of Australian artists and writers that is disturbing. It is significant, too, that there have been virtually no artists or writers who have come out in support of these Jewish Australian artists and writers banished from participation in Australian cultural life.

In February, Creative Australia revoked the appointment of the Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative at the Venice Biennale. Sabsabi’s past work included controversial depictions of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, something that Creative Australia apparently did not know when the appointment was made.

It was a bad decision to revoke the appointment. Sabsabi is a major and widely praised Australian artist. It was on that basis that he was appointed. It should not have been revoked – although, to complicate the matter, Sabsabi himself had signed a petition to exclude Israel from the 2024 Biennale and had signed a letter in 2022 supporting a boycott of the Sydney Festival because of the Israeli embassy's financial support of a Sydney Dance Company performance by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin.

There was widespread criticism of Creative Australia for its decision to revoke Sabsabi’s appointment. Many hundreds of artists and writers signed petitions demanding he be re-instated. The media covered the decision extensively and, in the main, with sympathy for Sabsabi.

A few weeks ago, the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism — a network of academics from 32 Australian universities — released a report that examined the experience of Jewish students and Jewish staff at Australian universities in the period April to July last year.

The survey was done by two of Australia’s most respected researchers. It was not a survey about attitudes but about incidents of anti-Semitism — verbal attacks; physical attacks; lectures disrupted by pro-Palestinian students, their faces often masked, searching for “Zionists”; students being forced out of shared accommodation on the basis of their support for what is described as racism and colonialism and genocide.

A large majority of students and staff surveyed — 67 per cent — reported experiences of anti-Semitism that had a significant impact on their lives. Only a third of the students and academic staff felt physically safe on campus. Incidents of bullying and threats are detailed in the report. A majority of students and academic staff say that university administrators did not do enough to counter the hostility and bullying of Jews at Australia’s universities.

These results mirrored the recently released results of the investigation into anti-Semitism at Harvard. Jewish students have been verbally and physically attacked, made to feel unsafe on campus, subjected to ridicule and scorn by some of their lecturers.

The Harvard report had significant media coverage in the US. The Australian report received hardly any coverage — if it received any coverage at all — on the ABC or in the Nine newspapers.

Nor has there been significant coverage of research and surveys — conducted by major Jewish communal organisations — that has shown attacks on Jews and Jewish property have grown exponentially these past 18 months.

Individual acts of violence — a synagogue set on fire, a pre-school centre vandalised — get coverage. The fact that these events are part of a trend that has left Jews feeling traumatised and unheard is hardly dealt with at all. What this represents is a denial of the experience of Jews in Australia, the vast majority of Australian Jews.

The idea that anti-Semitism on the left does not exist, cannot exist, because Jews are the quintessential example of white privilege, because they are wealthy, successful, powerful beyond their numbers and therefore must be part of the oppressor class rather than the oppressed, is widespread among the elites at universities and in journalism and even at the Human Rights Commission.

The result has been an under reporting at the ABC and in the Nine papers of the increased hostility to Jews in Australia. This under reporting exists because many journalists believe Jews have weaponised the accusation of anti-Semitism in order to deflect from the genocide by Israel of the Palestinians, a genocide they believe began in 1948 with the declaration of Israel’s independence.

At the same time, there is a view that any increased hostility to Jews must be a reasonable response to the deaths of Palestinians in the current conflict in Gaza. The suffering of Jews is trivial compared with the suffering of the Palestinians, for which Australian Jews, Zionists, must be held in some way responsible.

Journalists, like the universities, have been incapable of dealing with what is incontrovertible: there has been increased hostility to Jews in Australia since the October 7 attacks. They have been unable to accept the fact that Jews feel threatened and unheard. They have ignored the real instances of attacks against Jews, physical and verbal, and the tidal waves of hatred against them in social media, only thinly disguised as anti-Zionism.

Australia’s cultural institutions and universities — not all of them, but the sandstone universities in particular — have failed Australian Jews. The young singer-songwriter, banished from the Australian music scene because she is a “proud Zionist”, has had her life blighted by anti-Jewish hostility. What has happened to her has reverberated and affected fellow Jews in the arts, young Jews in particular.

What makes it particularly and uniquely painful is that the hostility towards her is either denied — she is making it up — or justified — that Jews who are labelled Zionists deserve what they get.

Michael Gawenda is a former editor-in-chief of The Age and the author of My Life As A Jew.