All over the world people are in the streets celebrating Hamas for their ‘just resistance’. I don’t understand. Weren’t we the ones attacked and slaughtered? Irena Zilberman
I recently read My Life As A Jew by retired editor of the Age, Michael Gawenda, published just before the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023. Although I loved the Yiddish culture Gawenda describes and certainly his insights into the antisemitism of the Australian media, I was left feeling that his attitude to Gaza ran along the same lines as his journalistic community – that Israel is the problem. I guess, as well – and because he is a journalist – that he lacked the three things I believe are essential to understanding the conflict in the Middle East, religion, languages and history. ‘I’m no historian,’ he wrote. ‘And I’m too old to learn a new language.’
I thought about this as I read Ruptured.
Our media, our government, our tertiary institutions, the Teachers Federation, the
arts and the educated elite, feminists, the new-left, not forgetting the nefarious
individuals in my electorate who are attempting to wrest office from our Jewish
Federal member by blaming Jews for Hamas’s crimes against its own people – a strategy
Hamas has successfully used against Israel for twenty years – have never demonstrated
my knowledge of the religion, history and languages of the Middle East. Yet the propaganda campaign based on their ignorance is isolating Jewish Australians
in their own cities. In Australia, Muslims outnumber Jews by a factor of ten,
and the consequence of this is that politicians consider their chances of re-election
before making any decisions about Jews or statements about Israel.
What also concerns me is that in my
particularly comfortable, educated suburb, I have not heard what I have read in
this book – not any of it, as if we have been packed in cotton wool. Christians
with whom I worship every Sunday criticise Israel on the basis of biased media
reports, only to watch movies and documentaries about the Holocaust, little realizing
that they are players in an identical drama. No one I know seems to be aware of the
women in Ruptured whose lives are being ruined by racism. Or is antisemitism
merely racism? The historian Edward Flannery called it a secular diabolism, Deborah
Lipstadt, a prejudice coming from both the right and the left, and Douglas Murray, a shape-shifting virus.
I understood this as I made my way through the book, and it was a rapid read. Antisemitism isn’t logical, it doesn’t make sense. The point made most frequently in Ruptured is that this latest round of antisemitism exploded on October 8, before the bodies of the Hamas victims had been identified and before Israel had fired a shot in its defence. I read about the doxing of Australian Jewish women, the lost friends, the cancelled talks and Writers’ Festival appearances, hate speech online and off, harassment and career destruction, victims turned into villains, the reawakening of intergenerational trauma. ‘The online food world is rife with anti-Zionist slogans and anti-‘Israhell’ propaganda,’ writes Lisa Goldberg. ‘Some days I feel overwhelmed by the hate circulating in my industry.
Some of the experiences recorded in the book are just horrifying, and over every
story hangs the smell of fear which is the reality of living as a Jew in Australia today.
A further point the stories demonstrate is that while the worst perpetrators may be only a vocal minority, the
majority remain silent. It has been said that the reason we all know the famous
Christians who shielded Jews in World War 2 is that there were so few of them.
‘In the year following October 7, antisemitic activity in Australia increased by 316 percent.’
Ruptured records how this has affected the lives of our Jewish women.
I had already
avoided the CBD on Sundays, because it had been captured by loud protestors,
marching weekly through the streets, some carrying terror group flags, their
faces covered with masks and keffiyehs…Why [do] so many leftists now march with
Hamas and Hezbollah supporters? Is this a new thing or have they always
supported Islamist terrorism? Ramona Koval
Because of your
Jewish identity, you don’t belong in the queer community…I was fifteen and
rejected by a community that preached acceptance…My favourite artists, from
queer musicians to actors, attended pro-Palestinian protests where chants
praising Hamas and urging the demise of my people proliferated. Noa Gomberg
It takes a
thick skin to survive as a female in the media, and I experienced all kinds of
sexism and misogyny, but I never experienced hatred for being a Jew. After October
7, all that changed…[It] wasn’t empathy for the Palestinians, it was hatred of
Jews…No arguments worked, nothing could make the commenters reflect on their
own prejudices. Kerri Sackville
It is this point that should wake Australians
up. Whether it’s the Rhineland massacres, the Tsarist pogroms, Hitler’s final solution
or the Al Jazeera propaganda machine, it all boils down to Jew hatred in the
end, as Siana Einfeld’s harrowing depiction of Darebin Council deliberately turning
against its tiny Jewish community early in the war illustrates.
In dark moments
I wonder if Israel’s destruction, dressed up in human rights, is the world’s
clandestine fetish…When I am not overwhelmed by fear, I marvel at the hate. Lynette Chazan
As a former
prisoner of the Iranian regime…I recognised the vocabulary of these fighters as
they raped and tortured and murdered on a visceral, instinctive level…Explained
it away, justified it, revelled in it…In the streets of my city were IRCG flags
and insignia…A handful of so-called friends called to sound out where I stood
on ‘the genocide’. When I refused to throw myself headfirst into the rapidly
swelling tide…I was dropped and denounced and smeared. Kylie Moore-Gilbert
And just
as my comfy suburb was getting used to this new normal, 2025 drew to a close with
the Bondi massacre.
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