Israel weaponises Bondi Beach massacre

The correct response to violence in fact to consistently oppose violence, not the opposite

After the antisemitic attack on Jewish Australians at Bondi Beach, I didn’t want to talk about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, Israel and its cheerleaders had other ideas.

What I wanted to talk about was the very real evil of antisemitism, and the need to fight it. That we have a responsibility to make the Jewish diaspora feel safe and secure wherever they live.

The horror of Jewish Australians gathering on that iconic beach for the start of Hanukkah, eating doughnuts, celebrating, listening to music, only to run for their lives as so many were mowed down by high-powered rifles.

How no cause on earth can ever justify slaughtering unarmed civilians. That whatever was going through the minds of these terrorists, the only real cause underpinning their actions was hate, and the only cause they have advanced is hate.

How one of the victims was a little 10-year-old girl, another a survivor of the Holocaust.

About the importance of different communities uniting against hatred, and how this was encapsulated by Ahmed al-Ahmed, the Syrian-born Muslim bystander and son of a refugee, who risked his life to save Jewish Australians - and was seriously injured in the process.

How a second asylum seeker intervened to try and stop the massacre - and was shot at by police and attacked by bystanders in the process.

These are all the things we should be focusing on.

But, immediately in the aftermath, the State of Israel and its cheerleaders have sought to weaponise this sickening atrocity.

Before engaging with what they have said, here is a statement of principles which should be wholly unnecessary:

Opposing violence against Palestinians is not incitement of violence.

Believing Palestinians are humans of equal worth is not hatred.

And if you use the Bondi Beach atrocity to justify violence against Palestinians, then it’s not violence that you object to.

Let’s start with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He has blamed Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for the attacks, in part because Australia did the bare minimum of joining most countries on earth in recognising Palestinian statehood.

As happens, the Australian government has supplied crucial parts for Israel’s F-35 jets, which have rained death and destruction on the people of Gaza, as Amnesty International Australia have noted.

But Netanyahu’s position, backed by the vast majority of Israeli politicians, both in government and opposition - is that there will never be a Palestinian state. That the only state which will ever exist between the River Jordan and Mediterranean is Israel.

The best case scenario is that the half of the population in this land who are Palestinian will be subjected to an eternity of apartheid, illegal occupation, colonisation, mass incarceration, suspension of basic civil rights, displacement, and relentless violent displacement.

But we have already witnessed genocide in Gaza, and it is clear that Israel’s long-term ambition is that Palestinians will be driven from the land, certainly to the degree that they do not represent a significant population. In the West Bank, for example, the Palestinian people are trapped in an ever-tightening vice, their land stolen by ever-growing numbers of illegal settlers.

In pursuit of an ethnically pure ‘Greater Israel’, there is a deliberate strategy of conflating support for Palestinian rights with hatred against Jewish people.

And what of Israel’s cheerleaders?

Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi of the UK, who in practice represents a small minority of Britain’s Jewish population, blamed the “demonisation of Israel” for radicalising people into atrocities such as the Bondi Beach attack, and called for tighter regulation of social media.

Last year, he described IDF soldiers committing genocide as “our heroic soldiers.” Mirvis is not Israeli - he is a Brit of South African heritage - and he was conflating Jewish people with Israel. Israel’s cheerleaders have systematically trashed this crucially important demarcation between state and people.

What does he mean by the “demonisation of Israel”? In the Telegraph last year, he wrote:

The misappropriation of the word ‘genocide’ is an affront both to the victims and the survivors of these unspeakable crimes.

Its use in the context of this conflict is the ultimate demonisation of the Jewish State. It is a term deployed not only to eradicate any notion that Israel has a responsibility to protect its citizens, but also to tear open the still gaping wound of the Holocaust, knowing that it will inflict more pain than any other accusation. It is a moral inversion, which undermines the memory of the worst crimes in human history.

He believes action needs to be taken against the “demonisation” of Israel on the grounds it leads to horrors like the Bondi Beach massacre. And he thinks the ULTIMATE demonisation of Israel is accusing the state of genocide.

But it is the consensus of genocide scholars - including in Israel - that the State has committed genocide, as well as a UN Commission and NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

What we are witnessing is an attempt to silence those stating the truth about Israel’s murderous - yes, genocidal behaviour - on the grounds that stating this truth is inciting violence.

That includes multiple attempts to blame the massacre on protests against the genocide.

For example, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said:

It’s a bleak day but we’ve got to learn the right lessons from it. And this is the kind of terrible, terrible thing that happens when we have hate on our streets. And we’ve had hate on our streets from that appalling occasion on 9 October, we’ve seen terrible marches promoting death to the IDF, the extirpation of Israel, across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and elsewhere.

I strongly recommend listening to response of the brilliant Antony Loewenstein, a Jewish-Australian author who among other things wrote The Palestine Laboratory.

Standing against antisemitism and supporting free Palestine are not in fact irreconcilable beliefs. The exact opposite is true. Both flow from the rejection of injustice in all forms. Both flow from the rejection of violence against innocent people by virtue of their ethnicities. Both flow from treating all human life as having equal innate worth.

For those who are using this atrocity to justify violence against Palestinians: you do not oppose violence. You actively support violence. You just object to violence when it’s used against those you’ve deemed to be human.

If the Israeli army mowed down 15 Palestinian civilians, it would be a quiet day in Gaza, and there would be minimal reporting of it.

The Western media and Western politicians do not treat people’s lives as equal.

But the proper response to these hideous horrors is moral consistency, however unfashionable that might be in these gruesome times.