anti -semitism : the viscious circle (bulletin art

ANTI-SEMITISM: THE VICIOUS CIRCLE






Anti-Semitism: the vicious circle

Middle East violence is having a profound effect on Australian Jews. Many are finding their support for Israel is igniting a backlash that has frightening echoes of an ancient scourge. Diana Bagnall reports.

On March 22, the Australian Senate passed a bipartisan motion condemning anti-Semitism. On the same day, Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin was assassinated by an Israeli missile, and condemnation of Israel's action ricocheted around the world. The timing of the events was serendipitous but their connection is no less intimate.

The parliamentary motion was driven by expressed need. In Australia, as elsewhere, events in the Middle East are leaving many Jews feeling exposed and vulnerable. The critical question is at what point legitimate criticism of the Jewish state mutates into illegitimate criticism of Jews as people, based on ancient stereotypes and bigotry. Is it, for example, acceptable to attribute the characteristics of the Nazis to Israel (the swastika is used to make the crude link in graffiti and cartoons) or is such a comparison, as Britain's chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggests, "one of the most blasphemous inversions in the history of the world's oldest hate"?

The issue is the centrality of Israel to Jewish identity. In Australia, which claims to have the highest proportion of Holocaust survivors of any Jewish community, Israel is held particularly dear, says Geoffrey Brahm Levey, a political scientist who co-ordinates the Jewish studies program at the University of New South Wales. "[Along with the Holocaust], it's a core value within the Australian Jewish identity." Australian Jews, for example, are almost twice as likely as American Jews to have visited Israel at least once.

"All Jews are aligned in some way with Israel," says Philip Mendes, a Monash University social scientist with a history of support for the Palestinian state. "I don't support Ariel Sharon, and I wouldn't vote for [his] Likud [party] in a million years ... [but] clearly the Palestinians have won the PR battle internationally and are able to present themselves as victims ... I don't really call myself a Zionist but people on the left who are anti-Zionist call me a Zionist and even right-wing Zionist, which is ridiculous."

In Australia, the Israeli-Palestine conflict has low political visibility, for the most part. It broke through into mainstream political debate last October when Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi visited Australia to be presented with a Sydney Peace Foundation prize, provoking Jewish fury and, in turn, generating voluble hostility towards the so-called Jewish lobby. Since then, however, silence. The storm over the depiction of Jews in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ seems largely to have passed over Australia.

Yet in 2003 the number of anti-Semitic incidents – including physical violence and property damage, abusive calls and email, and graffiti – logged by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry reached 481, the highest level recorded and more than twice the average recorded over the previous 12 years. Few Australians in mainland states, for example, are probably aware that over the new year, someone used weedkiller to burn a swastika and the words "Kill the Jews" into the lawn of Parliament House in Hobart. Swastikas are regularly sprayed around university campuses, where anti-Israel sentiment runs high.

While Jewish schools and synagogues have long been protected by armed security, it is a more subtle shift in social attitudes that worries Jewish leaders such as ECAJ president Jeremy Jones: "For years in Australia, you never judged Australians by [the existence of anti-Semitism] but on how they reacted. I had never encountered a situation where it was accepted. What is different in the last few years is it seems to be tolerated."

He adds: "People are seeing overt anti-Semitism coming from groups that are themselves suffering from discrimination and alienation and so this is somehow treated as though it isn't the same sort of problem. The people saying these [anti-Semitic] things are seen as being victims in one sense, so they get away with victimising others."

Jones doesn't say such things lightly. As one of the major drivers of the Australian National Dialogue of Christians, Muslims and Jews, he has vested much energy in promoting interfaith understanding. "I'm dealing with a fringe phenomenon," he says, "and in a sense you can feel sorry for Australian anti-Semites. In many countries, Jews are the outsiders, but in Australia, Jews were on the First Fleet ... Australians are highly sensitive to accusations of being anti-Semitic. Every society has its defences against anti-Semitism and Australia has some of the best. But it doesn't mean we are not going to experience serious challenges to those defences."

The term, the "new" anti-Semitism, has wide currency in Europe and the United States. The suggestion is that hatred of Jews is again playing a large part in world events. Several books and articles have been published on the subject, while the Australian Jewish press is similarly in a state of high anxiety. Frequent reference is made to 1930s Europe – "the déjà vu of oppressive danger", as Vera Ranki wrote recently in the Australian Jewish News.

Paranoia comes with the territory, says Alan Jacobs, founding director of the Jewish Museum in Sydney, now a freelance curator and writer. Even though he feels no more insecure as a Jew in Sydney than he felt five years ago – "Australia is a paradise for Jews compared with some parts of the world" – he too senses a wind shift. He acknowledges he's moved to the right in terms of his attitude towards Israel, as have his Jewish friends. "With non-Jewish people you are constantly called upon to defend Israel since the second intifada began. A lot of my non-Jewish friends say, 'I love Jews but I'm anti-Israel'."

Writer Dawn Cohen says that where she lives, in Byron Bay, northern NSW, there's more anti-Semitism than she's ever experienced. "In Byron Bay, you are a good Jew as long as you are anti-Israel." As she noted in the AJN: "Many progressive Australians assume their own secure identity as critical 'citizens of the world' should be the norm. However, Jews bear the intergenerational impact of being hounded from country to country. Public criticism of Israel is a threat to what has been their only security in a very unreliable world."

There are degrees of anxiety and, for survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants, those degrees are minutely calibrated. Israeli-born social researcher Neer Korn says: "We are at the point of being scared of being scared of what might happen, while not being afraid for our personal safety whatsoever." It's not an irrational fear, he says.

Where Jews are looking most anxiously is Europe, anti-Semitism's oldest habitat. In the past three years, there has been a spate of attacks on Jewish people, schools, cemeteries and synagogues in Euorpe, particularly in France. Acknowledgment of anti-Semitism's reawakening has been slow and far from uniform. But in February, shaken by a poll showing Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to world peace, European Union leaders sponsored a seminar on anti-Semitism. The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, in a draft study released at the end of 2003, found that where perpetrators of anti-Semitic attacks could be identified, they were mostly right-wing activists and radicalised Islamist youth. The study also noted that "in the extreme left-wing scene, anti-Semitic remarks were to be found mainly in the context of pro-Palestinian and anti-globalisation rallies" and that "a combination of anti-Zionist and anti-American views ... formed an important element in the emergence of an anti-Semitic mood in Europe".

Notes Mendes: "What is happening here is a minuscule version of what is happening overseas. I'm not saying that in Australia there's a blowout. But we are getting that same blow-up, particularly from the key ethnic and ideological groups."

Levey, whose courses attract a sizeable minority of non-Jews, puts a different slant on that fear, while not contesting its reality. The Jewish community, he says, is very well organised, and good at voicing its concerns. "If we simply take the bipartisan motion [opposing anti-Semitism], there was no similar motion condemning Islamophobia and attacks on Australian Arabs and Muslims in the wake of the first Gulf War ... All of these attacks need to be condemned."

Care to comment? Write to Letters, The Bulletin, GPO Box 3957, Sydney, NSW 1028; fax (02) 9267 4359; email [email protected] with your daytime phone number, suburb/town and state.

........................................................................

bye.dub