Australian society has failed its Jews at every level

No one in the Jewish community I spoke to felt like this was a surprise. Many felt like this was an inevitability. Ever since October 7, the Jewish community in Australia has been drinking from a firehose of antisemitism. Daily occurrences of hate – an inexorable tide of evil we felt rising around us.

The worst feeling was seeing those who we thought might be sympathetic to our plight dismiss our fears as a “hoax” or a “moral panic”. Elites in our media threw these deliberate fictions and red herrings into the national debate, making the warning signs almost impossible to see for the average Australian.

The worst were the egregious and uncalled-for accusations that Jews were “weaponising” antisemitism to shut down debate on Israeli policy, and the obscene navel-gazing debate over whether pro-Hamas rioters at the Sydney Opera House were chanting “Where’s the Jews” or “Gas the Jews” – as if the difference between the two actually matters.

Australian civil society has failed. This attack is the result of a series of failures of leadership across our country.

From politicians to business leaders, academics and commentators, there has been too much equivocation and misdirection on antisemitism.

Feckless politicians have caved to constituencies that laud violence, refusing to repudiate the hatred that comes from their supporters – some even went so far as to indulge in it themselves.

Courts have allowed marches in the streets calling for “resistance” and a globalised intifada.

State-funded media have provided inflammatory coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict. Public commentators have tied Jews in Australia to the policies of Israel, deliberately conflating the two into what they call the “Israel Jewish Lobby”.

Business leaders declined to investigate credible accusations of antisemitism in the workplace, afraid of the potential consequences.

University administrators allowed exclusionary and deeply antisemitic encampments on their campuses for months at a time while their Jewish staff and students were attacked.

Mendacious academics worked hard to redefine Zionism away from its definition as a form of Jewish civil rights – specifically the right to self-determination – towards a completely unhinged definition suggesting Jewish supremacy.

Arts bodies drove their Jewish stakeholders out unless they complied with political tests. Artists painted murals on walls in Sydney depicting Jews as parasites, while Jewish creatives were doxxed by their peers.

Police failed to enforce laws against the public display of terrorist or Nazi symbols.

Schools allowed the politicisation of their classrooms by staff asserting a genocide by Israel to their students during school hours.

Through all this, social-media platforms let angry people marinate in their own echo chambers, with algorithms encouraging Jew-hatred.

Australian society failed Jews at every level.

The responses since the attack have been predictably milquetoast, with multiple persistently online commentators registering their shock at an event which they implicitly encouraged through their consistent dehumanisation of Jews.

Many of these same commentators are now complaining that the tragedy is being “politicised”, while ignoring that the clearly political nature of the act necessitates a political reaction.

The offers of more security funding are beyond parody. There is no wall high enough to protect Jews in Australia, for the true barriers to the outrage at Bondi are those built in the human mind. They are built through an understanding that there are consequences for anti-Jewish hatred.

The offer of higher physical walls feels like a means of segregating Jewish Australians further in their own country – a modern-day ghetto being built for the Jews of Australia.

For this to be reduced to a question of gun control, in a state where access to firearms requires permission from the commissioner of police, is to conflate the means with the ends.

These vile creatures had bombs as well as bullets – they wanted dead Jews by any method.

Australia must change course. It cannot allow this form of stochastic terrorism to take root. There must be consequences for Jew-hatred – at all levels of our society – and this should be just the start.

The government must implement the recommendations of the Special Envoy’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism. More broadly, Australians must reject the laissez-faire attitude towards antisemitism, and there must be political consequences for our leaders letting their supporters engage in this sort of behaviour.

The monotonous drone of our leaders saying that “antisemitism has no place in Australia” has been shown to be a hollow lie. It is clear that there is antisemitism in Australia, and it is spreading.

These are the ashen wages of permissive antisemitism.

Jack Pinczewski, who worked for a previous Australian prime minister, campaigns for Jewish civil rights and has sat on the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. This column was originally published in Quillette