by Andrew Tucker
On December 14, two Islamic gunmen attacked a Hanukkah festival at Bondi beach in Sydney, Australia. Two armed assailants opened fire during a large “Chanukah by the Sea” celebration marking the first night of Hanukkah, killing at least 16 people and wounding 40, including two police officers, according to local authorities.
The Bondi beach massacre is what “globalizing the intifada” looks like. As the Global Imams Council has clearly stated, when Islamist hatred is normalized, incitement excused and extremists are tolerated under cover of politics, slogans and cowardly silence, violence is inevitable. What begins as chants and threats inevitably ends in blood.
This is a warning that government and media acquiescence in anti-Zionist demonstrations on the streets leads not to tolerance but terror.
According to the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, antisemitism is a form of hatred of Jews, and includes –
- Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor;
- Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Zionism is nothing more, or less, than the deep desire of the Jewish people for independent nationhood in the land where their nation was born.
Demonising and calling for the death of “Zionists” is antisemitism. Denying the moral and legal legitimacy of the Jewish State of Israel feeds into hatred of the Jewish people.
Over the last two years, the Australian government and mainstream media have failed abysmally to condemn anti-Zionist rhetoric. Worse, their constant criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian statehood – without unambiguously condemning Palestinian and Islamist extremism – have contributed to an atmosphere where hate-filled radicals think they can do whatever they want.
To some extent this has been driven by a legal/historical paradigm that Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Wong have embraced and propagated at every opportunity: that the state of Israel that was established in 1948 is a colonial settler state that needs to give way to the establishment of a state for the “real” people of Palestine – the Palestinians.
For the last two years, this Federal government and many others in the Australian elite and mainstream media have blindly repeated the mantra that international law condemns the existence of a “Jewish “ state, restricts its right as a sovereign state to defend its citizens against terror, condones acts of violence by Palestinians as justified by a “right to resistance”, demands the removal of Jews from the “occupied Palestinian territories”, and compels the unconditional establishment of a Palestinian state. The government has voted along these lines in the UN.
Anyone familiar with the legal and political history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict knows this is a political position which is neither morally coherent nor founded on legal and historical reality.
The Australian government has never provided any coherent explanation how either the historical record, an objective analysis of international law or Australia’s security interests justified the abandonment of decades of bipartisan support for Israel’s existence as an independent sovereign state on the same basis as Australia treats other sovereign states, in favour of a policy that rewards Arab Islamist aggression and denies Israel the right to exist in secure borders free of acts or threats of aggression.
One could be forgiven for suspecting that this about-turn is motivated by the fact that the Muslim population in Australia is now vastly larger than the Jewish population.
However the Bondi massacre and every act of terror against the Jewish people in the name of anti-Zionism since October 7 2023 expose the simple fact: twisting and distorting international legal and historical narratives to suit a preconceived ideological view inevitably leads to chaos and disorder, leaving a vacuum that the enemies of freedom fill only too eagerly.
Acts of violence against Jews are a symptom, not the cause of the problem. The underlying root cause is anti-Zionism: the deep antipathy towards the legitimate existence of the Jewish people as an independent nation.
And one vital pillar of those foundations is the integrity of our national and international legal system. The process of politicisation of the law in recent years is dangerously eroding that foundation.
For that reason alone, it is imperative that the Australian government state and restate unambiguously (as indeed both left-wing and right-wing Australian governments have done for decades, until Marxist anti-western ideology recently hijacked our intellectual leadership): while a resolution of Palestinian aspirations for self-determination must be achieved, this can only happen through good faith negotiations with the State of Israel. In the meantime, international law and justice support the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, the territorial integrity of that state based on basic principles of law, and its fundamental right to protect itself (within the limits of international humanitarian and human rights law) against all acts and threats of terror and aggression. All acts or threats of violence against these fundamental rights of the Jewish people and the State of Israel must be vigorously prosecuted and punished.
As Bondi shows, failure of governments to speak about law and history with moral clarity contributes to the killing of Jews.
