Bridge battle was lost, but we’ll win the war

What took place on the Sydney Harbour Bridge on Sunday was a gut punch for our community.

A militant anti-Israel group, the same one that held a pro-Palestinian rally as the October 7 horrors were still unfolding, relishing the massacre as a “humiliation” for Israel, succeeded in defeating the elected state government and the NSW police and convinced a single judge that its rally was motivated by humanitarian concerns and not anti-Zionist ideology.

A senior journalist who was on the ground covering the march, told me that from his interactions with the crowd, he concluded the marchers were not from a broad cross-section of society but were drawn overwhelmingly from the Arab-Australian communities and those on the hard left. In other words, this wasn’t so much a sample of wider societal feeling, this was the bulk of the anti-Israel movement itself that came out for what was framed as a historic event, and which had by virtue of the government’s opposition and the subsequent Supreme Court victory, received wall-to-wall publicity in the days before.

This is not to dismiss the impact of the Harbour Bridge rally or to wave away the very real emotions we have all felt in the past few days. With talk of an imminent recognition of a Palestinian state, there is a justifiable sense that our enemies are racking up the wins, which will embolden them to go further and further, as their hardline nature demands, posing a further threat to Jewish participation, way of life and physical security.

When one suffers a reverse, the natural compulsion is to try to claw it back, or undo the pain with a like-for-like victory. Many in the community, and supporters beyond it, are calling for a pro-Israel march on the same landmark.