Ergas draws Dreyfus Affair parallel to October 7

Economist and columnist Henry Ergas has told a Melbourne audience that the antisemitism unleashed in Australia after October 7 follows a pattern first set more than a century ago in France’s Dreyfus affair.

Speaking at a Lamm Jewish Library of Australia event at Beth Weizmann on Tuesday, October 13, Ergas said the hatred did not follow Israel’s military response in Gaza. It came within hours of the massacre.

“It was not October 7 that created the torrent of antisemitism that erupted on our shores,” he said. “It revealed the hatred and it set it loose.”

Ergas, a columnist for The Australian who was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2016, spent 15 years at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris and has taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Monash University.

He traced the 1894 conviction of Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason, a case built on forged evidence that divided France for more than a decade. Ergas argued the affair became a “condensation symbol”, a term coined by American political scientist Murray Edelman, which absorbed every grievance in French society until it marked the line between friend and enemy.

“In our time, the issue that plays that condensing role is Israel,” he said.

He argued that parts of the left had turned Zionism into a symbol of settler colonialism and Western power, while Islamist movements carried their own long tradition of Jew hatred. The two had formed what Ergas called “common enemy politics”, held together by shared hatred rather than shared hopes, with social media playing the role the mass-circulation press played in 1890s France.

Referring to French far-left militant Pierre Goldman’s 1978 warning about antisemitism seeping into the left, Ergas said: “Nearly half a century later, it no longer seeps. It marches, it chants, and at Bondi it killed.”

He criticised political leaders for giving Islamist organisations legitimacy and taxpayer funding, and said institutions including universities, Creative Australia and the ABC had been “given carte blanche to fan its flames”.

Ergas said government responses had given Jewish institutions more money for security while leaving the underlying hatred untouched. He drew the same conclusion about the political settlement that ended the Dreyfus affair: “The symptoms had been treated; the causes never were.”