I used to deeply admire Grace Tame

I remember when Grace Tame burst into the public consciousness in 2021. We had endured years of Scott Morrison, who often felt like the most dysfunctional prime minister imaginable. The state and the federal governments were constantly blaming each other for the sloppy vaccine rollout and there was this heavy sense that the lockdowns might stretch on forever.

Into that void stepped Grace Tame. She was a year younger than me, articulate, fierce and so refreshing. A child sexual abuse survivor who had become a fearless advocate for others.

I loved her immediately, her badass energy, her refusal to be intimidated, and the famous moment where she scowled at Morrison in that photo and basically told him to rack off in the most Australian way possible.

Tame felt like my kind of role model. A young woman who had already done extraordinary things in such a short life, pushing for better protections for all children and bravely speaking about child sex abuse and grooming.

I thought she represented something new, someone brave and uncompromising.

Then I saw the footage of Tame at the February 9 protest against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s Australian visit, shouting, “From Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the intifada,” and my blood ran cold.

I read Tame’s recent piece in Crikey, and I believe her when she says she does not support antisemitism and abhors violence of all kinds. I also hear her when she writes about being called “difficult”. But I also think she has missed what us Jewish Australians are saying about that specific phrase.

Tame writes that the word intifada translates as “shaking off” in Arabic. While she is technically correct, in my mind, as a Jewish Australian, the first and second intifada will never mean that to me.

When I hear the word intifada, the first person I think about is Malki Roth.

Malki was a 15-year-old Australian Israeli girl whose family moved to Israel when she was still a child. In August 2001 Malki was at the Sbarro pizza shop in Jerusalem, eating pizza with a friend during the summer holidays, when a suicide bomber walked in and blew himself up, killing her along with 15 others, including other children.

One of my core memories from primary school is being in Grade 3 and seeing the front page of the Herald Sun, with pictures of the Sbarro pizza shop carnage and many articles about the Australian girl killed in the intifada. I remember when Malki’s father, Arnold Roth, came to speak to me and my classmates at Beth Rivkah Ladies College, telling us how Malki had been a student at my primary school before her family had moved to Israel.

So, when Grace Tame says, “globalise the intifada”, I think about Malki and the more than 1200 innocent Israelis killed in suicide attacks during those years, and I think, you want to globalise this carnage and bring it here, to Australia? You want to bring the violence of the Middle East to Australia, where innocent people, like 10-year-old Matilda can be killed at Bondi Beach? That’s what you want?

I remember Arnold Roth’s grief, the way he spoke about his daughter who had been taken from him while doing something completely ordinary. Malki left behind a sister with severe disabilities and a family that has been living with her loss ever since.

Grace Tame references “two periods of Palestinian resistance that began with labour strikes, boycotts and peaceful protests against Israel’s violence”.

I think about buses blown up, nightclubs and restaurants attacked, and the murder of Holocaust survivors at a Passover seder. Ordinary people going about ordinary life and never coming home.

To me and so many other Australian Jews, globalise the intifada does not sound like a slogan about liberation, rather, it sounds like a call for violence to spread.

In the aftermath of the Bondi terrorist attack, these words land even harder.

I don’t think Australian Jews should have to sit around trying to decipher what someone might have meant when for us, these words themselves carry so much blood and memory.

There is no competition when it comes to suffering. Palestinians in Gaza are suffering. Israelis are suffering. And the Australian Jewish community is carrying its own grief right now too.

Bondi shook us deeply. Many of us feel less safe here than we ever have before. But we also have a right to say how these words make us feel.

I used to admire Grace Tame deeply. I still admire the courage it took for her to tell her story and fight for the safety of all children. But courage also means listening when people tell you that something you said has hurt them and has caused fear and anguish.

When I hear the word intifada, I do not think about a translation. I think about Malki Roth.

Nomi Kaltmann is president of the Australian Jewish Feminist Alliance (JOFA) Australia.