I’m not Jewish, but October 7th 2023 changed my life.
It was seeing how the world reacted to the October 7th massacre that made me start looking into Israel, the war and the wider region.
It wasn’t the events that took place that day, horrific though they were, that catalysed this change. While the atrocities committed by Hamas are hard to top, it was the horrific events that happened afterwards which have affected me so deeply. The events which started a mere day later. The events which have only worsened as the 18-month anniversary approaches. October 7th changed my life because it was the impetus for me to discover a generations-old campaign of hate and propaganda, a campaign so successful it has even captured prominent members of the group it’s aimed against.
I refer of course to the campaign against Israel and the Jews.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d fallen for it at one point. I recall saying to myself many years ago, after reading a Wikipedia article on the number of United Nations resolutions against Israel, “This has to be the evillest country on Earth.” In my defence, one can be forgiven for thinking the UN holds no agenda against the only democracy in the region, an idea that seemed utterly uncontroversial to me at the time. Thankfully, I never shared my views.
It was seeing how the world reacted to the October 7th massacre that made me start looking into Israel, the war and the wider region. Two days after the attack, protests erupted against Israel in Sydney. It sounded like “Gas the Jews” was chanted alongside the burning of an Israeli flag. This chant was interpreted by a police expert as the no-less-disturbing “where’s the Jews”, but despite the mob also chanting the unambiguously hateful “fuck the Jews”, the ABC focused an article about the protests on the fact that the chant wasn’t as bad as people had first thought. The article also featured a Palestinian rally organiser complaining about a smear campaign against Palestinians – he was photographed, but no Jews were. I wondered at this interpretation of “fair and balanced” reporting in light of explicit antisemitism. Later on, I wondered why our national broadcaster decided to include an outraged quote from the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister in a future article about the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Since when is the offence of a brutal dictatorship at the assassination of a brutal terrorist leader an appropriate way for Australia’s state-run media to frame the news?
The more I read articles, listened to podcasts, studied the history and watched interviews and documentaries, the more I noticed such oddities in the response to the Gaza war. The death toll being quoted by pretty well everybody comes directly from the Gaza Health Ministry. Hamas, who spent almost 20 years building tunnels beneath the Palestinian population and turning schools, mosques and hospitals into military bases, runs that institution – and one might suspect they have a motive in inflating the numbers. The Hamas-Gaza Health Ministry connection was referenced less and less over time by the media and even the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, omits it from an official statement. Türk also neglects to mention that the death toll includes upwards of 10,000 Hamas combatants, plus anyone who has died in Gaza for any reason since the war began.
I noticed more and more such omissions in reporting. Israel is bombing schools and hospitals, yet there’s often no mention of Hamas’s military bases within. Hamas are resisting “occupation”, yet Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, including the forced expulsion of almost ten thousand Israeli citizens, isn’t noted. Israel invades Lebanon, yet the thousands of rockets shot by Hezbollah, the resultant tens of thousands of Israeli refugees, and the complete failure of UNIFIL to fulfil their mandate of keeping Hezbollah north of the Litani River is ignored. In fact, despite studying the topic daily, it took me many months to discover that Hezbollah had even been firing rockets at Israeli civilians – every day since October 8th, before Israel had even retaliated against Hamas, no less. These rockets have killed civilians yet this fact is rarely reported, or it’s reported in utterly repugnant ways such as BBC’s stunning headline “Israel hits Hezbollah targets after football pitch attack”, published when 12 Israeli Druze children were hit by Hezbollah rockets and killed.
It was becoming clearer and clearer that an agenda is afoot. Every day I read about Israel’s brutality, yet John Spencer, the world’s leading academic specialising in urban warfare, is almost never quoted despite (or likely thanks to) his belief that Israel is doing “harm mitigation at a level that nobody’s ever tried.” Rarely is it mentioned that civilians are routinely notified, by Israel, of military actions before they take place. Even rarer is the blame for the civilian casualties, all of which could be stopped in a day if Hamas returned all of the hostages and disarmed, placed on the group which started the war. Instead, Hamas are often painted as freedom fighters or a resistance group even though their charter openly outlines their core aims of Jihad and the ethnic cleansing of Jews.
This effect extends beyond the media and the United Nations. Wikipedia articles on Palestine often display the same style of bias as above, cherry picking experts and statistics that make Israel look as bad as possible. Campus protests around the United States are left alone by faculty administration, despite chants for “intifada” (a callback to the second intifada, which was characterised by scores of suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians), the waving of terrorist flags and “Zionist exclusion zones”.
In parallel to all of the above, antisemitic attacks around the world have begun to ramp up. A Jewish woman is raped in France to “avenge Palestine”, and, also in France, a 12-year-old is gang-raped by attackers who call her a “dirty Jew”. Jews are openly hunted and viciously attacked in the Netherlands days before the anniversary of Kristallnacht. A synagogue is burned down in Melbourne and attacks here in Australia are escalating at a frightening pace. There are countless more incidents.
Yet instead of international outrage against these race hate crimes, Israeli civilians and even non-Israeli Jews are being conflated with the actions of the Israeli government – the very definition of dehumanisation. For example, the organisers of some of the campus protest groups openly demand policies to exclude Zionists or even just those with “ties to Israel” from involvement in certain aspects of their universities, such as being on boards. These anti-Israel sentiments are becoming harder and harder to distinguish from outright antisemitism – what else is it called when you punish a citizen for the actions of her country, irrespective of her own beliefs?
I take pause at this point to ask myself a question. “What if I’m wrong?” By many accounts, Israel has, by overwhelming evidence, committed innumerous war crimes against not only its Palestinian but also its Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni and Iranian neighbours. How can I justify ignoring or dismissing so much evidence and coming to the minority view on the topic? Is Israel my flat Earth?
To help me answer that question, I ask some questions of my own:
How is Israel an apartheid state if 20% of its population are Arabs who hold the same rights as Jewish citizens?
Why don’t Israel’s neighbours get accused of apartheid for expelling almost a million Jews throughout the 20th century, or for their other acts of ethnic cleansing?
Why aren’t countries that charge the jizya, a tax specifically levied against Jews (or sometimes other non-Muslims), accused of apartheid?
If Gaza is an “open-air prison” and Israel is an apartheid state, how come Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, isn’t also called an apartheid state?
If Gaza is an open-air prison and Israel is an apartheid state, why did almost 20,000 Gazans hold Israeli work permits and receive higher wages and better rights working in Israel than in Gaza?
Why is Israel blamed for the poor infrastructure in Gaza rather than the Gazan government, Hamas, who spent billions of dollars building terror tunnels rather than looking after its own people?
Why does no one want to blame Palestinian civilian deaths on Hamas when they refuse to allow civilians to shelter in the tunnels? Why when Hamas openly admits to using civilians as human shields doesn’t that change how critics view Israel’s culpability?
If Hamas is a resistance movement, why did the perpetrators of October 7th yell “Allahu Akbar” while murdering civilians instead of “free Palestine”?
Why is Zionism considered an evil form of colonialism but the far more prevalent and successful Islamism is not?
Why is it okay for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran to fire rockets targeted at civilians yet everything Israel does is a “war crime”? Why aren’t these groups considered equally bad as Israel, or at least criticised for targeting civilians?
After the global protests against the Iranian regime for the murder of Mahsa Amini, why aren’t we talking about the fact that Iran has executed many hundreds of civilians since and clearly little has changed?
Where were the campus protests against the Assad regime in Syria when over half a million people were murdered? Where are the campus protests against the Taliban’s horrendous treatment of women?
Why did UN Women take 57 days to condemn Hamas’s attack despite eyewitness accounts, testimony and even video evidence showing that girls and women were brutally raped, mutilated and murdered?
Why don’t we ever hear about the doomsday clock in Iran which counts down the days until Israel will supposedly be totally destroyed?
Why isn’t prominent Jew Norman Finkelstein thoroughly discredited as an authority when he says the Houthis should receive the Nobel Peace Prize despite the Houthi’s slogan containing “Death to Israel” and “Curse be upon the Jews”? How does that level of cognitive dissonance even exist?
Why did Queers for Palestine openly support the Houthis for attacking ships in the Red Sea yet say nothing when the Houthis sentenced nine men to death for sodomy? Don’t they also care about queers?
Why does Qatar give more money to US universities (almost $5B over the last 20 years) than any other nation? Why don’t we do something about the fact that antisemitic incidents are 2-3 times higher at the institutions that received funding from the Middle East than those that didn’t?
Why did the world not react with a “Jewish Lives Matter” campaign when the pogroms in Amsterdam took place? If you want to argue that soccer hooligans deserve to be the victims of racist attacks, why at least did we not get “Jewish Lives Matter” when a 12-year-old girl was called a “dirty Jew” and gang-raped?
Why do all the refugees in the world have a single UN agency to look after them but the Palestinians alone have their own separate, dedicated UN agency?
Why do the grandchildren of Palestinian refugees have refugee status when this is not how refugee status works anywhere else in the world? Why are Palestinians who live freely in the cities in which they were born considered refugees when this is not how refugee status works elsewhere?
Why is Israel an illegitimate state but the other nations that were formed around that time or since, e.g. Pakistan, are legitimate?
Why did the UN General Assembly adopt 154 resolutions against Israel and only 71 against the rest of the world combined between 2015 to 2023? That is quite the level of disproportion!
Why wasn’t it a major scandal when the UN drastically reduced its estimate on the number of women and children killed in Gaza, a number being reported ad nauseum by most of the world’s media?
Why are the comments of an idiotic Israeli politician considered to reflect the views of the entire nation yet our own politicians’ dumb opinions are definitely their own dumb opinions only?
If Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians, why do they allow passage for thousands of aid trucks? Why aren’t Hamas accused of genocide for stealing aid and selling it to Gazan civilians?
If Israel has been committing a genocide against the Palestinians for decades as some claim, how has the Palestinian population more than doubled since the genocide started? Given Israel’s military resources, why aren’t they simply carpet bombing refugee camps? Why did they evacuate almost a million people from Rafah?
Why is responding to Israel’s alleged ethnic cleansing of Palestinians with “from the river to the sea”, a call to ethnically cleanse the land of Israelis/Jews, considered acceptable?
Why is the lack of a two-state solution being implemented always blamed on Israel when Palestine has rejected all of the proposed two-state solutions?
It’s a long list of questions, yet it’s far from exhaustive.
While there is much fair criticism to level against Israel, such as against the appalling actions of some settlers in the West Bank and the government’s complicity in this, many of the above questions seem impossible to answer without a fair degree of conspiracy theory or argumentative gymnastics. Looking at them in the aggregate, it’s clear that even if Israel was committing most of the atrocities it’s accused of, there’s nonetheless an agenda. The worst accusations against Israel would still only put it on in the middle of many other nations who have committed the same calibre of crimes against humanity, so why is it singled out so uniquely? When Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, surrounded by dictatorships, many of which no one denies have committed atrocities, it’s hard to accept that this phenomenon doesn’t have anything to do with “the Jews”.
The net effect of singling out Israel has been that, over time, hating Israelis or even just hating Jews seems justified to many millions of people around the world. This has led to antisemitism rising to terrifying levels, and most distressingly, no one seems to care.
The global response to this war has showed me that the world’s oldest hatred stays strong. The Tik Tok activist types and their followers simply mindlessly repeat the slogans and talking points of a generations-old propaganda campaign run by groups and nations who openly call for the abolition of Israel and the annihilation of the Jews. Why don’t they give any ground when evidence in favour of Israel comes to light? Rather than adjusting their worldviewwhen they come across answers to any of my questions above, these people are forced to instead adjust the world in order to maintain these views.
I didn’t know it until recently but I see now that Jews are not safe simply because they’re Jews. Racism is not universally condemned; it seems, in this regard, that some animals are more equal than others.
Couple the lack of response to the escalating antisemitic attacks with respected Western media outlets like the BBC putting spin on a terrorist attack that killed a dozen Israeli children to make the victim look like the perpetrator, and I can truly see how the Holocaust took place.
I don’t live in the world I thought I did, and that is why October 7th changed my life.
Pete Malicki is an Australian business innovator and career coach.
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