Nina Bassat: We felt betrayed by leaders’ silence

Melbourne Holocaust Museum Foundation board member Nina Bassat gave powerful evidence yesterday in the final session of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion’s hearing blocks.

The 87-year-old Holocaust survivor said Australian political leaders at all tiers of government had failed the Jewish community in their silence on antisemitism, and warned that the word “genocide” is being dangerously and harmfully misused in debate over the Gaza war.

Bassat arrived in Australia in 1949 after surviving the Holocaust in a ghetto and in hiding in Poland, followed by two years in a displaced persons camp in Germany. Only four members of her extended family survived.

She went on to a career as a lawyer and decades of Jewish communal leadership, including two terms as president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, and the presidency of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

SORROWED BY THE LOSS OF EMPATHY IN SOCIETY

Addressing the erosion of civility in Australian life, Bassat said the loss of empathy across society was a source of real sorrow to her.

She said Australians had “lost the power to be kind and the power to interact with civility,” and warned that without relearning how to see one another as individuals rather than as opposing camps, the country would not recover the social cohesion it has lost.

She described Australia as having been, for 74 years, “a paradigm of multiculturalism” where background and religion did not matter — a country that, in her words, had allowed people to simply “get on” with one another.

That, she said, changed abruptly after October 2023.

“We’ve [Australian society] become very divisive. We’ve put labels on each other. We no longer treat each other as just another human being,” she said.

ANTISEMITISM: OUR PAIN, BUT AUSTRALIA’S SHAME

Bassat was in Israel when Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023, and she told the Commission she had watched from there the footage of the pro-Palestine rally at the Sydney Opera House two days later with disbelief.

“I just cannot understand how it could have happened, adding the nation (Israel) had not even buried its dead, yet was met not with sympathy, but vilification.

“I couldn’t understand that lack of empathy. I was shattered by the lack of humanity.”

That response led her, along with roughly 100 fellow Australian Holocaust survivors, to sign an open letter in November 2023 that urged Australians to denounce antisemitism and hatred.

Explaining her decision to do that, Bassat said the atmosphere was “so incredibly reminiscent of the rhetoric of Germany in the 1930s” — not something that frightened her personally, but something she feared for the country.

“We had never, ever envisaged that Australia … would become Europe of the 1930s,” she said. “It was to me incomprehensible.”

Asked about antisemitism as a broader social failure, she gave one of the hearing’s sharpest lines: while antisemitism is the Jewish community’s “individual pain and communal pain,” she said, “it is not a Jewish problem,” because a society that tolerates bullying and vilification “depraves itself”, and undermines the values of the whole population.

“It’s our pain,” she said of the unprecedented rise of antisemitism, “but it’s Australia’s shame.”

A FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP

The most pointed section of her evidence at the hearing concerned political leadership.

Bassat told the Royal Commission that many in the Jewish community felt “betrayed” by the near-total absence of federal, state and local government voices condemning antisemitism after October 7, 2023.

“There was a great silence,” she said. “I expect more from leaders. That is what leadership is. Leadership is noticing the vacuum, getting up there and saying what has to be said.”

She described hate speech as “corrosive,” saying it undermines “the fabric of what I thought was Australian life,” and said leaders should have made clear that such conduct would not be accepted — but did not.

ALARMING MISUSE OF THE TERM GENOCIDE

“Language has become perverted,” she told the Commission, warning that terms like “freedom of speech” and “the right to protest” were being invoked “with a disingenuity that I find alarming.”

She said such freedoms were not absolute: “You have to observe the freedom of other people when you use those freedoms for yourself. You do not have blank licence.”

Bassat reserved her strongest words for the use of the term “genocide” in relation to the Gaza war, calling it “a very specific, defined United Nations accepted legal term” that cannot be used “with gay abandon.”

Citing Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word after the Holocaust, she said it applies only to the state-sanctioned, systematic destruction of a population with proven intent at the highest level — not to deaths in war, however tragic.

“The word genocide brings into sharp focus what it means to be one of 100,000 children who survived when one and a half million were murdered,” she said.

“That knowledge has guided my life. That is what genocide means.”

‘ZIO’ USED AS A SYNONYM FOR ‘JEW’ TO SPREAD HATE

In a written statement to the Royal Commission by Bassat that accompanied her appearance at the hearing, she expressed her view that in the current climate of unprecendented antisemitism in Australia, “the words ‘Jew’ and ‘zio’ or ‘Zionist’ have now become synonymous and are used interchangeably as derogatory and demeaning words.

Bassat wrote, “Most Australian Jews are Zionists, as research has shown and this Commission has heard that evidence. We are proud of our indigeneity based on more than 3,000 years of continuous history and connection to the land of Israel, and our prayers have always reflected this and have reflected the centrality of Israel to our faith and culture.

“The most obvious example that ‘Jew’ and ‘zio’ are being used as synonyms is that those Jews who are not Zionists are also referred to as ‘zios’ and subjected to abuse, doxxing and exclusion.”

REFLECTIONS ON HOPE

Bassat told the Royal Commission that its very existence, the more than 20,000 public submissions it received, and the sensitivity shown toward witnesses, had been sources of comfort and healing for her community.

And in her submitted statement, she wrote “My strongest hope lies in my fellow Australians. I have a deep belief that the silent majority is with Jewish Australians, not against us.

“This belief is based on the many courageous non-Jewish people who made submissions to this Commission and who appeared before it, often at a high personal cost.

“It is based on the many Indigenous leaders who have supported us, on the sporting figures who have stood by us and advocated for us, the members of the media who are ruled by a moral compass and not by expediency, and on the hundreds of people who have said publicly, and to me, “this is not my Australia”.