Rhetoric to bloodshed: How ideology turned lethal
The Chanukah attack on Bondi Beach that has is a result of sustained ideological conditioning.
How did we get here?
It is a question many Australians will be asking themselves over the coming days.
The second most deadly mass casualty event to rock Australia’s shores. After the last, in 1996, we introduced the National Firearm Agreement, a route that New Zealand followed after its own mass casualty terror attack on Christchurch mosques in 2015. When you can no longer only blame a person’s access to weapons of mass destruction, you can only follow the ideology that inspired the attack.
The Chanukah attack on Bondi Beach that has, at the time of writing this, so far killed 16 people, is a result of sustained ideological conditioning.
Jews in Australia have been begging the Australian government to act on the antisemitism that has become awash in Australia. Rabbi Eli Schlanger z”l, who was killed in the attack, had penned a letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, urging him to act on the antisemitism becoming rife in daily Australian Jewish life. Three months later he was dead.
Jews in the community have not feared that this would happen, but rather knew it would happen. For the past two years; as cars have been burnt out across Dover Heights, as synagogues across the country have been vandalised and burnt to the ground, as calls to find “the Jews” were chanted en masse at protests for Palestine, as Jewish children have been assaulted at train stations, as Jewish school kids are verbally abused while on excursions, as Jews have been told to “go to the gas chambers” on public transport, Jews cannot help but feel as if they are being excluded from public life.
The Jewish community have been waiting by each headline and Community Security Group (CSG) report, as each attack inches closer to murder, knowing that as they continue, alongside their reports by media outlets online with comments closed lest they be found liable for the antisemitism by commenters, the likelihood of mass casualty runs higher and higher, only to be met with “this attack was promised to them 3000 years ago” going viral online.
The government cannot put a bandaid on the violence that is gushing out of society like an open wound. It is an infection taking hold on us, and they must stamp out the root of the ideological inception that inspired the event that took place yesterday: anti-Zionism.
That is, not criticism of Israeli policy or actions, but the advocacy of the destruction of a sovereign country, and the people belonging to it, and the people worldwide tied to it: Jews.
The legitimisation of anti-Zionism as a position has birthed an insidious moralisation of the attack and killing of Jews across our Diaspora. From the United States, to the UK, to Australia. It has spread as a disease, and radicalised all those who claim to have moral conscience, and yet can those same people who pray for the “people of Bondi” with social media posts that leave the identity of victims blank, give reason to why they have been targeted?
Anti-Zionism has become a rot in Australian society. It has festers like black mould, and it is making Australians sick. For the past year, Australian Jews have been having conversations during Shabbat dinners about the possibility of leaving the country that had previously welcomed them, torn and tattered, with open arms. Our leaders and politicians are the landlords who refuse to send out for the repairs. Is it any wonder?
Anti-Zionism has seamlessly integrated with other iterations of antisemitism. It has become part of the sociocultural mechanism that externalises fear, guilt and instability by projecting such manifestations onto Jews.
Today, to the regular Australian, libels of murdering Christian children, or polluting the white race, are laughable and inconceivable to be taken seriously. However, within the context of its time period, it was taken as common sense. Today, it is the inverse; being a driving force for white colonialism and genocide, and thus, intentionally killing Palestinian children as part of its gleeful process, now also taken by those people as “such common sense”.
Thus, being cast as uniquely immoral, and inherently so, has been normalised. A conspiracy theory becomes “common knowledge”, breeding moral panic amongst the righteous. Subsequently, social endorsement extends to the panicked exclusion of Jews from society; our punishment, and then finally violence unto us.
Cars in Sydney are firebombed, homes vandalised across the nation, synagogues destroyed. And in each attack, comment sections on social media accuse a “false flag” to inspire victimhood and sympathy – for, as such immoral people it is not possible for harm to be done to us without justification of inversion.
This fuels the self-enforcing cycle in which cause and effect are deliberately inverted, and thus, its manifestation in the Bondi terror attack. This presents in the same structural function as medieval blood libel, which became racial conspiracy, which has become colonial/genocidal conspiracy; the dehumanisation of Jews and the removal of our moral centre.
This ancient structure persists as factual disproval is reinterpreted as further evidence of deception, power or bad faith, flaming its conspiracy. It is a self-sustaining ritualised accusation.
Deploying more police to our streets, mask bans and protest permits, do little when the antisemitism is already at spewing point, but rather reinforces Jews as stiflers of free speech and protest.
So, I ask Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, just as Rabbi Eli Schlanger did, along with the harbingers of our social institutions that have allowed this rot to sink into society. How will you treat this epidemic of antisemitism?
Elie Rawlinson is a writer and artist currently living in Melbourne.
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