Sidoti and Cox face off at Caulfield Shule

A co-author of a United Nations genocide inquiry and an international law expert who challenges its findings addressed a packed hall at Caulfield Shule on Thursday night, in an event organisers say was targeted online and forced them to screen every guest by hand.

Chris Sidoti, one of the three members of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, shared the stage with Dr Brian L. Cox, a senior fellow of Canada’s Macdonald-Laurier Institute and former professor of international law at Cornell. The commission determined that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The event was organised by ABC Watch, the Australian Jewish Association, Allies for a Strong Australia and The Hague Initiative for International Cooperation (THINC).

Organisers told The AJN the livestream was disrupted for the first half of the evening by what appeared to be a denial-of-service attack by hundreds of bots. The stream was restored for the second half.

Jewish community activist and ABC Watch co-founder Sharon Kuperholz said the event could not be publicly promoted for security reasons.

“In order to sell tickets, you need to advertise, and yet that’s exactly what Jews are not allowed to do,” she said.

“We cannot advertise. We cannot promote anything on social media. Everything has to be on WhatsApp groups where we know every single person.”

Kuperholz said guests had to register through a third-party ticketing platform. Organisers then went through each registration individually, checking the social media accounts and connections of anyone they did not know personally.

She said those who registered included one person from the Red Cross and one from Amnesty International.

Kuperholz said the concern was not simply that the two individuals might get in.

“The problem, of course, is that they could then go in the pro-Palestinian pages and advertise the event, and the next thing I would have 2,000 people out there screaming genocidal baby killers as we arrived,” she said.

“It’s what those one or two infiltrators could do on social media that could threaten our community.”

In his opening remarks, Sidoti told the audience he had not come to debate.

“You know, a debate for me is a game,” he said.

“What we’re discussing tonight is not a game. It’s far too serious. And debate has winners and losers. There’s not going to be any winners and losers tonight. I’m not going to convince a single person in this room. And nor is Brian or any of you going to convince me.”

He said he had come “in the hope that in some way this can contribute to peace”.

Cox noted the event fell the day after the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks.

“We carry the pain and the loss of October 7th every day,” he said.

He argued that anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish sentiment had moved from the fringe to the mainstream since that day, and that “one of the primary tools that has been used to justify” it was international law.

Later in the evening, Sidoti said Gazans, unlike Rohingya, Ukrainian and Sudanese refugees, “had nowhere to go”, because both Egypt and Israel had refused to admit them.

He said 2.1 million people were now “squeezed into a territory that is three times the local government area of the city of Melbourne”.

Members of the audience interjected at several points, though the crowd was largely respectful.

In his closing remarks, Cox agreed with Sidoti that neither man was likely to change the other’s mind.

“This is a conversation. It’s a dialogue,” he said. Turning to Sidoti, he said: “I applaud you and I respect you immensely.”

He also thanked the audience, which he said had “sat and listened to competing perspectives even if you very strongly disagree with one or the other”.

Speaking to The AJN afterwards, Sidoti said the audience had been “fabulous in coming out in such numbers”.

Asked whether nobody changing their mind meant mission accomplished, he said: “Well, it wasn’t an objective; it was an expectation.”

“I had a chance to hear much more detail from Brian than I’ve heard before. So absolutely, it was worthwhile on my part.”

Asked about the hostile pushback from some audience members, he replied: “I mean, so what?”

Cox, who travelled from Colorado for the event, described it as an “insightful and respectful conversation”.

He said having both men on stage was “a way for the audience to evaluate how much credibility they can and should extend to the UN commission’s report”.

“It got a bit unruly, but that’s a bit understandable, I think, because of the passion that comes along with this topic,” he said. “But even though it got a bit unruly, it wasn’t completely disrupted.”

Asked if it had been worth the trip, he said: “It absolutely was.”

Sidoti said he hoped “there are more opportunities like this”.