The slow work of persuasion
The case for Israel won’t be won by shouting louder, but by patient persuasion of the Australians still open to it
After the Islamist terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 against the United States, I felt American. From half a world away, it felt like an assault upon people, values and a way of life I recognised as my own.
After the Islamist terrorist attacks of 7 October 2023 against communities and a music festival in southern Israel, I felt Israeli. I still do.
What I did not foresee was how few across the comfortable, complacent, distracted and historically illiterate West would feel the same.
For Jewish Australians—and non-Jewish Australians such as me who have lived in that magnificent democracy—the response of many fellow Australians has been beyond comprehension. Israel is a vibrant, imperfect and argumentative democracy resisting enemies that openly seek its destruction. Yet much of the moral suspicion is directed not towards those movements, but towards the people defending themselves.
There is no contradiction in a secular, non-Jewish Australian Army veteran standing with Israel and the global Jewish diaspora while caring about innocent life everywhere. Both positions rest upon democratic values, human dignity, individual liberty and the conviction that the Islamist ambition to establish a caliphate is irreconcilable with almost everything we know and value in the West.
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