Socialists and labour movement activists everywhere should condemn without qualification the killing of sixteen Jewish people, and the wounding of dozens more, at Bondi Beach, Australia. That attack was a most egregious example of antisemitism, an attack on people purely and simply on account of their religious beliefs and traditions.
Among the victims were two rabbis, a Holocaust survivor and a 10-year-old girl and it would not matter if there were off-duty holidaying members of the IDF; the attack should still stand condemned without reservation. It is important that workers should adopt such a stance because antisemitism is wrongly conflated, not least by pro-Israeli politicians, with anti-Zionism and any criticism of the monstrous policies of the state of Israel. Indeed, the attack has already been leapt upon by the Israeli Prime Minister to condemn pro-Palestinian voices in Australia.
In September, Australia, along with the UK and Canada, formally recognised “the independent and sovereign State of Palestine”. Netanyahu has blamed that action, among others for fanning the flames of antisemitism. “Your government”, he wrote to the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, immediately after the attack, “did nothing to stop the spread of antisemitism in Australia. You did nothing to curb the cancer cells that were growing inside your country. You took no action. You let the disease spread and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today.”
Right wing commentators and lazy journalists
For decades, Netanyahu has assiduously nourished the idea that any criticism of Israel is “antisemitism” when it is not. His mission has gone into overdrive in the last two years, as his armed forces have committed war crimes and atrocities in Gaza – described, correctly, by the majority of humanitarian and human rights organisations around the world as a genocide.
Right-wing commentators and lazy journalists (who are often the same people) complain about “whataboutery”, by which they mean that in the aftermath of such murders as those on Bondi Beach, no-one is supposed to comment about the Israeli genocide in Gaza. But it is absolutely appropriate to point to the hypocrisy of politicians and the media and the double standards in the reportage and comments.
The Daily Mirror carried a front page story on the young girl killed on Bondi beach, with her name and her whole back story. We would not for one moment deny the horror of this girl’s murder, or the devastating impact on her family. But we cannot recall any similar front page spread for even one of the many thousands of Palestinian children blown to pieces in Gaza – and that point needs to be made.
On Monday, the Guardian give space for an opinion column by Dave Rich, who is the director of policy at the Community Security Trust, an organisation funded by the UK government, which claims to offer security to Jewish people, and which explicity equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Rich, predictably, linked the huge world-wide pro-Palestinian protests over Gaza – the probably the biggest single-issue political movement in history – with antisemitism.
The aim of the Rich column was to demonise the Palestinian movement and hint at its legal curtailment – exactly what the Israeli government would want. In reply, journalist Jonathan Cook delivered an excoriating riposte, point by point. He wrote in his blog on Substack, that “The lobby is milking the Bondi Beach attack to silence critics of Israel’s genocide.
Even the language of killing is different, depending on the victim
Netanyahu’s prescription, linking anti-Zionism and antisemitism together has been largely adopted by much of the political mainstream and the media, where even the language of killing is different, depending on whether it is Jews or Palestinians who are the victims. The killings in Australia are appalling and wholly indefensible, but the word “massacre”, widely used by the media, is rarely if ever applied to Gaza, where well over 60,000 people, including thousands of children, have been killed by Israeli tanks and aircraft.
It is no less disgraceful that Netanyahu’s view of what constitutes ‘antisemitism’ has been adopted by the right wing faction in control of the Labour Party. Since Starmer became leader, anti-Zionists, including, ironically, dozens of Jewish members, have been expelled for ‘antisemitism’, when they have had the temerity to criticise Israel.
Antisemitism was weaponised against the left
The supposed fight against antisemitism was the policy honed by Labour’s right wing to undermine the left and Jeremy Corbyn, and even at that time, to stifle criticism of Israel. It has continued to permeate the Labour Party to this day. It became such an all-pervasive accusation that even to question the scale of antisemitism in the Labour Party, or the denial of antisemitism in a particular instance, was itself deemed to be ‘antisemitic’.
What Dave Rich wrote in the Guardian, however, did have a grain of truth in it, in as much as there has been a rise in antisemitism around the world. A rise in anti-Jewish hatred is welcomed around the Israeli cabinet table, among politicians who want Jews around the world to associate themselves with and be associated with the policies of Israel.
But for socialists, any increase in antisemitism is a matter of great regret, all the more so because, despite Netanyahu, there is an increasing number of Jews around the world who condemn the genocide in Gaza and the continued state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from rural areas in the West Bank.
However regrettable a rise in antisemitism might be there is an undeniable link between that and the actions of the Israeli state. It was something that was raised immediately after the Sydney killings, by none other than Dale Vince, a UK-based energy industrialist who has been a frequent donor to the Labour Party.
Vince, predictably, was roundly condemned for his suggestion that the Sydney killings were linked to Gaza, but to his credit, even in his later clarification he doubled down on that link. “My words on this subject” he wrote on X later, “were not intended to excuse or legitimise terrorism, or any form of racism – what happened at Bondi beach is an atrocity. My words are aimed at the intervention of Netanyahu who in my opinion overlooks the impacts of his own terrorism”.
It is ironic that the ‘hero’ of Bondi Beach is one Ahmed al Ahmed, a Muslim and the son of a Syrian refugee settled in Australia. He managed to disarm one of the two attackers, even though he sustained gunshot wounds himself. His courageous action has completely undercut what would have been expected – namely a wave of Islamophobia in the British and international press.
The labour movement has its own standards of morality which do not rely on the hypocrisy and double-standards of politicians and the media. What is ‘moral’ is what is in the best interests of the working class in general. By those standards, the murder of ordinary people because of their religious beliefs serves no purpose other than reinforcing those opposed to the workers’ movement, the perpetrators of mass terror and genocide.
[Feature picture is a still from Australian 7News channel, showing one of the shooters about to be tackled by Ahmed al Ahmed. From YouTube, here]
