The Great Silencing
Last week it snowed heavily twice in Paris, turning the city into a frigid, monochrome fantasy land over three days, and at the weekend I popped into the Musée Marmottan Monet for a spot of impressionism and an exhibition called the Empire of Sleep.
In what seems to me a sort of La Niña / El Niño weather and cultural switch, things back home were on fire (the countryside) and being set on fire (writers' festivals, et al) in a drought of common sense. This is not a finicky update about how those two things are most likely related – though the forces that shape inaction on climate change are of a species with the ones that deny the reality of a genocide, I think – but these trains came into the station at the same time and the thought was hard to avoid.
My first Adelaide Writers' Week was in 2019, about half a year after my first book One Hundred Years of Dirt was released – published by Louise Adler, as it happens, the heroically just departed director of the festival – and I have since been to two or three more among dozens and dozens of other events in places all around Australia from Sydney to Kyogle, Perth to Boorowa, Melbourne to Queenscliff(e) and Sorrento. Long before this saga erupted I would tell anyone who listened that Adelaide was the best festival in the country: it was free, outdoors in a buzzing garden setting where people could wander in and out and sample rich and at times challenging programming. I remember seeing what I assumed (correctly, I think) were homeless people who had moved to the grassy hill alongside some of the main event stages where they could pass their long, long days listening to the conversations unfold. A cynic could easily make the joke right now: haven't they suffered enough? But I am not in the mood for that kind of cynicism because this was a sublime event and, this year, because of the most heinous politics, it is dead.
You don't need me to recap the whole thing but, in short, the Adelaide Festival board cancelled the programmed Palestinian-Australian writer and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah because of her public activism around the genocide in Gaza which produced 'statements', it said, that would endanger the cultural safety of Jewish people so soon after the Bondi massacre. Then some of the board resigned, then the chair, then the entire board bar one and finally writers' week director Louise Adler – a Jewish woman whose family narrowly escaped and were also dispatched in the Holocaust – quit her post because of the censorship forced on her artistic direction from the highest corners of the state.
As she wrote for herself in the Guardian Australia:
The board’s statement cites community cohesion, an oft-referenced anxiety which should be treated with scepticism. This is a managerialist term intended to stop thinking. Who, after all, would argue in favour of social division? Presumably only a terrorist or a nihilist. The raison d’être of art and literature is to disrupt the status quo: and one doesn’t have to be a student of history to know that art in the service of “social cohesion” is propaganda.
The thing I find genuinely upsetting about [waves hand] all this, is that the Bondi massacre really should be the thing we keep talking about in domestic terms because it affects all of us. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre almost three decades ago. On a world famous beach, two extremists targeted a Jewish community event and slaughtered 15 people, including 10-year-old Matilda. It happened just a few days before I flew back to Australia. Friends of mine had been at the event, to mark Hanukkah, and were still nearby when the shooting started. One gunman was shot dead, the other alleged shooter survived and has been charged with dozens of offences and will face court.
I was in the process of flying back home and organising a very silly itinerary to see friends and family but I kept telling myself to quarantine some time to write about it. Quickly – too quickly – the bloodbath became something else. It became a laboratory for extraordinary political intervention where the government of the day in Australia was explicitly blamed for the act of violence itself by both the domestic opposition in Sussan Ley and internationally by wanted war criminal and Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who has overseen one of the most brutal and prolonged campaigns of systematic extermination of life, livelihood and even civilisation in recent history. A crook, no less, who values Palestinian life only so far as the termination of such can prolong his increasingly authoritarian political career.
What began as as a tragedy with clear objects of interrogation – intelligence failures, the apparent missed warnings, alarming access to high-powered rifles for people who at the very least should have been unable to possess them legally – deteriorated into the same amorphous call for Australians to take seriously the threat of antisemitism, a call with which I earnestly agree but which three-quarters of the time was conveniently and unhelpfully hitched to the mandatory protection of a foreign power; Israel. It wasn't enough to to assert the inalienable right of Jewish people to live in safety. For certain actors and hardline commentators this was conflated with eternal immunity from consequence for another country's actions in Gaza; it was seen as an opportunity for revenge on the noisy 'pro-Palestinian' protestors who, along with a growing chorus of voices around the world, refused to take their eyes from Israel's greatest shame as it played out in real time.
Every time I vowed to come back and write about the first thing, nine others sprang up in some nest of related-but-not-causally filibuster. It was overwhelming, and if I started on one then the others demanded attention, too.
I'm a simple man. My morals are not especially sophisticated and, I would argue, that we should not want any of our core morals to be so. I find the killing of innocent people to be abhorrent. I did so on October 7, 2023 and for every day since then in Gaza as Israel exacted a death toll many orders of magnitude greater than the one inflicted by Hamas. And I did so, again, with Bondi. What I have noticed, over the past few years, is that not everybody seems to view these lives in equal measure. One doesn't even need to imagine how this happens, just read to the comments made by the leadership in Israel within days and weeks of October 7.
They told us what they would do, and they are doing it.
I have struggled with this realisation, that a life is not always equal to another life, throughout my own. It is written across continents and classes, but never so plainly to my living eyes as it is in the remarks of some of the most powerful people on Earth about the 'insects' in Gaza. To some extent I was aware of this prior to the Hamas operation but I did not have a political upbringing and it was a dim awareness as a result. That changed. It was impossible to avoid this new understanding. I don't say this as someone confessing any great diligence in learning what I had never learned. I am saying that it was forced upon me by even the most anodyne, passive-voice news reports about what was happening overseas.
I vividly recall watching Nine News Queensland back home just a few weeks after October 7 when images of the bombing campaign in Gaza were being shown in a pretty no-frills package. Mum's face sort of twisted and she turned to me and said, softly and so surely: 'I think they've retaliated enough now.' I mean this in the nicest possible way, but if the biggest normie in the world watching Channel 9 is arriving at that conclusion in November 2023, then it is clear that the most significant public relations damage visited upon Israel since 1948 has been by its own hand.
What does this have to do with being Jewish in Australia? Well, many – but not all – Jews have a connection with Israel. This alone does not mean they condone its actions, anymore than we condone the actions of Australia or some Muslims condone the actions of Saudi Arabia or Iran. It has been very much in the interests of Israel the state, however, to link every Jewish person in the world to it because it grew out of the abject horror of World War Two and the centuries of persecution faced by Jews before then. Nevermind that in doing so its behaviour as a state, and more keenly with the vociferous insistence of its most strident defenders, people manage to conflate Jewishness with a nation. As Louise Adler said during an address in Brisbane to mark the United Nations Day of Peace in September 2024:
Why should Palestinians (or anyone) respect a distinction between Jewishness and Zionism when the Israeli state is founded on – and its continued existence justified by – precisely this conflation? When the Star of David is emblazoned on the uniforms of the IDF soldiers who humiliate, torture and murder Palestinians? When, as an Australian Jew, I can settle on a kibbutz in southern Israel that was once home to the family of a Palestinian – now confined in Gaza mere kilometres away, who have to break through a barbed wire fence to “return” – simply because I am a Jew, and he is a Palestinian?
These are not easy conversations to have. Last year, I was talking to a prominent Jewish Australian friend of mine who has also been vocal in his defence of Palestine and its people. I asked him, as a person, if he had noticed what I felt was a genuine rise in antisemitism that had been masked by the opportunistic classification of all anti-Israel criticism by some groups as antisemitic.
Of course, he had noticed it. And he told me something similar to what Adler said above: the actions of Israel hurts all Jews even as it claims to be protecting them. None of this is to excuse racism but to mark it; to untangle it. Will a royal commission make any inquiry into whether a concerted effort from within some sections of the Jewish community not only to silence any anti-Israel dissent but to punish it has contributed to the rise in antisemitism? These campaigns have been coordinated, consistent and as often effective as they are spectacularly wayward. And that's Lattouf.
But still, they roll on. We now have draconian anti-protest edicts, and new race hate speech laws put before the Australian Parliament just this week. If you want an indication of the knot some prominent individuals have got themselves in, look no further than Josh Frydenberg who spent a few days recently railing against the then mooted (now confirmed) pick of former High Court of Australia Justice Virginia Bell to lead the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion (for what, exactly?) but in 2016 was more than chirpy about how section 18C of the Race Discrimination Act had 'too low' a threshold for penalising conduct that could 'offend and insult'. As he told noted proponents of social cohesion Sky News Australia.
“It’s invited complaints. I think that a better balance can be struck. I don’t think it’s appropriate to bring cases against cartoonists even though some of their cartoons may be uncomfortable, so I think we can reach the objectives of preventing racial vilification, and at the same time preserving individual freedom and particularly freedom of expression and speech," he said in November 2016.
All well and good when the cartoonist is Bill Leak, to whom he was referring above. I'm not sure he has been quite so soothing about Cathy Wilcox this week.
On the subject of the royal commission, some Jewish figures, quoted happily by The Australian newspaper, included the lawyer Mark Leibler who last year was made to apologise for calling a group of other Jewish people 'vicious antisemites' and 'repulsive and revolting humans' for their objection to Israel's war in Gaza. Before the inquiry was announced he was adamant that it should only look into antisemitism and not Islamophobia because '[antisemitism] is the major problem that has arisen and it is a problem which has fractured Australian society'.
I even saw some reporting, apparently quite serious, that people were upset at the inclusion of the phrase 'social cohesion' in both the name of the royal commission and its terms of reference because that provides Commissioner Virginia Bell with the chance, if not to achieve then certainly to suggest ways to make Australia more... socially cohesive. Forgive me my language but what the everlasting fuck is going on here?
A large cohort of voices, including Frydenberg and many of the most fulsome defenders of Israel, said it was 'unthinkable' that Bell would be appointed as Commissioner. Not only that, but that these groups were demanding an essential veto power over who that Commissioner would be. Look, I'd understand the outcry if Prime Minister Albanese was considering appointing Worzel fucking Gummidge but he wasn't.
It's Bell, a former justice on the High Court of Australia.
So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across the only 'concrete' example unnamed 'critics' were able to feed to The Australian about why they feared so heartily a Bell inquiry. Here it is, word for word:
Critics have highlighted her 2017 judgment in a High Court case brought by Greens founder Bob Brown that struck down Tasmanian protests laws, a ruling that was cited by the NSW Supreme Court in overturning a ban on a pro-Palestinian protest in Sydney.
That's it! The sole reference in the entire piece. To a judicial decision she made on one court that became a precedent, as such things tend to become when they are novel judicial decisions, in a lower court. There really is no link too tenuous for some of these agitators. And, by all means, let them agitate. What rankles is that anybody who professes to care about freedom of speech, the rule of law and the entire canon of western civilisation that once so animated the Tony Abbotts of this world should act on these absurd claims.
You don't have to sack Lattouf when she has one or two days left on a five day summer fill-in job and didn't do a single thing wrong. Really, you don't!
The new hate speech amendments bill dropped just yesterday my time and I was reading through its explanatory memorandum, as one does, to discover that while there are a vast array of offences currently listed under the Criminal Code Act and the Crimes Act which will all have penalties significantly boosted under these amendments, some have been curiously left out. Included: Things like cracking down on individuals who use their position as a religious official or spiritual leader to preach hate or target others (with the exception of quoting from relevant scripture) and also grooming children to do same, for which there are separate aggravated penalties under this proposed regime.
On and on it goes. Except for the existing offence of advocating genocide. By the way, these are almost all existing offences, all of which have been given increased penalties or aggravating circumstances a judge ought to consider under this bill. But not advocating genocide. The memorandum says this is because 'generally' hate speech falls short of advocating genocide and there may be some greater technical legal argument out there that hasn't occurred to me about why this might be so but it seems a little odd, on first reading. For one, some of these new hate speech penalties would now include jail time five years longer than that stipulated for advocating genocide. I guess that's what they mean by 'generally falls short of'.
Honestly, what a mess.
Everything seems a little odd at the moment.
I remember in August 2019 I wrote a news feature about some research out of Victoria University that showed clearly and for the first time how rightwing talking points in the mainstream press became the palatable source of 'authority' for far-right and extremist white nationalists groups who laundered these 'just asking questions' news reports from conservative press in particular and used them to drive recruitment and sympathy. The biggest news sources for these recruitment drives were from outlets like The Daily Mail Australia and, surprise, News Corporation. My former newspaper, The Australian, spent the better part of a week running front page stories about how I got the story wrong (I didn't) and how Victoria University disavowed my reporting of its research (the researchers didn't).
That was in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, when an Australian man radicalised in Australia flew across the ditch and murdered 51 Muslims at worship in New Zealand. There was no united call here to consider how this had been allowed to happen on our watch. Indeed, the federal government's current antisemitism envoy has been remarkably slow at condemning neo-Nazi and rightwing movements even today, despite their despicable racism, and despite being asked if she would do so.
Fast forward six years from the concerted conservative press spasm about my reporting – Nick Cater, a former editor at The Australian perplexingly called me a 'narrative journalist' – and the same outlets were absolutely sure that Palestinian protestors had caused the Bondi massacre.
My kingdom for some consistency.
On that note, it's worth clarifying that I still believe words are powerful things. Just as they were prior to Christchurch, just as they remain with all forms of hatred. Look at the United States of America to see how quickly permission flourishes once you cross a certain threshold. The threshold is eventually always instant, but one can never know completely in advance when the crossing will happen, igniting in a single moment the critical mass required for a frightening new normal. Once this happens, we usher in a generation or more of heinousness. Many of the same voices cheering for Israel here are cheering for Trump and his goons, too. I've watched them. I've seen them.
We cannot ever cede the ground in being able to label these authoritarian regimes for what they are. I'm not talking about Israel's right to exist – to borrow from the other Albanese, it exists! I'm talking about what its people choose to do with that existence. I'm talking about what Trump chooses to do with his nation of sycophants and enablers. Once we lose the ability to condemn these regimes, as many others throughout history have learned, it is decades before those rights are restored, if indeed they ever are.
It's one (terrible) thing to call people of any race insects of vermin or imply that they are trying to enact some 'great replacement', however, and quite another to suggest that anyone protesting against a genocide being carried out by a nation is trafficking in ancient hatreds.
And here we land, with the conflation of the two, and the vandalism of many of our cultural institutions and freedoms as a result. And for what? The silencing of testimony about a nation whose infamy during this period has already been assured by history.
