Lucy Hamilton
Zionist ideas of “social cohesion” are based on a dangerous, twisted reality
For more than two and a half years, Gaza’s children have been murdered in their thousands while Australia’s lickspittle political and media class obsess over the emotional comfort of a tiny, powerful minority.
In the same week that Premier Chris Minns was parading around in a yarmulke at a non-religious event, Australian activists from the Sumud Flotilla crew, returning home after being beaten and sexually assaulted by the Israeli Defence Force, were being grilled on national television about their clearly traumatising ordeal.
Meanwhile, a Royal Commission grinds on — not about genocide, not about war crimes, but about whether Australians are being sufficiently respectful to those who defend the slaughter. Fair fucking dinkum. This country is now trapped in a grotesque inversion of reality.
If you watch the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, you will witness a small group of people who support Israel speaking deliriously about their victimhood, all while the country they blindly support rapes and kills people in Gaza, rapes and kills people in prison, and rapes and kills people in their own community.
The people that support Israel at this point, as they rail for war against Iran, after dismantling Syria, invading Lebanon, and threatening to go to war with Turkey and Egypt, actually need to do some quiet soul searching away from a soapbox. They shouldn’t be given the most comprehensive platform in the country to tell us that we have the problem.
John Menadue wrote a submission for the Royal Commission that rings out to most in the country who are living through this warped reality: “We are told to heed the hurt feelings of Zionists, some on university campuses, who support genocide or have wilfully chosen to ignore it. They should be protected. But they should also feel shame.”
It’s the lack of shame that stands out. The stubborn entitlement to a reality that deserves to be discarded. It’s a disgrace that the Australian people have to be subject to the unreasonable demands of Zionists more loyal to a foreign criminal country than their own, and it’s unacceptable that our governments are conjuring everything in their power and codifying those unreasonable demands against millions of Australians who are made to feel the shame instead.
Of course antisemitism is real and it is vile — any decent Australian recoils at synagogue vandalism, schoolyard taunts, or the casual hatred that has spiked since October 7. Jewish Australians have every right to live without fear in this country. But the loudest voices in the Australian Jewish community have spent two and a half years defending the indefensible, cheerleading a slaughter that shocks the world, and demanding that criticism of that slaughter be treated as hatred itself. In doing so, they have poured fuel on the very flames they now demand the rest of us extinguish. When you stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich while West Asia burns, you don’t get to lecture the rest of Australia about social cohesion. Real antisemitism is fought by repudiating war crimes, not by criminalising opposition to them.
Threading between the hearing blocks of the Royal Commission is pressure on local governments by transnational Zionist organisations who are teaming up with Christian Zionists to agitate against the Muslim community, including a court hearing for a Zionist public agitator who harassed a cafe in Sydney.
All of this is occurring against a backdrop of dark web arsonists lighting fires, dummy explosive-laden caravans that resulted in stripped public freedoms in NSW, bans on discussing certain waterways together in Queensland, media parroting IDF statements after a UN declaration of genocide, diplomats who should have been sent home long ago, and staff being sacked for sharing accurate posts on social media.
In the years since October 7 and the subsequent intensification of the Gaza genocide, loud and powerful voices in the Australian Jewish community have not budged an inch in their support for Netanyahu’s bloody wars, Ben-Gvir’s prisons, and Smotrich’s settlements. The same voices — some who have had every advantage to make up a wildly disproportionate share of Australia’s wealthiest — continue to act as benefactors for Israel. So how can they lecture us on how Australians should think and feel? How can they not see their own positions as a danger to the broader Jewish community?
With all the attention brought by the expensive process of a publicly funded Royal Commission, it’s interesting to see what Zionist Australians actually think the definition of social cohesion is.
In yet another chunk of broadsheet pulp dedicated to Zionist objectives published in The Australian, one of the five Jewish Australians that make up the top ten billionaires in this country, Frank Lowy, spoke about his view of the concept: “The social licence that has allowed for the open expression of anti-Jewish sentiment needs to be reworked… If you don’t like Australia, leave.”
This is galling. Lowy means the social licence that allows criticism of Israel and its depraved acts of violence. He is essentially telling most Aussies to pack up and leave if they disagree with the twisted, inverted reality of the Zionist entity.
After all we have seen with our own eyes!
After the systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, widespread sexual, reproductive, and gender-based violence, mass forced displacement and “forcible transfer”, starvation as a method of warfare, attacks on civilians, schools, and shelters, detainee abuse and torture, high civilian death toll and destruction of civilian infrastructure, and war crimes in Lebanon and every other contiguous neighbour, our political class still stands with Israel! Senator Sarah Henderson exemplified this pathological bootlicking position in her insane Senate enquiries angle, grilling SBS on why Australia gave Israel zero votes in Eurovision.
Sometimes it feels like we are living in a bad dream, in a country run by strangers, but the continuous real-time confirmation of endless suffering and the incessant unreasonableness from IRL Zionists supporting it quickly disproves that.
What more can we do? A nation that has marched across landmarks, that polls in landslides in support of Palestine and collective hostility towards Israel — run by a state and federal political machine that has been enamoured and encircled by the most powerful small interest lobbying group in the Western world. The joint chambers of commerce, the councils, the federations, associations, and appeals, the foreign pressure, the former-terrorist-turned-billionaires who run strategic Australian thinktanks, and the federal funding that dwarfs any other community in the country — and the people at the Royal Commission say that not enough is being done? And all the politicians we elect are agreeing with them?!?
Why do Aussies have to take on the IHRA definition of antisemitism, get door-knocked by cops for displaying watermelons, arrested and charged for posting art in windows, suspected for singing lyrics to songs, or beaten on the streets of a proud democracy for protesting the invite of an internationally labelled monster representing a rampaging rogue state? A concert pianist is going through hell, journalists are afraid to speak plainly, sports starts are muzzled, actors hounded, academics bullied, and everyday Australians are forced to live in a strange reality, wrapped around us like a cage, where instead of calling out a genocide we must endlessly discuss the interests of Zionists in Australia.
If the powerful voices of Zionism in Australia actually repudiated Israel’s actions instead of enabling them and telling Australians who they are, it would do far more to fight real antisemitism than any effort to criminalise support for human life in Gaza.
Israel isn’t a footy team or a state of mind. It is a brutal apartheid nation that has lost its soul emptying its lands of the people who have lived there for generations. Supporting it absolutely, with no exceptions, may be anyone’s prerogative — but it should never be the price of being Australian.
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