Friday essay: to tackle the dreadful rise in antisemitism, we must speak the truth about Israel’s war crimes

Over the past weeks I have watched with interest the ways, following the horrific Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7 2023, prominent Jews with a connection to Australia have justified, in response, the killing by the Israel Defence Forces, or IDF, of around 75,000 Gazan Palestinians, the majority of whom were innocent civilians, or more than 20,000 babies or children.

Recently, the British historian, Lord Andrew Roberts, was interviewed by Geraldine Doogue on the ABC Radio National program Global Roaming. According to Lord Roberts, the massacre of the Israeli Jews by Hamas and Islamic Jihad was an unspeakable moral crime, while the killing by the IDF of perhaps 40 or 50 times as many innocent Palestinians, was the kind of thing that, alas, happens in fighting a just war.

Even the propaganda department of the IDF has barely challenged the estimates of the numbers of civilian deaths. However, without pointing to any evidence, Roberts claimed the number of innocent Palestinians massacred by the IDF had been greatly exaggerated.

What was more interesting, however, was Roberts’ contrast between the killing of the Jews and Palestinians since the massacre of October 7. According to Roberts, the October 7 Hamas killers were in a “frenzy”. The things they did were “foul”, “vicious” and “disgusting”, resembling the accounts of warfare during “medieval” times and in recent history of the Japanese at “the rape of Nanking”. With “civilised countries”, this kind of “frenzied killing” did not take place.

In Gaza, the IDF’s killings were “totally different you see”. He said:

At no point did the Israelis look into the eyes of Palestinians and murder their children after torturing and raping them […] It’s an entirely different kind of warfare. You get tanks of course and aeroplanes […] Also of course you’ve got to kill as many terrorists as possible […] They [Hamas] also don’t care how many of their population die. In fact, in terms of public relations the more that die the better […] As an historian I try to stay rational and logical […] I see a totally different thing between the face-to-face massacre after torture and rape of Israelis on the 7th of October and the warfare that took place in Gaza between the IDF and Hamas.

The IDF’s post-October 7 destruction in Gaza involved anything but conventional warfare. Anyone who has followed the Israeli campaign knows the Palestinians were killed according to an AI program called “Lavender”. It was first revealed in an article in the 972 Magazine on April 3 2024, written by Yuval Abraham, one of the filmmakers of the documentary NAZA.

When NAZA was shown at the Venice Film Festival, the applause lasted for 24 minutes. Israel had complete control of the air. The number of Palestinians who could be taken out as “collateral damage” – 20, 50, even 100 – depended on the seniority of the member of Hamas the IDF intelligence believed was sleeping in the same building.

If Roberts had thought for five minutes about his black-and-white contrast between the Hamas killing of Israelis and the IDF killings of Palestinians in the most recent war in Gaza, it might have occurred to him that in the Holocaust, which Roberts almost certainly would regard as the darkest crime in the history of humankind, the Germans did not kill most of the six million Jews in a “frenzy” or in “face-to-face” combat".

Eventually, the SS leadership recognised the most efficient and orderly method of exterminating the Jews was with deception. Vast numbers of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were led naked into the gas chambers of the extermination camps, believing they were about to be showered. (Or in the case of my maternal grandfather, into a sealed truck in Chelmno.)

Does Roberts believe this was a more civilised way of killing Jews than, for example, the often frenzied face-to-face pogroms that broke out during the Russian Civil War, where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered?

Any judgement about the comparative morality of Hamas’ frenzied, hate-filled killing of Jews on October 7 and Israel’s nonchalant, formulaic, algorithmic killing of innocent Palestinians in response, is to my mind dauntingly difficult. Not so, apparently, for Lord Roberts.

‘Jew hatred’ and genocide

In late October, Schwartz Media, owned by Morry Schwartz, published a Jewish Quarterly essay (edited by Jonathan Pearlman), Jew-Hatred: The Latest Episode, by the distinguished British historian, Sir Simon Schama. One of Schama’s contentions is that the claim the IDF has committed genocide against the Palestinians is “the most consequential” contemporary expression of millennia-old Jew-hatred.

Almost everything Schama says about the crime of genocide is false.

According to Schama, genocide is “the organised, systematic extermination of an entire population; a Wannsee-type, planned mass murder”. Schama seems not to recognise that largely because of the passionate political struggle of Raphael Lemkin, in 1948, genocide became a crime under international law.

When an international court will decide whether or not Israel is guilty of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, it will do so not according to Schama’s Holocaust-inflected private definition, but according to law — the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The Convention outlines what the International Commission of Jurists describes as “five specific underlying acts, any one of which may be constitutive of the crime of genocide”.

These are: “killing members of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”; “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”; “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; "imposing measures to prevent births within the group”; or “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.

When the genocide case is heard before an international court, one of the most important questions will be Israel’s intent. Here is all Schama says on this vital question about Israel’s arguably genocidal post October 7 massacres.

Did Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, not call Palestinians “human animals” and wish out loud for their extermination?

No, he did not. On 9 October 2023, as details of unspeakable atrocities were becoming known, Gallant used the phrase when speaking of the Hamas terrorists who had planned and executed the horrific massacre, whose power — and if necessary whose lives — he wished to see ended. Therein lies the difference between war and genocide.

What Gallant actually said was quite different:

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.

Under conditions of total siege, the principal victims will, of course, be the civilian population of Gaza. Without food and water, everyone suffers, eventually everyone dies. The Gazan Palestinians, not just the Hamas terrorists, are Gallant’s “human animals”. One day later, to underline the point, Gallant promised: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” Not Hamas; everything.

More importantly, as all those who write about the events in Gaza should know, when South Africa outlined its case to the International Court of Justice about Israel’s commission of genocide, it devoted nine tight, carefully footnoted pages to the question of Israel’s genocidal intent regarding the Palestinians in Gaza. What follows is a small sample.

Time and again, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the coming battle between the Jews and the Palestinians as a war between light and darkness, civilisation and barbarism, good and evil. As Israel prepared for its ground invasion, Netanyahu called upon Israeli troops to “remember Amalek”. In the Torah, as the invasion of Amalek territory begins, the Jews are commanded by God: “Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.”

On October 12, the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, made clear that “the entire nation” of the Gazan Palestinians was responsible for what occurred on October 7. And that the nation’s “backbone” must be “broken” as a result.

Three days earlier, the Coordinator of Government Activity in the Territories, Major General Ghassan Alian, had warned: “Human animals are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water […] You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

On October 11, Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old veteran of the notorious and brutal 1948 massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin, was wheeled out. He broadcast on social media: “Erase the memory of them [the Gazan Palestinians]. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.”

On October 13, the Minister for Energy and Infrastructure, Israel Katz, tweeted: “All the civilian population in Gaza […] will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

On November 1, the Minister for Heritage, Amichai Eliyahu, described the north of Gaza as “more beautiful than ever. Everything is blown up and flattened, simply a pleasure for the eyes.”

On November 11, the Minister for Agriculture, Avi Dichter, described what was happening as “the Gaza Nakba”. Nakba, the catastrophe, is the Palestinian name for the killings and the expulsions of 700,000 Palestinians at the time of the Arab–Jewish War of 1948.

On December 25, a former Knesset member was reported thus: “I tell you, in Gaza without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be exterminated, all of them killed.”

I hope not to be misunderstood. I have no idea whether the evidence collected by the South Africans or by others will eventually convince an international court of Israel’s commission of genocide in Gaza. I do know, however, that Schama’s suggestion that the “human animals” remark of Yoav Gallant was restricted to Hamas terrorists and did not involve the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, and that it was the sole or principal piece of evidence of Israeli post October 7 genocidal intent, are both false.

Towards the end of his essay, Schama writes:

So, for all the chants, this paroxysm of rage is, at its psychological core, not about Palestine, Israel or even the Jews. The hatred is about the haters: a failure of self-recognition: a displacement of the obligation to make amends. The Nazification of Israel […] act[s] as a reprieve from failing to do much about saving the Jewish victims even after the facts of their annihilation [in the Holocaust] were known. Likewise framing the Jews as history’s paradigmatic imperialist oppressors spares the descendants of actual colonisers from too much critical self-examination. Put the Jews in the dock rather than your great-grandparents.

I do not know how much Schama knows about Australia. However, the idea that the group Schama calls “white progressives”, including Australians, are trying to hide the guilt they ought to feel about the Indigenous dispossession in Australia, by defaming Israel for its supposedly genocidal campaign in Gaza, is about as comprehensive a misunderstanding of the politics of Gaza in this country as it is possible to imagine.

Schama argues, repeatedly, that those who accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza know nothing of the Holocaust. I am not sure how he can also, absurdly and contradicting himself, claim the genocide accusers are displacing onto Israel the guilt they ought to feel about their country’s failure to save the Jews during the Holocaust, of whose history they are supposedly ignorant.

More importantly, the hundreds of thousands of Australians who have demonstrated for the Gazan Palestinians – for the murdered, the wounded, the surviving two million whose lives lie in ruins – are overwhelmingly the same people who lead the struggle in Australia for Indigenous rights and the recognition of the tragedy of Indigenous dispossession.

At the very head of those who march and chant for the Palestinians against what they believe to be Israel’s genocide in Gaza are Australia’s younger Indigenous leaders.

At the conclusion of his denigration of the people who have reacted with appropriate horror at Israel’s pitiless destruction of Gaza, Schama thinks he can still speak with kindness, even intimacy, to the Palestinian people. “[S]hould we, Jews and non-Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, fail to listen to each other with respectful attention, informed by the truth, the unhappy victims of such deafness will, in the end, be all of us.”

A better title for Jew-Hatred would be Chutzpah.

Jillian Segal’s ‘astonishing overreach’

In October, Jillian Segal AO, Australia’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, published her progress report into the curse of rising antisemitism in Australia. The content has been expertly summarised in Deepcut News by Jeffrey Loewenstein, a former chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission in Australia.

“If Segal has her way, nearly every facet of life in Australia would, in effect, be subject to vetting by a cohort of pro-Israel supporters who wish for us to be muzzled as Israel carries out the worst crimes imaginable,” he wrote.

“The unelected Segal wants to reshape the arts, vet our public broadcasters, oversee the use of venues, stages, art spaces, what festivals should and should not be doing, revise our visa programs, sit atop digital governance and online regulation and tell universities how to conduct themselves. The gall of the overreach is extraordinary and yet mainstream media freely aired Segal’s report and arguments with barely a care for its implications on Australian democracy.”

Beyond this astonishing overreach, what emerges from Segal is an even more alarming dimension of her progress report.

On 14 occasions, Segal recommends the adoption throughout Australian institutions of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. The reason seems clear. Despite acknowledging not every criticism of Israel or its government is antisemitic, time and again the IHRA definition links criticism of Israel and antisemitism.

According to IHRA, it is antisemitic to claim that Israel exaggerates the Holocaust. It is antisemitic to accuse Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to their own homelands. It is antisemitic to deny Jews their right to self-determination or to describe Israel “as a racist endeavour”. It is antisemitic to compare Israel’s policies to those of the Nazis. And it is antisemitic to hold Jews in the diaspora responsible for Israel’s actions.

Under the IHRA definition, everyone in Australia who criticises Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank, or the diaspora for its uncritical support of those policies, will have to be very careful they have not strayed into territory the IHRA definition has forbidden and become vulnerable to the charge of antisemitism.

An addition to the Segal agenda in her recent progress report is the claim the most important camp of antisemitism in Australia is to be found among left-wing progressives:

Modern, progressive antisemitism is the most pervasive manifestation of antisemitism facing Australia today […] Modern progressive antisemitism has grown out of, and is especially prevalent in, some institutions of intellectual and cultural leadership, including universities, media, arts organisations and human rights NGOs […] The claims that Israel has committed humanity’s worst crimes — including genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid — allow for the depiction of anyone who associates or aligns with Israel as complicit in its purported evil.

As it happens, Segal has supplied us, by implication, with plentiful examples of what she takes to be modern, progressive antisemitism in Australia and elsewhere.

According to Segal, anyone who claims Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, as do very many international human rights bodies and genocide scholars, is an antisemite. According to Segal, anyone who believes it is almost self-evident that by destroying the houses, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, cultural sites, agricultural lands, etc., Israel has been conducting a ruthless policy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, thwarted only by the failure of Israel to find a country willing to take the two million survivors, is an antisemite.

According to Segal, anyone who argues that by turning a blind eye to the daily attacks on the Palestinian villagers by the Jewish settlers, Israel has begun upon a policy of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, is an antisemite. And according to Segal, anyone who argues the combination of liberal and democratic rights for the citizens of Israel and the suppression of those rights for the Palestinians in the West Bank (and now also most of Gaza) resembles the former system of apartheid in South Africa, is an antisemite.

By labelling as antisemitism the opinions of a goodly part of the Australian left, and beyond that the politically informed public, the Segal report represents the most insidious attack on political free speech in the recent history of Australia.

Asking to be left alone

Throughout my life, I have been preoccupied by the evil of antisemitism. One of my books, The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust, was about Helen “Demidenko’s” celebrated novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper. The novel revived the key Nazi concept that drove the Holocaust: Bolshevism and Stalinism as the expression of Jewish political power.

Another of my books, The Mind of the Islamic State, analysed the vicious antisemitism of ISIS. Accordingly, there is one eloquent passage in Schama with which I wholeheartedly agree:

Honestly, all we are asking for is to be left alone, to be able to send our children and grandchildren to a Jewish school in their uniforms, maybe with a kippah on their heads, without their being screamed at and being made to feel frightened and ashamed; to be able to ride public transport without being spat at or assaulted; to go to synagogue without having to pass through protective men with guns …

Schama believes he can help combat the rise of antisemitism in the diaspora by defending the indefensible: the war crimes of the IDF under Benjamin Netanyahu.

I believe a more likely remedy would be for leading diaspora thinkers, like Schama, and influential publishers, like Morry Schwartz, and the leaders in Australia of the principal Israel and Jewish lobbies, like Jillian Segal, to speak the truth about what, under Netanyahu and the two Kahanist-fascist members of his Government, Israel has become.

And about the moral revolution that has to happen in Israel if Jews in the diaspora are to be spared from the dreadful rise of antisemitism that is spreading around the Western world.

This is an edited version of an article originally published on Robert Manne’s Substack.