October 7 diary
The year after the day that changed everything
On Tuesday morning I spoke to B’nai B’rith, a Jewish community group, on the topic “How October the 7th has changed us.”
I told the audience that even though I had suggested this topic I’d found myself struggling to answer my own question because to explain how October 7th has changed me I need to remember what life was like before October 7th and that’s hard to do.
It is like trying to remember a faded romance or the texture of life when I was at high school.
**
A text from a Jewish friend:
**
I tell the B’nai B’rith audience that before October 7th I never wore a Star of David necklace, apart from a hippie version on a chunky chain that my sister bought in the 1970s and that I would wear, ironically, very ironically, to hippie dress up parties. My fingers play with the delicate Star of David around my neck. I tell the people that while these days I wear a Star of David necklace it is not to project “Jewish pride.”
“I’m not proud to be Jewish.”
An unsettled murmur runs through the audience. After the mid-morning break I notice nearly half the crowd has left.
**
A text from a non-Jewish friend:
A handful of other non-Jewish friends send me heartfelt emails weeks or months later; simple expressions of solidarity. One explains that she had to avert her eyes from the horror, it was too much, another that she had to interrogate her own murky and complicated thoughts about Israel.
**
I contemplate this: The earlier, pseudo-Marxist generations of Palestinian terrorists at least made a show of denouncing anti-Semitism. PLO chairman Yasser Arafat famously described Jews and Arabs as “cousins,” promising the two peoples would live side-by-side in a democratic Arab-majority state once the Jewish state was destroyed.
Not so the leaders of the contemporary Palestinian “resistance.”
Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari, a veteran analyst with sources inside Hamas, revealed some months after October 7 that on that day the ultimate ambition of Yahya Sinwar, the terror group’s leader in Gaza, was to penetrate 40 kilometres inside the border to Hebron in the West Bank where the militants would join with local cells and co-ordinate with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iranian proxies in Syria to unleash “an Al-Aqsa flood,” a holy war named after the holy mosque in Jerusalem.
They might have succeeded, Yaari told The Sydney Institute in March, had Hamas militants not stumbled upon the Nova music festival.
“There were so many girls there — good looking— and so many hostages to be taken and people to be butchered so they stopped.”
**
Over lunch one day in May a Jewish friend, a leftist who grew up in the US, tells me that he didn’t really identify with Zionism or Israel. Until the 7th.
“On October 7th I realised that Israelis are Jews. And that they were killed for being Jewish.”
**
On the morning of October 9 a small group of women are walking around Caulfield park, in Melbourne’s Jewish “ghetto.” They are draped in Israeli flags. I’m in the car, driving my daughter to school. One of the women turns her head towards the road and I glimpse her face. Her cheeks are streaked with mascara; her eyes wild with grief and horror and anger. She gathers the Israeli flag more tightly around her shoulders and marches, headlong, down the path.
In this moment, seeing my own emotions reflected in the face of this woman, I somehow sense my life will never again be the same, and neither will I.
That evening the infamous mob gathers in front of the Sydney Opera House to burn Israeli flags, some chanting “where’s the Jews?” and “fuck the Jews”, while police arrest only a lone individual carrying an Israeli flag.
This incident sets the tone for the year to come in Australia and beyond.
**
For some time after my mother’s death 10 years ago, I had an aversion to music. I know many people swear by music therapy as a balm for grief, although, interestingly, Jewish law forbids the bereaved from listening to music during the prescribed mourning period. For me, music felt too raw, it struck emotional chords I wasn’t ready to experience.
After October 7 the aversion to music returns. When the occasional concert ticket comes my way I attend— but I stop myself from letting go.
The slogan arising from the Nova festival massacre is “we will dance again.”
In the weeks following the massacre a video circulates of some female soldiers in the IDF mock breakdancing, assault rifles slung casually across their bodies. They laugh and high five. They appear manic. It’s understandable: they need to be pumped. War is on its way.
But in my proxy war down-under, I do not dance. For a year, I live without music.
**
First there is silence. From some friends who are no longer that.
And silence from comrades and “good” people forever emoting about this and that on social media. They say nothing about the flood of images of men with green bandanas and AK47s rounding up elderly socialists and a terrified young mother holding her children with only a blanket for protection. Nothing about the young woman, the seat of her tracksuit pants stained with blood, pulled by her hair into a pick-up truck. Nothing about the pornographic desecration of the lifeless, near-naked body of Shani Louk. (Forget “believe all women;” the deniers of systematic sexual violence on 7/10 refuse to believe their own eyes.)
Then, after the silence, barely a fortnight after the genocidal attacks, barely a week after the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, the first open letter is published in Overland journal condemning “war crimes committed by Israel in its ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.” A flood of petitions and open letters follow, all of a genre: the state of Israel is guilty since birth, it must be excommunicated from the brotherhood of nations, it is perpetrating a “genocide” and never a lesser crime than the ultimate crime.
The tone is always highbrow: “..The destruction of literature’s condition of possibility in Gaza..” The sentiments are always rancid.
The petitioners do not mention hostages. They either ignore or seek to contextualise October 7. They do not mention Hamas or the Palestinians used as human shields. They do not mention Hamas’s chief patron, Iran. Theirs is a narrative with only one character: a malignant, murderous and treacherous Jewish state. Which all decent folks must resist by any means necessary.
The signatories are a roll call of the literary and arts world, academia, the bureaucracy, the union movement, the human rights fraternity. After a while I’m no longer jolted at the names — prize winners, grant recipients, festival regulars who speak with furrowed brows about the evils of racism and colonialism, or to be precise about white racism and white colonialism, never about brown racism and brown colonialism.
They speak solemnly about the Holocaust.
**
I resign from the journalists’ union after they endorse a similar anti-Israel petition. I remove myself from every group I was once part of that includes signatories to such petitions. I’m not interested in smoothing over tensions. Nor am I interested in changing one heart and mind at a time.
I’m a one-woman cancel culture regime.
“You’re wrong to think that way,” a Jewish friend ministers to me over lunch. So many lunches and dinners; only one topic of conversation.
“If you just resign from the group then you’re gone, they’ll never have to think of you again. You should engage with them.”
She slams Bibi, his far-right Coalition partners, the Gaza war, the stupid leftists in Australia. We do the Jewish thing and argue. She slumps into her chair.
“I just want people to like us,” she moans.
**
A Jewish friend urges me not to alienate our mutual non-Jewish friend.
“He has a great deal of affection for you,” my Jewish friend says. “But he’ll find it hard if October 7 starts to define everything about you.”
He’s saying: I should try to preserve some non-jewy parts of myself so I don’t congeal into 100 per cent Jew.
**
Post October 7 I notice a new tendency among leftist commentators to criticise Zionists for their perceived character flaws. Not merely wrong about the Middle East, Zionists, in this telling, are bad people: “narcissistic.” Fixated on the wording of slogans on placards, on the tearing down of hostage posters. Imagine being fixated on the tearing down of posters when actual genocide is going on in Gaza?!
In November activists hound visiting Israeli relatives of Hamas victims and hostages at their hotel. The grieving families are forced to evacuate to a police station for quite some time before the protestors are persuaded to leave. When last month six hostages, none of them older than 40, are executed in the tunnels of Gaza the same leftist intellectuals have nothing to day about these actual deaths.
**
When the first school “strike for Palestine” is called in Melbourne the Premier, Jacinta Allan, responds with a word salad about everyone being very traumatised and distressed about the Gaza war and “social cohesion” blah-blah. She throws under a bus the vastly outnumbered Jewish students in public schools who would likely confront a hostile environment on strike day.
A long-time public education zealot, I practice what I preach when it comes to my own children. But after the schools strike, I ask my youngest daughter if she would like to shift to a Jewish school. That she declines is not the point, and nor is the fact one of the largest Jewish schools in the country is later graffitied with “Jew die.” The point is: I was forced to abandon a principle I held sacred.
For this I will never forgive Jacinta Allan and her government.
**
Two non-Jewish friends sheepishly confess their kids are going to pro-Palestinian rallies or intending to go.
“I’m disappointed,” one says about her son. “He doesn’t want to think too deeply.”
I watch in disbelief a clip from one these rallies; a group of teenage girls in school uniform chant, “Allahu Akbar.”
**
Not only do I stop listening to music, I stop reading novels. The novel I was reading on October 7 remains unfinished. I don’t have the head space for fiction.
Instead, I re-educate myself about anti-Semitism, reading late into the night non-fiction books and pieces such as Dara Horn’s published in February in The Atlantic, one of only a handful of prestige journals prepared to run pieces interrogating anti-Zionism. Horn’s piece is entitled, “Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies.”
**
After months of disruption, in May Sydney University invites anti-Israel campers to join a working group to review the institution’s defence and security research ties for links to the Jewish state in what some in the media describe as a “stunning capitulation.”
“This time I have words,” writes a Jewish friend after I email an article with the news. “This reads like Germany in the 1930s. Maybe even the early 40s, with their working groups to solve the ‘Jewish problem’”.
**
In February a writer posts on “X” a story about five-year-old Hind Rajab found dead in Gaza two weeks after her family’s car came under fire and she pleaded with the Red Crescent for help. The writer says: “This is unbearable. Ceasefire now.”
I try to bear it, lingering on the little girl’s photograph. She is in costume, dressed as a garden nymph with a floral halo. She radiates sweetness.
**
On high rotation in Canberra, alongside references to “social cohesion” and the twin ills of “anti-Semitism” and “Islamophobia”, is the phrase: “Israel has a right to defend itself but how it does so matters.”
This is true. But Albanese and his foreign minister Penny Wong and their backing chorus of government ministers — and indeed, leaders from other democracies — never elaborate on precisely how the state of Israel should defend itself against an enemy that embeds its military infrastructure in schools, mosques and hospitals, shelters its fighters underground and above ground sacrifices its children for propaganda purposes. So the accusation of Israeli criminality and wrongdoing just dangles there, undefined in the public consciousness, fuelling Jew hatred.
**
On “X” a regular troll calls me “genocide Julie,” one of the worst Zionist propagandists in the country, and on the payroll of not only the Mossad but also the CIA.
**
Over breakfast in January I read that a lesbian couple rejected a sperm donation from a Perth hairdresser because he’s a pro-Israel Jew. The women reportedly said: “We don’t have the capacity to navigate parts of your identity in this donor relationship, so we are respectfully ending this now.”
**
The walls close in.
On the weekends Melbourne’s CBD is out of bounds. Earlier this year the State Library puts on an exhibition of a thousand years of Hebrew manuscripts. But every weekend anti-Israel protestors annex the forecourt of the State Library; to view the ancient manuscripts Jews must run the gauntlet of protestors calling for the dismantling of the world’s only Jewish state. It is too intimidating a prospect for some so they stay away.
Jews retreat into our “ghettos” only to be targeted in our ghettos. In Sydney a violent pro-Palestinian motorbike and car convoy takes a scenic route through bayside Jewish suburbs. After an Islamist and hard-left mob descend on Caulfield in November, forcing worshippers at a local synagogue to cancel the Friday night service, Nasser Mashni, head of the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, tells the ABC that Caulfield is not “in Israel.”
“You don’t own the streets,” thundered anonymous citizen journalist “RonniSalt” on “X” at Caulfield’s Jews. “This is what fuels the hatred; this entitled sickness.”
When in May a Christian movement exercises their right to rally in Melbourne’s CBD against anti-Semitism mounted police are forced to keep the anti-Israel protestors at bay.
Risk an outing to the theatre, the MSO or the cricket and Jews risk becoming a hostage audience to anti-Israel provocation. Even our WhatsApp groups turn into unsafe spaces when our identities are leaked and disseminated to catastrophic outcomes.
**
The best that can be said about Australia is the Jew-hatred is worse in Canada and Ireland.
I travel to Europe with my daughter, confining ourselves to Jew-friendly places, most of which were the epicentres of Jewish extermination yesterday and the day before yesterday places of sophistication and enlightenment where Jews could assimilate and thrive. Austria, Berlin — where the graffiti in trendy neighbourhoods reads “Fuck Hamas” — and Budapest where 80 years ago the fascist Arrow Cross militia shot thousands of Jews into the Danube but where now Hungary’s far-right leader Viktor Orbán won’t allow anti-Israel protestors to call for Free Palestine from “the river to the sea”, won’t allow anti-Israel protests full stop.
**
“I knew the next wave was coming I just didn’t know when,” says a friend’s sister I bump into in East St Kilda. There is no small talk in the ghetto. Group therapy sessions take place in the supermarket aisle.
“And now I realise; of course, 80 years. The end of living memory.”
**
One night in March I venture with three friends to Collingwood to support an Israeli restaurant whose owners had reportedly lost 80 per cent of their trade since October 7 because .. they are Israelis.
We have the outdoor courtyard to ourselves.
One friend says, choking up: “On October 7 for the first time I imagined a world in which Israel ceased to exist.”
**
We don’t own the streets. We can’t even own October 7.
In Melbourne and Sydney pro-Palestine rallies will be held over the anniversary weekend. In Sydney pro-Palestine groups will hold events on the 7th itself. One of the vigils, to be held outside Lakemba Mosque and reportedly widely endorsed by Muslim community organisations, is organised by a group associated with the extremist Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir. In response to news of these planned protests on the October 7th anniversary Anthony Albanese urged organisers to “think about whether your cause is being advanced or set back.”
He made the same remark in June after Jewish MP Josh Burns’ office was vandalised with anti-Semitic imagery — that such acts undermine the protestors’ “cause.”
To which “cause” does Albanese refer? Does he think these groups holding protests on the anniversary of the 7th — a day when the casualties from Gaza were the murderers and rapists inside Israel — want a two-state solution?
**
Here’s a thumbnail sketch of progressive Australian Jews. They’re taking a big step to the right, ditching The Age for The Australian, the ABC for Sky News, the Greens for Labor, Labor for Liberal, north of the Yarra (in Melbourne) for south of the Yarra, and in some cases, the universal for the tribal. Others understand that ours is a fight for the return of universal values and we must invite like-minded partisans to join us in the trenches.
**
“I want you to understand that I don’t need this thing called ‘Jewish,” I lecture to a non-Jewish friend over dinner in St Kilda six weeks ago. I’m downing a Campari so I’m a little.. flushed. I say words to this effect:
“Because it’s really not worth it — being Jewish. Not on a cost/benefit analysis. Yes, the Jewish story is rousing and beautiful but when the price is 6 million dead it’s not worth it.
“I’d done my bit. I’d even partnered with a non-Jew. Yes, I made sure my children know their history, know who they are: their grandparents were Holocaust survivors, I don’t have the right not to pass on that legacy, it would be impossible not to anyway.
“But I did imagine that over time, over the generations, the Jewishness of my descendants might become more diffuse and eventually might even disappear. And while I might have felt a bit sentimental about that, I was not as upset about that possibility as you might think. I certainly thought it was a good problem to have.
“Never, never, could I have predicted that it would be harder for my children to be Jewish than it was for me. Not ever.”
I take another gulp of Campari.
“So I wasn’t sitting around waiting for any of this to happen, you understand. I never felt less Jewish than when I went to bed on October 6th.”
**
Within the post-October 7 Jewish world there is a flourishing discussion about Jewish pride. Many argue that we must not let the anti-Semites shape our Jewish identities. Podcaster Dan Senor speaks of “October 8 Jews”, the sort who cluster in what he dubs “can you believe?” Whatsapp chats. Groups, for instance, where the banter is along the lines of, “can you believe this Greens senator said Zionists are reaching their tentacles into power?”
When in December the actor Stephen Fry outs himself as a Jew, he says: “I’m frankly damned if I’ll let anti-Semites be the ones who define me, and take ownership of the word Jew, injecting it with their own spiteful venom. So I accept and claim the identity with pride ..”
**
I take ownership of the word “Jew” because there is simply no way to divest from it. Not when non-Jews, across time and across the continents, keep failing in their capacity to “navigate parts of my identity” as the lesbian couple who rejected the Jewish sperm donor put it.
**
At the lectern in front of the B’nai B’rith group, I say I’m not wearing my Star of David necklace out of pride but as battle-gear in what will be a long, long war.
I felt very sad reading this article.
I have a small anecdote that gives me some hope. I had to come into the city today (I also live in Melbourne) and the tram stopped at the Arts Centre. A woman from Yarra Trams calmly explained that the trams had to stop outside the city because of the anti-Israel rallies.
At that point, I got angry. I snapped and said something like, "these people are sick - they're lowlife anti-Semites." The woman from Yarra Trams responded, "hallelujah - someone agrees with me."
It reminded me that there are plenty of sensible people out there. But the sensible people aren't the vocal ones.
Wowzers. Even as a non-Jewish atheist, I found that a bruising read, like being gut punched and copping blows to the head as I attempted to understand and absorb the obvious pain and despair being communicated. I can only imagine how Jewish people are feeling as one year on the long, long fight continues.
I'm a subscriber to the excellent History of the Crusades podcast series. As a patron, I have access to some extra episodes, including some on the Jewish experience in the Middle Ages. The massacres in the Rhineland preceding the Second Crusade and the birth of the blood libel in Norwich are particularly illuminating on the failure of those in charge to prevent them and the readiness of the masses to believe anything negative about Jews. It's pretty clear to me that after nearly 1,000 years, nothing much has changed except the Jews ability to defend themselves. So they must fight, and more power to their arms.