The vanishing of October 7
And the Jews fighting for truth
Three weeks after the October 7 pogrom where am I in the seven stages of grief?
Swirling about the first three stages — shock, pain and anger.
It is hard to progress in linear fashion when your sense of time is scrambled. I struggle to hold on to the chronology, the cause-and-effect.
Three weeks ago Hamas, an Islamist terror group constitutionally committed to genocide against the Jewish people, slaughtered, raped, tortured and kidnapped more than 1400 people in southern Israel. More than 200 are being held hostage in Gaza. Two days ago the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly called for an immediate humanitarian truce between Israel and Hamas in a resolution that did not name Hamas, did not explicitly refer to the October 7 atrocities and while calling for the unconditional release of hostages described them euphemistically as “captives.”
On Friday morning ABC journalist Patricia Karvelas asked cabinet minister Tony Burke if he considered Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza an act of “genocide” — not a loaded question in the slightest — and Burke answered he would “prefer to describe the facts” and leave it to listeners “to find their own words.”
In other words, if you want to call Israel’s actions genocide — fine.
Has language ever been subject to such inflationary (and in the UN’s case deflationary) pressure? Barely — what?— a week ago the (contested) accusation against Israel, over its blockade and bombardment of Gaza, was one of “collective punishment,” a plain old serious violation of the rules of armed conflict. Now Burke won’t refute the allegation that Israel is carrying out the gravest of all war crimes, genocide, the same label ascribed to the systematic and intentional mass exterminations in Rwanda during the 1990s, Cambodia during the 1970s and of course Europe during the Holocaust.
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The celebrated Israeli writer David Grossman said October 7 had created a “fundamental doubt that we might ever be able to lead a normal, free life, unfettered by threats and anxieties .. A life that is home.” While Grossman was writing from the Jewish homeland his words resonate just as powerfully in the Jewish diaspora, forced to the realisation that “home” is nowhere near as fortified against Jew hatred as we liked to imagine.
From the day after the massacre — well before Israel’s military reprisals in Gaza began — protestors took to the streets in cities across the West. Not in solidarity with the slain and their Jewish brethren, as the writer Douglas Murray argues should have been the case, but with their murderers. To be honest, until I read Murray’s piece the idea that people should be marching with Jews hadn’t even occurred to me.
Yesterday I woke to news that Russian authorities were forced to close the airport in Makhachkala, capital of the predominantly Muslim region of Dagestan, after hundreds occupied the landing field to protest the arrival of a plane carrying passengers from Tel Aviv. The mob, chanting “anti-Semitic slogans” and “Allahu Akbar,” reportedly tried to storm the plane in search of “Jews.”
On the weekend 100,000 anti-Israel protestors marched in London. Not all of them Jew haters, the clueless, the ideologues and the naive are always well-represented in such settings, nevertheless, outside Westminster Abbey some chanted in Arabic, “By soul and blood, we will sacrifice ourselves for you, oh Aqsa.” At a march a week earlier a young woman displayed the image of the Hamas paraglider, the new signifier of “radical chic.”
In my hometown of Melbourne anti-Israel protestors marched through the city centre on the weekend as they have done every weekend since October 7. Several placards compared Israel to Nazi Germany: one of them depicted Benjamin Netanyahu’s face morphing into Hitler’s with the words “THE IRONY OF BECOMING WHAT YOU ONCE HATED!”
The irony of living in Melbourne; capital of the so-called “progressive” state of Victoria, home to all manner of laws restricting free speech, where people nonetheless get to march through the streets vilifying the Jewish state and a Victoria Police spokeswoman tells the Herald Sun “there were no major incidents of note.”
The protestors chant for Palestine to be “free”— a catch-cry that’s not a war-cry, the more polished spokespeople assure the stray journalist who bothers to ask, but rather a call for “peaceful” negotiations to dismantle the world’s only Jewish state and substitute in its place a state with “equal citizenship and rights for Jews and Palestinians.”
I cannot for the life of me come up with a counter-factual to this vision of a “free” Palestine in which a Jewish minority thrives alongside its Muslim neighbours in liberty and peace. Hell, I can practically see this promised land, this liberal freedom-loving utopia, shimmering on the desert sands.
In the meantime, however, while we impatiently await the coming of this secular, democratic Palestine, Melbourne’s vastly outnumbered Jews rally, for the most part, inside our beloved “ghetto” encircled by police. We rally sorrowfully for the release of the hostages, brandishing posters of the kidnapped, young people, old people, children little older than toddlers. Thirty children are among the taken, their families plunged into unfathomable anguish. But the posters of the kidnapped get defaced and torn down, in Melbourne, as elsewhere, the clips flooding social media.
What is so offensive about these posters of the disappeared?
Who is harmed by these posters?
We Jews try to keep our routines normal. We come home, we go to work — only to confront yet more contempt for our slain in our professional milieus. The more “intellectual,” the more social justice-y the milieu, the more intense the contempt, which in its most insidious form simply wipes the pogrom from the historical record. Vanishes October 7 as if it never happened.
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In his ABC interview on Friday, Burke was asked if he supported the decision of his local council, in his heavily-Muslim electorate, to raise the Palestinian flag. He said he did, explaining it was important to acknowledge grief for the death of innocents on both sides of the conflict and resist the compulsion towards “competitive grief.”
Whoever said that grief was a competition? Of course it’s not a bloody competition! How would you measure the grief of an Israeli parent whose baby was murdered in front of them, against the grief of a Palestinian parent forced to retrieve their dead baby from the under the rubble? Grief is grief. The grief of each parent — and their families and brethren — is bottomless, absolute and indivisible.
And that’s why from here on I’ll no longer tolerate the all-too-frequent dinner-party provocation from the smarmy white leftist who asks, with furrowed brow, “but whatabout the Palestinians and their suffering?”
I’m done with those dinner parties. Forever.
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To imply, as Burke did, that the public monuments in Melbourne and elsewhere should not have been illuminated blue-and-white because “grief is not a competition” is to misrepresent why October 7 gave rise to this top-down expression of solidarity. It was not about the subjective suffering of the victims; it was an objective judgment about the depravity of the perpetrators.
Apologists for October 7 insist the pogrom must be “contextualised” as part of Israel’s continuing violent repression of the Palestinians. But that’s exactly what Australia and other countries did. In the context of the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict, with its background thrum of terrorism and state violence, the threshold for a crime against humanity is by definition steep, or monuments in Western capitals would be illuminated in national colours every other day. The moral consensus deems Hamas’ October 7 atrocities so inhumane that they diminish all humanity, rising above their context to attain universal significance.
And this truth has thrown much of the Western intelligentsia into a state of cognitive dissonance because, in writer David Suissa’s blunt description: “The world’s most popular victims, after all, cannot be allowed to be butchers.”
To be fair: not everyone is experiencing the dissonance, definitely not the students at George Washington University in Washington DC who projected genocidal slogans such as “GLORY TO OUR MARTYRS” onto their campus library. (At this point I’m out of gags about trigger warnings and “safe spaces.”)
Yet it says something about the unprecedented moment in which we find ourselves that I regard the brazen celebration of Jew killing the lesser of two evils, the larger one being the brazen erasure of Jew killing, and therefore of Jew hatred, with the aim of demonising the Jewish state and laying the justification for its destruction.
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Let’s talk about psychiatrists, likely experiencing an uptick in trade in recent weeks. Psychiatrists are clever people, probing the human psyche for the truth of what ails us. Some of my closest family members are psychiatrists — which you may conclude explains a great deal — and they are history takers, in the business of narratives, the what happened and when. But according to a report in The Australian — such reports being almost always in The Australian — in the immediate aftermath of October 7, Elizabeth Moore, president of the peak body of psychiatrists, the Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, issued the following remarks:
“The College condemns all forms of violence and human rights abuses and remains deeply concerned about the ongoing conflict in Gaza,” the statement read, failing to mention the word “Israel,” let alone what happened there.
Is the omission a sign of ideology trumping good judgment, or of deep-seated Jew hatred? I’m going to say neither, charitable type that I am, and suggest it’s simply indicative of Australia’s professional class: conformist, mediocre and cowardly. And they’re the good ones.
Elsewhere, say in universities, the denialism is conscious strategy. A statement from the branch committee of Melbourne University’s academic union, the NTEU, asserts the “mainstream media” has “vilified Palestinians and both their right to self-determination and to self-defence.” The “Palestinian struggle” is defined as one against settler-colonialism and not “a religious or ethnic war,” which, an astute friend pointed out, would be news to Hamas, so just as well the terror group and its deeds aren’t mentioned.
As I reported last time, the bodies of the slain were yet to be buried — and the Jews bury their dead fast — and Israel’s “genocide” yet to begin, when Sydney University linguist Nick Riemer, revived a petition (currently at about 90 signatures) for a full academic boycott of Israel, reassuring his social media followers that “no progressive should feel the need to publicly condemn any choices by the Palestinian resistance.”
Riemer, branch president of NTEU, is also the instigator of a post-October 7 petition signed by members, officials and in some instances entire branches from the broader union movement, expressing solidarity with Palestine, which begins: “We are horrified by the current war between Israel and Hamas and the unspeakable bloodshed and violence it has caused.” The bloodshed and violence being “unspeakable;” the pogrom is not spoken of and the statement dashes to the moral of the story: “This tragedy is a direct result of Israel’s blockade and siege of Gaza, and of the apartheid and ethnic cleansing it maintains in the West Bank and within its own borders.”
The petition includes several names from my journalists’ union, the MEAA. I’m so proud to be union, I pay union fees even when I’m unemployed. And I remained a member of the union even when, during the last Israel-Hamas war in 2021, more than 400 journalists, some big names among them, signed a petition that similarly expunged Hamas from the narrative, omitting to mention it had sparked the war by firing rockets indiscriminately at Israeli cities, this detail evidently considered irrelevant because — yes, I’m going to say it — Jewish lives don’t matter. At the time the MEAA endorsed the right of its journalist members to sign the petition without adverse professional consequences.
This time I decided that should the MEAA give its de facto endorsement to the Riemer petition I would loudly resign my membership. Fortunately, or unfortunately from my accountant’s perspective, an MEAA spokesman tells me the union has not released a statement on the current Israel-Hamas war. The union respects the right of individual members to express their views on a range of issues, “and does not regard those actions as representing official endorsement by the union.”
So for now I remain part of a union movement in which a sizeable chunk of members and officials believe “solidarity forever” does not extend to Jews in their darkest hour since the Holocaust.
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There’s one last open letter deserving of mention. Entitled “Stop the Genocide in Gaza,” it’s published in the literary journal Overland with no small number of signatories. Among the names are some lauded First Nations writers: their books are read in Jewish schools, their essays are published in a magazine owned by a Jew, they appear at writers festivals funded by Jewish donors where they share platforms with Jewish writers and discuss, with appropriate solemnity, the Holocaust and shared legacies of loss and “intergenerational trauma.”
I’m just giving you the facts. I’m not telling you what to do with them.
The letter these indigenous writers signed, alongside Palestinian and Arab writers, does, unlike the union petitions, contain a fleeting reference to October 7, amid a dissertation on Israel’s crimes starting with its creation 75 years ago “on stolen land.” The pogrom is described as “armed attacks by Palestinian people.” The perpetrator of these “armed attacks” is once again not named. Presumably, in circles where “heteronormativity” is akin to a crime, there’s some uneasiness about the Palestine resistance having at its vanguard an Islamofascist rape cult. In which case, these writers could just admit they’re uneasy rather than undermine the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause by blurring Hamas into an emblem of “the Palestinian people.”
The October 7 “attacks”, the letter instructs, “cannot be decontextualised” from “apartheid, extreme oppression .. and the open embrace by the Netanyahu government of policies that openly aim to exterminate the Palestinian people,” the nature of these “policies” apparently requiring no further elaboration. The letter continues: “The appropriate response to these and all attacks, is investigation and accountability, and addressing the root cause, namely, an end to the settler colonial regime once and for all.”
The attacks require “investigation.” Maybe they didn’t happen at all. (Are we really sure the Jews were murdered in gas chambers?) Never mind “the Palestinians” uploaded body-cam footage, proud of their deadly handiwork. Filmed themselves shooting two women huddling in fear under a desk. Firing meticulously into a line of portable toilets at the music festival. Executing a father in front of his young sons and then, as the little boys, splattered in their father’s blood and dressed in their underwear, cry for their mother, the younger child asking “why am I still alive?” raiding the fridge for a can of coke and taking leisurely sips.
Never mind that one gunman was recorded on his phone calling home, boasting, “Dad, I killed 10 (Jews) with my bare hands.”
Best we keep an open mind.
What preys on my mind about the Overland letter is its disciplined refusal to show a shred of empathy for these butchered souls. Even if condemning “the Palestinians” crimes is a bridge too far for these writers, could they not have tossed the tortured little boy an adjective — “tragic” attacks? — to soften the clinical tone, make one tiny concession to our shared understanding of being human?
I’m not asking them to cede political ground, not even asking them to concede Israel’s right to exist, even that debate is 10 times more enlightened than the subject at hand, no, no, no, no, we’re stuck here in the medieval bog, wondering: the roasting of babies — good or bad? Good or bad the raping of children?
That’s inaccurate, let me rephrase: good or bad the roasting of Jewish babies? The raping of Jewish children? Puts a different complexion on things, doesn’t it?
Because these Jews — socialists in their kibbutzim, peaceniks at a dance festival, human rights advocates in the mould of the 85 year-old former hostage Yocheved Lifshitz, who spent years risking her own safety taking sick Gazans to hospitals in Israel, and who, on her release from captivity in Gaza, turned around to shake the hand, shake the hand, of the masked Hamas gunman who had held her captive — these Jews, all of them found inside Israel’s internationally-recognised borders, are deemed so monstrous, such irredeemable filth, that the Overland signatories, feted writers some of them, teachers at our most prestigious universities, couldn’t grant them one soft adjective, not a moment’s grace. The writers couldn’t extend even a pause, a full-stop, between the “appropriate” responses of “investigation” and “accountability,” and addressing the attacks’ root cause, namely, “an end to the settler colonial regime once and for all.”
For the “appropriate response” to a pogrom against Jews is eliminating the Jewish state. A state poisonous from its very conception, a state so heinous the world must be rid of it as a matter of moral urgency.
How Israel’s “end” is to be achieved the writers don’t say but we can probably assume the objective justifies almost any means.
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What happened again?
There was a pogrom against Jews. Now there’s a “genocide” against Palestinians. And there’s people marching in the streets calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state established in the wake of the Holocaust. There was a Holocaust. There was Jesus and Judas, allegedly betraying Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, thereby setting in train the oldest, most enduring hatred, though that’s possibly news to the Australian Human Rights Commission.
On 13 October, the Commission’s President and Acting Race Discrimination Commissioner, Emeritus Professor Rosalind Croucher AM, called “for respect for human rights to be front of mind for all Australians as the situation in the Middle East continues to worsen,” which tells you all you need to know about the meaningless content thereafter. Except she did express concerns about reports that people’s right to peaceful protest may be blocked in certain states and territories. (She need not have been concerned; the right to protest was not blocked.) She was speaking, of course, of the right of people to protest Israel’s military response to the pogrom, the pogrom she naturally did not mention, and their right to protest Israel’s existence full stop.
But that’s not why I brought up the Commission. Last week a friend told me she sat the Commission’s “e-learning anti-racism module.” It took her three hours, she said. It covered comprehensively all the major types of racism. Except one. Sporadic references only to that one. A “note on religious discrimination,” which gave as an example laws prohibiting discrimination against Sikhs and Jews. Not much else.
According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, the institution charged with stamping out racism, Jew hatred in Australia barely exists.
As Scott Morrison would say, “how good’s that”!
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Jews, and decent people who are not Jewish, are fighting back against the erasure of October 7, the erasure of Jew hatred.
They are resigning from the morally-corrupted academic union, from an “interfaith” group that went spiritually mute after October 7, penning open letters, withdrawing from corporate partnerships, pulling funds, calling out, speaking up.
Australian Labor party members signed an open letter of solidarity with Israel entitled, “Line in the Sand:”
“In the face of the terror unleashed by Hamas no good person can remain silent, much less blame the victims for the terror they have experienced.” The letter is similar to the October Declaration signed by prominent people in the UK.
In Israel, more than 60 intellectuals and peace activists, including the writer David Grossman, banded together to tell the world of their sense of abandonment by a global left in the main either indifferent to the massacre or, worse, celebratory.
Former Australian prime ministers, all except for Paul Keating, issued a collective statement saying pretty much everything I would want and expect them to say about the conflict and its local repercussions, although I’m unclear on how Israel is to square its “legitimate” objective of defeating Hamas with its duty to avoid innocent casualties when the terrorists deliberately embed themselves within civilian populations, putting all Palestinians at risk. I don’t think our former PMs have the answers either: “On the battlefield in Israel and Gaza we do not presume to give strategic advice to Israel.”
Even in Hollywood more than 300 Jewish writers, including Jerry Seinfeld, sent an open letter to the writers’ guild asking why they had not publicly denounced the attack on Israel — Hollywood! Aren’t the Jews supposed to rule Hollywood? — to which the guild responded that the board’s viewpoints “are varied and we found a consensus out of reach,” and when that made the situation worse issued another statement condemning the attacks and explaining their initial silence was not “because we are paralysed by factionalism or masking hateful views” but rather because “we are American labor leaders, aware of our limitations and humbled by the magnitude of this conflict.”
The guild that powers Hollywood, America’s dream factory, found itself paralysed with writers block when met with the challenge of finding words to denounce the slaughter of elderly women and the dismemberment of babies.
Sorry, I did it again. I meant: the slaughter of elderly Jewish women and the dismemberment of Jewish babies.
At least now we know.
Lest I end on a crushing note, I’m going to leave you with a recording of Al Jolson singing Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, “The Hope,” which I believe is from 1948, the year the state was born.
This is wrenching to read Julie. Please know for every naive ideologue on streets there are thousand upon thousands of us who are with you, who will never forget.
Thank you Julie for this terrific article. Please keep writing!
Another bizarre aspect of all of this is that 120 nations at the UN recently voted for a "humanitarian truce" but none have taken a single Gazan child or pregnant woman. Egypt has a border with Gaza which it will not open to let anyone out. Egypt's role is conveniently ignored across the world, because only the Jews are to blame.Yet 6 million Ukrainians have self evacuated all over the world; and Kosovars and East Timorese were evacuated in the war, and the crisis, in their respective countries. A temporary evacuation is not ethnic cleansing or forced removal of populations. So there is massive world wide collusion at all levels with this.