From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Monday, December ninth. Syria is in full blown civil war as rebel forces who stunned the dictator Bashah al Assad by taking Aleppo last week, move into the capital Damascus, Asad has reportedly fled the country. It changes everything in the Middle East, and at the Australian dot Com dot a U we have live reporting and analysis of this fast moving story. The firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue was terrorism.
That's what Anthony Albanezi says is his personal view, as a manhunt continues for the arsonists and law enforcement leaders gather this week to consider declaring the attack a terror event. It comes after Israeli PM Benjamin Ettanna, who condemned the Albanese government's handling of events since October seven, twenty twenty three.
Nettannia who said anti Israel sentiment is the same as antisemitism. Today, our correspondent Joanni Bisham joins me to explore one of the thorniest issues of our age, how we think and talk about the Middle East. Before we start. Today's episode contains some explicit language.
There's outrage from around the world tonight after an arson attack on a synagogue in Melbourne's Jewish heartland.
Of RiPP and Lee.
This in Melbourne and this in Sydney.
Jewish Australians were barricaded inside Sydney's Great Synagogue last night after a noisy and aggressive pro Palestinian group decided to protest on the street right outside.
After condemnation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nettanna who and three days of pressure led by Josh Fridenberg and Peter Dutton. On Sunday, Anthony Alberanzi defended his record on standing up to anti Semitism.
If you want my personal view, quite clearly, terrorism is something that is aimed at creating fear in the community, and the atrocities that occurred at the synagogue in Melbourne clearly were designed to create fear in the community and therefore, from my personal perspective, certainly fulfill that definition of terrorism.
Joanni Bishan is a senior journalist with the Australian YNI. What's your interpretation of Anthony Albanese's remarks? There Is this a new stance for Albanesi or is this business as usual for him?
It's business as usual in the sense that it takes some time with Albo to.
Take a bold stance and call something what it is.
So Anthony Albanesi calling the fire bombing attack on the ADUs Israel Synagogue as a terrorist act or what he sees is personally being a terrorist act, well he's doing what the Jewish community.
In Australia did. In about three seconds. We all saw what happened, we knew what it was.
The fact it took him two days to pronounce it as a terrorist act, well that's in keeping.
That's Baau for Albow. But he is right in one sense.
Which is that the technical definition of a terrorist act is something that needs to be decided by the law enforcement agencies. They're going to be meeting on Monday, and in the past it's taken many months for these very agencies to figure out whether, for example, the Link Cafe siege was a terrorist attack or not. Everyone who watched that new almost on site that they were watching hostages being held up in a cafe with a shotgun while they were holding a Shahada flag, and they knew what
it was. They were calling it a terrorist atackt But for many months it was described as an instance of a mentally ill manned So these things can take time.
There's an author called Alex Rifchin who's also co chief executive of an advocacy group called the Council of Australian Jury. He's written a book about antisemitism called The Seven Deadly Myths. In it, he says antisemitism is as diverse as Jewishness. You can be a Jew if you are very religious, or even if you have no religious faith at all, and if you're born into a Jewish family, or if you're a convert to the religion. Alex Rifchin writes that
antisemitism is similar. You can be an anti Semite if you despise the Jewish faith on religious grounds, but you don't hate the ethnic group of Jews, or like the Nazis, you can hate the Jews as an ethnic group without really focusing on their religious practices. And then he says this one can adorn the state of Israel with all manner of antisemitic conspiracy theory, yet hold Judaism and Jewish culture in high regard, as has become common in some sectors of the far left.
Yanni.
This is the idea I'm keen to dig through with you today, and it's big and complex. On Saturday, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netna who took to social media to declare anti Israel sentiment is anti Semitism, and he was talking particularly about Australia. So let's start with that idea. Would you agree with NTNYA, who is anti Israel sentiment the same thing as antisemitism.
Well, the first thing I would start off by saying is that there's a tendency even among Jews to interpret Netanya who's phrasing here as any criticism of the government of Israel or its policies is akin to anti Semitism. And that's not what I think Netanyahu meant at all. I think what he's talking about here is the anti Israel movement that broadly speaking, denies the right of Jews
to live in their ancestral homeland. The anti Israel movement at its worst is not one that seeks to state solution. It's one that actually doesn't seek Israel to exist at all. But it's also and I guess this is the part that aligns a little more closely with the Albanese government. It's a mindset that tends to apportion all of the blame for all of the situation in the Middle East on Israel itself, And that's partly why Nettnyahu responded so
forcefully on Friday night with that tweet. So he's responding to Australia's fresh positioning at the UN and a number of hostile steps taken by the Albanese government to distance itself from Israel over the past year, when Israel, with whom Australia is supposed to be a very warm ally, was the one that was attacked in the first place on October seven.
Over the past year and a bit since October seven, you've been back and forth to Israel, covering the conflict as it's unfolded, and covering the development of sentiment within Israel itself. I've been struck in your reporting that Israel is itself a very diverse place. There have always been Arab members of the parliament, for example, there villages in Israel, and there are plenty of Israelis who strongly disagree with Netnya,
who on vs On all sorts of things. So how do we square that the idea of Israelis who don't like Netnya Who and don't like the conduct of the war. With the idea that anti israel sentiment is anti Smitic by definition.
They really are two different things.
So again there's ordinary political dissent and disagreement, and this is abundant in Israel, as anyone who has been there will to test, and since the war began last year, there's been extraordinary disagreement over how the government, for example, should be negotiating the release of the hostages. And separate to that, there's ample criticism of netna who himself. That's not anti semitism. No one would suggest that that's anti semitism.
But protesters standing outside Central Synagogue in Sydney, holding Jews here accountable for the actions of the Israeli government and forcing them to be locked inside the synagogue for their safety, that's anti Semitic. Protesting in the streets calling for an anti five or of violent uprising against Jews, that's anti Semitic. When the police tell Jews they shouldn't venture into parts of the city because their safety cannot be assured, as they were told on October nine last year, there's a
word for that too. So people use the cover of anti Israel critique to mask an anti Semitism. They're never critiquing the government's domestic policies or as foreign policies. They're critiquing Israel's right to exist and boycotting Jewish products and blaming Jews in Sydney and Melbourne for events unfolding a world away. And that's what I think Bibie was talking about.
Here in Australia. Since October seven, twenty twenty three, we've seen a few different types of reaction. First, of course, was the Opera House protest on October nine, where protesters were chanting something that was either fuck the Jews or where's the Jews? That has been widely interpreted, particularly in the community, as anti Semitic as well as anti Israel. What's your take on that.
Well, it was a curtain raiser, like not just in terms of the grotesque messaging and violence that we've seen in the months that followed, but the response from government at the state and federal level was what.
Many would describe as totally lacking.
There were no arrests, There was yes condemnation, but that condemnation has always counted in language quite merely on the tongue and This is where federal labor, in particular, I feel has repeatedly failed. For example, why doesn't every statement made by this government about Israel and Gaza just start with the words release the hostages, Like, surely that's not a position.
They don't support. Those words make it into the.
Press statements, but they're often buried under convoluted statements about restraint and ceasefires. But generally speaking, my feeling about October nine is the leaders were probably experiencing a collective state of denial about what they themselves were witnessing, and they were probably unwilling to be sensible and call out what they were witnessing, or they were hoping it would go away, and that was naive.
So after October nine here in Australia we've seen protests through city streets every weekend and university encampments inspired by the ones in America, and at those encampments and on the protest we've seen a couple of different types of people. There's people of Middle Eastern descent and then there's white Australians and they're chanting slogans like Israel is a terrorist state, accusing Israeli murdering babies. So how do we interpret all
of that from that group of people. Is that level of protest do you think anti Israel or is it anti Semitic? And what would be the difference in this context? I guess I'm asking, is there a way to disagree with the way Israel is conducting the war in Gaza from here in Australia and still be an ally to Jews?
Well, to go to what you just mentioned, I would say it's certainly anti Israel, and many would rightfully argue that it's flagrantly anti Semitic, as I would as well. What fascinates me about these catch cries is that the people saying them seem to display a sort of wilful disregard of Hamas's involvement in this tragedy altogether. So let's just clear away one thing first. Israelis themselves. They're appalled by the civilian deaths in Gaza, as any sensible human
being would be Bibi himself. The hardline is in the Israeli government, believe it or not, they don't want innocent people to die either, but they do see Hamas as culpable for those tragedies, and rightfully so. The Australian government
seems to hold a slightly different view. But to the protesters in the streets, with their kafirs and the signs calling for Antifada and other slogans, I often wonder why they aren't acknowledging what brave Palestinians in Gaza are saying themselves, which is that Hamas wilfully endangered their lives by turning their homes into rocket launching sites, or that Hamas deliberately embedded itself in hospitals and schools, or in the aid camps where the population now seeks shelter, or that Hermas
wasted billions in eight dollars on building tunnels, and to state the bleeding obvious that Hamas launched this war and are still holding more than one hundred hostages.
The protesters always have to.
Work very hard to justify that point, to justify that morally reprehensible starting point. But to answer your original question, there's a very simple way to disagree with the war, and that is say whatever you like about it, have a view, without punctuating your point or framing your argument by saying that Israel has no right to exist in the first place and has no right to defend itself.
It's pretty simple coming up.
How did anti Israel sentiment become fashionable for the progressive left? That's after the break. There are plenty of Australians who would never show up at a protest, but for many of them, Palestine has now moved from the fringe where it was once the pet subject of the labor left or the Greens for example, to being now a very
fashionable cause. So these are people who you would normally think of as the progressive left, and I would think they would describe themselves like that, their pro gay rights, their pro reconciliation for example. So how have they ended up being anti Israel although Israel is really the only place in the Middle East where ideas that they believe in gay rights and women's rights are fully embraced.
What I would say is that if you're in your twenties and political activism is a form of identity and expression, then you can't sit on the fence. There is an imperative to voice your moral outrage, and you have to choose wisely what side you'll take or risk excommunication from your group, and you have to participate in the rituals of that group, like hosting to social media or sharing
and liking, or attending a protest. So there's a lot of stake, and the incentives, which are always to be like to be accepted, are the same as they've always been. The incentive isn't to be historically literate, it's just to be aghast at something.
And we've seen this before with Israel and Gaza.
We're all partly surrendering ourselves to the distortion of our own social media algorithms, much as we did during debates over the vaccines and Trump and Black Lives Matter and Ukraine and Russia.
What I would say is that.
It would seem to me that in this debate, all roads lead back to where our attention is being focused, the information we're being provided, and in large respect, social media.
So here in Australia there are some very vocal Jewish people who say Israel doesn't represent me. I don't want to be included in this group who believes that even Israel has a right to exist. How do you think those sentiments, express very vocally by certain people here have influenced the bigger conversation.
I'm not sure if they have.
I know that there is a vocal minority that exists and who hold that view, But they are again a vocal minority, and they are part of a vanishingly small minority of the Jewish population in this country, which, for anyone wondering, is also tiny. It's about one hundred thousand strong nationally. I would say the overwhelming majority of Jews in this country are Zionus who believe in Jewish self determination and the right of Jews to live in their
ancestral homeland. And I believe a bulk of them also live in hope of a country that's at peace with its Arab neighbors. And if you think that's not possible, just consider there is peace between Israel and Jordan, Israel and Egypt. These were countries with which Israel was once
fiercely at war, but no longer. So it's not impossible, but it is impossible while genocidal Iranian proxy groups like Hamas and Hezbola running around destroying the joint and destroying the lives of their own populations.
Joli Bishan is a senior journalist with The Australian. He's reported for US multiple times from the Middle East this year, and also writes our must read business column, margin Call You can check out Yo on his work right now at the Australian dot com dot au