Amid a very real and terrifying rise in antisemitism, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, and the Coalition – prior defenders of the “right to be bigots” – have now appointed themselves our nation’s anti-antisemitism warriors. But their concern for Jews appears to me to be confected and self-serving. Mirroring the global far right, they have created an imaginary caricature of Jewish people to push their own political agenda. They use us as political footballs to stoke division, spread Islamophobia, attack the Labor party and push anti-immigration policies. In doing so, they make Jews less safe.
This week I’ve faced a relentless smear campaign by the Murdoch press and pro-Israel lobby groups for making this point during a comedy debate, and ridiculing Dutton and the Coalition’s imaginary conception of Jewish people as “Dutton’s Jew”. The smear campaign against me, which deliberately misinterprets my presentation, concocting a fantasy of it that is completely divorced from reality, proves my point: the right will go to great lengths to silence any Jew who does not fit into their mould.
Peter Dutton has increasingly invoked the Jewish community and the fight against antisemitism to justify divisive political positions and his party’s increasingly indefensible support for Israel. Israel currently stands accused of a myriad of international crimes, including genocide, for its conduct in Gaza.
When comparing Hamas to the Nazis during his argument for Australia to refuse temporary visitor visas to Palestinians fleeing persecution in Gaza, Dutton appeared to suggest the Nazis at least felt guilt because they tried to conceal their crimes. In parliament, he was criticised for linking antisemitism to the high court’s decision to ban indefinite immigration detention.
He has pushed draconian measures such as mandatory sentencing, which has no evidence of reducing hate, in response to rising antisemitism. He has referred to the weekly anti-war protests in support of a ceasefire and Palestinian rights as “anti-Jewish protests”, ignoring the multicultural nature of these rallies and the large number of Jews like me who attend them. Dutton effectively blamed the ALP’s positions at the United Nations for the terrifying arson attack on Adass Israel synagogue, despite no relationship between the two. He has labelled the international criminal court’s arrest warrants of Hamas and Israeli leaders as an “antisemitic stance”.
And Dutton is not alone in this use of Jews and the Jewish community as political footballs to push a rightwing political agenda. Globally, the far right refers to the fight against antisemitism as the fight on behalf of “western civilisation”. The rightwing Dutch politician Geert Wilders uses Jews as an excuse to rally against “multicultural scum”. The recently inaugurated US president, Donald Trump, states that the fight against antisemitism is about the fight against “radical left thugs”, “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners”, “radical Islam” and “the mass importation of antisemitism”.
These statements rely on a reductive depiction of Jews as all singularly supportive of Israel, and opposed to the left, protesters, Palestinian refugees, immigrants and international law. As historian Dr Max Kaiser has said, we are depicted as the “super-western canaries in the coalmine for civilisational decline”. In other words, the far right is not necessarily concerned with actual Jews; rather, they use us as an excuse to push bigotry towards other racialised groups.
Trump appeared happy to host neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers at Mar-a-Lago for dinner. His right-hand man, Elon Musk, gave two fascist-style salutes at Trump’s inauguration and has recently endorsed the extreme far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party. I don’t believe that Trump and the far right could care less about the threat these groups pose to actual Jewish people, because they’re not really interested in us, they’re interested in the avatars they have created to replace us.
In contrast to this reductive depiction of Jewish people, the Jewish community is incredibly diverse. This diversity of Jewish views on Israel, migration and anti-racism work is exactly what Dutton, Trump and their ilk are afraid of. In order for them to be able to use Jews to push their divisive agenda, they have to actively silence and suppress the voices of those of us who don’t fit into their stereotypes. Trump says Jews who vote for Democrats “hate their religion” and “should be ashamed of themselves”. In Australia we have seen the hostile treatment of leftwing Jewish witnesses like me at the Senate inquiry into antisemitism, and even Jewish MP Josh Burns. The campaign to silence me, led by the Murdoch press and far-right actors, provides yet another example.
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The devastating part about all of this is that reductive language in support of Jews actually makes all of us less safe. It is always harmful to flatten any group into a single archetype and silence any member who displays individuality. But it’s not only that – anti-Jewish conspiracies have historically provided elites with a shock absorber, to prevent popular rage reaching the kings, queens and tsars. In the present day, the elite don’t tell tales of Jewish devils pitted against pure Christians; they have concocted an antisemitic narrative about Jewish people on the frontlines of the fight against immigration and other racialised groups. In this conception, Jews are still “the other”; we’re not expected to have solidarity across racial lines and our safety is still at the whims of the political class.
Because none of this is actually about real Jews or Jewish safety, none of this prevents the far right from fuelling racism, including from neo-Nazis, one of the most significant global threats to our safety. I receive almost daily online harassment and abuse from neo-Nazis, who particularly fixate on leftwing Jews and spread antisemitic conspiracies about us.
And so as we witness a terrifying rise in fascism, both in Australia and globally, I won’t be stopped from calling out these contradictions, ridiculing these dangerous dynamics and pointing out the ways in which they pose a threat to all Jewish people.