MY LIFE AS AN AUSTRALIAN JEW IN 2023

Born in a displaced persons’ camp two years after the end of the Holocaust, Michael Gawenda spent his childhood and teenage years in a left-wing non-Zionist Jewish youth group in Melbourne. He went on to become a public figure during his 40 years as a journalist, including his role as editor-in-chief of The Age – the only Jewish editor-in-chief in the newspaper’s history. Michael Gawenda became dismayed and pained by the growing hostility of the left to Israel and to Jews like him who were not prepared to declare themselves as anti-Zionists. As he wrote his book My Life as a Jew in 2022, Michael Gawenda could not have imagined the way this, and the atrocities in Israel on 7 October 2023, would lead him to re-examine his identity and his view of Israel. Michael Gawenda addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 20 November 2023, to reflect on the rise of antisemitism, especially after 7 October 2024, and how it has been allowed to fester.

MY LIFE AS AN AUSTRALIAN JEW IN 2023

MICHAEL GAWENDA

Thanks to The Sydney Institute for having me here tonight and thank you all for coming along to hear me speak.

In a sense, my life as a Jew in 2023 – as opposed to my life as a Jew in 2022 when I was writing and editing my book – started when the year was almost over, on Saturday 7 October, in the late afternoon in Australia and early in the morning in Israel.

I am a secular Jew, though in recent times, for reasons I explore in my book, I feel an increasing connection to Judaism. I have even attended synagogue this year and last year on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But I do not observe Shabbes – the sabbath – except that we light candles on Friday night and recite the Shabbes prayers, drink a few glasses of wine and a shot or two of whiskey and eat the challah that my son has baked, the best challah that I have ever tasted.

So, unlike many Australian Jews – and Israelis – who on Shabbes do not read or listen to any news, do not go on the internet, do not check social media and do not even have their phones switched on, late in the afternoon on 7 October, I received news alerts from a range of media outlets in Australia, England, America and Israel.

A barrage of rockets had been fired from Gaza into Israel. The residents of the small communities and kibbitzes in the south, not far from Gaza had hurried to their safe rooms.

The news quickened. There were reports that the Gaza security fence had been breached. The military posts had been attacked. Hamas fighters – it turned out to be thousands – had streamed through the breaches of the fence. They were attacking the villages and kibbitzes, where people were locked in their safe rooms because of the rocket fire. They were setting homes ablaze to smoke out the residents. The IDF was nowhere to be seen.

Could this be true? Could it really be true that the thousands of people who lived in these communities and kibbitzes, including Bedouin communities and scores of Thai workers on work permits who helped with the running of the farms, were there alone in their so-called safe rooms?  Defenceless, without any IDF presence.

Then came the most horrifying news. Young people at a rave dance party for peace in the desert, a thousand or more of them, were attacked by Hamas killers who flew in on motorised hang gliders and came in trucks and bulldozers. They had shot and stabbed and burnt to death hundreds of revellers for peace, mostly young people in their late teens and early twenties. The killers had also used hand grenades to blow up groups of young people.

The death toll, at first reported to be 250, is now believed to be 360. Not all the dead have been identified. [In the months to follow this speech, the number of dead would be revised to some 1200] Later we learnt that young women had been raped before they were killed, and some had been raped before they were taken hostage. Scores of ravers for peace were taken as hostages. And then came the news that hundreds of hostages had been taken, men, women and children and babies, taken into Gaza by the killers.

I remember the first call I made to my family in Israel. They are, most of them Israeli born. They are the children and grandchildren of my mother’s brother and sisters who went to Israel from the DP camp in Austria where I was born. My family received visas for Australia because my father had cousins in Australia to sponsor us.  My mother’s family could not get visas for anywhere. And so, they went to Israel just months after the state was born.

We shared information that first night of the attacks, all through the night in Australia. And ever since that first call, we have been in touch with my family every night, with calls and messages and photographs.

I tell you all this because this nightly contact with my family in Israel is just one of many ways my life as a Jew in 2023 changed on 7 October. Before that, we were in contact just every now and then. We visited with them, my wife and I, when we went to Israel.  My son, a frequent traveller to Israel, sees our family every time he is there. But there was nothing like the intensity of our relationships post 7 October.

As every terrible detail emerged in that first week after 7 October, of what the Hamas murderers had done, I often felt like I was living in Australia during the day and in Israel at night. I was living in two realities. This is the Jew I had become on 7 October 2023.

I was not alone in this. There are fewer than 100,000 Jews in Australia according to the last census. Though there are probably thousands more because some Jews, secular Jews in particular, answered the religion question on the census form with the word “none”. Whatever the actual number, it is a small community, less than a sixth the size of the Muslim community. But it is a unique diaspora community. From around 1947 to 1952, Australia took in more Holocaust survivors, as a proportion of its population, than any other country bar Israel. More than the United States, more than Canada. The children of these survivors and their grandchildren and even great grandchildren, form more than half the community.

The survivors were a remarkable lot of Jews. They rebuilt their lives in Australia, they built successful businesses and law firms. They joined the major political parties. They set up Jewish cultural and religious institutions. They built a Jewish school network unmatched anywhere in the world. And they were, from the start, overwhelmingly fervent Zionists who believed that without the miraculous birth of Israel, so soon after the darkest chapter of Jewish history, there would have been no future for them or the Jewish people.

Their children and even their grandchildren, in survey after survey, have described themselves as Zionists. Indeed, in the most recent surveys, close to 80 per cent of Australian Jews described themselves as committed Zionists. Australian Jews, according to these surveys, have visited Israel in greater numbers proportionately than the Jews of the United States and they feel a connection to the country that only going there, being there, can establish. And many, like me, have family in Israel, most likely family members who have made Aliya – have gone to settle in Israel. There are many thousands of Australians who are dual Australian and Israeli citizens.

Why am I telling you all this? I am telling you because without understanding it, you cannot really understand, how it was, that what happened on 7 October was so devastating, so frightening, for Australian Jews. For them, there were echoes of a darker time, the darker time that their grandparents lived through and in my case, for people my age, their parents had lived through.

Let me go back to the Jew I was before 7 October 2023. I think it is fair to say that Israel was not a miracle for that part of the Jewish community in Australia, that very small part of the Jewish community, in which I grew up. I describe my Jewish upbringing in my book which I hope all of you will read.

Suffice it to say that from a very early age, I was a member of SKIF which was the children’s organisation of the BUND. The BUND was a major political party in Eastern Europe before the Second World War. It was internationalist in outlook, militantly secular and anti-Zionist before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. But it believed in Jewish peoplehood. And it was committed to Yiddish and Yiddish culture, the language and culture of secular East European Jews of which there were three million or more.

Before the Second World War, the BUND in Eastern Europe, in Poland and Lithuania in particular, had tens of thousands of members. In Poland, it was among the biggest Jewish political parties, bigger than most of the Zionist parties. It was a democratic socialist party and by then it had been suppressed in Russia after the revolution and its leaders were subsequently executed by Stalin or sent to the gulag for the rest of their lives in the great purges of the 1930s.

Its credo was that Jews were a people of the world and that the unique strength of Jewish peoplehood lay in the ability of Jews to build strong Jewish communities wherever Jews lived. At the same time, it was to be part of a larger human story, the inevitable triumph of an international brotherhood through socialism. This credo proved to be fatally flawed. It was literally fatal for most of its members. The Nazis and their helpers murdered most of them, in the extermination camps they had set up in Poland.

A small remnant of the BUND, perhaps a couple of hundred Bundists, managed to survive the Holocaust and ended up as refugees in Australia. There were never more than a few hundred Bundists and perhaps a couple of hundred Skif members like me, but they were influential beyond their numbers in the Labour Party. They built Jewish communal cultural centres and they built a primary school where Yiddish was taught – the only Yiddish day school in the world.

My education – my general education and my Jewish education – was in SKIF where I first declared myself a socialist when I was eight years old. I was not a Zionist. This was when being a Zionist meant believing that the only future for the Jewish people was in Israel.

My book describes my long journey away from Skif and the BUND – but not from social democracy, for I was and still consider myself to be a social democrat, a person of the left. But my book is also about how, increasingly, I came to feel that a growing part of the left – including former comrades of mine from SKIF, people I grew up with and who were my friends – had come to believe that the only good Jew, the only Jew who can really be a Jew of the left, was a Jew who repudiated Zionism.

The only good Jew was a Jew who called out Zionism as evil and racist and considered Israel the poisoned fruit of this evil, racist, colonialist ideology. Jews like me, left wing Jews like me, were bad Jews because we refused to repudiate the connection we felt with Israel.

Does this sound like I am saying that my book, published just days before the mass slaughter by the Hamas terrorists on 7 October was prophetic? That it predicted the way much of the left, including Jewish leftists, would respond to any flare up of hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza?  I think I am sort of saying that. Of course, I could not predict the 7 October massacres. Nor did I predict the explosion of antisemitism across the world, the virulence of it, the widespread hostility to Jews, that has followed the massacres of 7 October.

In 2022 when I wrote my book, I had already concluded that some of my Jewish friendships, some childhood friendships – and one friendship that I write about in my book, with the publisher Louise Adler – were over. These friendships were unsustainable because our sense of ourselves as Jews was in conflict. This conflict was at the core of the sort of left-wing Jews we were. I supported Israel’s right to exist and, more than that, I had grown to love the country and believed it had become essential to Jewish survival. They did not. In many ways, they had come to despise Israel.

The Jew I am, less than two months after 7 October, is anxious about the future, concerned that my children and grandchildren may be subjected to significant antisemitism and a widespread hostility to Jews that might subside once the war in Gaza ends, though I would not bet on it. I fear they will live their lives in Australia, in this goldene medene – this golden land for Jews as we Jews have long regarded it – with antisemitism and with a sort of endemic hostility to Jews that was wholly absent when I was growing up.

I fear that it is increasingly possible that significant sections of the Labor Party, will go the way of the Greens, which has significant representation in the federal parliament, in most state legislatures and even at the local council level across Australia the third largest political party in the country. Like the Greens, these members of the Labor Party, including members of the Albanese Labor government, will buy the anti colonialist ideology of the antizionist left and the shallow and unhinged ideology of the social justice warriors and race essentialists who blame the Israeli victims for what happened to them on 7 October for what was done to them.

Look at what happened in the days after the Saturday 7 October massacres and the kidnapping of hundreds of hostages. There was the now infamous rally outside the Sydney Opera House where hundreds of demonstrators chanted death to the Jews and gas the Jews and from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. A day later there was a pro-Palestinian rally in Melbourne where the protesters again chanted from the river to the sea and free Palestine and many held placards  portraying Benjamin Netanyahu as Adolf Hitler.

One of the things that struck me about the Melbourne rally, one of the things that I found confounding, inexplicable but in the end contemptible was that Jordy Silverstein, a Jew, a Jewish academic who is a scholar of Jewish cultural history at Melbourne University was one of the speakers at the rally. She stood there in front of placards calling for an end to Israel. She led chants of free Palestine. This, two days after the massacre of many hundreds of Jews in the biggest slaughter of Jews since 1945.

At subsequent rallies, two young Jews – they identified as non-binary – who had attended Jewish schools, made speeches, wearing Palestinian scarves and cheered on by people holding signs calling for the elimination of Israel and leading chants of from the river to the sea interspersed with chants of shame. They were, I suspect, graduates in gender studies courses and anti-colonialism studies at – pick one, any one – an Australian university.

Even before the Israeli campaign against Hamas had begun, indeed almost instantly, what had happened on 7 October was wilfully forgotten by people who call themselves pro-Palestinian but are actually supporters of Hamas. It was forgotten too, more or less, by people who went on marches in their thousands calling for peace, before the bodies of the murdered had even been recovered. It was forgotten by the media which, in the main it seems, can’t remember what happened an hour ago let alone days ago. The victims were vanished, the hostages were vanished, so much so that now there is a growing movement of people, some apparently formerly sane people, who believe 7 October did not happen.

Within days of 7 October, there were petitions circulating – even before the start of the Israeli bombing campaign – about Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza. A genocidal war conducted by an illegitimate state for no reason other than its colonialist and racist nature, against innocent and defenceless Palestinians who had suffered 75 years of a brutal occupation. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of writers and academics signed these letters and petitions. Senior journalists signed these letters and petitions.

One petition was signed by hundreds of members of the journalists’ union, the MEAA. One was organised by the cultural magazine, Overland which called for an investigation into what actually happened on 7 October. The magazine’s patron, Barry Jones, labelled this petition appalling but hundreds of writers signed it. Most of these petitions did not mention the Hamas terrorist slaughter. When they did, like Overland, they both questioned what happened and justified it at the same time on the basis that in the anticolonial struggle, the Hamas “action” was an act of resistance.

Antisemitism was on the rise – in part of course because of these rallies and petitions and letters. In part too because of this ignoring and wilful forgetting of what had happened on 7 October. And, in part, because history tells us it is always there, antisemitism, lurking beneath the surface, and that when the time is right so to speak, it emerges with an unexpected fury and intensity.

In my view, in the media, only The Australian called out the rise of antisemitism and antisemitic attacks on Jews in a clear and unqualified way – without as a matter of “balance”, referring to the rise of Islamophobia. Let me state this bluntly: there is no equivalence between the rising tide of antisemitism in Australia and internationally, and whatever the increase has been of Islamophobia, however that term is defined.

Why was this, why was there this need for equivalence in the media? In part this was because many of their journalists had imbibed the structural racism and anti-colonial ideology which posits that Jews are white and therefore cannot be the victims of racism. What this means is that many on the left, including many journalists, find it very hard, to accept that antisemitism exists at all. Except for straight out neo-Nazi antisemitism.

Jews are white and have white privilege, which explains why they are successful—not that they worked hard and made sure their kids had a good education for instance – and, rather than being victims of racism, are themselves racist, supporters of a racist ideology and a racist state.

Among Jews, there was fear and anger and, above all, a sense of being abandoned, a sense of powerlessness. I felt it. Officials of the major Jewish organisations mounted campaigns to counter the rising hostility to Jews, but I fear that their voices in much of the media, were not given an airing. This was because many journalists had come to see themselves as activists, warriors for the Palestinian cause. And had publicly declared that this is what journalism means to them.

What I found confounding I must say, is that there was no pushback from the media companies to this notion of journalists as activists. As far as I know, none of these journalists were told that the sort of journalism they wanted to do, was not acceptable in the media companies they worked for. Increasingly, what I thought it meant to be a journalist – a commitment to fairness, to factual accuracy, to never being agenda driven – is considered nowadays by many journalists to be a quaint definition of the profession from a distant past.

I am and remain a Jew of the left, a social democrat. But what has happened in the past few weeks has made it clear, that the antizionist left, in the main, is not just hostile to Jews – which I had long considered to be the case – but is infected with the disease of antisemitism. Do I need to say that of course there is antisemitism, old fashioned antisemitism of the extreme right? And that it is repulsive? And even a physical danger in some cases to the Jews? That should go without saying.

But it is the antisemitism of the left – of which I have long been a part – the antizionist antisemitism of the left, the anti-Israel antisemitism of the left, that is on the rise and that is increasingly making Jews feel unsafe and isolated and that is threatening them with violence.

For me, perhaps the greatest disappointment has not been those Jews on the left, some of whom were my former friends – who joined the pro-Palestinian protests and even spoke at them or who signed those letters and petitions calling for Israel’s demise. I expected that from them. No, my greatest disappointment was with leftist Jews like me who had a public profile and who no doubt felt horrified and full of pain at what had happened on 7 October but could not bring themselves to say so.

They could not bring themselves to declare that they were in mourning for the lives lost in that terrible pogrom but instead were either silent or spoke in the language of obfuscation describing 7 October, in one case, as an “escalation of violence”. They were silent, in my view, because they feared being expelled from the brotherhood and sisterhood of the left.

In 2021, I published a book called The Powerbroker, an Australian Jewish Life. It was a biography of the Jewish Zionist leader Mark Leibler and in a sense, it was the story of a small but successful – and even powerful – Jewish community which could produce a leader like Leibler. He was a leading lawyer and business adviser who over the years, has had the ear of every Australian prime Minister since Malcolm Fraser.

Back then, I did think the Jews were a wonderful success story in Australia, in this golden land. And powerful, way beyond the size of the community, powerful not for nefarious reasons, but because of that community’s success because of the outstanding business people, lawyers and judges, medical researchers and educators, outstanding Australians, it had produced.

Right now, that all feels like bulldust. Jews are not powerful. They are a small community which makes them politically marginal. At best. There are more than six times the number of Muslim Australians as there are Jewish Australians. Jews are not powerful politically, especially in the Labor Party. Nor in our institutions, in our universities and in the media.

Now it may be that this is overly pessimistic and dark and that, in the main, this is the response from a left-wing Jew who feels cast out of his political home. A Jew increasingly disillusioned with the Labor Party whose leaders, in the main, can’t call out antisemitism without immediately calling out islamophobia, when in reality they know there is no equivalence between the two.

This is the first time I have spoken at The Sydney Institute, I appreciated the invitation and the chance, yes, to promote my book. And I know that here, there will be people who will understand what I am saying, and who understand why Australian Jews feel isolated and threatened.

I am an Australian Jew in November 2023. I am a lifelong social democrat. I edited a left liberal newspaper for seven years. But let me tell you this. Every morning, I read The Australian and nowadays I thank goodness for it. I even, quite regularly, thank goodness for Gerard – and I have told him so.

Thank you, Gerard and Anne, for having me. Let me tell you, there are places that would not have me because they are too scared to host a writer who has written a book about being a Jew.

And thank you all for coming to hear me speak. And please buy a copy of my book. I am sure you will enjoy it. Even if I do say so myself.