ANTI-SEMITISM ON CAMPUS – THEN AND NOW – JOE GERSH

Following the October 7 Hamas invasion of southern Israel and the atrocities committed on the day, pro-Hamas/Palestinian demonstrations and protest about Israel has engulfed the Western world especially on university campuses. Jewish students have been attacked, vilified and made to feel unwelcome on campus. The protests have spread to affect the Jewish community at large and brought fears of age-old anti-semitism becoming a new norm. To discuss in depth this phenomenon on Australia’s university campuses, Joe Gersh – Executive Chairman of Gersh Investment Partners Ltd and President of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) in 1975 – Freya Leach, Director of the Centre for Youth Policy and Professor Timothy Lynch, Professor of American Politics at the University of Melbourne came together to lead a seminar at The Sydney Institute on Monday 30 September 2024.

ANTI-SEMITISM ON CAMPUS – THEN AND NOW

JOE GERSH

On 3 June this year, Julian Leeser MP introduced a Private Members Bill

to establish a Judicial Inquiry into campus anti-semitism. The Bill was referred to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee. The result of their review is expected to be announced by 4 October.

Australia’s newly appointed Envoy against Anti-Semitism, the redoubtable Jill Segal AO, has strongly supported the establishment of a Judicial inquiry, as have the Australian Jewish community’s representative and advocacy organisations. The Jewish community supports this approach because the alternative – an investigation into incidences of anti-semitism by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) – is unlikely to approach the issue with impartiality or appropriate respect, let alone empathy.

We will need both respect and empathy in these challenging times, in which anti-semitism is revealing itself in institutions that we should be able to rely on to be enlightened. Because as Julian Leeser observed in his Second Reading Speech, “What we are seeing on Australian university campuses today is the next evolution of a hatred that has endured through human history.”

In her submission to the Senate Inquiry, Jill Segal made 14 specific recommendations. But she also made a number of chilling observations. Observations such as that there is an “embedded culture of anti-semitism” on Australian university campuses, and the “febrile situation” on some campuses is “causing Jewish students to be traumatised, feel unsafe, stay away from campus and not partake equally in educational opportunities”.

Safe Work NSW has confirmed that investigators would consider a complaint by a former Sydney University staff member alleging that the university failed to adequately protect the psychosocial safety of Jewish students and academics. This comes after the Sydney University Vice Chancellor, Mark Scott, negotiated with violent protesters to end an encampment on campus; a move which led Zionist Federation President Jeremy Leibler to call for his dismissal. Professor Scott has since apologised to the Senate committee; in my view too little, too late.

The question is – how did it come to this?

I have recently had occasion to re-read a report which I wrote in 1975 as a 19-year old. At the time I was President of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS). The Report covered the period of 1974 and 1975.

At its January Council of 1974, the Australian Union of Students (AUS), the peak “representative” body of campus student councils, passed a series of crude and extreme anti-Israel resolutions. The most relevant of these read: “AUS informs the National Union of Israelis Students that AUS does not recognise the existence of the State of Israel, or of the National Union of Israeli Students, and that AUS supports “the liberation forces of Palestine”.”

The motion was easily defeated. As I wrote in my Report: “The resolutions, because of their extreme nature, were overwhelmingly rejected on campus by margins of up to 10-1. They offered no alternatives and were so simply and naively anti-Israel that a majority of Australian students rejected them completely.”

It is important to understand what AUS was trying to do in 1974. The AUS council was convened annually in January during the summer break, when most students were disengaged from campus. It was, as such, dominated by activist student leaders, usually acting without consulting their constituents. The convention at the time was that resolutions passed at the AUS Council stood as policy unless reversed by a majority of students attending duly convened campus general meetings on a majority of campuses.

In other words, the onus of achieving the double majority required to reverse the activists’ policies fell to its opponents. Any campus (and there were 73 in the post Whitlam expansion) which failed to vote was taken to have automatically endorsed the activists’ position. So, it fell – not to put too fine a point on it – it fell to the Jewish students and their allies. (Many a future leader cut their teeth on these debates. And lifelong friendships were forged, such as mine with Peter Costello.)

As I observed in my Report, the initial AUS resolution came as something of a shock. AUS had in 1972 sponsored the admission of the Israeli student union into the Asian Students Association. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been. Australia had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1972 and the left were looking for an issue. Then came the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the global oil shock. In 1974, the PLO was granted observer status at the UN. Later in 1975, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, the infamous and now revoked determination that “Zionism is racism”.

It soon became clear that the 1974 resolution wasn’t an aberration. At its Annual Council in 1975, the following resolution was passed:

AUS supports the establishment of a Democratic Secular State of Palestine (encompassing the area of Mandate Territory) wherein all people currently residing in Israel and all Palestinian Arabs forcibly exiled from their homeland will have the right to Palestinian citizenship. This motion embodies the right of Palestinian citizens of all religions, race, colour creed and sex, to the protection of the new State and rejects racist legislation, such as the present Zionist Law of Return.

AUJS estimated at the time that no more than 19 of the available 292 votes were cast in favour of the “democratic secular state” concept, a precursor to the “from the river to the sea” mantra, and both of which call for Israel’s destruction. A similar resolution recognising the PLO garnered even fewer votes. I should acknowledge that, for the most part, unlike today, the debates were conducted in a respectful manner.

There were some violent incidents, and the debates and interactions between the opposing speakers were not without some anti-semitic remarks and undertones, but the Jewish student leadership and other supporters were able to advocate in support of Israel unimpeded.

I don’t want to look back at this era through rose-coloured glasses, but the idea that Jewish students as they are today would be intimidated into not expressing their views, howled down, refused entry or threatened with violence on the basis of their Zionist beliefs was simply unthinkable at the time.

The Jewish student leadership were – and indeed very much still are – forthright and courageous advocates. The main point here is that back in 1975 the activists’ anti-Israel sentiment was overwhelmingly rejected. But the prevailing sentiment on campus was that the effective dismantling of a State which Australia was instrumental in creating, and the only democracy in the Middle East, was simply unacceptable.

How different is it today.

My 1975 Report recorded chilling precursors to today’s campus violence and to the odious and counterproductive Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which has since become ubiquitous.

In 1975 AUS sponsored two spokesmen from the General Union of Palestinian Students to undertake campus tours. AUJS opposed the visit and mounted a peaceful protest. Someone connected to the AUS leadership alerted the May Day marchers nearby so, as I wrote in my Report, “150-200 Maoists and local members of the Arab community rounded the corner at Drummond Street, Carlton… their arsenal including clubs, flagpoles and every other crude weapon imaginable”.  A TV film crew was present. Among their victims was a 70-year old on his way back from the (Carlton Jewish) cemetery.

In a precursor to the BDS campaign, AUS – which owned a travel agency at the time – called for the cessation of all flights to Israel. The AUS leadership were indignant when the Jewish students labelled “AUS – the only travel agency that supports hijacking”, referring of course to a spate of hijackings by pro-Palestine terrorists carried out at the time. Never a truer word was spoken in jest.

Much of what I wrote as a 19-year old about campus life could have equally well been written today. But much has significantly changed.

What was once fringe would today be considered mainstream. And not only on the campus. What was once questionable is now apparently the received wisdom. We will, of course shortly, be hearing from a current student and a prominent academic.

Let me just make a few observations as the “then” speaker, offering my perspective on how anti-semitism manifested in the past on Australian campuses. And in so doing I would like to thank Gerard and Anne – long-time supporters of Israel and the Jewish community – for setting aside a Sydney Institute session to look at this issue in depth.

It would be tempting to say that October 7 – the anniversary in a week’s time of Israel’s darkest hour – changed everything. I’m not sure that it did. It simply threw into sharp relief a painful existential truth. That is that the existence of the Jewish State is still, in the minds of Israel’s enemies, an open question. It is an extraordinary phenomenon, but to those who have watched the issue closely for a lifetime, not entirely surprising.

What is surprising is the velocity, the ferocity and the ubiquity of anti-semitic sentiment and action here in Australia.

I have said in public that in my view it threatens the viability of Jewish life in this country. And I know I am not alone in that feeling. AUS lit a fuse, and 50 years of campus education poured fuel on the fire. And, of course, social media has fanned the flames.

Of course, criticism of Israel is not anti-semitism as the IHRA definition makes clear. But calling for the destruction of Israel is anti-semitism. Calling Israel’s defensive war an act of “genocide” (an inversion of perpetrator and victim and a perversion of history) is anti-semitism. And substituting the word “Zionist” in place of the word “Jew” and then repeating every ant-semitic canard – the modus operandi of Australia’s first openly anti-Israel and arguably anti-Jewish party, the Greens – is anti-semitism.

And words have consequences. I read the story of an 84-year old Jewish woman in Melbourne walking peacefully to a pro-Israel rally in the city who was attacked by a young activist, spat on and called a “Zionist pig”. I don’t know the young activist, but I’ll back it in that she has a mother and a grandmother and that she doesn’t normally push, shove and abuse 84-year old women. What has disinhibited her? The relentless accusation that Israel is committing a genocide, the one sided reporting of the defensive war, the vilification, the doxxing, the unadulterated hatred of the Jewish people manifested at the demonstrations and encampments.  And it is this disinhibition of ordinary people that led to Nazi Germany

But that was then; we should turn to now.