What the fuck is going on? (Part 2)

                         Rocha Kanter, my great grandmother 

When I first laid eyes on the photo of my great grandmother a couple of months ago, I instantly collapsed into uncontrollable sobbing. I wasn’t expecting the level of grief and despair I felt on seeing her photo. I don’t know when the photo was taken, but there was sadness in her eyes. I’d found it alongside her Person Card in the database of Jews of Latvia 1941-1945. This is an historical record of the fate of Jews in that region during the Nazi occupation. I knew nothing really of my great grandmother when I was growing up, other than she died during the holocaust at the hands of the Nazis, along with a number of her children, my grandmother’s brothers and sisters. I could see my grandmother Celia (Zila)’s resemblance in her mother’s face. She looks like she was a proud woman. There is strength to her, and dignity, but also a sorrow. Maybe that’s me projecting feelings on to her, but I can sense it. Rocha (Soresmann) Kanter was her name. She was born in Šiauliai in Lithuania, but like a lot of Lithuanian Jews had migrated to Riga sometime in the late 1800s, possibly with her family. She married my great grandfather Moshe in Riga and it seems like they were quite well to do based on the neighbourhood  and building they lived in, which still stands today. By the time of the war she was a widow, with my great grandfather having died some years earlier in 1925. Her daughter (my grandmother) Celia had already migrated to the USA in 1924. Rocha’s record in the Jews of Latvia 1941-1943 database lists her as being in Riga before the war and in Riga during the war. Her place of death is blank. Her date of death is blank. The field indicating her fate during the years 1941 to 1945 is also blank. What seems highly likely is that she was one of 28,000 Jews who were taken from the Riga ghetto to the nearby Rumbula Forest and murdered in one of two mass shootings that took place on 30 November and 8 December 1941. These Jews had no record of death. They were force marched into a forest, murdered anonymously and buried in a mass grave.

Just as an aside, this is what an actual genocide looks like. 38,000 Jews were executed in two days at Rumbula; 28,000 Jews from Riga and the rest from Germany, Austria and elsewhere who were brought in by train to be slaughtered. In June 1941, there were 45,000 Jews living in Riga. By early 1944 there were close to zero.

It’s quite a thing to know that your relatives were rounded up and killed as part of a systematic eradication program. And to know also that you would have met this same fate if you had been around at that time. It’s difficult for it not to have a significant impact on how you view the world. I’ve never really been able to get my head around it and have been searching my whole life for an understanding of how something like this could happen. As I took in the aftermath of the killing of Jews on Bondi Beach, I couldn’t help but feel a sad continuum. Jews killed for being Jews. Nothing to do with their politics or their beliefs. Nothing to do with their character. Nothing to do with whether they were Zionists or not. Nothing to do with any aspect of them at all, other than the fact that they were Jews. And it should be noted a couple of non-Jews also died in the Bondi attack. Poor souls who had the misfortune of standing in close proximity to a whole lot of Jews, the target of Islamic extremists who had decided that it was their purpose in life to globalise the intifada, bringing it to an Australian icon. I was in a state of shock when I first heard the news. Maybe I still am. In the couple of weeks afterwards I oscillated between extreme sadness and white hot fury, flicking from one to the other in a fraction of a second. A heartfelt message of support sent to me from a friend, or a generous post online expressing support for the Jewish community as a whole still chokes me up and occasionally brings me to tears. On the other hand, reading or hearing discussions with people explaining away that the spread of antisemitism in Australia is in no way related to the relentless protests of the pro-Palestinian movement, or the inaction of government, makes me angry. It seems so clear to any Jewish person. But unlike for any other minority, people want to tell Jews what anti-Jewish hatred is and what it isn’t. The double standard of everything related to both the Jews and Israel since 7^th October 2023 has been astounding. This is not to say that I think that there is a direct causal relationship between the protests and the tragedy at Bondi, but there is certainly a strong correlation between the protests and the normalisation of anti-Jewish sentiment in Australia. When Jews hear the phrase “globalise the intifada”, it sounds to them unambiguously that people are calling for exactly what happened in Bondi. That might not be what sections of the crowd believe that they are chanting for, but that is exactly how Jews are hearing it and have heard it for the last two years. Jews know what the second intifada in Israel looked like. It involved the blowing up of Jewish school kids on buses or of people having a meal in a pizza parlour, or a suicide bomber exploding a nail bomb into a crowded marketplace. How we interpreted that chant didn’t change in any way after Bondi. This wasn’t a new realisation. It just seemed a manifestation of exactly what those people were screaming for all along and what the Jewish community had been raising with government and the authorities as an eventual likelihood for quite some time. When we are told that “Zionism = Nazism”, we are hearing that Jews wanting to have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland is somehow equivalent to the systematic extermination of six million Jews, including the rounding up of my grandmother’s community and their execution in a forest. Apparently, we are as bad as those Nazis. There are of course claims to redefine what Zionism means, which is funny coming from anti-Zionists, telling Zionists what it is that they believe. The “From the river to the sea” chant has always sounded like a call for eradication of the only Jewish homeland, a land that the Jews have had a connection with for thousands of years. Singling out the one Jewish state as illegal or immoral or evil, because it is based on colonialism is both a rewriting of archaeologically proven history and highly hypocritical when it’s coming from Australians who have no problem living on stolen Aboriginal land while making these claims. Invariably if Jews raise concerns of this overt, aggressive and often violent anti-Jewish sentiment, which they have continuously since October 7^th, they are told that they are trying to shut down legitimate protest about the actions of the Israelis in Gaza or the “occupied territories”. Playing the antisemitic card. What crap. Anybody can criticise a government or a country for their actions. Many Jews, including me, are critical of the Israeli government, but this movement has so clearly spilled over into generic anti-Jewish territory with many of the same old antisemitic tropes masquerading under the more benign and acceptable heading of anti-Zionism. It does seem highly suspicious to Jews that the only world conflict that anybody seems to give a shit at all about is the one involving the Jews, but… whatever. I have a friend, who I know is not anti-Jewish, who told me that his strong anti-Israel views were fuelled by seeing images of “Israelis murdering women and children”. I asked him if he considered all wars were the murder of people, of women and children. I was met with silence. Maybe he recognised the double standard at that moment, but he didn't acknowledge it. In a sense I agree with him. I think that all war is just legalised murder at a national scale. It’s abhorrent to me, the most disgusting manifestation of human fear and hate. But to single out just the war involving the Jewish state as murder, when wars of similar or greater brutality are going on all over the world right now and have been for the entire existence of humankind seems inherently antisemitic in nature. As I said, I don’t believe that this friend is antisemitic at all. But the one-sided narrative that is being pumped out into our society, into our institutions, blasted out by social media, paints this antisemitic narrative to a point where it becomes the accepted truth even by well-meaning individuals. For me as a Jewish person, when people who I know love me and have high regard for Jewish people in general have this kind of selective view, what hope really is there?

When raising with friends over the last couple of years that there seemed to me to clearly be a significant rise in antisemitism in our society, I was often told that I was just imagining it, that it wasn’t real. I was being over-sensitive or over-reacting. That I was seeking out supporting evidence to confirm my existing beliefs in a form of confirmation bias. Yet somehow over the last couple of years in Australia there has been a huge increase in physical assaults on Jewish people, vandalism and graffiti on Jewish schools or synagogues, destruction of Jewish property, firebombings of Jewish buildings and cars, boycotting of Jewish businesses, entertainers, writers and the like even to the point in some cases of making public their email addresses, phone numbers and addresses, so that people could take their virtue signalling Jew hate disguised as giving a shit about the Palestinians directly to their doors. Jewish businesses have had stickers with the star of David and a line through it plastered on their windows, that instantly take any Jewish person’s mind back to images they have seen of Germany in the early 1930s. And then of course there has been a torrent of open Jew hatred and ancient libels against Jews in the cesspit of social media comments sections. The evidence is clear and has been for some time. Why has it taken a massacre on Bondi Beach for anybody to take these claims seriously?

I’ve got to a stage where I now find laughable the view coming from the far-left that Israel embodies everything that is evil in the world. Colonisers. Apartheid. Nazis. Racists. Genocide. Ethnostate. And that anybody who is a Zionist is essentially the worst human in the world because they support all the evils that Israel represents just by its mere existence. I am unashamedly a Zionist. I believe that the Jews have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. I am bemused by the fact that people still talk about Israel’s right to exist and what form that should take, as if they have any say in the matter. Israel does exist as a sovereign nation. The Zionists already won. And if you are calling for the dismantling of the only Jewish state, while you may call yourself an anti-Zionist, I will be calling you a Jew hating arsehole. I didn’t feel so strongly for Israel before October 2023. I don’t like their policy on expanded settlements in the West Bank over the last decade or more. I particularly don’t like their right-wing government or their current leader. But the rise in anti-Jewish sentiment has somehow pushed me closer to Israel as a nation. I’d always considered myself firmly a part of the political left, being a strong supporter of minorities and their rights in our societies, regardless of their colour, race or beliefs. My beliefs in that regard and continued support for those people are unwavering, but I no longer feel part of any left movement or political collective as I have seen that cohort turn on the Jews in the name of anti-Zionism. They are like the inquisitors in Spain during the great inquisitions. Jews can be a part of their community if they renounce the great evil of Zionism, otherwise they are to be cast off as the modern-day leftist version of the antichrist where anything that happens to them is deserved. Fucking hypocrites.

I listen to the sanctimonious rhetoric from many European and other world leaders calling for boycotts and telling Israel how they should be acting towards their neighbours. Neighbours who voted in their Jihadist leaders with a publicly stated policy of removing every last Jew from Israel by whatever means necessary and who perpetrated the mass killing of Jews on October 7th. Many of those same countries helped the Nazis round up the Jews in their own countries to send them off to the gas chambers or to be executed in a forest. I only found out relatively recently that when the second world war ended and the concentration camps were liberated, that no country would take the 250,000 emaciated and traumatised Jews who had survived the camps. Not England. Not France. No country in Europe. Not the USA. Not Australia. Not Canada. Nobody. Everybody knew what had happened by then and what these poor souls had been through. Everybody had seen the photos of skeletal Jews in stripy pyjamas and mass piles of Jewish corpses. Yet no country would take them in. They had to remain living in those same camps as displaced persons until 1948, three years after the war had finished. And it was only on the founding of Israel that they finally had somewhere to go. And now some people want the Jews to give up the only country in the world that unequivocally guarantees their safety. Fuck off! Am Yisrael chai.

I don’t know where this all leads. I have great friends who aren’t Jewish. The vast majority of my friends in fact. And I feel that the wider Australian community in general are supportive of a multicultural society where Jews can go about their lives as any other Australian can. Seeing the petitions raised in the last few days by Australian sporting legends, community and church leaders and the like for a royal commission into the rise of Jew hatred and extremist ideology in Australia has been heartwarming.  I don’t know whether this is necessarily going to make a difference, but the fact that these people care enough to put their voices to it means something significant in itself. I love the country I live in. I’m a proud Australian. It’s my predominant identity on a day-to-day basis. I’m not a religious person, leaning more towards atheism than anything else. But I have felt myself much more isolated at times in these last two years. It’s made me identify more strongly with being Jewish than at any stage of my life since my bar mitzvah nearly fifty years ago. I lit Chanukah candles for the first time in half a century. I am much more engaged and interested in Jewish culture and history than I had been. There’s something about any attempt to intimidate or eradicate Jews that makes me feel defiant in a “fuck you” kind of way to those haters. It makes me more Jewish. Maybe that’s a good thing.

I’m not sure what the real point of this diatribe is. Probably just to get out of my head the multitude of thoughts that have been swirling around in there for some time. Better out than in. If you’ve read this far. Thank you. That probably makes one of you.

I guess that my request for anybody who cares about the current situation being experienced by many Jews in this country, or indeed around the world, is that regardless of your beliefs around the Israel/Palestine/Gaza situation, please can you form those views based on actual facts. There has been a flood of misinformation, false photos, probably AI videos and the like around things that the Israelis have allegedly done in Gaza. That’s not to say that they haven’t done some heinous shit for which they should be judged, but please can you hold your judgements on a situation until you’ve actually checked the veracity of what you are reading or looking at? I know that’s easier said than done. Who do you trust? It’s difficult to know. International institutions who are supposedly neutral arbiters of what is right, such as the UN and Amnesty International have regularly put out misinformation and biased views of their own. News media, right and left, have their own agendas to put forward, be it the right-wing “immigration is bad” crowd, or the left-wing “Zionists are evil” mob. I’ve put a list of sources that may be of interest to anybody wanting to know more at the end of this lengthy monologue. If anybody has any suggestions for me, I’m happy to hear. I try not to live in an echo chamber and to seek alternate viewpoints. Please just base your views on facts.

Secondly, can you please listen to the Jews in your life if they tell you that they are having a tough time with anti-Jewish rhetoric and sentiment. They are probably not imagining it. They will know better than you what it looks like. They are probably not over-reacting. And maybe, if something horrific like the Bondi massacre or a synagogue blowing up happens again, just reach out and let them know that you care. I know that I truly appreciate the messages of support that have been sent to me.

Some Links To Check Out:

On the history and differences between antisemitism and anti-Zionism

On genocide in Gaza

Facebook page of Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who is a Palestinian man seeking a better way for peace

The best podcast for a balanced Israeli view of history and the present

Organisations for peaceful Jewish/Arab coexistence:

https://www.standing-together.org/en/about-en  

https://www.nif.org.au/advancing_jewish_arab_partnership 

To the memory of my great grandmother Rocha, my great aunts Leya and Scheine, and my great uncles Lasar and David, who all perished in Riga or the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Shoah. Hopefully things will continue to get better for the Jews of the future.

My great grandmother Rocha with her family. Clearly no smiling for the camera in those days.