Following Sunday’s deadly attack on Jewish celebrants at Bondi Beach during Chanukkah, Tony Leon examines how inflammatory rhetoric and binary slogans around Israel and Jewish identity are fuelling real-world violence, calling for more nuanced discourse before words turn deadly.
“Antisemitism is a light sleeper”, a friend of mine in Sydney, Australia, wrote after Sunday’s horrifying and murderous attack near Bondi Beach on the first night of Chanukkah.
Ironically, this holiday is called the “Festival of Light” a public declaration of determination that Jewish life will continue despite millennia-old attempts to extinguish it.
Well, antisemitism certainly awoke with vengeful and indiscriminate fury on Sunday in Australia.
There, the butcher’s bill exceeded the murderous attack on a synagogue in Manchester two months back, during the commemoration of the holiest Jewish day, Yom Kippur.
The Bondi massacre was aimed at Jewish celebrants – ideology and distinction did not matter. And indeed anyone, Jewish or otherwise, in the area was hit.
The killers did not distinguish between those in the crowd who were Jewish Zionists, or anti-Zionist Jews (albeit a minority), or supporters of Israel’s Gaza excesses or opponents of it. Peaceniks or expansionists – it made no difference. An explicitly Jewish celebration was targeted, and the more Jews murdered or maimed on Sunday, the better.
An iconic beach globally synonymous with its famed lifesavers, happy surfers and hardy swimmers is now the latest and darkest killing field in a never-ending war.
Rush to judge causes
Naturally, and politically convenient as it can be, there is a rush to judgement on the causes of Sunday’s mass murder and an apportionment of blame for the event – beyond the sick pathologies infecting the father and son duo who did the killing and maiming.
Yet if a glimmer of light can emerge from this dark tragedy, then it is precisely in the nuance and distinctions that emerge in its wake.
The two killers and the everyday hero who, at risk to his own life, disarmed one of them, had a radically different view of faith and its meaning. The killers have been linked to Islamic State and the Syrian fruit seller who interrupted the murder spree might be from the same region of origin but hardly share the same world view. Far from it as events proved.
On the other side of the ledger, it is the precise absence of subtlety, the refusal to draw distinctions, the dumbing down of complexity, the triumph of the loudest and simplest narrative and the demand for simple binaries that has envenomed the environment at home and abroad.
“Globalising the intifada” is a ringing slogan, for example. But what does it mean, and among extremists or the recently radicalised, where does it lead, and what are the consequences of loose words adorning a banner? That these protests and slogans appear in Western countries, and in South Africa, which champion a freedom of expression outlawed in many of the countries where many Muslims live, is another irony.
Then there is the collapse of any distinction between the State of Israel and its government. I have never been a virtue-signaller – far from it. So when I write, as I have done, that many of the acts and much of the rhetoric of the extreme right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu offend me, that is one matter.
And many in the Jewish communities around the world and in Israel itself dissent from its views and actions, as the daily demonstrations across Israel confirm. And indeed, Israel will soon have a democratic choice on retaining or replacing the very government that has dishonoured its democratic traditions and reduced its standing in the world. That too is a rarity in its own neighbourhood.
Strengthening Netanyahu’s hand
Though, as other countries and communities under stress have proven, the open season against Jews in the world could have the unintended consequence of strengthening the very hand of Netanyahu, who offers the slogan of ‘tough on security with a strong right’. Yet another paradox.
But there is a very big distinction between the current government of Israel and the existence of the entire country. Yet throwing around slogans such as “genocide apartheid Israel” – as many of SA’s leading politicians and others in the broad left in the world do is not without consequence.
Because if Israel itself is a moral criminal and an international leper, then the entirety of its existence is open to question or even target for ‘erasure’.
The latter is a word of choice for the current Trump administration, though the target in that case is the perceived collapse of Western civilisation itself.
And while most Jews in the world, cognisant of their own history over centuries, especially in the bloody 20th century, support the idea of Israel as a safe haven, any gathering of Jews anywhere in the world can become a target for those who believe that the erasure of Israel is aided by the extinction of its advocates. That is one explanation for the rise in attacks on Jewish venues and events across the world.
Antisemitism is a mutating virus
Another explanation offered many years back by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel is that antisemitism is a virus that never dies – it simply mutates.
There is a body of opinion that regards the government here in its exemplary attention, criticism and even international court action against the State of Israel as broadly antisemitic.
References are often drawn to the muted position, diplomatic silences and inaction by the same government against extreme human rights violators, even certified genocidaires (such as the RSF forces in Sudan for whom President Cyril Ramaphosa unfurled a red carpet last year) across the world.
Why then, this school of thought asks, all the attention and moral capital and economic cost spent in singling out one country in the world, namely Israel?
I am by no means convinced, all appearances to the contrary on one side, that the government of South Africa is infected by antisemitism; and I don’t subscribe to the view that any criticism of the actions of Israel is ipso facto antisemitism.
I think more likely a cartoonish view of Israel as a colonial white Western outpost in the heart of Araby is the working model and lens at the head office of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation.
And if this leads to throwing some dust in the eyes of Washington and joining the cheering gallery in the balcony of the global South (though absent India and Kenya, for example) in a festival of anti-Israel rhetoric, then so much the better.
But as the festive season takes its happy grip on holidaying South Africa, we can take heart that none of the terrible events we have recently witnessed in Bondi and before that in Manchester have yet happened here.
But this is not a counsel for complacency. Politicians, universities and civil society should use the pause to reflect on the heated rhetoric and-stigma- labelling, the name calling and the casual inflammation of language and the binary slogans.
As we have seen elsewhere, words often have consequences. Sometimes deadly consequences.
