Jewish people are done with your sympathy. We need action!

Fifteen Jewish people murdered at Sydney’s Bondi beach celebrating Chanukah On Yom Kippur, two Jewish men were killed in the attack on Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester.

For the Jewish community there is grief, fear and anger but also a steely resolve to do as we have for more than two thousand years when facing persecution. To celebrate Jewish life and stand together in the face of adversity. The sad truth is we know what to do because, as we say at Passover, in every generation there have been those who tried to destroy us. But we are still here.

The question to our politicians, police and wider society is are you prepared to do what it takes to stop more attacks against Jews?

On Saturday I did a security shift outside my local synagogue, something I have done since I was 18 years old. This has always been my reality, only now we wear heavy knife proof vests. For two hours I scanned every car and pedestrian assessing if they could be the next attacker and thought hard about how the current threat has evolved.

Anti-Jewish hatred has existed for millennia as the Jews were the ultimate outsiders, a minority community that stuck stubbornly to its ancient traditions and refused to become Christians or Muslims. Centuries of Church led anti-Jewish rhetoric fuelled conspiracy theories that led to ghettoisation and horrific massacres through the middle ages. In the nineteenth century as ideas about nationalism and race became popular, Jews were again the enemy, a threat to racial purity whose allegiance to the nation was suspect. Extreme nationalists developed theories that the Jews were the obstacles to national success, possessed of immense power and wealth they were conspiring to rule the world. The antisemitic Russian book ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ became the classic of the genre and spawned countless other works. The Austrian and German writers and politicians who inspired Adolf Hitler built on centuries of antisemitic ideas. There was nothing new about the ideology of Nazi antisemitism apart from the ability to bring these theories together, spread them using modern communications like radio and film and ultimately make them a reality with devastating consequences.

There is a view, particularly on the left, that there exists classic antisemitism, as above, and people angry with Israel which is something completely different and should never be confused with antisemitism. Unfortunately things are more complicated than that. Arab nationalism developed late in the era of nineteenth century European nationalism and borrowed many of its antisemitic traits. The Muslim brotherhood and its branches like Hamas fill their writings with classic antisemitism. The idea that Jews cannot have a state on ‘Muslim land’ and that the forever war will only end when the Jews leave or are killed is a perfect fusion of nationalism, religious extremism and race based antisemitism.

These ideas find their expression in the extreme rhetoric that has come to dominate the conversation about Israel and the Palestinians in the UK and much of the world. In a bizarre form of hate washing there is a fable that this is pro-Palestinian, that this is how they call for peace and a two-state solution. I have been to marches and demos in London and I have never heard anyone mention peace or a two-state solution. I have heard chants of ‘Zionists go home’ ‘Globalise the Intifada’ and ‘There is only one solution, intifada revolution.’ In Whitechapel in October they chanted ‘Zionist scum off our streets.’

Australian Jews have drawn a direct link between extreme rhetoric on the streets, attacks on synagogues and ultimately the Bondi beach shooting. What we hear on the streets is a heavily sanitised version of what is being shared on social media but it is drawn from the same set of ideas that fuses Jews and Israel together, accuses them of malign conspiracies, possessing immense power such as controlling the media, controlling the US and ultimately being responsible for everything that is wrong with the world.

I have spent years studying Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, talking to Israelis and Palestinians about how to end the conflict and even convened secret talks here in London. Those discussions are incredibly hard and often infused with emotion and a long legacy of suffering on both sides. But those conversations have never resembled the rhetoric that is shouted in their name on the streets or on social media. There are no conspiracies and no mention of intifada because for them intifada means violence, death and destruction that has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people.

We have a choice now. Will there be warm words and sadness, and then silence until the next attack or will there be a cry of enough with action finally taken to tackle the extremism on social media and our streets.

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James Sorene is a commentator and writer.

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