The AFR View
Drawing a line under a toxic surge of prejudice
Turning societies overseas into echo chambers of prejudice and conflict in the Middle East is not helping the cause of a settlement
The Jewish family of Henry Kissinger, America’s towering statesman of the Cold War who died aged 100 this week, fled to the US from their home town in Germany in 1938 only just in time to avoid arrest, deportation and worse. Kissinger returned to Germany as an American soldier in 1945, to encounter a corpse-strewn concentration camp near Hanover. The kind of place, he knew, where his own life would otherwise likely have ended.
Genocide has become a routinely abused word. Nine
His experiences as a soldier and in post-war Germany created a belief in diplomacy over armed force, and a lifelong realism that sought sustainable peace through a dour balance of power between states, a moral end sometimes secured by amoral, imperfect means. He saw the world as it is, where moral choices are usually the lesser of two evils. As National Security Adviser and Secretary of State his approach helped end the Vietnam War, brought détente and arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, and reopened China’s diplomatic and economic doors to the West.
Islamophobes have used the conflict to turn up the volume of abuse
Fifty years after Kissinger’s famous shuttle diplomacy opened the way to ending state-on-state conflicts between Israel and its neighbours, American diplomats have once again been criss-crossing the Middle East vainly trying to extend a ceasefire in the ferocious war between Israel and dispossessed Palestinians. That conflict between two peoples over the same piece of land remains alive and toxic. Perhaps America might eventually broker another deal to replace terror and intransigence with a two-state solution, still the only real ending there is.
Australians must hope that hard-nosed diplomacy of the Kissinger sort will eventually prevail in Gaza and the West Bank. But the ugliness of the conflict is flowing into social discord far beyond the Middle East, including Australia. Nobody disputes the right to protest at the actions of the Israeli government, and few don’t feel horrified by the casualties inflicted on Palestinian civilians as Israel pursues the terrorists of Hamas. But the ancient prejudice of antisemitism, and the newer one of Islamophobia, is returning under the cover of political protest too.
Bailing up visiting Israeli family members of Hamas victims in a Melbourne hotel is not protest, it’s harassment. So are intimidatory flag-waving rides through suburbs with Jewish populations, or harassing Jewish school students, or the surging incidents of antisemitic racism. And Islamophobes have used the conflict to turn up the volume of abuse as well.
Some of this is triggered by garbled versions of an overseas conflict, or history turned into ludicrous conspiracy theories, amplified by the Babel of social media. School teachers in western Sydney who wear keffiyeh scarves are not showing solidarity, they are just educators failing impressionable students. The abuse of the word genocide, which is becoming a cover-all term for grievance rather than a description of the organised destruction of a race, typifies the nonsense. Old tropes about Jewish wealth have re-emerged on the left, beyond irony given the history of Jewish people in socialist politics and thought. The grown-up left has to get a grip on this. And actors hijacking the stage at the Sydney Theatre Company for a symbolic demonstration at the end of a play helps nobody and alienates many.
This week, 600 signatories to an open letter moved to draw a line under the outbreak of prejudice, with business, political and professional leaders calling for an end to racism against Jewish, Muslims, Asian and Indigenous Australians. They wanted to make a point that as employers, they have a direct duty to keep workplaces free of abuse and fear. One of the signatories, SEEK CEO and the son of Holocaust survivors Ian Narev, wrote on these pages that “never again” for Jews means “never again for anyone”, and that antisemitism is just part of a broader spectrum of hate for minorities. He rightly suggested that companies should agonise before they join in political campaigns. But prejudice is not politics, it’s just prejudice, and employers have to call it out, he says.
The outside world is not really helping the Middle East if it just becomes an echo chamber for the warring parties. And Australians need to maintain their own sense of perspective, and not let the region become another front in their own domestic culture wars.
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