Hamas is mounting a legal challenge against the group’s terrorist designation in Australia, arguing that the listing breaches international law and provides legal cover for Israeli attacks on Palestinians — its second such attempt after a similar case in the United Kingdom.

Earlier this month, Hamas filed a legal petition seeking to be removed from Australia’s list of proscribed terrorist organizations, Australian media first reported on Friday.

Pro-Palestinian activist and radio host Uncle Robbie Thorpe filed the application in Australia’s Federal Court on behalf of the Palestinian Islamist group, claiming that its terrorist designation restricts freedom of political communication in the country.

In the lawsuit, Hamas contends that the government denied procedural fairness when reviewing its application to be removed from the terrorist list.

According to the application, Hamas was denied the chance to present evidence showing how the proscription “undermines Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination, as well as the right to organized armed self-defense and resistance against the illegal siege of Gaza, illegal occupation, apartheid, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.”

The filing also claims that the group’s terrorist designation undermined ceasefire negotiations and the implementation of any peace deal, while inciting “Israel to commit genocide against the Palestinian people.”

“The ongoing proscription purports to declare as unlawful the armed self-defense of the Palestinian people against genocide carried out by the State of Israel, contrary to international law, and the armed struggle … for liberation from the unlawful occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” the lawsuit says. 

After its initial request was rejected, Hamas filed a follow-up application with the Federal Court and submitted a formal request to the Australian government seeking removal from the terror register, local media reported. 

Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, condemned Hamas’s legal action, saying it exposes a troubling level of support among some Australians for the terrorist group and its atrocities. 

“Since Oct. 7 we have seen public expressions of support for Hamas as an organization and specific support for its invasion of Israel and the horrors that accompanied it,” Ryvchin told the Sydney Morning Herald, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel in 2023.

“Now we can see that even as a ceasefire and peace plan was being implemented, and the full terror of their crimes both against Israelis and the people of Gaza was becoming apparent, there were Australians doing Hamas’s bidding,” he continued.

“The fact that any Australians would put their names to a document aimed at lifting Hamas’s terror status and asserting its so-called rights should shock and alarm all of us,” he said. 

In 2022, Australia designated all of Hamas as a terrorist organization, joining the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and other nations, after previously listing only its armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. 

Once an organization is proscribed, it means Australians are legally prohibited from providing financial support, joining the group, or recruiting others on its behalf.

Earlier this year, Hamas sought to challenge the organization’s terrorist designation in the UK, prompting fierce criticism from British Members of Parliament and Jewish organizations.

Hamas filed a legal petition arguing for its removal from the country’s list of proscribed terrorist groups, describing itself as “a Palestinian Islamic liberation and resistance movement whose goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project.”

“The British government’s decision to proscribe Hamas is an unjust one that is symptomatic of its unwavering support for Zionism, apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing in Palestine for over a century,” the filing read. “Hamas does not and never has posed a threat to Britain, despite the latter’s ongoing complicity in the genocide of our people.”

Hamas, whose founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, led thousands of Palestinian terrorists into southern Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. During the invasion, they murdered 1,200 people, kidnapped 251 hostages, and perpetrated widespread sexual violence.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin need no introduction. Since their son, Hersh, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, taken hostage in Gaza and, later, murdered by his captors, the American-Israeli couple have become, for many, the personification of an entire nation’s pain.

They didn’t want this. They surely didn’t ask for it. “We’re the manifestation of everybody’s worst nightmare,” Rachel said. And yet, it is precisely that fact, coupled with the almost supernatural grace they have brought to their international advocacy for Israel’s hostages, that helped make Hersh one of the most recognizable faces among the captives and why his death last year hit so hard.

It’s also why Jews have looked to them as exemplars of how to respond to one of the worst periods in Jewish history. Despite all they’ve gone through, and all they continue to endure, Hersh’s parents still see this as a moment of opportunity for cross-cultural connection.

“You’ve got your narrative, we’ve got our narrative,” Jon said. “You’ve suffered, we’ve suffered. You’ve got your Bible that says something. We’ve got our Bible that says something. You’ve got your claims. We’ve got our claims. And you know what? We’re never going to outshout each other. Let’s look forward and start right now and dedicate ourselves to something better for all of us. I still feel that way.”

The couple is speaking next week at the Z3 Conference in Palo Alto, California, near where they lived in Berkeley before moving to Israel in 2008. This interview, conducted by J. Jewish News of Northern California, has been edited for length and clarity.

A lot of people here in the United States, and also in Israel, felt as if they knew Hersh after Oct. 7. Some did, but most of us didn’t. I wonder if you could tell us about him as a person, and what it was like to be his parents.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin: Hersh, obviously, was a curious citizen of the world. “Obviously,” just because that’s really what I’ve come to realize is the most apt way of describing him. He was always hungry for knowledge, but very much outside of the confines of normative learning. So school was not really interesting to him. He did enough to get by, but was always an underachiever in school. And yet he was this voracious reader about whatever subject was floating his boat. As a young kid, he was obsessed with geography, obsessed with American presidents, obsessed with Native American history, obsessed with the Civil War.

And as he became a young man — I still think of him as a boy. He was a very young 23. He had just turned 23 on Oct. 3, three days before we said goodbye to him and he went down to the Nova festival. He was obsessed with his favorite soccer club, his Jerusalem Hapoel soccer club. He loved trance music and music festivals, and used them as an opportunity to get to know and meet different people from all over the world. He was very committed to traveling by himself when he went to those festivals, because he said when you travel in a clump, then you stay in a clump. And he wanted to meet people from everywhere.

He was also a real professional listener, which I’ve grown to understand is such a rare gift that is hard to learn. I’m trying to learn it in his memory and as part of his legacy. To train myself to really be with whoever’s speaking and not be thinking, what am I going to say next? What do I want to share? What do I want to say? What do I want to ask? And he was not afraid of having those pauses in between when someone was speaking. He would digest it, and then he would react.

We’ve had so many people come to us in these past two years to tell us about little moments that they had with him that were special, because they really felt heard. And in this time of such challenge in civil discourse everywhere around the world, when the new way of speaking is screaming, it is, I realize now, a unique blessing.

Jon, I saw you recently wearing a T-shirt that had an image of Hersh, and under it the Hebrew phrase “yehi zichrecha mahapeicha” — may your memory be a revolution. What kind of revolution did you have in mind?

Jon: It’s not the revolution of taking to the streets with fires burning. It’s a revolution for good. Hersh really, really — in some ways, naively — wasn’t jaded, and really it’s a revolution for bringing more good to the world. I was walking down the street this summer with my daughter, and a man who we didn’t know stopped me and said, “Hey, Hersh’s dad” — that’s how he referred to me — “can I show you something?” And he shows me that the screensaver on his phone is a picture of Hersh. And he said to me, “Every morning the first thing I do is turn on my phone and look at this picture and say to myself: What can I do today to be better? What can I do today to make the world better?” And right then I said, that’s the greatest legacy a person can have.

Rachel: Hersh still believed in goodness and possibility. But he also was a realist. When he was in high school in 2014, a young Israeli Ethiopian man named Avera Mengistu wandered into Gaza and Hamas took him hostage. Hersh was 15 years old and he came home and he was beside himself. He couldn’t believe that people were not on the streets advocating for Avera Mengistu. There were four or five people who would stand up on this square at the top of Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem a couple times a week, and they reminded me of the people on the UC Berkeley campus lawn who say “No nukes” — like, six people with gray hair and long braids. And then there was a short, dark boy with big, black-framed glasses standing with them. And it was 15-year-old Hersh. [Mengistu was released by Hamas in February.]

The resonance of him being out there as a kid, protesting in the street to bring someone home from Gaza, is quite extraordinary.

Rachel: We said before he was a hostage, he was a hostage advocate.

You’ve become the personification of an entire nation’s trauma. Obviously, you never wanted to be symbols like this, but you are now. Can you talk about what it’s like to have people look to you in this way?

Jon: We talk about this a fair amount, and sometimes wonder, can we just go and escape in privacy somewhere? And the answer is, maybe — but not in Israel. Part of us just wants to do that. But another part of us is saying, this has been thrust upon us, this horrific, terrible personal tragedy that’s part of a national tragedy that’s part of a global tragedy. And somehow, largely due to Rachel’s eloquence, there are people who are strangely looking to us. And we’re saying we might need to embrace this. Because part of the story is also the lack of clarity, leadership, morality, voices of sanity in the world today. And if somehow, in some small way, we can be a little bit those voices, it’s so important that we need to do it.

Rachel: We all experience loss. It makes us human. It’s a commonality that we all have. What’s different about our experience is that it was so completely public, and that is really scorching. And it is definitely hard, you know? When we go out, we are kind of the trigger for people — we’re the manifestation of everybody’s worst nightmare. That is a sad thing to be. A lot of people see us and they can’t help but cry. And I know that they are coming at it from a place of empathy and love. They’re feeling our pain. But it’s difficult to have that when you’re walking down the street just trying to go wherever your destination is, and to have people crying along the way, whenever they see you.

Jon: To the extent that we, in some way, are offering strength to anybody out there, it’s symbiotic. I’m not asking that people start coming up even more on the streets to say things and hug us, bring things to our apartment. But that stuff that we’ve been experiencing for 751 days has been remarkably strengthening. We buried Hersh 419 days ago, and we continue to be strengthened by the people who come anonymously and leave baked goods by our door every Friday. We take so much strength from so many people around the world who think they’re taking strength from us.

Rachel: Everybody is holding everybody, and I feel like that is where we as the Jewish people are, and have to be, now. And I don’t care if your hair looks that way, and you cover your knees down to here, and you pray with this book, and you don’t pray at all. It doesn’t matter.

It seems that many believe what you’ve endured must afford you special insight into what’s going on in the Middle East. That you’re singularly able to see through the confusion, right into the heart of what’s happening. I’m wondering if the terrible price you’ve paid has given you any particular understanding that’s different from what you understood before Oct. 7.

Jon: We have definitely been, against our wishes, thrust into the underworld of geopolitics and how it works. We watch the news like everybody else, and we read newspapers like everybody else, and we now understand that there’s the story that we all look at and hear and are told, and [then there are] the things we see out there every day of how the world [really] works. And I wish we could unsee it but, unfortunately, we’ve now learned that the world works on concepts like interests and equities. Every leader has them. And sometimes those interests and equities align with the will of the masses. And sometimes there are other things at play. I don’t know what to do with this information, other than it’s a hard burden to carry to know this reality.

With all that being said, I go back to something that I thought on Oct. 6, 2023, and I still think it today. There’s a better way. There’s a better path. And despite the pain, despite the suffering, despite all the agony that so many have felt, we can’t lose sight of that better path. I always say, let’s pick a day and say, “We’re moving on. We’re only looking forward. You’ve got your narrative. We’ve got our narrative. You’ve suffered, we’ve suffered. You got your Bible that says something. We’ve got our Bible that says something. You get your claims. We’ve got our claims. And you know what? We’re never going to outshout each other. Let’s look forward and start right now and dedicate ourselves to something better for all of us.”

You made aliyah in 2008. Can you tell me what it means for you to live in Israel? And I’m also curious if that meaning has changed over the course of the years you’ve lived there and specifically after Oct. 7.

Rachel: What really brought us here was very simple. Jon had said for years, we have an opportunity to be part of this giant Jewish experiment of living as a Jewish people in a Jewish homeland. We happen to be observant Jews who pray every day and we thought, how is it that every day we’re asking God to please allow us to return to Jerusalem? And Jon said, “We can go.” When you’re actually able to get on a plane and 12 hours later to be in this place, it started to feel inauthentic to be praying for that when we had the ability to do it.

So we came and we really did feel, and do feel, that we are privileged to live here. I certainly have had challenges all these years, because my Hebrew is not great, and I’ve felt like a fish out of water, and I’ve felt like a stranger in a strange land. And yet it’s my land. I feel privileged that I have lived here. I feel privileged that I raised children here. I feel privileged that my three children were and are bilingual, and that they had an opportunity and have the opportunity to still be part of this experiment.

We’ve had an enormous challenge thrust upon us. When I say us, I mean all of the nation of Israel and the people of Israel worldwide. But at the same time, with this great calamity comes extreme opportunity — extreme, extreme opportunity. And I pray that we will have the resilience, the recovery, the healing and the comfort that is needed to take this chance and make something really luminous.

Jon: You asked what we’ve learned or how things have changed. Something that’s become really clear to us, maybe to everybody in the world, is there is an intertwined sense between Israel and the Jewish people globally. We’re all connected, like it or not, and I would like to see us use this as an opportunity. How do we take this little country in the Middle East, this concept of an independent Jewish state with sovereignty and agency, and say, no matter who the government is, who the prime minister is, who’s in charge, this is a concept that’s bigger than us or any entity. How do we make this a source of pride and inspiration for all of us?

This is going to be your first time in the Bay Area since Oct. 7. What are you anticipating on coming here?

Rachel: Unfortunately, we won’t be there very long. But I know that it will be an embrace from the wonderful Bay Area Jewish community. We have felt the love and support and appreciate it. It sounds crazy to say that we feel it, but it’s like a visceral, tangible, tactile feeling of support and love. And we felt your confusion and we felt your pain and we felt your concern, and it helped us, and it touched us, and we will always feel a huge debt of gratitude to the Bay Area, because that’s where Hersh was born, and that’s where our older daughter, who’s younger than Hersh, that’s where she was born. They were both born at Alta Bates Hospital in Oakland. Jon and I had just gotten married, and we spent almost three years before Hersh was born in the Bay Area. It’s very much woven into the core of who we are. And I think in many ways, it was a foundation that made us strong as a unit in order to face this unbelievable mission that we are in now.

Jon: I just specifically want to bring it to Hersh for a minute and say, it’s amazing that we lived in the Bay Area for seven years. It left such an indelible, lasting mark on our identities. Hersh left the Bay Area when he was 3½ years old. He was blessed to grow up at Gan Shalom in Berkeley and to be part of Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley and the Berkeley JCC. He lived 20 more years outside of Berkeley, yet Berkeley, California, and the Bay Area more broadly were such a prominent part of his personality, his thinking, who he was as a person. You could take the 3½-year-old out of Berkeley, but you can’t take the Bay Area out of the boy. It was the embodiment of so much about who Hersh was.

Rachel: I think it’s a lot of why he never liked to wear shoes.

I’m curious about the power of prayer. You talked about living in California and praying about returning to Jerusalem. Can you talk about your own approach to prayer now, and if that’s changed in any way — but also what it’s like to know that there are thousands of people you don’t even know praying for you every day?

Rachel: It absolutely works and is felt and is appreciated. And I am bottomlessly, endlessly grateful to the people who still have us in their prayers. Because I’m telling you, unfortunately, we need it. I think we might always need it.

I’m so thankful that I have prayer as a tool that I use daily. Every day, I open my eyes and immediately say the line that many Jewish people say upon waking, thanking God for giving me back my soul, and [saying] that God has tremendous faith in me, and that’s why I woke up this morning.

When I go to do my morning prayers, it’s such a relief. It’s the best therapy. You know, Rabbi Nachman, the famous mystical Kabbalist, said, “Life makes warriors out of all of us, and the most potent weapon is prayer.” And so I say to people, use it. Everyone has their pain, and we have this toolkit accessible to us. I pour my soul out in the morning, and then I can start my day. The question was, how has it changed since Oct. 7. I think I use it more. I lean on it more. I think that it’s more transformative. All of us have a different idea of God. What is God? Nobody knows what God is. It’s very confusing. But I have this idea of God, and I’ve been in a relationship with this idea of God. I’m so thankful, because when Oct. 7 happened, I wasn’t approaching a stranger. I’m thankful that I still have that and I’m grateful that people are shooting energy our way. I think it changes the sender and it changes the recipient.

This interview first appeared in J. Jewish News of Northern California. It is republished here with permission.

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The post How Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin find grace in their shattered world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) repudiated controversial pundit Tucker Carlson, antisemitic commentator Nick Fuentes, and Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts while calling out a rise in right-wing antisemitism during remarks at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit on Thursday night.

“Now is a time for choosing. Now is a time for courage,” Cruz said to the audience in Las Vegas, Nevada. “If you sit there and nod adoringly as someone tells you that Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II, if you sit there and nod as someone tells you there’s a very good argument that America should’ve intervened on behalf of Nazi Germany in World War II, if you sit there with someone that says that Adolph Hitler was very, very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, then you are a coward.”

Cruz was referring to a series of recent podcast interviews in which Carlson hosted controversial guests who made such arguments but did not challenge their views, seemingly endorsing them as legitimate.

Most recently, Carlson conducted a friendly interview with Fuentes, an avowed antisemite and Holocaust denier, that was released earlier this week. During the conversation, both men rebuked Israel and Zionism, with Carlson lambasting Christian Zionism as an affront to the values of Christianity.

“I dislike them more than anybody. Because it’s Christian heresy, and I’m offended by that as a Christian,” Carlson said of Christian Zionists.

Fuentes further declared “organized Jewry in America” as the obstacle preventing Americans from experiencing true unity. He also stated that ‘these Zionist Jews’ need to be removed from the broader conservative movement.

Following the controversial interview, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts issued a statement reaffirming the prominent conservative think tank’s relationship with Carlson. Roberts argued that his loyalties rest with Christianity and the US, and that Christians are not obligated to lend support to Israel. He then repudiated critics of Carlson as “globalists” — a term that many people believe serves as an antisemitic dog whistle — and as a “venomous coalition.” He stated that he does not agree with Fuentes’s antisemitism, but “canceling him is not the answer.”

Roberts’s comments whipped up a firestorm of criticism online, with many Jewish conservatives expressing outrage and feelings of betrayal. Republican Jewish Coalition CEO Matt Brooks wrote that Roberts’s statement “is a total abrogation of their mission and what it means to be a conservative today.”

Carlson has sparked backlash among conservatives over his consistent pattern of condemning Israel and platforming individuals who peddle antisemitic narratives. He has falsely suggested that Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state, oppresses and persecutes Christians.

During an interview with controversial podcaster Darryl Cooper, Carlson did not push back after Cooper argued that the US was on the “wrong side” of World War II and that former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not Adolph Hitler, “was the chief villain of World War II.” Cooper also suggested that the slaughter of six million Jews in concentration camps was “humane” because the Nazis did not have food to feed the “prisoners of war.”

Over the past decade, Fuentes has established himself as one the most high-profile openly antisemitic commentators in the US. Despite facing near-ubiquitous bans by most social platforms, Fuentes has amassed a significant audience for his “America First” web show on Rumble, in which he has spewed a seemingly relentless torrent of anti-Jewish commentary. Fuentes once called for the extermination of Jewish people from American civilization, arguing that Jews persecute and oppress Christians. He has urged Christians to start a “Holy War” against Jewish people and said of Jews: “To cheat, to lie, act in bad faith as though it’s second nature.” The commentator Fuentes has further claimed that “Jews run the news” and defended Hitler, saying that the Nazi leader’s reputation was “crafted by Jews.”

“Everybody, in every nation, in all times, for thousands of years, eventually comes to the conclusion that Jews always act in bad faith,” Fuentes said during an episode of his show.

In recent months, Fuentes has embarked on an extensive media tour, becoming a guest for popular podcasters such as Dave Smith and Patrick Bet David. In these interviews, some observers noted that Fuentes has struck a more moderate tone, potentially as a calculated effort to soften and mainstream his image. Fuentes’s popularity among right-leaning Gen Z men — his audience has quintupled to around 500,000 over the past year, according to the New York Times — may have decreased the stigma of featuring the antisemitic podcaster.

Critics have noted that Carlson, in contrast to his friendly conversations with Cooper, Fuentes, and others, conducted an aggressive and hostile interview with Cruz, one of the most conservative members of the US Congress, during the summer. The interview quickly deteriorated into a shouting match, as Carlson interrogated Cruz over his staunch support of Israel. Cruz pushed back, accusing Carlson of fomenting antisemitic conspiracy theories under the guise of criticism of Israel.

On Thursday, Cruz warned of a surge in right-wing antisemitism that must be thwarted.

“In the last six months, I’ve seen more antisemitism on the right than I had in my entire life,” Cruz said.

“This is a poison,” he continued. “And I believe we are facing an existential crisis in our party and our country.”