World Jewish News
Antisemitism is on the Rise Down Under
By HENRY SREBRNIK As in other western countries, Australian Jews have been targeted by boycotts, harassment, and intimidation since the Gaza war began last October.
Throughout its history, Australia has been good to its Jewish community, which numbers more than 100,000 people today, with most living in Melbourne and Sydney.
From around 1947 to 1952, Australia took in more Holocaust survivors as a proportion of its population than any other country. Their children and grandchildren form more than half the community in Australia.
Being Jewish in Australia has never been seen as a bar to success. Yet since the Gaza war started, reports of antisemitism have spiked 700 per cent, including violent attacks.
Responding to pressure, on July 9 Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appointed Jillian Segal, the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, to be “special envoy to combat antisemitism in Australia” for three years.
There is an urgent necessity to overhaul laws about doxing, the intentional online exposure of an individual’s identity, private information, or personal details, which has had a disproportionate impact on Jewish individuals. Pro-Palestinian activists distributed a nearly 900-page transcript that they leaked from a private WhatsApp formed last year by Jewish writers, artists, musicians and academics.
For example, Josh Moshe, a 33-year-old grandson of Holocaust survivors, moved to Melbourne in 2010. He and his wife operated a well-known gift shop in Thornbury. He had never experienced problems before.
However, all of this rapidly changed after the WhatsApp group was doxed. “We were sworn at, the shop was graffitied with ‘Glory to Hamas,’ and ‘we don’t want Zionists in Thornbury,’” he said. As a result of such stories, the government plans to make the practice illegal.
Many politicians espouse openly anti-Israeli views. A video of Jenny Leong, an Australia Green Party member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, discussing how “the Jewish lobby and the Zionist lobby” are using their “tentacles” to “influence power” went viral in early February.
Pro-Palestine encampments have come under increased scrutiny. A joint statement by protest organizers at 10 universities claims their movement has been peaceful and opposition to the state of Israel and Zionism as an ideology was not antisemitism.
“There needs to be more nuance around the conversation,” remarked David Slucki, associate professor at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization at Monash University in Melbourne. “Our governments at the local, state, and federal level come out regularly in support of Jews and against antisemitism, which is something we have rarely seen throughout history. And yet I routinely hear people talk how similar the current situation is to 1930s Germany.”
On the other hand, a Monash colleague of his, Philip Mendes, Director of the Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Unit, disagrees. “Australia has experienced an unprecedented outbreak of anti-Semitism,” he maintains. (Full disclosure: he and I have collaborated on a number of scholarly articles and books.)
Jewish university students and academics have been subjected to various forms of defamation, threats and hate speech by university-based encampments and associated forums, flyers and graffiti, which are intended to exclude them from academic and public discourse, he maintains. Many Jewish students and staff assembled in early May at Melbourne University Square, well away from the encampment, where some told stories about feeling intimidated on campus.
On May 9 the federal opposition Liberal Party’s education spokesperson, Sarah Henderson, claimed campuses had become “hotbeds of antisemitic activism” in “flagrant breach” of university policies. Mendes sees this as a new form of McCarthyism, like that experienced by Communists and other leftists during the Cold War.
Michael Gawenda, a well-known Australian journalist, was editor of the centre-left Melbourne Age for seven years from 1997-2004, and a foreign correspondent in both London and Washington. In an article published in the British periodical Fathom in February, he describes his anxiety over current events.
“The Labor Government in Australia has been all over the place on Israel and the Palestinians and on the Hamas-Israel war,” he explained. “There are vital Labor-held seats in Sydney and Melbourne that have significant numbers of Muslim Australians, enough to swing election results.” It has meant that from Albanese on down, “there has been a failure to properly, unequivocally, call out what has clearly been an explosion of Jew hatred in Australia.”
Western Australian senator Fatima Payman, a devout Muslim born in Afghanistan, quit the Labor party recently in a major rupture with the Albanese government over Palestine. She used the politically charged phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which, she said, asserted “a desire for Palestinians to live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominating others nor being dominated.”
A close friend of mine, Michael Birkner, professor of history at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, has spent many sabbaticals in Melbourne over the past two decades. He agrees that the Labor Party in Australia is walking on eggshells about the war in Gaza.
“The intellectual community is pro-Palestinian, and there are thousands more voting Muslims in Australia’s cities than Jews.” A small community perhaps a fifth the size of the Muslim community, the Jewish community’s “political influence is scant, even as there are notable Jewish writers and elected officials.” Indeed, in so many ways, it resembles its sister community in Canada.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.
World Jewish News
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel is indeed committing “war crimes”
By BERNIE BELLAN (June 3, 2025) Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has recently written a column for Haaretz in which he says the accusation that Israel has been committing “war crimes” in Gaza is now a valid accusation even though, until recently, he would have denied that is the case.
Olmert’s column, published on May 27, is titled “Enough Is Enough. Israel Is Committing War Crimes.”
It begins with: “Recent operations in the Gaza Strip have nothing to do with legitimate war goals. This is now a private political war.
“The government of Israel is currently waging a war without purpose, without goals or clear planning and with no chances of success. Never since its establishment has the State of Israel waged such a war. The criminal gang headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has set a precedent without equal in Israel’s history in this area, too.”
Olmert goes on to write that, until very recently, he rejected the notion that Israel had been committing “war crimes” in Gaza, but he has now come to the conclusion, he writes, that Israel is indeed committing war crimes there. He notes his refusal to admit that until now, but explains:
“In recent weeks I’ve been no longer able to do so. What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. We’re not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it’s the result of government policy – knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”
Olmert fleshes out his argument in some detail, also referring to war crimes committed on the West Bank. He ends his column with this: “It is time to halt, before we are all banished from the family of nations and are summoned to the International Criminal Court for war crimes, with no good defense.
“Enough is enough.”
Wow! So, how are members of the Jewish community – and their non-Jewish supporters, who have continued to turn a blind eye to what Israel has been doing, most notably in Gaza, but also on the West Bank, supposed to react to what Olmert says is what has actually been happening in Gaza and the West Bank?
I would argue, that to be consistent, they would have to say Olmert is misguided, perhaps even a self-hating Jew, who was not only found guilty of corruption when he was prime minister, he is now giving encouragement to the enemy. But – he’s a former prime minister of Israel!
So what? those who would reject his argument might say. Israel was attacked on October 7, 2023 – end of story. And really, not many of those who would dismiss Olmert’s accusation that Israel is indeed committing war crimes are likely even to have heard about what Olmert wrote. (I daresay that, since Olmert hasn’t been prime minister for 16 years now, a lot of those defenders of Israel have likely either forgotten that he was prime minister for three years or have, even more likely, never heard of him at all.)
And, after all, Olmert’s column appeared in Haaretz – that paragon of “woke” left wing detachment from reality, right? And they’re definitely not going to pay attention to what that left wing Bernie Bellan has to say, even if all that he’s doing is quoting ver batim, what a former Israeli prime minister wrote.
No, they’ll be like other writers you can read on jewishpostandnews.ca who will go on denying the reality of what is happening in Gaza – and they’ll be joined in their denials by our Jewish Federation, by CIJA, and by a host of other establishment Jewish organizations – because it’s just too darn hard to abandon the ideal version of Israel that so many of us have grown up with.
World Jewish News
Antisemitism is a Problem Even on Tranquil PEI
By HENRY SREBRNIK (May 30, 2025) At the end of May the Jewish community here on Prince Edward Island met informally with a member of the RCMP to express our worries regarding rising antisemitism. We are very small, some 100 people, and with little visible presence, so it’s not surprising there’s little overt anti-Jewish activity, compared to everywhere else.
Unlike in other provinces, there was never a mass migration of Jews to PEI. The earliest record of a Jewish person on the island is from the mid-19th century but it wasn’t until the 1980s that the Jewish community formally organized itself. Most Jews here are “come from away,” as non-island born people are called. We have few roots and families here. Most Islanders don’t even know we exist.
PEI is a quiet place, and even the antisemites are almost invisible — though, as people at the meeting shared their stories about antisemitic signs on telephone poles, house windows with “from the river to the sea” placards facing the street, reports from some parents about problematic teachers in schools, and so on, they are out there.
For example, an event in Charlottetown last September, on the International Day of Peace, a United Nations-sanctioned holiday, was organized by the local Ukrainian community to protest Russia’s war against their country. Although it had nothing to do with the ongoing war in Gaza, nor was it meant to, yet there were more Palestinian than Ukrainian flags in evidence among the attendees, most of whom came out to make sure Gaza would not be “ignored.”
Our two independent downtown cinemas, which usually host art and foreign films, ran pro-Palestinian movies recently – with, apparently, significant turnouts. Despite City Cinema management having been told that the propaganda being disseminated at the theatre — they were showing the movie “No Other Land,” about life on the West Bank — is highly objectionable to our community, their failure to remove it was extremely troubling. Their lobby had a full display of pro-Palestinian material, a Palestinian flag across their counter, and a Palestinian representative accosting everyone entering the lobby with solicitations for money. At the Tivoli, they presented “The Encampments,” which explores the various pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 on American university campuses. This may not seem like much to people in Montreal, Toronto, or Winnipeg, but here it was a big deal.
During the recent federal election, the website VotePalestine.ca listed more than 330 candidates across the country who expressed “full” endorsement of their “Palestine Platform.” It demanded broad Government of Canada sanctions on anything connected to Israel, including “cultural and academic exchanges.” VotePalestine is closely associated with the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), one of the central organizers of Canadian anti-Israel blockades and street demonstrations.
Almost all the endorsers in the country were in the Green Party or among the New Democrats, but it included 19 Liberals and two Bloc Québécois. (No Conservatives.) On PEI, six candidates endorsed the platform, including, in Charlottetown, Liberal incumbent MP Sean Casey. The other five were running for the Greens or NDP.
Casey was the only Liberal on PEI to sign the VotePalestine pledge. The other three Liberals on the island did not. (The Liberals won all four of the island’s seats.)
There are very few Muslims on PEI, and most are Iranians, Kosovars, Somalis, South Asians, and Sudanese. Few are Middle Eastern Arabs. I can guess with almost certainty that they support the Palestinian movement, but they are not especially strident about it. They are immigrants, many who don’t speak English or French, and so have a modest degree of influence.
A more significant group of anti-Israel activists are people who see the devastation in Gaza and blame Israel for everything; obviously a streak of old-fashioned antisemitism is responsible for their one-sided tenderness for Gazans and lack of sympathy for Israelis, even after October 7. They are involved in island peace committees and church groups and write letters to the newspapers. They have more social visibility and move the needle in an anti-Jewish direction.
But, as elsewhere, the third and most influential people are the ones in the universities, where for the past 40 years, here as everywhere, they have inculcated generations of students with very fully-developed ideological theories about Israel being uniquely evil, an apartheid settler-colonial “white” supremacist racist and imperialist country, and as such an oppressive enemy of all Black, Brown, and indigenous peoples (as propounded by the academics who write articles on so-called “intersectionalism.”) Israel is, to them, the current embodiment of fascism. These toxic left-wing ideologies are a very danger to the continued existence of the Jewish state.
Their disseminators are many of the professors at Columbia, Harvard, McGill, Michigan, the University of Toronto, York, and so very many other universities — some even at little UPEI — who deny they are antisemites but rather “anti-Zionists,” and view that battle as being part of a larger anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle. They wear keffiyehs as their modern form of left- wing identity, after it came into widespread symbolic use when adapted by Yasser Arafat, by the hijacker Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and by other leading figures in multiple intifadas, globalized and otherwise.
The only framework many students have been given for viewing the world by them is the neo-Marxist vision of “oppressor” and “oppressed,” which they neatly apply to Israel and Palestine. As Kathleen Hayes, a former member of an ultra-left Party for Socialism and Liberation, the group to which the murderer in Washington DC belonged, wrote in “Witness to Jihad,” Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, May 25, 2025, today’s students “learned it in the universities, from professors who repackaged Marxism to resonate in our modern age, using the Jews and Israel as their instruments of choice. But beyond the focus on Jews, this Manichean worldview declares entire classes of people reactionary and evil and suggests they ultimately must be eliminated for the sake of human betterment.”
Israeli violence is the violence that maintains a neo-colonial military occupation and inequality. Palestinian violence is the inevitable response to that; therefore it will only end when the occupation “from the river to the sea” — a call to destroy a sovereign state — ends. The oppressor can never be the victim. Within that narrative, the oppressed sometimes strike back brutally — but this is justified by the greater and more enduring brutality of the oppressor. That is why they justify what happened on October 7, 2023.
So the man who recently murdered the two Israeli embassy officials in Washington DC might say he has nothing against Jews, he just wants a “Free, Free Palestine” to replace the illegitimate Zionist entity. He might even point to Jews in Jewish Voice for Peace and Not in Our Name, as evidence.
But given how intertwined Jews and Judaism are with the Land of Israel, culturally, emotionally, historically, religiously, and now with the state itself, it is really, for most of us, a distinction without a difference. And rightly so. And this is what we are up against.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
World Jewish News
Israel’s “starvation plan” for Gaza.
The world rushes to judgement
By GREGORY MASON (May 28, 2025) Israel’s re-imposition of a blockade on food and other necessities of life flowing into Gaza produced the expected hail of condemnation from the usual suspects. Typical was the reaction by Alex de Waal writing on UnHerd (May 22, 2025), a blog that prides itself on swimming against the current. De Wael writes:
“It seems monstrous, as we watch children in Gaza wasting before our eyes. But in truth, the weaponisation of food in counterinsurgency is nothing new.”
He continues to place Israel’s current blockage in the same category as infamous starvation programmes intended to demoralize a population, such as the British campaign of the fifties to suppress the Malayan counterinsurgency. This is a crude characterization of Israeli goals and motivations for the renewed military push into Gaza and the blockade on food aid.
Benny Morris, the noted Israeli historian, also expressed doubts about this strategy, although in a more nuanced tone than de Wael. Writing in Quillette magazine (May 24, 2025), he stated:
“Meanwhile, Israel’s international position dramatically worsened. EU member states and Canada have imposed minor sanctions against the Jewish state and threaten worse. Observers in Jerusalem have warned that Israel faces an international relations “tsunami.” In Washington, Israel’s staunchest ally, President Donald Trump’s aides, speaking anonymously, told The Washington Post that a break with Israel is likely if it does not end its war-making in the Gaza Strip.”
And more concretely on the withdrawal of food, fuel and medical supplies on March 2, 2025, he writes,
“Western public opinion and European governments are driven by daily TV clips from Gaza showing dead and dying women and children, though never dead and dying combat-age males. They are also influenced by worsening humanitarian conditions on the ground—Trump has even spoken hyperbolically of “a lot of people starving,”
The allegation that Israel has starved the Gaza population is a fabrication. According to the World Food Program, 94.000 tons of food can feed one million people for four months. During the first months of 2025, up to the most recent Israeli blockade, Gaza received 380,000 tons of supplies, sufficient to feed its population of 2.1 million for eight months. What happened to the extra supplies?
In a word, Hamas intercepted the supplies, allowed some to dribble to the civilian population, but then sold most to local merchants at widely inflated prices, to pay salaries to its fighters and acquire more military equipment. This expropriation has been an open secret for years. Hamas has diverted all the well-meaning aid from the West to create the military infrastructure and to support the lavish lifestyles of its political leadership in Qatar. For example, the late Ismail Haniyeh was estimated to have a net worth of $4 – $6 billion at the time of his assassination.
The current Israeli call-up of 30,000 reservists and deployment of regular troops into Gaza was triggered by the refusal of Hamas to agree to the release of 10 hostages, the cessation of all hostilities, and to lay down its arms. It did not occur out of a vacuum.
Israel’s stated goals for the current action in Gaza are to recover all hostages (estimated dead (39) and alive (20), control of Gaza militarily, the complete elimination of Hamas, and forcing the civilian population into areas where they can receive food aid without interference.
Notably, while the Geneva Convention requires all combatants to care for civilian populations, if one party subverts the distribution of aid, the other parties are no longer obligated to provide food aid. Under this criterion, the diversion of aid by Hamas appears to have obviated Israel’s legal requirement to distribute aid to Gaza,
But legality and political reality diverge especially when it comes to Israel. Quite simply, Israel has always struggled with public relations and communication. In contrast, the messages of Hamas have a fertile field of skepticism by much of Western media that seems ready to believe the worst of Israeli intentions. The recent statements of Starmer, Macron, and Carney neatly capture this deep confusion among Western leaders. Recent developments regarding food supplies to Gaza may force these virtue signalers to reconsider their stance; however, that’s a slim chance.
A hopeful development, if anything about Gaza can be promising, is the creation of a US-based NGO, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which will manage food distribution to the civilian population under the protection of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). After initial glitches triggered by Hamas interference, aid appears to be flowing to the civilian population. IDF reports cautiously claim that the limited capacity of Hamas to impede food distribution, as well as increased boldness of the population to defy Hamas, indicate its weakness.
As with everything about Gaza, the food aid situation is volatile, but some grounds exist for cautious optimism that mass starvation has been averted.