The first Australian Never Again Is Now (NAIN) rally was held in Sydney in mid-February, headlined by former prime minister Scott Morrison. A second rally, with Liberal MP Simon Birmingham as a speaker, was held in Adelaide on Sunday, March 3. More events are planned in Canberra, Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane and Hobart.
Self-described as “a Christian grass roots [sic] movement educating and mobilising Christian’s [sic] to actively stand against most ancient of racial hatreds, anti-Semitism”, NAIN pledges it is “committed to ensuring that no such evil finds a home in our beautiful country of Australia. We stand on Australian values of respect, compassion, freedom, truth and love.”
On the face of it, these rallies against antisemitism might seem progressive. Who could have a problem with fighting this growing problem? Gatherings calling for the end of any form of racism are usually something to get behind. Scratch the surface, however, and you’ll find that these rallies are part of a movement across the Western world that actually supports the institutions of racism and white supremacy.
The term “Never Again is Now” invokes the horrors of the Holocaust, implying that we are at risk of a new genocide if we do not take a stand. This might be understood as calling for an end to Israel’s current actions, which the International Court of Justice has found to be a plausible case of genocide.
But it is clear from the organisers, speeches and attendees that these rallies do not seek to prevent mass violence against Palestinian people — they invert reality by labelling those trying to stop this violence, Palestinians and their allies, as the real racist threat. The NAIN public Facebook page describes pro-Palestinian protests in Adelaide as “evil” and “radical hate” and key organisers have declared Palestinian support as “despicable” and “celebrating terrorism”.
We know what it’s like to be the subject of antisemitic attacks
The NAIN rallies are just another example of why we formed the Jewish Council of Australia in recent months. We’re a collective of volunteer Jewish academics, policy workers, lawyers, writers and teachers who are experts in racism and antisemitism. Our formation came at a pivotal juncture: the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza has contributed to both a rise in antisemitism and a rise in anti-Palestinian racism justified through “Jewish safety”, particularly in Israel, the US, the UK, Germany and Australia.
The Jewish Council aims to provide an alternative Jewish voice in Australia for those who oppose Israel’s current actions, support Palestinian freedom and do not feel represented by mainstream organisations. We do not claim to speak on behalf of the Jewish community, but we wish to highlight that there are multiple Jewish communities with increasingly diverse views on Israel and Zionism.
There is antisemitism on the left, and it needs to be challenged. But there is much more widespread and serious antisemitism among the right-wing groups supporting Zionism, and even among Zionists themselves. Their conflation of Jews and Israel is itself antisemitic. Many target and attempt to intimidate non-Zionist Jews, and some lobbyists’ ongoing attempts to influence institutions and silence debate reinforce existing prejudices.
Like all critics of Israel, we have long received targeted hate messages, harassment and attempts to intimidate us. Palestinians, Indigenous peoples, people of colour, non-white Jews and others face more intense attacks.
Many on the Jewish Council are currently victims of direct antisemitism. Most alarming is that it comes from two different cohorts, often difficult to distinguish based on their messages and actions.
Neo-nazis identify our family members, tell us we are warmongering globalists, say that Hitler should have finished the job, and send antisemitic messages about our noses.
Zionists, including some leaders of mainstream Jewish organisations, call us kapos, frauds and traitors (“the Jew Haters Council” or “the Judas Council”) and some tell us they would have pushed us into the gas chambers first.
When these two groups are using antisemitic tropes to attempt to silence and intimidate those speaking up against Israel’s actions, it raises an important question: why are they on the same side? And why do Jewish representative bodies remain silent about this — or contribute directly?
How the far right is weaponising antisemitism
The reality is that the current hyper-fixation on antisemitism on the left is not helping end any form of racism.
While antisemitism is a problem in all areas of society, including among some sections of Palestinian solidarity movements, this fixation is giving the growing violent threat of the far right a free pass. It intentionally conflates antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel in ways that contribute to rising hatred through the relentless dehumanisation of Palestinian people and the association of all Jewish people with Israel’s current crimes.
As well as painting legitimate support for Palestinian liberation as antisemitic, it prioritises and exceptionalises antisemitism, delinking it from other forms of racism such as Islamophobia. In fact, some groups and individuals supporting the NAIN rallies, such as the controversial Australian Jewish Association (AJA), have engaged in rhetoric labelling Islamic people as a threat.
An unlikely alliance
These events, like the “anti-antisemitism” rallies in the UK, US and Europe, are organised by Christian Zionists (a term describing evangelical Christians who strongly support Israel based on their reading of the bible) and attended by groups who have campaigned against civil rights.
For example, Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) CEO Michelle Pearse spoke at the Sydney rally. The ACL supports conversion therapy for queer teens, opposes abortion and gender-affirming medical care for trans people, and was a key lobby group behind the “No” campaign for marriage equality.
Not only is the “never again” cry selective and disingenuous — privileging Zionist feelings of safety irrespective of material conditions — it is an umbrella sheltering Islamophobic, anti-trans and anti-LGBTIQA+ viewpoints. Most fundamentally, it invites people to participate in Palestinian dehumanisation by ignoring Israel’s indiscriminate violence in Gaza, resulting in more than 30,000 civilians being killed by Israeli forces and a humanitarian crisis leading to mass starvation.
Some Zionists have formed strategic coalitions with evangelical Christians, many of whom hold antisemitic beliefs, because of their common support for the state of Israel. This support is expressed by a huge flow of donations from these Christian groups to Israel every year.
As historian Walker Robins observed, this relationship is deep and long-standing: “Israel’s former ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, made waves in May 2021 when he publicly suggested that Israel should prioritise its relationship with American evangelicals over American Jews. Dermer described evangelicals as the ‘backbone of Israel’s support in the United States’.”
This alliance has now extended to include openly far-right and fascist groups. The French National Front, the UK’s Tommy Robinson, Alternative for Germany, and Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni have all participated in rallies denouncing antisemitism and expressed support for Israel.
Defining antisemitism
Rallies like Never Again Is Now explicitly reference the Nazi genocide of Jewish people, but the antisemitism they denounce is not the far-right kind that actually killed Jews in the Holocaust. Instead, they strategically and deceptively conflate criticism of Zionism with antisemitism to silence opponents of Israel’s ongoing violence. They lean on legitimising tools such as the politicised and inaccurate International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism.
This definition was extensively quoted by former prime minister Scott Morrison (a conservative Christian politician with a long history of support for Israel) at the Never Again is Now Sydney rally, but is highly controversial and deeply contested by academics, activists and human rights groups around the world.
This weakens the label of antisemitism to the point that it becomes almost meaningless (as seen in the AJA’s self-declared “Merry Ham-mas” Christmas ham bag scandal), at a time when we need to be able to call out actual antisemitism.
Israel commits atrocities in the name of Jewish people, and last week a government minister declared in the Knesset that she was “personally proud of the ruins of Gaza” and that “every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did”.
None of this makes Jews safer. Given the story of the inevitable persistence of global antisemitism is a fundamental justification for Israel’s continued existence as an ethnonationalist state, we might ask whether all Israel lobby groups are actually interested in the safety of Jews around the world. We know that the people they hang out with are not.
Na’ama and Elizabeth, I cannot tell you just how much I welcome and appreciate your excellent essay! And many thanks also to Crikey for publishing this article.
I am not Jewish (I am an avowed atheist) but for the first 20 years of my (76-year-long) life, I grew up in a very Jewish neighborhood. I went to school with Jews, and many Jews were among my very best friends at both primary and secondary level. At secondary school, I even went along to the Jewish religious instruction classes for a few weeks to see what it was all about. I recall the Religious Instruction Teacher (I don’t know if he was a Rabbi or not) on one occasion asking me, “Which tribe I came from” (no doubt he knew that I was not Jewish). Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. Nevertheless, I was accepted into the class for the short time that I wanted to attend.
Because of my predilection for making Jewish friends at school, one of my (non-Jewish) friends dubbed me “Robert Reynoldstein”. I wore that epithet as a badge of honor.
Anyway, to more immediate and relevant matters. I cannot tell you just how much I admire and respect you and your Jewish Council of Australia colleagues for the stand that you have taken on occupied Palestine. There are not many people who I look up to these days but let me tell you that I look up to you and your group. Somehow, I have also found myself on the email list for the Jewish Council of Australia (and Mondoweiss, which also does great work).
I have attended all but three of the pro-Palestine rallies in Melbourne held each Sunday since October 7th last year. I have listened to Jewish speakers at those rallies and have marched alongside Jews carrying a “Jews for Palestine”, or similar banner. I even had a coffee with a 28-year-old Jewish woman after one rally.
Finally, I would just make the observation that the ghastly horror that is playing out in occupied Palestine to my way of thinking is what is to be expected when we have a toxic mix of the human scourges, religion, nationalism, and capitalism in play. (As far as capitalism goes, it is well known that “war is good for business”. If you still do not understand what I mean general reader, then study Antony Loewenstein’s excellent book The Palestine Laboratory). I acknowledge that some may disagree with that view.
Thanks again so much, Na’ama and Elizabeth!!
A minor point I relation to the remark, ‘I am not Jewish (I’m an avowed atheist) … ‘ – one can be both Jewish and an atheist!
Yes, I know KJudah. Antony Loewenstein is just such a person. I am sure that the description would also be apt for one of the greatest thinkers of all time as well, and I am talking about Karl Marx.
Thank you very much for your reply KJudah. I appreciate it.
The other problem with anti-Semitism is that we assume it only applies to Jewish people, when in fact Palestinians are Semites as well.
This is because today’s Palestinians are the heirs and descendants of the people who weren’t dispersed or exiled from Judea after the destruction of Herod’s Temple in 70 CE.
The myth that only the people who were dispersed through the world and maintained their Jewish faith are the only people for whom the land of Palestine is truly theirs is both false and widely believed; here’s an example of how the myth is expressed these days:
Notice how this myth creates the impression that the Palestinian people occupied the Middle East when it was left vacant by Jewish exiles?
What actually happened was that it was only the “original” inhabitants of Jerusalem who fled to European countries; everywhere else in what the Romans called “Palestine”, and the peasantry themselves knew as Judea, stayed put on the land and continued farming. That is, today’s “Palestinians” are the heirs and descendants of the peasants who farmed the land in the time of Christ, and today’s “Jews” are the heirs and descendants of the inhabitants of Jerusalem and other leading cities, who were forced to flee.
With Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem destroyed by the Romans, and the priesthood abolished killed or dispersed, the peasants started listening to prophets such as Jesus, and centuries later, Mohammed.
This may seem irrelevant, except that today’s Palestinians are the heirs and descendants of the people who always lived in the Middle East. As such, they haven’t just “occupied” Palestine for centuries, they have done so for millennia. In fact, the very name “Palestine” is the Romanisation of “Philistia”, the original name of the land of the Canaanites before a breakaway sect of Samarians (the other followers of Yahweh) established themselves in Jerusalem.
The upshot of all this is, and it is important that writers such as Mr Beatson understand this, that the righteousness of the claim of the Palestinians to the land we now call Israel is at least as strong as that of the people we call Jews. In many ways these peoples are brothers, it is their tragedy that they do not recognise themselves in each other.
Further, when we fail to recognise the brotherhood of these peoples, we add to the failure to help them find peace.
The Zionists seemingly have no sense of how obviously they’re bunging it on. It reeks of privilege, to imagine people should swallow such disingenuous conflation.
It’s arrogant to think that we can’t see the bullsh.t they present for what it is. It assumes that we don’t understand the facts.
The problem is, it seems that most people do swallow it.
I commend you for your courage. The Australian Jewish Association and the Council of Australian Jewry have managed to make me what they call anti-Semitic. I was raised to admire the achievements of Jews in the academic and artistic world and in our own history with Monash and Sir Isaac Isaacs. I admired 1970s Israel. I was raised the understand what the horror of the holocaust meant and I despise the deniers beyond words. As I got older though I began to think that those who have suffered great oppression ought not oppress others.
I saw how Israel backed the Apartheid regime with arms and aid, I saw how Israel became a rapacious coloniser and oppressor itself. I saw how the extreme Ultra Orthodox were no better than an Iranian Ayatollah, may a curse be on both. I also saw how many Jews were conflicted by what they knew was right and what the Zionists did.
I am now vigorously anti Israel in my thinking. I know that many of its citizens are better than the nation, but they voted for Netan the Yahu. I believe Israel has now lost the right to any sympathy and I hate saying that. I hate Hamas, but I also know that a generation has known only violence and that is how they will respond. I hate the settler murderers of the West Bank and people like Trump and Morrison who legitimise them. Only when the West says no more money and no more guns or planes will the Zionists cease, perhaps not then.
I see no future, but I greatly admire the way you and your fellows have spoken out.
Totally agree!!!!
Thank you for the brilliant work you’re doing.
One thing I’d say is that in general antisemitism on the ‘left’ is fundamentally different to antisemitism on the ‘right’.
Unfortunately nowadays we tend to almost exclusively focus on the receivers of messages not the communicators. But the motivations and rationale of the communicators is absolutely essential to understand the ‘wrong’.
Antisemitism on the ‘left’ is overwhelmingly driven by outrage in response to Israel’s actions against the Palestinians going back decades and thousands of Palestinian lives, all of which have culminated in recent events with Israel now formerly being investigated for genocide.
Antisemitism on the ‘right’ is overwhelmingly driven by white supremacy, and in the case of these Christian fundamentalist groups, Christian Zionism that is seeking to return Jewish people to Israel to trigger the second coming of Christ (I wish I was making this up!).
You simply cannot compare the two.
I get what you are saying. I have a sister who is a fundamental Christian, and, yes, she believes all that guff about the second coming, which increasingly allows her to say racist things about all Muslims.
I might have misunderstood your comment about antisemitism on the ‘left’. I don’t think that the left’s outrage against Israel’s actions is driven by antisemitism. It is driven my a belief that the state of Israel is, and has been for many years, committing unjustified crimes against Palestinians. There are many Jewish people who believe this too. The Christian lobby described in the article is enormous and powerful, and a danger to world peace.
Sorry I should have clarified.
Antisemitism on the ‘left’ is similar to attitudes on the ‘left’ to South Africa in the 1980s.
People didn’t say nice things about South Africa. And people might not say nice things about Israel or Zionism or even, in a misguided way, Jewish people.
When it comes to an emotional response to awful events people can be forgiven for not choosing their words more carefully.
It doesn’t necessarily make them antisemitic. It just makes them angry. In a large protest against Israel’s actions there’s bound to be people who either deliberately or by accident say terrible things. That doesn’t delegitimise the protests or even the people saying the terrible things.
“Why” are they saying the terrible things?
This is the point I made about understanding the motivations and rationale of the person making the communication.
Antisemitism is never justified, no matter what “drives” it. If someone who self-identified as left said their antisemitism was justified because of Israel’s actions I would say you are not on the left at all. Any position which applies discrimination or hatred towards a person for what they are, as opposed to say their actions or ideology is unacceptable. That is what antisemitism does. Being Jewish is made the crime. Even blaming all Israelis for the actions of their state is going way too far, like blaming (and currently punishing) all Palestinians for Hamas’s actions and ideology. So while antisemitism may be dressed up in different ideological frames it remains antisemitism and is unambiguously unacceptable in itself. So it is not that you can’t compare the two, it’s that you can’t separate the two.