Regardless of the make-up of the coalition that forms government in Israel after Tuesday’s election — most likely with Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister — we must expect nothing less of our own politicians and commentators than a commitment to differentiate between legitimate debate around Israeli politics, and spinning a line that casts aspersions on Jewish people in general.
Julian Burnside’s peculiar fixation with Israel — a marriage made in heaven for some of the Greens — does not make him an anti-Semite.
Indeed, there is nothing anti-Semitic about criticising the Israeli Government. However, he has likely crossed the line on some occasions.
In 2015, he signed a letter supporting the inherently anti-Semitic boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel. He has also signed a letter defending a Sydney academic who waved money in the face of an elderly Jewish woman at a protest.
While anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate speech — whether it’s directed at African Australians or Aboriginal Australians — all share common attributes, different types of bigotry develop their own unique narratives.
In the case of anti-Semitism, some of those narratives are centuries old, while others, like Holocaust denial, are more recent.
Disguising itself as anti-Zionism, the new anti-Semitism uses criticism of Israel as a Trojan horse to perpetuate age-old stereotypes about Jews under a quasi-intellectual cover.
Read the article by Jeremy Leibler (president of the Zionist Federation of Australia) in The Daily Telegraph.