Antisemitism in our hallowed halls

“We, as academics, have lost the ability to think and debate”

The current Australian Government has been quite busy appointing Special People. And by that I do not mean peculiar, disabled or dear to the government’s heart; I mean people placed in charge of addressing various societal ills, thus carrying special responsibilities. In November 2022 the government appointed the inaugural Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner, Micaela Cronin. In July 2024 Jillian Segal was appointed Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, and just last week, on 30 September 2024, Aftab Malik was appointed Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia (a term I find problematic but this is a conversation for another time).

The appointments are in themselves indicative of a certain political will to address these issues in a comprehensive and consultative manner, but as the sayings about devils, details and consumption of puddings go, how far that political will extends (on both sides of the party-political aisle) will only become apparent in time. How well the issues end up being addressed will further depend on how proactive and consultative the various Special People show themselves to be.

But to return to the Topic of the Day. Pretty much the first thing that Jillian Segal needed to deal with was the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee’s Commission of Inquiry into the second iteration of the Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism in Australian Universities Bill (yes, you read that right, a Commission of Inquiry into a proposal for a Commission of Inquiry), which published its report on 1 October. Segal, who in a 2 October radio interview expressed regret that the issue had not been the focus of a full Royal Commission, interviewed some 65 students and staff at Australian universities to make her submission to the Inquiry (into the Inquiry). Hers was one of a total of 669, a large number of which were confidential and another significant number of which were published anonymously. The Commission also conducted two hearings in Canberra.

Jillian Segal. Photo by AAP/Thomas Parrish

During the Inquiry into the Inquiry, my former employer, the University of Sydney, with which I retain an affiliation as an Emerita, was foregrounded as one of the worst offenders, if not the worst, and I have had several conversations with former colleagues about it. So Usyd (for short) will feature prominently in my discussion today. After this next bit.

I mentioned in my last post that Jewish people have for centuries been a universal scapegoat in (particularly) the Christian world, and promised you, dear readers, to elaborate on that comment in this one. So here we go. 

A potted history of the scapegoat

I was born in the year of the Goat in the Chinese zodiac. Which apparently makes me creative and compassionate. Also gentle and calm (clearly that is about another Goat). Goats mean various things in various cultures: they can symbolise greatness, excellence, fertility and strength, but also evil, demons or Satan. In Norse mythology the goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr pulled Thor’s chariot. They were versatile little things, because apparently Thor would eat them at night and then hammer them back into life to pull his chariot the next day.

But it is the goats of Leviticus, the third book of the Torah (the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament), that interest me today. In Chapter 16 of Leviticus, concerning the Day of Atonement, God instructs Moses to tell his brother Aaron not to just turn up in the Holy Place whenever he feels like it (such things are not done), before first making offerings of atonement for the Israelite people (the people, literally, of a persevering God). Among other things, he has to bring along two male goats. Lots are drawn to determine which one is to be sacrificed for God and which one is to be cast, alive, into the wilderness to atone for the people’s sins. That goat, the one that escapes (albeit into the wilderness), is the origin of today’s word scapegoat: that unfortunate innocent who pays for all the real and/or imagined wrongs done to, well, whoever decides wrong is being done to them and casts around for someone less powerful to blame.

(Incidentally, Leviticus is also where we got the modern political concept of places of refuge and asylum—although the term refugee comes to us from the late 17^th century, in relation to French Protestants fleeing renewed persecution in Louis XIV’s France. All this is for another day, but suffice it to say that even we atheists can find Biblical instruction illuminating from time to time.)

Of course, for the poor wee goat, a wilderness is not exactly a place to which one would wish to escape. In French the scapegoat is an emissary (which has terrible connotations for modern-day ambassadors, being sent into the wilderness of Foreign); in Italian and Spanish he is expiatory; in German, more terre-à-terre, he is a sin-goat.

The thing about scapegoats is that they do escape sacrifice, because in order to continue to carry the blame placed upon them, they must remain alive. They must continue to wander the wilderness of ostracism, to be there to have the collective finger pointed at them, to carry the weight of blame. Someone has to do it, after all, and goats fit the purpose very well.

The Scapegoat (1854-6) by William Holman Hunt co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that the human incarnations of our poor exiled emissary expiatory sin-goat didn’t also meet the fate of his brother goat, the sacrificed one. They did, by the millions, as we know, and not only in the first half of the 1940s. The Inquisition burned quite a few as well, to take one example, and forced many others to hide in plain sight as converts to Catholicism.

In short, in our Christian societies the emblematic figure of the scapegoat has consistently been the Jew.

Much has been written about this phenomenon, including the 2021 book (and documentary) by British comedian and author David Baddiel: Jews Don’t Count. Baddiel made the documentary and wrote the book because he had observed a rise in antisemitism in the UK (so, well before 7 October 2023, which is incidentally the same date as that in 2001 on which US air strikes began on Afghanistan. It was also the date of the Jewish religious festival Simchat Torah: no doubt a deliberate choice by Hamas). He argued that antisemitism is different from other forms of racism, with a double standard being applied to Jews related to enduring stereotypes about the supposed “wealth” and “power” of Jewish people. Baddiel argues that because of the weight of these stereotypes, Western progressives who care about racialised minorities do not see Jewish people as oppressed in the same way.

In an interview with ABC Radio National earlier this year, he commented that “my Jewishness and indeed my conversation about antisemitism, it does not depend upon the Middle East. It is indeed part of the ‘Jews Don’t Count’ phenomenon, that all conversation about antisemitism somehow or other ends up being about Israel”. In those conversations the actions of the state of Israel are frequently attributed the responsibility for the continued existence of antisemitism in the world, which is of course a fallacious claim. Baddiel further points out that no other member of an ethnic or national group is called upon to take a position on a state where they do not live and with which they do not necessarily feel directly concerned as individuals. Even if all Arabs or Muslims of various Middle Eastern backgrounds in general are often expected in racist fashion to distance themselves explicitly from Islamism and terrorism, and those of Palestinian background are expected to distance themselves from Hamas, these are armed political movements. Arabs are not routinely expected to take personal responsibility for the actions of a state with which they may have only the most tenuous connection, if any. Nor are they assumed to have wealth and power and whiteness with which to manipulate the world (the antisemitic hoax work The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is extremely popular in the Arab world, for example). Baddiel notes that he had hitherto felt personally remote from Israel or the Zionist project but has been increasingly dragged into those conversations which “somehow or other” always end up being about Israel.

So, argues Baddiel, there is something “special” about antisemitism and not special in any sort of good way. Special-peculiar.

Swimming through muddy waters

A quick read of some of the submissions to the Inquiry into the Inquiry reveals a range of positions, including a minority of Jewish organisations who claim that the Zionist right is weaponising antisemitism and even one from a Muslim organisation (The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network) which argued that:

Conflating Judaism with Zionism is dehumanising because it essentialises Jewish people and denies their capacity for independent thought and reason. Assuming Jewish people must be held accountable for Israel’s crimes because they are Jewish (collective guilt attribution) is also a form of dehumanisation.

Well, yes, quite.

The Bill, and the Inquiry into the Inquiry to which it gave rise, were prompted by a number of incidents at Australian universities, such as the denial by Macquarie academic Randa Abdel-Fattah that the rapes and murders committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 occurred, calling them “fake news” (she is not the only one to make that odious claim) and her claim on her Instagram account that “if you are a Zionist you have no claim or right to cultural safety”. Abdel-Fattah, along with Clementine Ford, also leaked on her social media pages details of Jewish creatives from a WhatsApp group. She further organised a “kids’ excursion” in collaboration with a group called Families for Palestine. A video of that “excursion” shown at the Usyd student Gaza camp showed a child leading a march while chanting into a loudspeaker: “five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state”, and another child was heard calling Israel “haram” (forbidden).

They still love her: Usyd Students for Palestine held this event on 23 September 2024

Hizb ut-Tahrir, that radically masculinist Islamist organisation that wants to create a caliphate, is believed to have infiltrated some of the Gaza-camp events at Usyd as well. Hizb ut-Tahrir means “party of liberation” (and yes, if you hadn’t already guessed this: Hezbollah means “party of God”).

Also at Usyd, a well-known professor allegedly doxxed Jewish staff, and one former staff member, Associate Professor Andy Smidt, has headed up a complaint to SafeWork NSW, stating that the climate in the University became “toxic” for Jewish staff and students after 7 October 2023.  Staff, students and the local branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) have all been deeply divided, with the issue exacerbating factionalism in the branch and leading to the October 18, 2023 resignation of the branch secretary, Fiona Gill. A widely cited passage from her resignation letter stated that

the seeping of external political factionalism and arguments into the branch has resulted in an increasingly dysfunctional, divided, and conflictual environment which is detrimental to the achievement of the base goals of our union.

Gill has recently been re-elected to that position as one of the Renewal faction: she received the most votes of any individual standing for election to the Branch committee. Yep, the branch sure is in need of her—and of Renewal. It is sad that the Branch is now plagued by factionalism: it does not help it place its members first, which is what it is there for.

Yes, I do have skin in this particular game. Not only did I work at Usyd for many years as an academic and retain close contacts with some former colleagues, but I was also one of the founding members of the NTEU when it first came together as a national union for all university staff in the early 1990s, and was University of Sydney branch president, Assistant State Secretary and national councillor during the early noughties. I was even co-founder of the national caucus Queer Unionists in Tertiary Education (yes, a very QUTE caucus), which has now, sadly, become a mouthpiece for transactivists to the detriment of other constituencies in that alphabet soup. (That one triggered my public resignation, post-retirement, from the Union’s Past Members Association: that was a tough call because I grew up Union, and resigning from one was thus a Very Big Deal.)  

Among the minority of submissions to the Inquiry into the Inquiry that denied the existence of antisemitism, claiming that it was weaponised as a Zionist smokescreen to deflect any criticism of Israel, was one by the past president of the University of Sydney branch of the Union, Nick Riemer. Riemer had been a key player in “the seeping of external political factionalism and arguments into the branch” that prompted Gill’s resignation. Riemer’s submission was published as being “from” the branch, because he wrote it in his capacity as its then president (although not on branch letterhead), but it was a personal statement, not a branch one.

Fortunately, the national office of the Union was somewhat more reasoned. It neither supported nor denied claims of antisemitism on campuses: its primary argument was freedom of expression and academic freedom. The Union also expressed concern that the proposed national Inquiry appeared to require an overhaul of some aspects of industrially negotiated Enterprise Agreements. Moreover, the Union questions why such an inquiry would focus exclusively on universities without investigating the problem more broadly.

The most worrying part of the Bill proposing the Inquiry (into which the Inquiry I am discussing inquired: are you still following?), was, for the NTEU, the specific referencing of the Union “as a representative body to be investigated” (no doubt because of the aforementioned kerfuffles at Usyd). It rightly noted that there was “no justification for investigating the actions of bodies that are independent of the universities and do not have the power to control the behaviour of individuals on campus or of university managements”.

The union further commented that the proposed Inquiry would interfere with other statutory processes for dealing with antisemitism and racism and as such, would “muddy the waters”. Certainly, in this particular debate, muddy waters (and backhanded union-bashing), are the last thing one needs.

 “A very casual slide”

I have lost friends and argued with colleagues over this issue, and am surely not the only one. One dear colleague, who was an unconditional supporter of the Gaza camp, denying even a whiff of antisemitism on campus, seems to have remained my pal for now. However, she almost lost my friendship after a discussion about a Gaza camp banner that showed the words “Decolonise your f**king feminism”. It was unclear who the “you” was supposed to be (anyone who disagreed with the people in the Gaza camp?) and why “feminism” per se would be colonialist. The slogan was of course typical of the sorts of protests led by males and male-identified women in which the “white”-feminism-as-racist-and-colonialist trope regularly features, but I was shocked that my colleague, who is herself feminist, could not see that. The Facebook page of the Gaza camp repeatedly claimed that the much smaller Jewish camp in support of Israel, on a different part of campus, had been “set up with the intent to intimidate us” (although I believe its establishment predated that of the Gaza camp).  

Other colleagues at Usyd, both Jewish and Gentile, spoke to me earlier this year about a climate of intimidation there, with one saying that “explicit antisemitic statements have been expressed to [her] by staff” who assumed that, being non-Jewish, she would agree with them, and that there had been a “very casual slide from anti Israel to anti Zionist to anti semitic”. Staff told me that undergraduate students were asking to be moved out of units of study because of antisemitic content, and a PhD student changed supervisor over it. They also spoke of masked students interrupting classes to harangue people and refusing to leave when asked by the teacher. They spoke of anyone who wished to acknowledge the suffering of the 7 October victims being labelled “supporters of genocide”.¹

So what did the Inquiry into the Inquiry conclude?

This:

Recommendation 1

The committee recommends that, in collaboration with the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) and the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, all Australian universities urgently review their complaints processes and give effect to any and all changes necessary to ensure these processes are known to and understood by students and staff, and deliver real and meaningful outcomes for complainants.

Recommendation 2

The committee recommends that the Attorney-General immediately refers an inquiry into antisemitism at Australian universities to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights.

Recommendation 3

The committee recommends that the Senate does not pass the Bill [you know, that Bill proposing a Commission of Inquiry into which this Inquiry was inquiring. Keep up, people!].

So we may have to go through all this again, if Recommendation 2 is adopted. Which won’t fix anything at all for those who are suffering in Gaza, Israel and Lebanon. I am not sure it will fix anything in Australia either.

Clearly, there is a reason I chose to publish this on the first anniversary of the 7 October attack, also known in Israel as Black Sabbath or the Simchat Torah massacre. Even as they grieve, not one single Jewish person I know (and I know quite a few) nor any whose blogs or articles or social media posts I’ve read (apart from those of the ultra-right) has any problem with anyone criticising the actions of the Israeli state and not one of them thinks that the IDF attacks against Gaza and Lebanon are anything remotely like a proportionate response to what happened that day. Yet practically all of them have been the targets of that “very casual slide” in which the actions of the Israeli state are reframed, tacitly or overtly, as somehow being their personal responsibility.  Guilty because Jewish.

Universal scapegoat? You bet.

1. The subtitle to this post comes from one of those colleagues with whom I spoke at Usyd.