Jewish Australian Lives Matter

Some of these thoughts are coming to me late at night, lying in bed recovering from knee surgery, while my wife tries frantically to hold down the fort at home and take care of our children (what a luxury). Children who are beautiful, innocent, and precious. Children we instinctively try to shield from what is happening outside our front door.

It is Christmas time in a country I love. A country I have loved for forty years. Christmas time means BBQs on the beach, Christmas trees in the city, fireworks and swimming pools.

Not this year. This year is different.

Australia was extraordinarily good to my grandparents, Holocaust survivors who arrived here with nothing. Everything had been stripped from them. Education. Family. Dignity. Safety. They arrived traumatised and broken, and they worked their arses off anyway. Cleaners. Tailors. Bakers. They built lives not because anything was handed to them, they built it through blood, sweat, and tears.

Then my parents did the same. So that my generation could go to school. To university. So that we could be educated at top Jewish private schools while also being taught what it means to be Australian. And we love being Australian. Genuinely. Deeply. Proudly.

So how did we get here?

You cannot fault the modern left for its moral conviction. It is absolute. But when did conviction replace curiosity? When did certainty replace questioning? When did moral righteousness become a weapon rather than a responsibility?

When a movement becomes so blinded by its hatred of Israel that it can justify the murder of 15 innocent people, or worse blame the victims themselves by calling it a false flag, something has gone horribly wrong. When did Jewish deaths become something to explain away rather than mourn, for political point scoring? When did that become acceptable?

Growing up Jewish in Australia, I never understood how the Holocaust could happen. How educated, articulate, morally confident people could watch Jews be isolated, dehumanised, and murdered while either doing nothing or actively participating. It felt impossible.

It does not feel impossible anymore.

Over the last two years something has shifted in this country. Quietly at first, then unmistakably. Many Jewish Australians are starting to ask a question we never imagined asking.

Do we still belong here?

Yes, there has been kindness. Friends of decades have reached out, checked in, expressed care. That matters. More than they know and I am so grateful. We have been cuddled by many Australians. But there has also been a loud silence, and silence is not neutral. Silence forces questions. What are people thinking? What are they willing to excuse? Where would they stand if things became harder?

We are told we are paranoid. That our words are being twisted. That statements like “Israel killed seventy thousand innocent Palestinians” can be repeated as unquestionable truth. But where are the questions? Were there no militants killed? No war? No complexity? No accountability for those who deliberately embed themselves among civilians?

The death of Palestinian civilians is tragic. Every civilian death in war is tragic. But why is nuance forbidden when Jews are involved. Why is context considered immoral. Why is Israel uniquely stripped of complexity while every other conflict on earth is allowed it.

War is brutal. People die. That does not make it right or fair or humane. But it also should not make Israel the pariah of the world.

What makes Israel the pariah of the world is something far darker. A swelling, largely unexamined resurgence of hatred toward Jewish people. A hatred that now hides behind language. It calls itself anti Zionism, as if Zionism is some sinister ideology rather than the simple belief that Jews deserve a homeland.

We are told they hate Zionists, not Jews. But what is a Zionist? A Zionist is simply a Jew who believes Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish homeland. Nothing more. So how is stripping Jews of the right to self determination not about Jews. How is that moral clarity rather than semantic cowardice.

And the bitter irony is this. The louder the chants. The justifications. The denial of Jewish suffering. The more they prove exactly why Israel needs to exist in the first place.

I am angry. I am scared. And I do not want to leave.

We have built something beautiful here. We have worked hard to earn it. And one Sunday, followed by the disgraceful noise of parts of the left and an unchecked rise of Islamic extremism, the sense of safety that took generations to build, has been shattered. It will never be the same.

So where do we go from here?

How do we make Australia great again? A place where hard work is encouraged. Where community is valued. Where lifting others up matters. Where helping each other matters. Where beaches and barbecues define us more than marches of hate that shut down our cities and make Jews who love their homeland feel unsafe in places they once felt safe.

How do we rebuild trust? How do we ask harder questions again? How do we demand complexity instead of slogans?!

Because I still believe in this country. I still love it, and I still want my children to grow up here believing, as I once did, that Australia is a place where people belong not in spite of who they are, but because of it.