The Bell Tolls Again in Australia
When Bob Hawke first visited Israel in 1971 as ACTU president, he called his meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir a “life-changing event.” He spoke of Israel as a small but resilient democracy, standing firm in a hostile region. He warned that “if the bell tolls for Israel, it won’t just toll for Israel, it will toll for all mankind.”
Hawke never wavered. In 1973, after the Yom Kippur War, he returned as both ACTU and ALP president, openly clashing with Prime Minister Gough Whitlam over moral equivocation. He condemned the socialist left’s hostility toward Israel as morally repugnant and inconsistent with Labor values. Years later, he would say, “I’m an Israeli. If I were to have my life again, I would want to be born a Jew.”
This year also marks forty years since President Chaim Herzog visited Australia in 1986, the first official visit by a sitting Israeli president. His visit symbolised friendship, shared democratic values, and solidarity between nations that understood the threats of extremism and antisemitism.
On a personal note, Herzog’s legacy is inseparable from my own family’s survival. As a British Army general in World War II, he helped liberate my grandmother from the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in April 1945. She emerged from hell and found refuge in Australia, where, with my grandfather, she built a life grounded in gratitude, resilience, and pride. That history makes President Isaac Herzog’s visit today especially poignant. Arriving after the terrorist attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Bondi, his presence is a reminder of what solidarity once meant and what it must mean again. The contrast with the chants now echoing on our streets could not be starker.
Today, as President Herzog visits Australia on a mission of solidarity, those values are under test. His visit comes after an antisemitic terrorist attack that shattered the sense of safety for Jewish Australians but also amid an atmosphere where extremism is increasingly excused rather than confronted.
In Sydney tonight, protesters once again chanted “globalise the intifada.” According to multiple reports, former Australian of the Year Grace Tame did not merely attend, she reportedly led these chants. The intifadas were campaigns defined by suicide bombings, stabbings, mass murder, and deliberate targeting of civilians. To call for their globalisation is to call for the export of that violence worldwide.
At no point did Tame speak up for the women violated in the October 7 attacks, or the children slaughtered. When has she spoken up for women in Iran, Nigeria, Congo, Syria, or Afghanistan, who cannot enjoy the freedoms she does? She hasn’t. Silence here is not neutrality, it is complicity and hypocrisy rolled into one. Fifteen people are dead because of normalised chants such as “globalise the intifada.” That those leading or participating in them show no remorse for events that, over two years, culminated in Bondi, speaks to a profound moral bankruptcy.
These chants continue despite Australia’s strengthened hate-speech and anti-vilification laws. When hatred is repackaged as activism, authorities look the other way. That selective tolerance is impossible to ignore when someone holding one of the nation’s highest civic honours stands amid it. The Australian of the Year award is meant to reflect decency, unity, and moral leadership. When a former recipient aligns herself with chants that glorify violence, the question is unavoidable: how is this Australian? And if this conduct does not warrant a review of her award, what does the award now signify?
Across Australia, similar rallies have played out. In Melbourne, Flinders Street Station was blocked as protestors took over the area. Merchandise was sold, propaganda pamphlets distributed, and clashes with police were reported.
This is not the Australia Bob Hawke believed in. He understood that standing with Israel was not blind allegiance, but a defence of democracy and moral clarity. Forty years ago, Australia welcomed Chaim Herzog as a friend. Today, as his son visits in solidarity after a terrorist attack on Australian soil to a Prime Minister and government that have turned what was once a close friendship into a hostile relationship, we confront an uncomfortable truth: the values that once defined this country are being tested and too often found wanting.
Hawke warned us what happens when the bell tolls and we refuse to listen. If calls to “globalise the intifada” are now acceptable on Sydney’s streets, endorsed by public figures and tolerated by the state, the toll is no longer just for Israel. It is for Australia’s moral centre, and for the unity we are rapidly losing.